been free and here I was in a trap. I felt the pressure of people all aroundme, all the time. People around me, people with me, people pressing on me,pressing me to be one of them, to be one of them, one of the people. How couldI make my soul? I could barely cling to it. I was in terror that I would loseit altogether. One of the rocks in my soulbag, a little ugly gray rock that Ihad picked up on a certain day in a certain place in the hills above the riverin the Silver Time, a little piece of my world, that became my world. Everynight I took it out and held it in my hand while I lay in bed waiting tosleep, thinking of the sunlight on the hills above the river, listening to thesoft hushing of the ship's systems, like a mechanical sea. The doctor hopefully fed me various tonics. Mother and I ate breakfast together everymorning. She kept at work, making our notes from all the years on Eleven-Sorointo her report to the Ekumen, but I knew the work did not go well. Her soulwas in as much danger as mine was. "You will never give in, will you, Ren?"she said to me one morning out of the silence of our breakfast. I had notintended the silence as a message. I had only rested in it. "Mother, I wantto go home and you want to go home," I said. "Can't we?" Her expression wasstrange for a moment, while she misunderstood me; then it cleared to grief,defeat, relief. "Will we be dead?" she asked me, her mouth twisting. "I don't know. I have to make my soul. Then I can know if I can come." "You know I can't come back. It's up to you." "I know. Go see Borny," I said. "Go home.Here we're both dying." Then noises began to come out of me, sobbing, howling.Mother was crying. She came to me and held me, and I could hold my mother,cling to her and cry with her, because her spell was broken. From the lander approaching I saw the oceans of Eleven-Soro, and in the greatness of my joy Ithought that when I was grown and went out alone I would go to the sea shoreand watch the sea-beasts shimmering their colors and tunes till I knew whatthey were thinking. I would listen, I would learn, till my soul was as largeas the shining world. The scarred barrens whirled beneath us, rains as wide asthe continent, endless desolations. We touched down. I had my soulbag, andBorny's knife around my neck on its string a communicator implant behind myright earlobe, and a medicine kit Mother had made for me. "No use dying of aninfected finger, after all," she had said. The people on the lander saidgood-bye, but I forgot to. I set off out of the desert, home. It was summer;the night was short and warm; I walked most of it. I got to the auntring aboutthe middle of the second day. I went to my house cautiously, in case somebodyhad moved in while I was gone; but it was just as we had left it. Themattresses were moldy, and I put them and the bedding out in the sun,and started going over the garden to see what had kept growing by itself. Thepigi had got small and seedy, but there were some good roots. A little boycame by and stared; he had to be Migi's baby. After a while Hyuru came by. Shesquatted down near me in the garden in the sunshine. I smiled when I saw her,and she smiled, but it took us a while to find something to say. "Your mother didn't come back," she said. "She's dead," I said. "I'm sorry," Hyurusaid. She watched me dig up another root. "Will you come to the singingcircle?" she asked. I nodded. She smiled again. With her rosebrown skin andwide-set eyes, Hyuru had become very beautiful, but her smile was exactly thesame as when we were little girls. "Hi, ya!" she sighed in deep contentment,lying down on the dirt with her chin on her arms. "This is good!" I went on blissfully digging. That year and the next two, I was in the singing circlewith Hyuru and two other gifts. Didsu still came to it often, and Han, a womanwho settled in our auntring to have her first baby, joined it too. In thesinging circle the older gifts pass around the stories, songs, knowledge theylearned from their own mother, and young women who have lived in otherauntrings teach what they learned there; so women make each other's souls,learning how to make their children's souls. Han lived in the house where old Dnemi had died. Nobody in the auntring except Sut's baby had died while myfamily lived there. My mother had complained that she didn't have any data ondeath and burial. Sut had gone away with her dead baby and never came back,and nobody talked about it. I think that turned my mother against the others

more than anything else. She was angry and ashamed that she could not go andtry to comfort Sut and that nobody else did. "It is not human," she said. "Itis pure animal behavior. Nothing could be clearer evidence that this is abroken culture -- not a society, but the remains of one. A terrible, anappalling poverty." I don't know if Dnemi's death would have changed hermind. Dnemi was dying for a long time, of kidney failure I think; she turned akind of dark orange color, jaundice. While she could get around, nobody helpedher. When she didn't come out of her house for a day or two, the women wouldsend the children in with water and a little food and firewood. It went on so through the winter; then one morning little Rashi told his mother Aunt Dnemiwas "staring." Several of the women went to Dnemi's house, and entered it forthe first and last time. They sent for all the girls in the singing circle, sothat we could learn what to do. We took turns sitting by the body or in theporch of the house, singing soft songs, child-songs, giving the soul a day anda night to leave the body and the house; then the older women wrapped the bodyin the bedding, strapped it on a kind of litter, and set off with it towardthe barren lands. There it would be given back, under a rock cairn or insideone of the ruins of the ancient city. "Those are the lands of the dead," Sadnesaid. "What dies stays there." Hah settled down in that house a year later.When her baby began to be born she asked Didsu to help her, and Hyuru and Istayed in the porch and watched, so that we could learn. It was a wonderfulthing to see, and quite altered the course of my thinking, and Hyuru's too.Hyuru said, "I'd like to do that!" I said nothing, but thought, So do I, butnot for a long time, because once you have a child you're never alone. And though it is of the others, of relationships, that I write, the heart ofmy life has been my being alone. I think there is no way to write about beingalone. To write is to tell something to somebody, to communicate to others.CP, as Steadiness would say. Solitude is non-communication, the absence ofothers, the presence of a self sufficient to itself. A woman's solitude in the auntring is, of course, based firmly on the presence of others at a littledistance. It is a contingent, and therefore human, solitude. The settled menare connected as stringently to the women, though not to one another; thesettlement is an integral though distant element of the auntring. Even ascouting woman is part of the society -- a moving part, connecting the settledparts. Only the isolation of a woman or man who chooses to live outside thesettlements is absolute. They are outside the network altogether. There areworlds where such persons are called saints, holy people. Since isolation is asure way to prevent magic, on my world the assumption is that they aresorcerors, outcast by others or by their own will, their conscience. I knew I was strong with magic, how could I help it? and I began to long to get away.It would be so much easier and safer to be alone. But at the same time, andincreasingly, I wanted to know something about the great harmless magic,the spells cast between men and women. I preferred foraging to gardening, andwas out on the hills a good deal; and these days, instead of keeping away fromthe man's-houses, I wandered by them, and looked at them, and looked at themen if they were outside. The men looked back. Downriver Lame Man's long,shining hair was getting a little white in it now, but when he sat singing hislong, long songs I found myself sitting down and listening, as if my legs hadlost their bones. He was very handsome. So was the man I remembered as a boynamed Tret in the auntring, when I was little, Behyu's son. He had come backfrom the boygroup and from wandering, and had built a house and made a finegarden in the valley of Red Stone Creek. He had a big nose and big eyes, longarms and legs, long hands; he moved very quietly, almost like Arrem doing theuntrance. I went often to pick lowberries in Red Stone Creek valley. He came along the path and spoke. "You were Borny's sister," he said. He had a lowvoice, quiet. "He's dead," I said. Red Stone Man nodded. "That's his knife." In my world, I had never talked with a man. I felt extremely strange.I kept picking berries. "You're picking green ones," Red Stone Man said. His soft, smiling voice made my legs lose their bones again. "I think nobody'stouched you," he said. "I'd touch you gently. I think about it, about you,