Another wound in the same old place, opening all the fragile scabs and scars, and she bled afresh at the shame of being a woman that no man wanted.

"You're not paying attention," said Zdorab.

"Sorry," she said.

He said nothing in reply. She opened her eyes. He was looking at her.

"Nothing," she said, brushing away the tear that clung to her lower eyelashes. "I didn't mean to distract you. Can we start again?"

But he didn't look back down to the Index. "It isn't that I don't desire you, Shedemei."

What, was her heart naked, that he could see right through her pretenses and see into the source of her pain?

"It's that I don't desire any woman."

It took her a moment for the idea to register. Then she laughed. "You're a zhop."

"That's really an old word for the human anus," said Zdorab quietly. "There are those who might be hurt at being called by such a name."

"But no one guessed," she said.

"I have made quite sure that no one would guess," said Zdorab, "and I'm putting my life in your hands telling you."

"Oh, it's not as dramatic as that," she said.

"Two of my friends were killed in Dog Town," he said.

Dog Town was where men who didn't have a woman in Basilica had to live, since it was illegal for an unattached male to live or even stay overnight inside the city walls.

"One was set upon by a mob because they heard a rumor he was a zhop, a peedar. They hung him by the feet from a second-story window, cut off his male organs, and then slashed him to death with knives. The other one was tricked by a man who pretended to be ... one of us. He was arrested, but on the way to prison he had an accident. It was the oddest sort of accident, too. He was trying to escape, and somehow he tripped and in the act of falling, his testicles somehow came off and got jammed down his throat, probably with a broomhandle or the butt of a spear, and he suffocated on them before anybody could come to his aid."

"They do that?"

"Oh, I can understand it perfectly. Basilica was a very difficult place for male humans. We have an innate need to dominate, you see, but in Basilica we had to deal with the fact that we had no control except as we had influence with a woman. The men living outside the walls in Dog Town were, by the very fact they didn't live inside, branded as second-raters, men that women didn't want. There was the constant imputation that Dog Town men weren't real men at all, that they didn't have what it took to please a woman. Their very identity as males was in question. And so their fear and hatred of zhops"— he said the word with scorching contempt—"reached peaks I've never heard of anywhere else."

"These friends of yours … were they your lovers?"

"The one who was arrested—he had been my lover for several weeks, and he wanted to continue, but I wouldn't let him because if we went on any longer people would begin to suspect what we were. To save our lives I refused to see him again. He went straight from me into the trap. So you see, Nafai and Elemak aren't the only ones who have killed a man."

The pain and grief he was showing seemed deeper than anything Shedemei had ever felt. For the first time she realized how sheltered her scholarly life had been. She had never had such a close connection with someone that she would feel their death this strongly, so long after. If it was long after.

"How long ago?"

"I was twenty. Nine years ago. No, ten. I'm thirty now. I forgot."

"And the other one?"

"A couple of months before I—left the city."

"He was your lover, too?"

"Oh, no—he wasn't like me that way. He had a girl in the city, only she wanted it kept secret so he didn't talk about it—she was in a bad marriage and was marking time till it ended, and so he never spoke about her. That's why the rumor started that he was a zhop. He died without telling them."

"That's—gallant, I suppose."

"It was stupid beyond belief," said Zdorab. "He never believed me when I told him how terrifying it was in Basilica for people like me."

"You told him what you are?"

"I thought of him as a man who could keep a secret. He proved me right. I kind of think—that he died in my place. So that I could be alive when Nafai came to take the Index out of the city."

It was so far beyond anything she had experienced—beyond anything she had imagined. "Why did you keep on living there, then? Why didn't you go to someplace that isn't so—terrible?"

"In the first place, while there are places that aren't so bad, I don't know of any place that I could actually get to that is actually safe for someone like me. And in the second place, the Index was in Basilica. Now that the Index is out of there, I hope the city burns to the ground. I only wish that Moozh had killed every one of the strutting men of Dog Town."

"The Index was that important to you, to make you stay?"

"I learned of its existence when I was a young boy. Just a story, that there was a magic ball that if you held it, you could talk to God and he would have to tell you the answer to any question you asked. I thought, How wonderful. And then I saw a picture of the Index of the Palwashantu, and it looked exactly like the image in my mind of the magic ball."

"But that's not evidence at all," said Shedemei. "That's a childhood dream."

"I know it. I knew it then," said Zdorab. "But without even meaning to, I found myself preparing. For the day when I'd have the magic ball. I found myself trying to learn the questions that it would be worth asking God to answer. And, still without meaning to, I found myself making choices that took me closer and closer to Basilica, to the place where the Palwashantu kept their sacred Index. At the same time, being a studious young man helped me conceal my—defect. My father would say, ‘You need to set down the books now and then, go and find some friends. Find a girl! How will you ever marry if you never meet any girls?' When I got to Basilica I used to write to him about my girlfriends, so he felt much better, though he would tell me that the way Basilicans marry, for just a year at a time, was awful and against nature. He really didn't like things that were against nature."

"That must have hurt," said Shedemei.

"Not really," said Zdorab. "It is against nature. I'm cut off from that tree of life that Volemak saw, I'm not part of the chain—I'm a genetic dead end. I think I read once, in an article by a genetics student, that it was not unreasonable to suppose that homosexuality might be a mechanism that nature used to weed out defective genes. The organism could detect some otherwise unnoticeable genetic flaw, and this started a mechanism that caused the hypothalamus to remain stunted, causing us to be highly sexual beings but with an inability to fixate on the opposite sex. A sort of self-closing wound in the gene pool. We were, I think the article said, the culls of humanity."

Shedemei blushed deeply—a feeling she rarely had and didn't like. "That was student work. I never published it outside the scholarly community. It was speculation."

"I know," he said.

"How did you even find it?"

"When I realized that I was expected to marry you, I read everything you wrote. I was trying to discover what I could and could not tell you."

"And what did you decide?"

"That I'd better keep my secrets to myself. That's why I never spoke to you, and why I was so relieved that you didn't want me."

"And now you did tell me."

"Because I could see that it hurt you, the fact that I didn't want you. I hadn't planned on that. You didn't come across as someone who would ever want the love of a contemptible crawling worm like me."

Worse and worse. "Was I so obvious in my attitude?"

"Not at all," he said. "I deliberately cultivated my wormhood. I have worked hard to become the most unnoticeable, despicable, spineless being that anyone in this company will ever know."