“Well, let’s do it now, then.” She threw herself down on the ground, laughing. “I’ll never understand why you just didn’t say so. You made such a fuss that I got the idea something more was involved, something I didn’t understand.” Then, at the expression on his face, she cried, “What’s wrong?” Yet all the time she felt that she knew without knowing, and that he knew. Knew what? “You’ve got that look again,” she said, accusingly.

“And you’re … Sorana and Marunda again,” Sumpter said.

She sprang up, grabbed a loose stone, shouted defiantly: “I’m Ma-ah!” and scratched the symbol for her name into one of the floor tiles as deeply as she could. “There!” she shouted triumphantly. “Now do we mate or not?”

“The part of you that can mate now will mate,” Sumpter said. And he thought: she was unpossessable … like the world from which she’d come; innocent, splendid, shrewd, and perhaps terrible in the same way that a storm was.

Ma-ah began to slip off her robe.

“Not here,” he said quickly. “The tiles are too hard…. We’ll use one of my private couches—”

She shrugged. Now at least she thought she understood what was wanted. It was something she wanted too. There was no conflict. She ran along beside him quite happily. She considered the whole affair so matter-of-factly that Sumpter was deeply troubled. So far, emotional feelings weren’t connected in her mind with sex at all. He’d suspected as much, but he wondered what to do with his own longings for the part of her that even she had not yet discovered.

“I’m walking on the tiles’ faces,” Ma-ah said. Now she felt anticipatory and carefree.

“Yes,” he said.

“Wait … why, the tiles are shifting.” She cried out in alarm and ran ahead of him.

Sumpter caught her arm. “Of course they aren’t. See? They aren’t moving.”

“I saw them. I was looking down and they began to … crawl … yet they stayed in the same place.” Ma-ah shivered.

“Well, they’re not moving now,” he said.

“No. But when they moved, I got frightened. They made me think of things. If we mate and I have a child, then it will live and come and go, and be forgotten like a wolf cub. That’s what I thought when the tiles moved. Or maybe I just thought they moved. But something shifts and we die. I’ve seen dead animals, and eaten them and never thought about it before.”

“Our child, if we have one, will have many birthdays,” Sumpter said. “And live to grow old.”

But Ma-ah stood there, still startled. Her feelings had erupted; feelings not connected with hunger or necessity, free emotions welling up as she remembered them doing only once or twice before in her life. Astonished, she said, “Feelings … move inside people.”

“You’ve felt emotions before—”