“I understand,” he said, smiling. Perhaps he did, a little.

“Your mother was Marsalforn and your father was Ramla.”

“Marsalforn. Ramla.”

“You were taken by the hjjks in 35. It’s in the city records. Captured by a raiding party outside the walls, just like me. Marsalforn disappeared while searching for you in the hills. Her body was never found. Your father left the city soon afterward and no one knows where he is now.”

“Marsalforn,” he said again. “Ramla.” The rest of what she had said seemed lost on him.

“Do you follow what I’m telling you? Those are the names of your mother and father.”

“Mother. Father.” Blankly. Her words didn’t seem to hold meaning for him at all.

“Do you know what I want to do with you?” she said in a low, urgent voice, with her face close to his. “I want to talk about life in the Nest. I want you to make it come alive for me again. The smell of it, the colors, the sounds. The things that Nest-thinker says. Whether you ever went marching with the Militaries, or had to stay behind with the Egg-makers. Whether they let you go near the Queen. I want to hear all about it. Everything.”

“Marsalforn,” he said again. “Mother. Father. Ramla. Marsalforn is Ramla. Mother is Father.”

“You aren’t really getting much of what I’m saying, are you? Are you, Kundalimon?”

He smiled, the warmest smile she had seen from him yet. It was like the sun emerging from behind a cloud. But he shook his head.

She had to try something else. This was too slow.

Her heart began to pound.

“What we ought to do is twine,” Nialli Apuilana said, suddenly audacious.

Did he know what she meant? No. He made no response, simply maintained the same fixed smile.

“Twine. I want to twine with you, Kundalimon. You don’t know what that is, either, do you? Twine. It’s something that People do with their sensing-organs. Do you even know what a sensing-organ is? This thing here, hanging down behind you like a tail. It is a tail, I suppose. But much more than that. It’s full of perceptors that run up into your spine and connect right to your brain.”

He was still smiling, smiling, obviously comprehending nothing.

She persisted. “One of the things we use the sensing-organ for is to make contact with other people. Deep, intense, intimate contact, mind to mind. We aren’t even allowed to try it until we’re thirteen, and then the offering-woman shows us how, and after that we can go looking for twining-partners.”

He looked at her blankly. Shook his head.

She took his hand. “Any two people can be twining-partners — a man and a woman, a man and a man, a woman and a woman, anyone. It’s not like coupling or mating, you see. It’s a union of souls. You twine with anyone whose soul you want to share.”

“Twine,” he said, and smiled even harder.

“Twine, yes. I’ve done it only once. On my twining-day — when I was thirteen, you know — with Boldirinthe the offering-woman. Since then, never. Nobody here interests me that way. But if I could twine with you, Kundalimon—”

“Twine?”

“We’d make contact such as we’ve never known in our lives. We could share Nest-truths and we wouldn’t need even to try to speak each other’s languages, because there’s a language of twining that goes beyond any mere words.” She looked around to see if the door was latched. Yes. A kind of fever was on her now. Her fur was damp, her breasts were rising and falling swiftly. Her own scent was rank and musky in her nostrils, an animal reek.

He might be beginning to comprehend.

Gingerly she lifted her sensing-organ and brought it forward, and let it slide lightly across his.

For an instant there was contact. It was like a shock of lightning. She felt his soul with astonishing clarity: a smooth pale parchment, on which strange inscriptions had been written in a dark, bold, alien hand. There was great sweetness in it, and tenderness, and also strangeness. The dark cloistered mystery of the Nest was everywhere in it. He was open to her, entirely vulnerable, and there would be no difficulty about completing the twining and linking their spirits in the keenest of intimacies. Relief, joy, even something that might have been love, flooded her soul.

But then, after that first stunning moment, he whipped his sensing-organ back out of her reach, breaking the contact with jarring suddenness. Uttering a hoarse ragged sound, midway between a growl and a hjjk’s chittering insect-noise, he beat frantically at her for a moment using both his arms at once, the way a hjjk would. His eyes flared wildly with fright. Then he hopped backward and crouched in a defensive stance in the corner, pressed tight up against the walls of the room, panting in terror. His face was a frozen mask of fear and shock, nostrils wide, lips drawn back rigidly, both rows of teeth bared.

Nialli Apuilana looked at him wide-eyed, horror-stricken at what she had done.

“Kundalimon?”

“No! Away! No!”

“I didn’t mean to frighten you. I only—”

“No. No! ”

He began to tremble. He muttered incomprehensibly in hjjk. Nialli Apuilana held out her arms to him, but he turned away from her, huddling close to the wall. In shame and anguish she fled from him.

“Are you making any progress?” Taniane asked.

Nialli Apuilana gave her a quick uneasy look. “A little. Not as much as I’d like.”

“Can he speak our language yet?”

“He’s learning.”

“And the hjjk words? Are they coming back to you?”

“We don’t use the hjjk words,” Nialli Apuilana said in a low, husky tone. “He’s trying to put the Nest behind him. He wants to be flesh again.”

“Flesh,” Taniane said. Her daughter’s strange choice of words sent a chill through her. “You mean, to be part of the People?”

“That’s what I mean, yes.”

Taniane peered close. As always she wished she could see behind the mask that hid her daughter’s soul from her. For the millionth time she wondered what had happened to Nialli Apuilana during the months she had spent below the surface of the Earth in the dark mysterious labyrinth of the Nest.

She said, “What about the treaty?”

“Not a word. Not yet. We don’t understand each other well enough to talk about anything but the simplest things.”

“The Presidium will be meeting next week.”

“I’m going as fast as I can, mother. As fast as he’ll let me. I’ve tried to go more quickly, but there are — problems.

“What sort of problems?”

“Problems,” Nialli Apuilana repeated, looking away. “Oh, mother, let me be! Do you think this is easy?”

For three days she couldn’t bring herself to see him. A guardsman had been sent with his food in her place. Then she went, bringing a tray of edible seeds and the small reddish insects known as rubies, which she had gathered that morning in the torrid drylands on the northeastern slope of the hills. These she offered timidly, without a word. He took the tray from her just as wordlessly, and fell upon the rubies as if he had not eaten in weeks, sweeping the little ruddy carcasses into his mouth with broad avid motions of his hand.

He looked up afterward and smiled. But he kept a wary distance from her throughout that day’s visit.

So the damage wasn’t irreparable. Still, the breach would be some time in healing. She knew that her attempt at twining with him had been too hasty, too bold. Perhaps his sensing-organ itself was something he barely understood. Perhaps the fleeting touch of intimacy he had shared with her had been too powerful a sensation for him, raised as he had been among a species that had emotions of quite a different kind; perhaps it had begun to undermine his already uncertain sense of which race he belonged to.

He must regard himself as a hjjk in flesh-folk flesh, Nialli Apuilana thought. Such intimacy with a flesh-folk person would seem a disgusting obscenity to him, then. And yet some part of him had reached out eagerly and lovingly to her. Some part of him had yearned to let their souls rush together and become one. She was sure of that. But it had terrified him even while it tempted him; and he had pulled back in agonizing confusion.