unnatural.'
She turned away when he began to shave, but she glanced over her shoulder, glanced again, and then turned and watched distastefully. 'Don't you cut your skin?' she asked.
'I did in the beginning,' he said, pressing taut his cheek and working the razor easily, watching it in the side of his flashlight propped on a stone. 'I had to keep my hand at my face for days.'
'Do you always use tea?' she asked.
He laughed. 'No,' he said. 'It's a substitute for water. Tonight I'm going to go looking for a pond or a stream.'
'How often do you—do that?' she asked.
'Every day,' he said. 'I missed yesterday. It's a nuisance, but it's only for a few more weeks. At least I hope so.'
'What do you mean?' she said.
He said nothing, kept shaving.
She turned away.
He read one of the Francais books, about the causes of a war that had lasted thirty years. Lilac slept, and then she sat on a blanket and looked at him and at the trees and at the sky.
'Do you want me to teach you this language?' he asked.
'What for?' she said.
'Once you wanted to learn it,' he said. 'Do you remember? I gave you lists of words.'
'Yes,' she said, 'I remember. I learned them, but I've forgotten them. I'm well now; what would I want to learn it now for?'
He did calisthenics and made her do them too, so that they would be ready for Sunday's long ride. She followed his directions unprotestingly.
That night he found, not a stream, but a concrete-banked irrigation channel about two meters wide. He bathed in its slow-flowing water, then brought filled drink containers back to the hiding place and woke Lilac and untied her. He led her through the trees and stood and watched while she bathed. Her wet body glistened in the faint light of the quarter moon.
He helped her up onto the bank, handed her a towel, and stayed close to her while she dried herself. 'Do you know why I'm doing this?' he asked her.
She looked at him.
'Because I love you,' he said.
'Then let me go,' she said.
He shook his head.
'Then how can you say you love me?'
'I do,' he said.
She bent over and dried her legs. 'Do you want me to get sick again?' she asked.
'Yes,' he said.
'Then you hate me,' she said, 'you don't love me.' She stood up straight.
He took her arm, cool and moist, smooth. 'Lilac,' he said.
'Anna.'
He tried to kiss her lips but she turned her head and drew away. He kissed her cheek.
'Now point your gun at me and 'rape' me,' she said.
'I won't do that,' he said. He let go of her arm.
'I don't know why not,' she said, getting into her coveralls. She closed them fumblingly. 'Please, Li,' she said, 'let's go back to the city. I'm sure you can be cured, because if you were really sick, incurably sick, you would 'rape' me. You'd be much less kind than you are.'
'Come on,' he said, 'let's get back to the place.'
'Please, Li—' she said.
'Chip' he said. 'My name is Chip. Come on.' He jerked his head and they started through the trees.
Toward the end of the week she took his pen and the book he wasn't reading and drew pictures on the inside of the book's cover—near-likenesses of Christ and Wei, groups of buildings, her left hand, and a row of shaded crosses and sickles. He looked to make sure she wasn't writing messages that she would try to give to someone on Sunday.
Later he drew a building and showed it to her.
'What is it?' she asked.
'A building,' he said.
'No it isn't.'
'It is,' he said. 'They don't all have to be blank and rectangular.'
'What are the ovals?'
'Windows.'
'I've never seen a building like this one,' she said. 'Not even in the Pre-U. Where is it?'
'Nowhere,' he said. 'I made it up.'
'Oh,' she said. 'Then it isn't a building, not really. How can you draw things that aren't real?'
'I'm sick, remember?' he said.
She gave the book back to him, not looking at his eyes. 'Don't joke about it,' she said.
He hoped—well, didn't hope, but thought it might possibly happen—that Saturday night, out of custom or desire or even only memberlike kindness, she would show a willingness for him to come close to her. She didn't, though. She was the same as she had been every other night, sitting silently in the dusk with her arms around her knees, watching the band of purpling sky between the shifting black treetops and the black rock ledge overhead.
'It's Saturday night,' he said.
'I know,' she said.
They were silent for a few moments, and then she said, 'I'm not going to be able to have my treatment, am I?'
'No,' he said.
'Then I might get pregnant,' she said. 'I'm not supposed to have children and neither are you.'
He wanted to tell her that they were going someplace where Uni's decisions were meaningless, but it was too soon; she might become frightened and unmanageable. 'Yes, I suppose you're right,' he said.
When he had tied her and covered her, he kissed her cheek. She lay in the darkness and said nothing, and he got up from his knees and went to his own blankets.
Sunday's ride went well. Early in the day a group of young members stopped them, but it was only to ask their help in repairing a broken drive chain, and Lilac sat on the grass away from the group while Chip did the job. By sundown they were in the parkland north of '14266. They had gone about seventy-five kilometers.
Again it was hard to find a hiding place, but the one Chip finally found—the broken walls of a pre-U or early-U building, roofed with a sagging mass of vines and creepers—was larger and more comfortable than the one they had used the week before. That same night, despite the day's riding, he went into '266 and brought back a three- day supply of cakes and drinks.
Lilac grew irritable that week. 'I want to clean my teeth' she said, 'and I want to take a shower. How long are we going to go on this way? Forever? You may enjoy living like an animal but I don't; I'm a human being. And I can't sleep with my hands and feet tied.'
'You slept all right last week,' he said.
'Well I can't now!'
'Then lie quietly and let me sleep,' he said.
When she looked at him it was with annoyance, not with pity. She made disapproving sounds when he shaved and when he read; answered curtly or not at all when he spoke. She balked at doing calisthenics, and he had to take out the gun and threaten her.
It was getting close to Marx eighth, her treatment day, he told himself, and this irritability, a natural resentment of captivity and discomfort, was a sign of the healthy Lilac who was buried in Anna SG. It ought to have pleased him, and when he thought about it, it did. But it was much harder to live with than the previous week's
