Blake sat down upon it. Nervously he watched Eldoria slip out of her white street robe, his eyes moving back and forth from her smooth dark skin to the arras. The incense thickened around him.
She noticed the back-and-forth movement of his eyes. "You need not fear the little one," she said, laying her hand upon his knee. "She will not enter."
"It's not that so much," Blake said.
"What?" The warm bronze shoulder was touching his....
He rose up once in the night, thinking to find his hotel bed. His next awakening was in the grayness of dawn, and he got up and dressed and moved silently to the doorway. The girl slept just without the arras on a thin sleeping-mat, and he had to step over her to gain the anteroom. In sleep, a strand of her copper-colored hair had tumbled down across her forehead and lay like a lovely flower upon the virginal whiteness of her skin. There was something saintly about her quiet face.
When he reached the alley he began to run, and he did not stop running till the chocoletto sector was far behind him.
The hill was a memory-image and Aldebaran 12 rain-country hills were notoriously steep. Blake was breathing hard when he reached the crest.
Before him lay a memory-image of a section of Deneb 1 wasteland. The image extended for no more than half a mile, but Blake was annoyed that he should have remembered even that much of the wretched terrain. Ideally, a man's mind-country should have been comprised only of the places and times he wanted to remember. Practically, however, that was far from being the case.
He glanced back down into the rain-pocked valley that he had just crossed. The rain and the mist made for poor visibility. He could only faintly distinguish the three figures of his pursuers. The trio seemed a little closer now.