She looked about, studying areas of blackness within the darkness where side tunnels debouched into our own.

“How far back do you think they go?” she inquired.

“I just don’t know.”

“Under the palace?”

“Probably,” I said, remembering the series of side tunnels I’d passed on my way to the Pattern. “It seems possible they cut into the big caves below it somewhere.”

“What’s it like down there?”.

“Under the palace? Just dark and big. Ancient…”

“I’d like to see it.”

“Whatever for?”

“The Pattern’s down there. It must be pretty colorful.”

“Oh, it is all bright and swirly. Rather intimidating, though.”

“How can you say that when you’ve walked it?”

“Walking it and liking it are two different things.”

“I’d just thought that if it were in you to walk it, you’d feel some affinity, some deep resonant kinship with it.”

I laughed, and the sounds echoed about us.

“Oh, while I was walking it I knew it was in me to do it,” I said. “I didn’t feel it beforehand, though. I was just scared then. And I never liked it.”

“Strange.”

“Not really. It’s like the sea or the night sky. It’s big’ and it’s powerful and it’s beautiful and it’s there. It’s a natural force and you make of it what you will.”

She looked back along the passageway leading inward.

“I’d like to see it,” she said.

“I wouldn’t try to find my way to it from here,” I told her. “Why do you want to see it, anyhow?”

“Just to see how I’d respond to something like that.”

“You’re strange,” I said.

“Will you take me when we go back? Will you show it to me?”

This was not going at all the way I’d thought it would: If she were what I thought, I didn’t understand the request. I was half tempted to take her to it, to find out what she had in mind. However, I was operating under a system of priorities, and I’d a feeling she represented one concerning which I’d made myself a promise and some elaborate preparations.