Lydia shivered and looked around anxiously. At once she knew that she was in the farmhouse. A young woman lay on a bed piled high with mattresses. It was apparently late at night. A fireplace in the corner had died out and only a few embers leapt up now and then in the darkness. The woman, nevertheless, was perspiring. She was muttering in her sleep, tossing her blonde-braided head swiftly back and forth, so that the ribboned blue night cap trembled.

Lydia tiptoed closer.

Could that be her future mother? The woman lay on her back, her huge stomach pushing up the coverlets. There were woolen rugs on the floor and a few smaller ones at the foot of the bed. A pitcher of water stood on the bedside table. Lydia nervously hallucinated a cigarette for herself, lit up, and poured herself a glass of water. Forgetting herself, she drank the real thing instead of hallucinating her own, but Bianka, still sleeping, never noticed.

“Damn,” Lydia muttered. Bianka was lovely, but her own connections were with Josef. She would be her father’s rather than her mother’s daughter, in that respect. She prowled around the room, eyes narrowed, considering. Bianka’s true labor, as opposed to the false one just passed, couldn’t be put off forever.

Just then a motion caught Lydia’s eye. She leapt back. Bianka’s dream image moved easily up from the bed (pregnant and all) but light-footed and graceful.

“Who’s there?” asked the dreaming Bianka.

Lydia froze. She had little experience in dealing with people’s dream selves; and besides she was suddenly confused because in relationship to her twentieth-century life, Bianka had been dead for centuries. But the same applied to Josef, and she met him fairly often, she thought. And she was, after all, being born back into the past only from the very limited viewpoint of “the living.”

She said softly, “It’s Lydia. Well, it’s really Tweety. I’m supposed to be born as your daughter.”

“No. No. No,” Oversoul Seven cried, suddenly appearing. “Look younger. You aren’t born adult!”

Startled, Lydia turned into a three-year-old pudgy blonde-haired little girl with round face and unswerving earnest eyes.

“Oh,” Bianka cried. She bent over, smiling.

But Lydia was suddenly frightened.

“Oh, you’ll be my baby!” Bianka exclaimed. “And until now I wasn’t really sure that I wanted a baby at all! But just to see you—”

Quickly Lydia turned back into herself. She strode toward Oversoul Seven. “Somehow you engineered this … somehow—”

“She had second thoughts too, but she doesn’t have them now,” Seven said, grinning and pointing at Bianka, who stood staring. She wore her nightgown and carried a hallucinatory candle.

“Well, I still have second thoughts,” Lydia whispered angrily.

“Oh, I thought I saw my future baby,” Bianka cried. Her dream image grew agitated, blurred, was drawn to her body on the bed and, crying, “I saw my baby,” Bianka woke up.