CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

The Fierce Dance of Bliss

"I am sorry," Karolla announced as the family sat under the awning eating supper together, "that Anatoly Sakhalin has gone."

Ilyana stiffened, but for once her mother's comment didn't seemed directed at her. Instead, Karolla watched Valentin, who sat playing with his meat but not eating any. The skin under his eyes looked bruised, it was so dark. Twice in the past six days Ilyana had caught him in the middle of the night at the latticework nesh, but she didn't wake up every night.

"I'll eat his if he doesn't want it," said Anton, and grabbed for the meat.

"Pig." Valentin swatted his hand, and Anton wailed. Evdokia stuck her thumb in her mouth and began sucking determinedly. The baby slept in a sling against Nipper's chest, but even so, the khaja woman leaned over and pulled Valentin's hand away from his brother.

"Now now," she said in her most irritating remonstrative voice, "your brother is quite right, Valentin. If you won't eat your food, it mustn't go to waste."

Valentin jerked away from her and scuttled back. "Don't touch me!"

"Valentin!" said Karolla. "Your manners."

"What gives her the right to tell me what to do? She isn't even part of the tribe, except I guess he porks her once or twice a month to keep her happy."

Nipper gasped and flushed.

Vasil, who had been ignoring the interplay, as he usually did, turned right around and slapped Valentin on the face, hard. "Get out. Don't come back until you've learned some manners. Never speak to a woman in that way. You're a disgrace."

Valentin leapt to his feet. "You're the disgrace! I hate you! I'm never coming back, ever." He spun and ran off around the tent.

Ilyana began to get to her feet.

"Yana," said her father softly, "we're not through eating yet."

"But, Papa—"

He just looked at her. She sank back down and ate. The food tasted like ashes in her mouth.

Anton ate every scrap on Valentin's plate as well as his own, and Evdi sucked her thumb. Karolla discussed making felt for rugs with Nipper, and the baby woke up and demanded to nurse. Ilyana felt sick to her stomach.

She gathered up the wooden platters and took Evdokia aside to help her clean them. Karolla only expected them to be scraped clean before they were put back in the chest, but Ilyana had eaten meals over at Kori and other friend's houses too many times now not to find that embarrassing. They went to the washroom, where they found Diana, Portia, and the lighting designer, a broad-shouldered man with a gorgeous mahogany complexion and old-fashioned glasses.

"Good evening, Yana," said Diana cheerfully. She didn't seem very despondent over Anatoly's absence. Portia sat on a stool clutching her pillow, and Evdi sidled over next to her and just stood there, sucking her thumb. "They're a morose pair, aren't they?"

"Uh, can I leave Evdi with you for a little bit?"

"Of course. But don't forget I've got rehearsal at oh twenty hundred."

"I won't. I'll come get both of them before then. Thank you."

The lighting designer smiled kindly at her, and as she left with the platters she heard him say to Diana: "I feel sorry for that girl."

Ilyana flushed, horrified by his sympathy, and stopped outside the door to catch her breath.

"Her father's a criminal. He ought to be confined to the madhouse."

"Hush," said Diana. "Don't forget Evdi is over there. And I think it's unfair. Vasil is self-absorbed and tiresome, but—"

"He treats his children horribly."

"I know he neglects them ..."

"Sells them off to the highest bidder, you mean. Surely you know about the boy."

"Yassir, this isn't the sort of thing we should talk about in front of the girls." A pause. "Valentin, do you mean? You forget I knew them back when they were with the tribes. Valentin's never gotten on very well here, but that isn't just because of his father. What about him?"

"Di! You live in the same house as them! He was practically being raped by that perverted old financier from the Hoover Institute of Interactive Studies."

"I don't believe it! He's barely thirteen years old."

"I don't have any proof. But I by damned almost caught her at it once, that was when they were doing the prototypes for the actie the Hoover wanted Veselov to do on Genghis Khan and he'd asked me to come in and do the lighting on the set pieces. Anyway, I laid plans to try to get evidence so I could file a third-party complaint, but then she got called away on something, the whole project got put on hiatus, and we came here. You really didn't notice anything wrong?"

"Hyacinth complained about a lot of the people who went over to their flat. I admit that some of them were the kind of people who made you want to wash your hands after you shook hands with them, but... really, Yassir, I don't... not that I don't believe you, but...."

"We techies sometimes hear and see things other people might not notice. Did I ever tell you about the time that I overheard Veselov offering his daughter's virginity to— Goddess, what was his name?—that cultural minister assigned to Soerensen's entourage by the protocol office, a lecher if I ever met one, in return for getting Veselov secretly onto ... what's the name of the planet they come from?"

"Rhui," said Diana in a hollow voice. "He couldn't have said that."

"Neh. Not straight out. But there were a lot of unspoken things being said. Something about a traditional ritual for a girl coming into womanhood and how one man was picked for the honor, that kind of thing. I assume the minister never managed to complete the transaction."

There was a silence.

Bathed in shame, Ilyana fled. She was too furious, too humiliated, to go back to her mother's tent, so she ran out to the ruined caravansary instead, a haven now that Anatoly Sakhalin wasn't around anymore to make it unsafe.

Oh, gods, was it true? Had her father really betrayed her like that? How much worse than what her mother had done ... at least her mother had been trying to help her, however awkward and disgracefully it had been done. At least she had picked someone like Anatoly Sakhalin.

Shuddering, Ilyana recalled the minister: He stank of oil, and his hair always looked greasy, and his skin had the same bloated, pasty white film as uncooked rolls glazed with egg. And now—oh, gods—now she understood why he had spent so much time looming over her for that month—what was it? a year ago now—when the interactive institute Veselov was working for had done that adventure actie on Tau Ceti Tierce at the same time Soerensen was in residence.

Pebbles skittered. Sand crunched under boots. She whirled around, but saw nothing. Movement flashed in the corner of an eye, and she spun. She heard him panting.

"Valentin! Come out here."

Nothing. Silence. But she knew he was there. She could feel him watching her from his hiding place along one of the walls.

"Oh, Valentin, what good does it do you to hide out here?"

But why should he go home?

"I wish I had gone with Sakhalin," he said from the shadows, and she ran toward the sound of his voice only to have him dart away from her and vanish into the underground entrance to the storage rooms, cluttered with fallen brick and huge, immovable pithoi.

If they had been with the jaran, it would have been the next step in his education, that he ride out under the supervision of an officer, in the train of the army, to care for the horses and the gear of the soldiers.

She leaned into the cavernous opening. "I promise you, Valentin. When he comes back, I'll tell Mother and Papa—" Faltered. That was no good. "I'll talk to Sakhalin himself, really I will. I'll tell him you need to go, anywhere, to get away."

His figure shifted in the blackness, but came no nearer. "Will you really? Even after what happened with your flower night?"

Ilyana imagined how utterly awkward and mortifying it would be to approach Sakhalin after what had happened. But no one else could help Valentin. "Yes. Even after that I will. I promise you."

"Well. All right."

"All right, then. Come out. I'm not going in there after you. I'll get all dirty, and so will these dishes, and anyway, there're spiders in there."

"I'm not coming out. Just let me stay here, Yana. Don't make me go back. They won't care, anyway."

"I can't drag you out. Oh, all right, sulk out here if you want to. It'll be cold at night."

"It doesn't matter. Cold doesn't matter." His voice sounded eerily disembodied, echoing through the underground vaults. "It's only the surface world."

She would have thrown up in her hands in exasperation, but she was still holding the platters.

Instead, she left him there.

But in the morning she found time to sneak him out a platter of food, which she left by the empty cistern. That night when she went back, half of it was eaten. She left fresh food and a flask of water.

She went again the next morning. The flask was gone, so she left another one, but the food hadn't been touched.

"Where's your broiler?" David asked when she arrived for her tutorial. "I didn't notice him around yesterday, and we had a tentative tutorial planned on early computer architecture, but he never showed up."

"I dunno." She could hardly face him. Did other adults besides the lighting designer Yassir, someone she had seen around a fair bit but didn't really know except to say hello to, know all about me awful bargains her father was trying to make? Did everyone know? "He had a —" But if she said that Valentin had had a fight with their dad, men maybe David would blurt out all the horrible secrets that he knew about her and her brother. "He isn't feeling well."

David blinked at her, and she got the feeling that she didn't lie very well. "You'll let me know if you need any help, won't you?"

"Uh. Yes."

He sighed and shook his head. "So. I think we should strike while the iron is hot."

"What does that mean?"

He grinned. "We've had three days to let our—your— encounter with Genji sink in. It's a big step, but it worked with Sakhalin. I think we should go."

"Yes," said Ilyana, who wanted nothing more than to get as far away as possible, even if it was only for a little while.

David borrowed Vasil's saddle, since Sakhalin had taken his saddle with him, and together they rode out to the rose wall with Gwyn and Hyacinth in attendance. Gwyn had to get back for rehearsal, so Hyacinth agreed to wait with the horses for as long as he could.

Ilyana stood in front of the wall and said, in a trembling voice, "My name is Ilyana Arkhanov, and begging your pardon, I've been invited to visit, er, Genji, in the hall of monumental time."

The wall clouded and vanished and a barge appeared. This one was smaller. Stairs extruded, and David waved at Ilyana to stay back so that he could enter first, but she followed on his heels and found a circular chamber domed by a low, cloudy ceiling and ringed with a bench. She sat. David, after a hesitation, sat. The barge rose, and rose, and rose, and Ilyana realized that they were flying.

"This is interesting," said David. "The other barge glided. It rested on some kind of cushion of air and never left the ground. Why is this different?"

"Maybe we're going farther away." She set a hand on the curve of the dome. "Oooo. It's gooshy and sort of sticky."

"Yana! Get your hands off that."

She giggled. "You sound like Diana. She's always telling the girls not to touch things, like the things will bite back."

"Things do bite back sometimes."

The ship banked and rose higher and Ilyana slipped off the bench and landed on the floor. She laughed, as much out of nervousness as surprise, and hoisted herself back up on the bench.

"My point exactly," added David, and steadied himself on the bench as the ship banked again. He shoved his heels into the floor but almost slid off, and then did when he started laughing because Ilyana had slipped off again. So they were laughing when the craft came to a halt so abrupt that Ilyana felt like she'd slammed into a wall. The entryway slid open and Ilyana scrambled for purchase, but there was nothing to hold onto, everything was smooth.

The opening gaped onto a gulf of air. About twenty paces away, if one could walk on air, the tip of a steeple ended in a jeweled peak, like emeralds winking in the sun. Farther, she saw the stubby top of a glass pagoda, and the curling black and red stripes of an onion dome, and nothing beneath. From this height she could not see the ground, and she felt herself slide slowly, inexorably, toward the opening and the inevitable death plunge to the ground. She didn't grab for David because she didn't want to drag him with her, didn't even dare look toward him for fear of losing what little purchase she did have. The craft cycled a quarter turn to the left and suddenly a towering wall of smoky glass blocked out the light.

The floor settled and the door lined up with a two-meter-high arch set into the glass tower.

Gingerly, Ilyana stood up and walked over toward the opening.

"Don't go too near," whispered David.

"That arch is open, I think," answered Ilyana in an equally quiet voice, as if loudness might send the craft into a death spin. "But there's like two meters between it and us. I can't jump that far. Do you think—"

A sound teased at her ears, the whisper of soft paper being crumpled, the flutter of the leaves of a paperback.

"Come over," said a voice, hanging on the air like a breath of wind.

Ilyana swallowed. "I would, but I can't jump that far, and neither can my ke." She flashed a glance back at David, but like a cornered rat, he had fixed his gaze on the immediate threat: the craft's open hatch and the empty air beyond.

"Ah." The sound was more an exhalation than a word. The craft slid in toward the tower. Ilyana felt as if it were pushing against a thickening cushion of air, and it finally came to rest about half a meter from the wall and the open archway.

She did not wait to think. She pushed off and took the step—it took forever and ever hanging above the chasm— and threw herself forward into the round chamber of slick black stone, landing on her knees. The stone was hard and cold. She crawled on her hands and knees into the center and then, remembering, looked back. She was alone. The craft hung outside, swaying slightly as if in a breeze.

"David? David!"

At last he appeared, teeth clenched. He made an ungainly leap, pitched forward and stumbled into her, flung himself down on his rump, and just sat there, panting and laughing weakly.

"What an entrance," he said finally as he pushed up to his feet. "The Chapalii must not get vertigo."

The little ship backed away as if repulsed, lifted up soundlessly, and vanished from sight. "I'm not sure I can get back the same way I got on."

Together they looked around the room: A featureless, circular chamber of black stone that looked like obsidian. A single gray disk resembling the color of the tower's outside walls marked the center of the room. The archway through which they had come was the only outlet.

"We'll step on that thing together," said David, and taking Ilyana's hand he led her over. As soon as they stepped onto the disk it sank down into the floor. Ilyana held her breath, but the rate of descent remained steady, and her stomach didn't leap up into her throat. It just went down and down and down for what seemed like eternity.

"Sakhalin said he came up a staircase," whispered Ilyana.

"But that was in nesh. Your legs could climb this high in nesh, but it might be more difficult in the real world."

She shivered, thinking of Valentin, who seemed more and more to think that the real world was irrelevant. "Valentin ran away. He's hiding in the old caravansary."

"Had a fight with your father?"

She nodded, unable to speak past the sob catching in her throat.

"I'll see what I can do," he promised, resting an avuncular hand on her shoulder.

At her feet light exploded. As if they were emerging from a vertical tube, they sank down into empty air and settled onto a floor of granite. Above, in the ceiling, a round shaft bored upward into blackness. They stood in a gray-toned entry hall. Behind them lay a wall of granite. Ahead stood a portico lined with columns.

"Come on," said Ilyana, wanting to get it over with. She started forward, took the steps with gusto, and halted staring into the next room.

"Well I'll be damned," said David. "It's Karnak."

It was. An avenue of ram-headed sphinxes dressed out of red-rock sandstone led through a pale stone land that seemed, just barely, to have a roof far far overhead, streaked with a delicate filigree of cirrus clouds. They walked down it. There was no dust, nor did the Nile River flow past behind them.

But as they approached the pylon, the monumental brick wall that marked the entrance to the temple, Ilyana saw a slight shine in the gateway, a whispery gleam. There, waiting for her, was Genji.

David gulped down a sound in his throat. Ilyana just stared, even though she knew it was rude.

Genji looked a little like a Chapalii male who had been shined until he glowed; yet it wasn't a gaudy kind of light but more the soft richness of a pearl. Her head was narrow, her mouth like the opening of a clamshell, her skull behind the slender face swelling into a very inhuman but subtle bulge to the sides and behind. Her eyes were faceted like crystals. When she spoke, the sound seemed to emanate from her throat, not from her mouth.

"I welcome you, young one. The ke may wait here at the gate."

She turned. Her robes were like banners of silk swept up by the wind. They murmured with the crackling of a thousand distant campfires or the muted fall of a stream over rocks. Ilyana squeezed David's hand and bravely walked after Genji.

Massive walls loomed on either side, pierced by a doorway whose lacework trim bled a ghostly light into the passageway. Passing through the door, they came out into a vast hall. It was so big that the single statue placed in the middle of the hall could have been any size. Ilyana simply could not estimate its dimensions from where she stood now.

"The anteroom to the hall of monumental time," said Genji.

"Anatoly Sakhalin said there were a lot of statues in here," said Ilyana, looking around and feeling faintly disappointed. She had thought maybe there would be odd, exotic, alien things, something no human had ever seen before. The distant statue she recognized, even though it was small: It was Shiva.

Or maybe, she thought wildly with a half hysterical gasp, it was Kori's Uncle Gus, frozen in the act of dancing the part. She squelched the thought and concentrated on Genji, who after a pause now began to reply.

A-na-to-ly Sa-kha-lin." She pronounced each syllable so distinctly that at first Ilyana didn't realize that she was repeating the name. "The prince of the Sakhalin, who has now gone to approach the emperor. You know him?"

"Yeah. I'm, uh, sort of related to him."

"You are his sister."

"No. More like a cousin."

"This word, cousin, denotes a genetic relationship?"

"Well, not really. I mean, maybe. I'd have to ask my mother if there was any marriages between the Sakhalins and the Arkhanovs, which there probably was at some time, but it's more that the Sakhalin tribe is First of the Ten Elder Tribes and the Arkhanovs, and the Veselovs, that's my father's people, are two of the younger of the Elder Tribes." Then she felt like an idiot for babbling on and not making sense. Why would Genji possibly be interested in a bunch of barbarians on a backwater planet?

"Like the ten princely houses recognized by the emperor. Of course, one of the princely houses passed through the rite of extinction just moments ago—or perhaps that was several years by the way you would reckon time. The emperor will no doubt be pleased that another princely house has risen so quickly into the vacuum created by the rite of extinction."

It took Ilyana some moments to sort this out, because she wasn't quite sure what a rite of extinction was, except for what she knew about trilobites and dinosaurs. "Don't you reckon time the same way I do? I mean, isn't there only one way to reckon time?"

Although she hadn't really noticed it, they had been walking the entire time, as if with seven league boots covering more ground than they ought to have been able to.

Genji extended an arm. Her sleeves were as much an extension of her robes as discrete sleeves, extending all the way to the floor. Cloth whispered. "Here is Lord Shiva, in his aspect as Nataraja, Lord of Dance. With this dance he can both create and destroy the universe."

Shiva stood poised before them, his body circled by a mandala-ring of fire. His skin was a lovely burnt golden-brown, except of course it wasn't really skin. He was a statue cast of bronze. The statue was about two meters high, the same height as a man and the same proportions, except he had four arms.

Ilyana walked a ring around Shiva. The graceful play of his four arms fascinated her. He balanced on his right foot on a dwarf, the demon of forgetfulness, and his left leg swept upward in an elegant line that, frozen, yet suggested the essential dynamism of the dance. "But he's just a statue," she said.

"Is that all he is? Language is simply a map by which we make sense of the world. The world exists outside of language, just as the dance of destruction and creation, the great cycles of time, exist outside of the linear time in which the brief flashes of consciousness you call an individual life are measured."

Ilyana shivered. Genji made her feel so ... insignificant. "Do you live a long time?"

"Time is a language by which you measure the world. Even the speech by which you communicate measures space as linear time. You depart. You progress. You arrive. The speech begins and it ends.

It unfolds with the expectation that there will be completion."

"Oh. Right. Are you immortal?"

"Not even the stars are immortal."

Shiva regarded this exchange with raised brows and a half smile, simultaneously delighted and aloof. But of course, he was just a statue. He was made that way.

"Kori's Uncle Gus—Augustus Gopal, well, I guess you wouldn't know him—says that dancing is the oldest form of magic. He said that with enough power he could dance the universe into and out of existence. That's why he did the Shiva piece. Well, you wouldn't know about that either."

"Do you seek to learn this knowledge of the dance? It is not mine to teach."

"Neh. I mean, when he dances, it's beautiful, but after it's over there's nothing left. It's like a cloud.

It takes shapes, but there's no solidity to it, it just dissolves. That's why I like buildings. I'm studying architecture with Dav—with my ke. I guess it always seemed to me that buildings last longer than anything else, even than the civilization that built them."

Ilyana caught a sense from Genji that she was pleased in some alien fashion: whether for the clever answer or the choice of buildings over dance, Ilyana didn't know.

"Temporal power is indeed both fleeting and insignificant." Genji began to walk again, toward the far end of the vast hall, and Ilyana followed her, followed the rustling of her robes, a little sorry to be leaving Shiva behind, with his lithe young body caught in stillness while still in motion.

"But we remember the names of people who lived before, in our history," Ilyana objected.

"Names are names. Language is a map, and if the map loses meaning, or the map is lost, what is left?"

"But people don't think about what's going to happen after they die. They live now, while they're alive. Well, I guess they could hardly live any other way. But I was named after a man who is leading a big really big army to try to conquer the world." She frowned, a trifle annoyed with the implied suggestion that human pursuits were somehow trivial. "Even in the Empire, don't the lords and dukes and princes try to, I dunno, try to become more powerful? It must mean something to them, just like it does to humans."

"To what end? A mighty civilization could flourish for ten million years, as you reckon time, in some far corner of the universe and yet never meet another intelligent species. Did not your philosophers wonder if you were alone in the universe? Is it not mere coincidence that your ten million years have overlapped with ours, and in such close proximity? It would have been far more likely that you grew and flourished and faded into nothing and thought yourselves always alone, while a billion years before another species rose in a distant galaxy, asked the same questions, and died, and a billion years later in another place, the same process occurred. So you might not be alone, but separated by gulfs of time and space that can never be bridged."

"Then you might just as well be alone, wouldn't you?"

"The void is like the fathomless waters of a pure ocean, and there universes float, coming and going, a fleet of exquisite but frail boats. Here we pass through into the hall of monumental time."

Ilyana paused and looked back toward Shiva, who remained, as ever, soaring in perpetual motion and eternal stasis ringed by the fire of cosmic energy. "But I thought Shiva represented time."

"So he does. But the Nataraja dances death and creation, the eternal recurrence of the rhythm of what you call nature. Pass through."

Ilyana walked through a low doorway that barely cleared Genji's head and found herself in an even vaster hall, if that was possible. Beyond, a cliff dominated the chamber. It was so tall that its height was lost in clouds. Cut into the stone, in relief, was a huge image of Shiva, sitting cross-legged, one hand raised, palm out. The great hall smelled dry, almost metallic, and Ilyana realized all at once that the usual spicy scent she associated with Chapalii air was absent.

"There sits Lord Shiva in his aspect as the supreme Yogi. On the tower of ice called Mount Kailasa, he meditates upon the eternal. He is both unchanging and unchanged. There he will sit while one hundred civilizations rise and fall, while vast reaches of space are explored and abandoned and an immense net of light spreads its tendrils between thousands of star systems and then collapses back in on itself until it is only a weak flame burning at a single point, soon to flicker out from lack of fuel."

"He looks very calm," said Ilyana, staring up at the rock face. She liked the dancing Shiva better.

"His disinterest is truly divine."

"But if nothing is immortal, then how long will he sit up there?"

Genji turned away and walked back toward the doorway that led them into the hall of the dancing Shiva. She seemed amused. "Temporality has so little to do with the massive presence of eternity, Il-ya-na Ar-kha-nov. Like imaginary space, it is infinite, all-encompassing."

That made Ilyana think of Valentin. "Uh, I always wondered, I mean, I know you have nesh here.

Some people—" Fleetingly, Ilyana wondered if Genji could read minds and know she was thinking about her brother. "—some humans, that is, they think that the imaginary space of nesh is more real than here, the real world. But maybe that's like these two kinds of time—what you said—linear time that moves and monumental time that really isn't time but just is."

"Building occurs as a biological process," answered Genji. "All of what we call life is a building, a fine edifice that rises and decays and vanishes only to rise again in a new form, balanced against the static repose that is the meditation of Shiva upon the eternal, the fathomless waters."

"I remember what this is called," said Ilyana, pausing in front of Shiva dancing and then running to catch up with Genji, who had kept walking. "Kori and I did a project together on her Uncle Gus's set of dances. Anandatandava, the fierce dance of bliss. Shiva's dance is him doing five things at once."

She bit her lip, trying to remember it; she felt impelled to impress Genji with her knowledge. "He creates, maintains, veils, unveils, and destroys his creation, which is the world, but at the same time he grants release to the person who worships him."

"Here is the gate, and your escort. You will visit me again."

"Uh. Yes, I will."

Genji turned away. The soft rustling of her robes skittered through the hall, the faintest of echoes.

"Wait," said Ilyana, aware of David standing in the shadow of the passageway. She gathered up her courage to ask the question she had most wanted to but had not been sure she ought to or was allowed to ask. "I just wondered, why did you ask me to visit you?"

"Because you came to my notice."

"Well, uh, how come you have a human creation in this hall?"

"Learning begins with what is familiar, and what is simple." Genji moved away, back into the hall.

The dark floor was polished to such a sheen that the colors in her robes seemed to scatter and flash along it as she departed.

David came to the very edge of the passageway but did not set foot in the hall itself. Ilyana hurried over to him.

"It's like teaching me about architecture by beginning with compression and tension instead of right away starting to build a Gothic cathedral, isn't it?" she asked him.

"There's a Gothic cathedral in here?" he demanded.

"No, just Shiva."

They emerged from the pylon and walked back down the avenue of ram-headed sphinxes. "I hope you're going to tell me what happened, Yana. You were gone for four hours."

"Four hours! It can't have been that long."

"Did she give you any idea why she asked you to come visit her?"

"I dunno. I think she's curious about human females."

"What did you see?"

"We looked at two statues of Shiva, and talked about time. We saw Shiva as Lord of Dance and the other one was him sitting on a mountain meditating."

David cracked a smile, beginning to relax finally. "I always liked the statues of Shiva and Parvati best. Well, anyway." He seemed embarrassed suddenly. "Do you know how we're getting back?"

They came out onto the portico and descended the stairs to the granite entryway. The gray disk waited patiently for them.

"I guess the same way we came in."

"Oh, wonderful," groaned David, eyeing the disk with loathing.

Ilyana hesitated before she stepped onto it. "You know what else, though? It was like Genji was giving me a lesson. And she wants me to come back."

Startled, he examined her for a long moment, making her uncomfortable. "No doubt Shiva told her he's lonely," he said and then, at once, "Sorry."

Quickly, he stepped onto the disk and she jumped on after him. The plate began to rise and soon was swallowed up in the glass tower. "That's great news," he finished, and said to himself in an undertone, "Goddess, what an idiot you are, David."

Ilyana stared at her feet, dim now, since they were surrounded by the black tunnel. The only illumination came from the ring demarking the boundaries of the gray disk. She had remembered who Parvati was: Himalaya's daughter, who was so beautiful that Shiva loved her divine body without respite for a thousand years. Blushing, she tried not to think of the dancing Shiva, but the more she tried not to, the more she did think of him, his graceful limbs and slender torso, the sensuous flow of his hands.

At last, they emerged into the tower chamber. The little ship was waiting for them, docked now so that only a hand's width line of air separated the ship from the ledge. Ilyana crossed over and sat on a bench and spoke not one word the entire journey back, even though she could tell David was burning to know what had happened. She just could not bring herself to talk.

When they arrived back at the dome, Gwyn was waiting instead of Hyacinth. His rehearsal was over for the day and Hyacinth had been called. The sun was setting. Only the planet's great rings peeped over the horizon. One moon gleamed softly in the sky.

When she got back to her mother's tent, Valentin had not come home. Nor, when she went out to the ruined caravansary, had he touched the food she'd left that morning.