“I don’t have to be born again, do I?” she asked.

“Well, you have to do something,” Seven answered. “And you need a framework right now or else—well, you have to learn to use your consciousness within a framework or you can get very confused.”

“And God?” Lydia asked.

“Who?” Seven said.

“Are you a soul or aren’t you?” Lydia demanded.

“I thought you didn’t believe in God,” Seven answered.

“But you’re a soul; my soul from what you tell me, and what I feel. You’re supposed to believe in God or who else will? What’s the use of souls and all this if God is dead?”

Seven didn’t want to laugh and hurt Lydia’s feelings. In fact, he didn’t know how to handle the situation at all. “I’ll ask Cyprus,” he said.

“Who’s that?”

“Don’t get me off the track,” Seven said. “If you aren’t really dead, how could God be dead? I didn’t say that there wasn’t one, and I have my own ideas of Who It Is, or What It Is. See, when I use your terms, I get all mixed up.”

“Well, for heaven’s sake, use your own terms then,” she said impatiently.

Seven sighed. “In many ways I’m still an Earth-bound soul, or you wouldn’t have already decided to be born again.”

“I’ve decided no such thing,” Lydia retorted.

“Yes you have.”

“Well, not that I know of,” she said. “I’ve always suspected it—this proves it—there’s no free will.”

Seven closed his saintly type eyes and mentally called for Cyprus. She appeared looking feminine and lovely, but with the clearest, most brilliant intelligent eyes that Seven personally had ever seen. He smiled gratefully; a touch for Lydia who trusted the intellect so, he supposed.

“Would you please explain free will to Lydia?” he asked. “She’s worse than Josef—argumentative, that is.”

“Like someone else I know,” Cyprus said, but so pleasantly and with such sympathy that Seven couldn’t take offense, much as he wanted to.

“Who are you?” Lydia asked, liking her at once.

“A friend.”

Lydia and Cyprus looked for all the world like two young woman friends, walking arm in arm, which was precisely what they did. Seven felt left out, or he would have, but part of him understood what Cyprus had in mind.

“This reminds me of my college days when I was trying to learn so many things at once,” Lydia said to Cyprus. And Seven smiled—why hadn’t he thought of that?