“But I didn’t have time to know what I felt,” she said wonderingly. “I never had feelings before that I didn’t have to do something about right away. Well, once I did, watching a storm when I was safe in a cave. Or maybe a few times that I’ve forgotten. I don’t know if I like this kind of feeling or not. You can’t do anything about it.”

“Something shifts,” Sumpter said, echoing her earlier remark. “Strange.” He refused to read her thoughts, though he could have easily. But he knew that something had happened to her. In some way she’d changed, opened. She walked pensively now, beside him. Quite unaccountably he felt sorry for her. The birth of feelings, and feelings’ reflections, he thought.

And into Ma-ah’s mind rushed memories of her earlier life, in the world of cliffs and hunger, light and night’s unmitigated darkness. The contrasts had been so brilliant and demanding that there’d been no time to think. They’d just seemed given, and she’d accepted them without questions. Now she discovered her memory clear and unblemished—yet there was no reason to remember. The memories just came. “I won’t go back there,” she said, in a hard voice.

“You won’t have to—” Sumpter broke off, realizing that for the first time, perhaps in her voice, Ma-ah had given him a real glimpse of her life before she came to the Speakers. She’d told him all the details before, but in such a matter-of-fact way that her emotional response to the environment never came through. With all he knew about her, she gave little of herself.

They were almost at his quarters. It was a humble enough stone structure, with a single unit—the basic pyramid-shaped center shabia or center room, with two smaller rooms on each side. The tiled floors were covered here and there with small white wool rugs, and the walls hung with tapestries in bright, glowing colors. Sumpter led her to a side room, with its wide windows and low couch.

The dwelling was much like the one the Speakers had given her.

“I’ve never mated where it was protected like this,” Ma-ah said. And suddenly she was uneasy and shy. “Usually we just mated when we felt like it, on the spot. All this talking—” She began stalking about the room.