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After supper, Cira showed me a room on the upper floor where, as she explained, I could stay overnight. She said that it would be an honor if I did, and more so if I allowed her to stay with me.
Odessa on Bohr's planet came to my thought. If I could reach the same state of mind again.... The thought was suppressed as impractical. Still, I told Cira that I would love her to remain with me. Indeed, why shouldn't she? The room was obviously her own. I looked a Cira and felt that the threshold might yet be crossed to where closeness is no longer a valid concept in one's experience as it related to distance, the opposite to closeness. Both were evidently invalid concepts, having the same root so that feeling close is related to distance. Yes, even feeling close to another is in Bohr's universe nothing more than a myth where distance is no longer a reality. I tried to explain the concept to Cira in as simple terms as I could, and how the Bohr/Miller effect works, which I hardly understood myself. As if it were in response she began to undress herself by the window against the orange glow of the Beta Sun. The oneness that I felt with her, a feeling that reflected the superabundance of being in which clothing had no significance, must have touched her. Moment's later, something made her stop getting undressed. We didn't speak to each other. Speech appeared to be too crude. Only now and then, a few questions were asked. How many children she had, and why she hadn't re-married.
She said that she could have had three children as the wife of a village chief. But they never had any. There were always some reasons why he didn't want to have children. Then he died. Now she couldn't have any at all, she said. People on "Latush," as she called her planet or country, were allowed to marry only once. She could re-marry only someone who had lost his wife, and have children only if he had none in his previous marriage. Any unauthorized children would be taken away by the state to be raised as laborers, that is as she said, "to become feed stock for labor camps." This control process was intended to keep the population figures small. She said that she could not live through a thing like that, having her child taking away to labor camps. "Consequently," so she said, "no more thoughts about marriage are entertained."
I hugged her for the longest time after her story brought tears to her eyes. I couldn't think of a time when I felt more sorry for anyone. But soon I could only feel her real presence again the contrasted with the story. I felt an intelligence that reached far beyond this miasma of misery. The intelligence linked her unmistakably to the Spirit of the universe, the central 'sun' reflected in universal principles that are the center of everything, even at this far away place.
Suddenly, a flash of fear entered my mind, for Natalia. I had seen her walking off with the captain in conversation with a young man who had accompanied the village chief Reuel. In this repressive environment there might be immense pressures lurking in the background for sexual adventures, especially if the village chief condoned them, who might have been the young man's friend. Since imaginary purity was the captain's ideal of morality, in the same manner masculine dominance might be the highest ideal of morality in this fascist-based state-culture.
Before I could question Cira, I heard Natalia scream murder outside the house.
I rushed down stairs. She burst through the door, totally out of breath, and began to block the door from within.
"They have killed the captain, we must get out of here!" she cried.
"Why!"
"They know we're not from Virtus. We are spies to them."
I told her to run upstairs where all the others were, and followed her. I knew the upstairs door could also be locked.
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