“Yes. You’re thirty, aren’t you, you’ve been a Master for four months now. Did you ever think, Ganil, that to be a Master means you have learned everything your trade can teach? From now on until your death you’ll learn nothing more. There is no more.”

“But the Shopmasters—”

“Shopmasters learn some secret signals and passwords,” Mede said in his soft, dry voice, “and of course they have power. But they know no more than you. . . . You thought perhaps they were allowed to compute, didn’t you? They aren’t.”

Ganil was silent.

“And yet there are things to be learned, Ganil.”

“Where?”

“Outside.”

There was a long pause.

“I can’t listen to this, Mede. Don’t speak of it again. I won’t betray you.” Ganil turned and walked away, his face harsh with anger. With all his will he turned that confused and struggling anger against Mede, a man as deformed of mind as of body, an evil counsellor, a lost friend.

It had been a pleasant evening: Lee jovial, his fat wife motherly, and Lani shy and radiant. Ganil’s youthful gravity made her tease him, but even in her teasing was that pleading, yielding note; another moment, it seemed, and all her verve would turn to tenderness. Passing a dish at table once her hand had for an instant touched his. He still knew exactly where, there, the side of his right hand near the wrist, one soft touch. He moaned luxuriously as he lay in bed in his room over the Shop in the utter blackness of the city night. O Lani, soft touch of a hand, of lips—O Lord, Lord! Courtship was a long business, eight months at least, going from step to step as one must with a Master’s daughter. Ganil had to get his mind off this unendurable sweetness. Think of nothing, he told himself firmly, go to sleep. Think of nothing. . . . And he thought of nothing. The circle. The round empty circle. What was I times 0? The same as II times 0. What if you put I beside 0, what would that figure be, 10?

Mede Fairman sat up in bed, brown hair lank over groggy blue eyes, and tried to focus on the person crashing around his room. The first dirty-yellow light of dawn showed at the window. “This is Altarday,” he growled, “go away, I’m sleepy.” The vague figure resolved into Ganil, the crashing into a whisper. “Mede!” Ganil kept whispering, “look!” He stuck a slate under Mede’s nose. “Look, look what you can do with that figure for Nothing—”

“Oh, that,” said Mede. He pushed Ganil and the slate away, went and dunked his head in the basin of icy water on his clothes-chest, and kept it there a while. He returned dripping to sit on the bed. “Let’s see.”