For at times while speaking, the antinomial would play on different instruments—gentle, interminable melodies without repetition or variety. Sometimes he would chant the words, or clap his hands between them, or space them so irregularly that it was hard to make the jumps. Sometimes he would sing, or talk in a dreary, inaudible monotone, and the doctor would have to strain to understand. In the dark warehouse, it seemed to him the voice illuminated the story as badly as a flickering candle would a book.

Intermittently, though, the man had played a flute, and that had been enough to compensate. For then it had been restful to listen, when music was the end and not the means.

Morning came in through narrow windows high up along the walls, and the doctor looked around. He and the prince had come there in the dark for entertainment, and at first, while the antinomial was singing, a girl had heated wine for them. She had burned a dirty fire, and he had seen her face and shadows in the empty space around them. Even when the prince was drunk, she had fed it for a while longer with handfuls of dung. But then she had gotten up and gone, the fire had burned out, and Thanakar had sat for hours, listening to stories in the black dark. Now, with the windows turning pink, and pink light playing on the walls, he was surprised to see the warehouse was full of people. Antinomials were wandering between the rows of mattresses, or sitting among piles of broken bottles, or lying wrapped in rags. He was surprised that they had made no noise, required no light. And he was anxious to see them there at all, though none paid any attention. None had yet approached the remote corner where he and the prince sat on a shred of carpet.

The girl, though, had returned sometime in the night, and was standing motionless quite close to him. She was dressed in a coarse shirt of unalleviated white, rolled up to the elbows and open in the front, so that he could see the hairless skin between her breasts. Her legs and feet were bare. It was a pose too frankly immodest to be stimulating. He had friends who came down nightly to this section of the docks, looking for antinomials, addicted to their powerful bodies and cheap fees. The doctor found it unimaginable, even if he had been able to imagine, in principle, paying for a woman’s body with a bucketful of entrails or a yard of cloth. To him the antinomial women were intimidating and unfeminine. This one was over six feet tall. And while he might admire her lithe bulk, her long legs, her unmarked face, her short, simple hair, she looked too alien to be beautiful. In the quiet air, she was humming a quiet, tuneless song. Perhaps, he thought, if he had been able, he could have heard in it the expression which her features lacked. What was it? Sadness without experience, perhaps.