Her eyes darkened. “Why not? I’m always in the position of your knowing more than I do. Why can’t you just tell me?”

“Because I’d rob you of something important.”

“Not if you have my permission,” she laughed.

“Ma-ah,” Sumpter said. “How can you give it, when you don’t know how invaluable the thing is you’d be giving away?”

“Oh, all right,” she said, only half-convinced. “But tell me one thing. Does that boy really live in the future? That’s impossible in one way because he wouldn’t be born yet.” She frowned. “When I was in the outside world, before you found me, I would never have thought anything like this was possible. I mean, everything was Now. If I wanted to I could remember past nows, but I never thought of a future now.” Ma-ah’s eyes widened. “Why, that would mean that there was a future-now me to remember me, and you, and all of this. Just saying that gives me the strangest feeling.”

“The now part is the truest statement,” Sumpter said. “But you have to go through the past and future stage of thinking to understand it.”

“Well, I’m more concerned about something else,” Ma-ah said. “If I’m going to bear your child, I have a right to know about your people; that is, if what you tell me is true, and a child comes from both of us.”

“It’s true,” Sumpter said gravely. “But what about your own people? How much do you remember of them? So … mysterious in a way, that your stock grew out of the Earth itself like the trees, literally emerged from the womb; everything, men and animals, coming from the rich body of the planet, and physically at least returning to it. It’s still such an alien concept to me.”

His eyes were half-lidded, and his tone frightened her. She said slowly, “Sumpter, did someone give you … training on how to go in body? I mean, on how to live in one, just as you train me to live out of it, and remember?”

He stared at her. “Ma-ah, sometimes you frighten me. After showing the greatest ignorance of your own body mechanics and the birth of children, then you perceive something that I’ve … tried to keep from you, at least for a while. I shouldn’t have said what I just did. I was swept away by your own beauty, as I often am. Then to think that this planet of itself produces such fantastic channels through which consciousness can express itself—” He broke off. “We still haven’t discovered how you knew your way here.”

“The old man, I remember him now, too,” Ma-ah cried. “And I know he’s somehow different than I thought he was. That’s another thing. He’s the one who directed me here, I’m sure of that—”