What?

A fly. Inside a block of plastic. That was a thing Blink had.. Tell me. Who is it that I am?

Rush that Speaks.

That's not an answer.

It's the only one that's true now.

It's very confusing. I feel myself to be me, and only me; but that can't be so.

Go on with your story; it's less confusing. It's best just to tell the story, beginning to end - that's something we know about you. Will you tell about Blink?

Blink.

If Blink was a saint, then I'm not; if Blink wasn't a saint, then perhaps it's true that I could be one. Transparent: that's what Painted Red said the saints were, or tried to be; and that's what I am now, isn't it?

She said: "The saints found that truthful speaking was more than just being understood; the important thing was that the better you spoke, the more other people saw themselves in you, as in a mirror. Or better: the more they saw themselves through you, as though you had become transparent."

It was the end of my second seventh year, and I had come to have the System read for me again; and before she began work with her lenses and squares of glass we sat talking, eating apples which reminded me of the first day I had come to learn with her.

"Why are there no saints now?" I asked.

"Well," she said, "perhaps there are. Saints aren't known to be saints, you know, till long after they're dead, and people see that their stories have lived. So if there are saints now, we don't know it."

"But there haven't been saints. Not for many lives."

"That's true," she said. "Little St. Roy and St. Olive were the last; and St. Gene, if he's a saint, as Thread cord thinks. But there are quiet times, you know, centuries long they can be, where the task is only to learn what the busy times discovered; and then there will come a time of new discovery. People in motion."

"Seven Hands thinks one is beginning now."

"Does he?"

"He talks about leaving Belaire, 'going to meet it and not wait,' he says."

"Yes?"

I knew by the way she spoke that she doubted Seven Hands truly knew of a new thing, or meant to go out and discover it. "And Once a Day left," I said.

"Who is that?" Painted Red said. "Ah, the Whisper cord girl…" She looked at me closely. "Do you suppose she left to learn to be a saint?"

"I don't know."

"Will you follow where she went?"

"I don't know," I said. "No."

When Once a Day had at last been found to be missing, I was questioned. I said I knew she had gone with the List, and of her own accord, but not why, or whether she would return; and they saw that this was the truth. The news went quickly all through Belaire, and there were reproaches, and a meeting was nearly held; messages flew along Path, and gossips met, but no one could determine whether the grownups of Whisper cord had known beforehand what Once a Day would do, or not, or if the List had asked her to come, or how it had come about. It ought to be, among truthful speakers, that such mysteries couldn't occur, but they can. Little St. Roy said: "Truthful speaking would be a simple way to tell the truth, if the whole truth were simple, and could be told."

When the traders of the List came next spring, she wasn't among them. Waiting for them to come, I had imagined a lot of things: that she would return, but would be changed beyond recognition, unable to speak truthfully; that she would not be changed at all, would greet me as she always had, and share with me all the wonders she had seen; that she would be sorry she had run away, and ask us humbly to take her back; that she would have sickened and died amid the alien surroundings of the List, and they would bring back her white, sad corpse amid them. But she didn't come back at all; and they would only say that she was well, and happy enough, and they forgot what else, nothing important, and could the trading begin?

We counted our children, that spring, after they had gone.

Every spring I waited for her, but she didn't return. Every year, waiting for the List to come, waiting for her, became part of waiting for spring. It made the need for spring more urgent, the boredom of winter's end more maddening; made the signs - snow torrents, birds returning - spur me more terribly. She, who was so autumnal, so indoor, came to mean spring to me.

"You won't follow her," Painted Red said. "Then where will you go?"

"Well, I don't know," I said. "Not exactly."

"For someone who's to be a saint," she said, "you don't know a lot of things." She smiled. "That's a good sign."

That Painted Red knew, though I had not told her or anyone, that I meant to leave Little Belaire and learn to live a life that could be told in stories - that I meant to be a saint - didn't surprise me. I had told her. There was nothing now that I knew or wanted or thought that I could keep from telling her: for I spoke truthfully, and it was she who had taught me.

"A life," she said, folding her hands and regarding the first slide of the System which shone on her wall, "is circumstances. Circumstances are encirclings, they're circles. The circle of a saint's life, all its circumstances, is contained in the story of his life as he tells it; and the story of his life is contained in our remembering it. The story of his life is a circumstance in ours. So the circle of his life is contained in the circle of our lives, like circles of ripples rising in water."

She rose, leaving the marks of her skirts on the hard dirt floor. From the long box that was Palm cord, she drew out a second square of glass and put it in place with the other. The board changed; colors mixed and became other colors; masses changed shape, became newly related to other masses.

"Do you see?" she said. "The saints are like the slides of the System. Their interpenetration is what reveals, not the slides themselves."

"It's like the saints," I said, "because they made their lives transparent, like the slides; and their lives can be placed before our own, in our remembering their stories, and reveal things to us about ourselves. Not the stories or the lives themselves, but their -"

"Interpenetration, yes," Painted Red said. "They're saints not because of what they did, especially, but because in the telling of it, what they did became transparent, and your own life could be seen through it, illuminated.

"Without the Co-op Great Belaire there would be no truthful speaking. Without truthful speaking there could be no transparent life. And in transparent life, the saints hoped that one day we might be free from death: not immortal, as the angels tried to become, but free from death, our lives transparent even as we live them: not through a means, you see, like the Filing System or even truthful speaking, but transparent in their circumstances: so that instead of telling a story that makes a life transparent, we will ourselves be transparent, and not hear or remember a saint's life, but live it: live many lives in the moment between birth and dying."

"How could that come about?" I said, unable to grasp it, or even imagine it.

"Well," she said, "If I knew, perhaps I would be a great saint. Perhaps if you discover it… But tell me this, Rush that Speaks: how anyway is truthful speaking itself done?"

I must know that; I was a truthful speaker, the craft could never be taken from me; and yet… How: Painted Red's question reverberated within me, as a thing held up between two mirrors multiplies itself endlessly; as though my mind were crossing as my eyes can cross. I laughed, helpless. "I don't know," I said. "I don't know how it's done."