He woke up to hear Shibo singing. Words pealed, a delicate but persistent melody, light and airy. Then he realized that his eyes were open but he saw nothing.

He blinked to restore vision. Twisted trees, big-bellied clouds, rock—his vision flickered, stabilized. He sat up, disturbed. Nothing threatening nearby. Wind sighing in the stringy brush. A sulphurous lance of light cutting a foggy glade to his left.

There was no reason for her to co-opt his senses. “What . . . ?”

I needed an outing. You were soundly asleep so—

“Yeasay, and now I’m not. No thanks to you.”

After your misadventure yesterday, I expect you could use a little help.

“Misad—oh, the purple flames? You were the one wanted to give it a closer look.”

You misremember. I alerted you to it when you were up to your chin in—

“Not the way I recall. You were at my back, pushin’ the whole time, wanting to touch it.”

You have edited out your own attraction.

“The hell I have. I wondered what it was, sure, but—”

Let’s not argue. We escaped without harm—together. That is the important point. As long as we remain together and alert, even in such a strange and wonderful place we can stay safe.

This little lecture put his teeth on edge but he kept quiet. Directing thoughts to her would just make her say more and right now he wanted inner silence, a chance to think by himself. For himself.

He went for a call of nature. While he was burying it so the smell would be hard to track, Shibo talked to him. He butted her back—pressure against a stiff wall. He struggled silently, mouth twisting, and then came the shock: he could not get rid of her. She was always there now, riding behind his eyes.

Why should you not want my help?

“Why? ’Cause I got no choice anymore.

You are too young to go forth without my aid.

“How ’bout I decide that?”

My point exactly. You can make bad decisions, you know.

“At least they’d be mine.”

We have such a closeness. Do not push me away.

Something about her “closeness” made him uneasy, but he could not find the words.

—a cloying sense of moist pressures, syrupy air that would not leave his heaving lungs, liquid running in through his nose and ears and unwilling mouth, snaky fog-feelers sweet, so sweet—

When his breathing was back to normal he tramped back to Quath. She had warmed up some of his own field grub, stock she was carrying for him.

He forgot about Shibo. The greasy excellences of the hot, oily food pushed her presence clear out of his consciousness. Which was a relief. She had been hanging in him for days now, heavy as a wet boot. He only realized this when she was subdued.

<You kicked and spoke in your sleep.>

“Uh huh. Dreams, I guess.”

<Something more.>

“How would you know?”

<Your kind conveys much through facial signals—an odd method, one we do not employ.>

“You read my face when I’m asleep?”

<I read always. This is essential to understand humans. I digitize your image, then compare with previous measurements.>

“Measurements of what?”

<Of angles and amplitudes of skin folds, color, eyebrow thickness, curvatures of mouth and eyes.>

“My God! You work pretty hard.”

<But that is merely what you do.>

“Naysay, I just give people a squint and figure out—hey, you mean that’s how I know how people feel?”

<Of course. You are designed so that none of this work is conscious.>

“But for you it is?”

<If I wish it to be.>

“And if you don’t?”

<Normally I delegate the task.>

Toby knew that thought was a net of racing electrical impulses, the dance of atoms speaking through their fleet messengers. But was that all his thoughts meant? He looked at Quath without knowing what to say.

<I have been reading for a long while now the signals which move across your face. Especially at times like now.>

“It’s Shibo. Something about her.”

<She rides upon you uneasily.>

“Yeah . . .”

<Maleness for you must always carry some anger, a ruthless density. You are impelled to unsettled movement, androgen-agitated. Your moral errors are most often a quick brutishness.>

“Hey, I’m better than that.”

<Femaleness—a convention which applies to me only vaguely—carries in your primate varieties an acute sensitivity of response. This is embedded within a composed stability, self-contained. Your females are expectant, impelled to waiting, estrogen-slow. Their errors tend to the static, the enduring face.>

“Hey, come on. That’s so simplified. Hell, I feel steady and composed plenty of times—just not lately, is all. And Besen, lookit her. She’s as kick-ass as they come, when she gets riled.”

<Your genus drifts between these polar extremes—a mode with great survival value, and so seen again and again throughout higher life. But frequent gray does not disprove that black and white exist.>

“You got sex on the brain, big-bug,” Toby said uneasily.

<Your sexual geometries shape your perception of the world—a collaboration between male and female, a painting etched by tensions. Man is pointed toward invasion. Woman exploits the advantages of the hidden, the never-fully-knowable, the grotto of welling darkness. This is the strategy of your species. Merging them in a mind so young as yours is inherently destabilizing.>

“That’s what’s going on in me?”

<I believe so.>

“What’ll I do?”

<I do not know. We are without the required technology for the two principal remedies. As I understand your primate minds, the optimum cure would be to reinforce your own subcharacters.>

“Which?”

<Perhaps your self-sense. That is an idiosyncratic agent present in all human minds. It supports an obliging illusion—that a single self rules your intellect and senses.>

“So if I built up this ‘self-sense’ . . . ?”

<It would counter the areas which the Shibo Personality is invading.>

“Ummm.” He was having trouble keeping his attention on the discussion. He felt a foreboding when he paid exact attention to Quath’s words. But then an itch in his servo-couplers would make him scratch, or a yawn, or some small piping of his sensorium. He would lose the thread of Quath’s argument.

It seemed as if all kinds of little things were poking at him, making his attention veer away from this problem. “The other way—”

<We do not have the equipment to adequately carry out—>

“Yeasay.” A deep breath. “Look, I’ll handle this on my own.”

<I believe the problem can only worsen.>

“We got plenty more to worry about.”

<I fear that—>

“Leave me—and her!—alone.”

Toby leaped up, prickly with energy. He walked off, contracting his sensorium, cutting off discussion. Quath’s words were still with him. You are impelled to unsettled movement, androgen-agitated. His boot thumped in frustration on a chunk of timestone.

He drank from the stream that muttered nearby. The water was sharp and fast-running. It cleared his head and quite suddenly he became aware that he felt deliciously lazy from the sleep. The uneasiness in him was gone, soothed away somehow, and he did not ask what had done it.

As he walked back to Quath a distant peak cracked apart and showered down glittering fragments. Pensively he gazed around at the warped greatness. “Hey, y’know, we could name these.”

<I do not follow.>

“Maybe nobody’s been in this particular Lane before. Could be, right?”

<Possibly. Though humans and others have occupied this complexity for very long times.>