"I resent that," Callista said. Able now to pick up the child and walk away with her through the woods where all light was granite-gray, she did so, seeking her father to show him a long overdue report card on progress in pancreation. The little girl—naturally, a little girl, with that lyre waist and tumbling hair and dainty genital groove—said to her: "I am so sorry, Callista Johnson Blake, I have to stop here and paint a picture. Can I look at that thing?"
"I got my paw stuck in it."
"Irrelevant," said the little girl. "Incompetent Callista."
"All right," Callista said, and walked away from her through the grayness, uncertain whether she could find her father. He sat (she thought) behind a gray screen, by a lighted window. "Daddy, please!—"
Now the bracelet on her wrist had caught, snarled itself in a tangle of black vines, and Callista called: "Daddy, I can't seem to fix it. Can I go now?"
She could not go, because in front of her beyond the vines were the two doors, so very nearly alike, and someone—NOT Daddy, because Daddy NEVER said anything so unkind—someone said: "It's one or the other."
Callista tried then to scream with all her power: "Daddy! My back hurts—" nothing in her throat but a mumble, hardly even that, a scream in silence without breath: "Daddy! Please come—my back hurts—"
Callista sat up drenched in sweat that soaked her pajamas, and shivering. No relief at first, rather a frustrated anger, since in another moment her father might have been able to hear and answer. Comprehension then; reorientation; qualified relief—Is waking any better?
It was, of course. Steadier, anyway. The familiar exchange of selves: What I was in the dream, I am not; what I am, I was and was not in the dream.
The grayness before her eyes yielded the image of a cross, and a second horizontal bar grew visible—there all the time. A window, the same one through which yesterday, by straining on tiptoe to the limit of pain, she had succeeded in watching the wheeling of doves. The same effort now would give her the field of winter sky before dawn. If the rain had stopped, a few stars incorruptible, indifferent.