“I believed in you,” she said. “But the examination isn’t over. Proteus and Ma-ah and Josef are in physical reality, you know. There’s some important questions that you must learn the answers to; then I want to see how your personalities apply what they’ve learned—or almost learned.”

But Seven felt crushed, and disappointed with himself. He glowered impatiently and erased the letters from the sky.

“Any Oversoul can make a mistake,” Cyprus said. “And sometimes we make mistakes on purpose, to teach ourselves something important…. Oh, Seven, stop it—”

He’d changed his image to that of a little, angry old man, and started pacing up and down. “Oversouls are supposed to be dignified and … well, Window or Sumpter look more like souls than I do,” he muttered irritably. “Physically speaking, that is. And they looked up to me so down there, and I tried to help Lydia; and here all the while I’d made a big error and didn’t even know it.”

Cyprus immediately changed into a clown and started laughing. “See, examine your beliefs again,” she said. “Souls are full of vitality and energy, and if people want to think of them as being dignified and longfaced, then it’s up to you to change their beliefs, not accept them.” And Cyprus rolled into a ball and went bouncing over the tiles.

Seven was utterly astonished. Still in the old-man image, he went rushing after her, trying to keep up. When she stopped he said: “I never thought I’d see you do anything like that—ever—for any reason. I’m … scandalized…. I mean, well, you shouldn’t act like that.”

“Why not?” Cyprus said, adopting again her more conventional woman form.

“Why, just because,” Seven started to answer. Then he got it, and blushed.

“You’re learning,” Cyprus said dryly.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Proteus Gets a Few Answers from Window and Learns That Window Doesn’t Know It All

Proteus awakened. He felt lonesome, which was silly, he thought. Still, he’d had that crazy dream about all those people, and he missed some of them: the girl called Ma-ah, for instance. He grinned, rubbing his eyes to get the sleep out of them. She was so splendidly … insolent in a way; well, maybe not insolent, but—Actually, though he tried to remember it, most of the dream was disappearing. Wait. He sat up, feeling that he was about to recall something very important. But he lost it. Anyhow, he thought: it was reality that counted. And he had a million questions for Window.

The Tellers, for example: how strange that this second dig wasn’t discovered from above. It was protected by the cliffs to some degree, but it wasn’t underground. And Window’d said nothing about the rest of the planet. Was it populated? And why had Window been so certain that search parties wouldn’t find him here? What was there to stop them?