head to the music. I imagined her as a dancer. She felt the music very well. But after a few minutes she stopped moving and started to cry. "It's not the same," she said. "You've heard it before?" "Turn it off. Turn it off!" I turned it off. "Sorry," I said. "Thought you'd like it." "Guilt, nothing but guilt," she said. "You always feel guilty, don't you?" "Pretty nearly always," I admitted cheerfully. A lot of my patients threw
psychological jargon in my face. Or soap-opera language. "I'm sorry," she said. "It's just -- it's just not the music. Not the music. Now that I've heard it, everything is so dark compared to it. Like the rain, all gray and heavy and dim, as if the composer is trying to see the hills but the rain is always
in the way. For a few minutes I thought he was getting it right." "Anansa's music?" She nodded. "I know you don't believe me. But I hear her when I'm asleep. She
tells me that's the only time she can communicate with me. It's not talking. It's all her songs. She's out there, in her starship, singing And at night I hear her." "Why you?"
"You mean, why only me?" She laughed. "Because of what I am. You told me yourself. Because I can't run around, I live in my imagination. She say that the threads between minds are very thin and hard to hold. But mine she can hold, because I live completely in my mind. She holds on to me. When I go to sleep, I can't escape her now anymore at all."
"Escape? I thought you liked her." "I don't know what I like. I like -- I like the music. But Anansa wants me. She wants to have me -- she wants to give me a job."
"What's the singing like?" When she said job, she trembled and closed up; I referred back to something that she had been willing to talk about, to keep the floundering conversation going.
"It's not like anything. She's there in space, and it's black, just the humming of