Worse, she couldn’t seem to make up her mind about anything—her age or sex or clothes. Now that she’d learned a few of Oversoul Seven’s tricks, they weren’t half the fun she’d expected. She changed into a male page, looking like an illustration she’d once seen in a history book; then into a young girl dancer in Turkish veils; then, bored, back to herself. But even as herself, she had all of those ages to contend with, and none of them contented her or seemed to fit: She wasn’t a young girl, for example, without an old woman’s knowledge, even if she could look that way. And she wasn’t an old woman, with youth behind her forever, either. She was obviously both, and the more she thought about it, the more confused she became.

She supposed that she was out of line, trying to figure out the god business, but on the other hand, she knew that once she was reborn, she wouldn’t have the time. Or maybe even the inclination. She was getting tired of pilgrimages, though, particularly since Oversoul Seven had left her alone. Suddenly she realized how important his company had become. She’d met no one since he left her, yet she knew that some people or inhabitants of some kind were invisibly about. Their presence was tantalizingly close and attractive. Now and then she almost heard laughter. Once she almost glimpsed faces. Yet she felt some strange psychological opaqueness, too, that separated her from … whoever they were.

Musing, Lydia came to a large window, the first she’d noticed in the long passageway. She paused, looking out, if “out” was the proper word, and what she saw struck Lydia through with nostalgia. There, spread out sparkling before her eyes, separated from her only by the window pane, was a snowy scene reminiscent of a Christmas card. An old-fashioned, dear scene, she thought, showing farmlands and white-topped mountains; a place where people lived one age at a time, and with only one image to contend with; tucked neatly between night and dawn, birth and death.

She pressed her nose against the window, wanting to cry, feeling at the same time like a coward for yearning—as she was now—for a new birth into space and time. Her eyes sprang open. Of course, she thought, that must be Josef and Bianka’s farm! Otherwise why would she be so drawn to it?

More, she felt—again nostalgically—that she already knew each tree and shrub in the yard, each horse in the barn, as if in some indescribable past she’d already lived the life she hadn’t yet begun. On the other hand, she was filled with expectation and curiosity, and with such a feeling of suspense that she held her breath; and when she let it out, it suddenly turned into frost against the window.

And the air was cold.