God changes, and man,
And the form of them bodily;
I am the soul.
He tried to sit up again, but he was very weak. He wanted to quote it to her and tell her what he had never told her: that the name of it was Hertha and that it had been written long ago by a man named Swinburne, and he wanted to explain why he had named her after a poem, because it was very funny.
The harsh light hurt his eyes and made him feel dizzy. He lay watching her as she bent toward the oxygen dial, wrinkling her face in animal concentration, trying to read it for him. Her puzzled expression was pathetic; it reminded him of the first time he had seen her.
The walls began to spin crazily, for the hut had been intended for only one person.
He remembered the first time he saw her, cowering in a filthy alleyway in the Miramus. At first he thought she had taken some food from a garbage pail and was trying to conceal it by holding it to her breast. But when the flare of a rocket leaving the field two blocks away lit the area for a moment, he saw that she was holding a tiny welikin, terribly mangled, looking as if it had just been run over by a heavy transport truck. He took it away from her and threw it into the darkness, shuddering.
"It was dead," he said.
She continued to stare at him, starting to cry silently, big, round, salt tears that she brushed at with reddened hands.
"My—my—" she stammered.