Each of them stripped down briskly to their linens. Baru fidgeted. Context mattered, of course, clearly this was artistic or clinical nudity—but she was wary, so wary, of his trap. She tried to focus on his beauty, how valuable he might be as a statue, to keep her attention off Iscend, off the diamond-knurled muscles cross her back and the flare of her hips and oh dear.

Baru shook herself, and then regretted it, and tried to be still.

Hesychast unpacked a bag of small paper placards. Iscend Comprine smiled once, a calm competent pleasure at the work about to be done: that shot a thrill right up Baru’s spine.

“Is this a test of my sexual preferences?” she asked. “My taste is hardly a secret.”

“No, not a secret.” Hesychast dealt out the placards into piles. “Hardly a crime, either.”

“Hardly a crime? Hardly a crime?” Tribadists got the knife. It was his law: eugenic law, Metademe law.

“Is it a crime to have the flu?” he asked, to Baru’s almost unmasterable rage. “A treatment isn’t a punishment.”

“You circumcise us!”

“Yes, in some unresponsive cases, there’s a painless surgical intervention to deinforce the behavior.” He held up his hands and Baru did not miss that protective gesture. He could see that she wanted to murder him. “But we reserve those, ah, relic punishments mostly for the provinces. In Falcrest, so long as you don’t act on your condition, or show any intent to bear or work with children, you’ll go untouched. Our laws are very humane.”

“Humane.”

“Yes,” he said, looking at his hands, not at her, “yes: things have to get better as one moves from the provinces toward Falcrest, don’t they? There must be a gradient of hope.”

“In Aurdwynn they told me that women in Falcrest can’t enjoy sex. That they are all as dry as stone.”

“What? No, I assure you, that’s quite untrue.”

“Perhaps it’s conditioning,” Baru said, blandly. “Your women are so worried about their writs of hygiene and childbearing licenses that they’ve come to associate conjugation with terror.”

“You’re needling me,” he said, in delight, “you really are his student, aren’t you? Well. Let’s see how deep his teaching runs.”

Hesychast held up a fan of paper placards: on each one was a nonsense word in clear Aphalone script, blocked out so that each letter took up precisely the same space.

Foer. Lvbe. Haut. Rimprss. Hoie. Grievy. Caut.

He gave half the cards to Iscend. She smiled slyly at Baru, a sideways mocking expression: already, already she’d started to probe for reactions.

“Let’s begin,” she said.

*   *   *

IT was a mind probe. A Metademe game calculated to pierce deception. Iscend must have been trained to read the briefest involuntary expressions on the human face, the hesitation of falsehood in the voice.