She looked down at her feet on the pavement. They were cold. She would have worn her boots if she had thought it was going to snow, if Fana hadn’t hurried her so. She felt cold, lost, lonely to the point of tears. She set her jaw and set her lips and stood firm on her cold feet on the cold stone. There was a sound, sparse, sparkling, faint, like the snow crystals. The crowd had gone quite silent, swept by low laughing murmurs, and through the silence ran that small, discontinuous silvery sound.

"What is that?" asked Bruna, beginning to smile. "Why are they doing that?"

This is a committee meeting.

Surely you don’t want me to describe a committee meeting? It meets as usual on Friday at I I in the morning in the basement of the Economics Building. At 11 on Friday night, however, it is still meeting, and there are a good many onlookers, several million, in fact, thanks to the foreigner with the camera, a television camera with a long snout, a one-eyed snout that peers and sucks up what it sees. The cameraman focuses for a long time on the tall dark-haired girl who speaks so eloquently in favor of a certain decision concerning bringing a certain man back to the capital. But the millions of onlookers will not understand her argument, which is spoken in her obscure language and is not translated for them. All they will know is how the eye snout of the camera lingered on her young face, sticking it.

This is a love story.

Two hours later, the cameraman was long gone, but the committee was still meeting.

"No, listen," she said, "seriously, this is the moment when the betrayal is always made. Free elections, yes; but if we don’t look past that now, when will we? And who’ll do it? Are we a country or a client state changing patrons?"

"You have to go one step at a time, consolidating—"

"When the dam breaks? You have to shoot the rapids! All at once!"