him. "Of course it's a lie," said Wang-mu. "The truth is simply too unbelievable."
"But the truth is the only thing worth believing, isn't it?" asked Grace's son.
"If you can know it," said Wang-mu. "But if you won't believe the truth, someone has to help you come up with plausible lies, don't they?"
"I can make up my own," said Grace. "Day before yesterday a white boy and a Chinese girl visited my friend Aimaina Hikari on a world at least twenty years' voyage away. They told him things that disturbed his entire equilibrium so he could hardly function. Today a white boy and a Chinese girl, telling different lies from the ones told by his pair, of course, but nevertheless lying their lips off, these two come to me wanting to get my help or permission or advice about seeing Malu --"
"Malu means 'being calm,'" added Grace's husband cheerfully.
"Are you still awake?" asked Grace. "Weren't you hungry? Didn't you eat?"
"I'm full but fascinated," answered her husband. "Go on, expose them!"
"I want to know who you are and how you got here," said Grace.
"That would be very hard to explain," said Peter.
"We've got minutes and minutes," said Grace. "Millions of them, really. You're the ones who seem to have only a few. So much hurry that you jump the gulf from star to star overnight. It strains credulity, of course, since lightspeed is supposed to be an insuperable barrier, but then, not believing you're the same people my friend saw on the planet Divine Wind also strains credulity, so there we are. Supposing that you really can travel faster than light, what does that tell us about where you're from? Aimaina takes it for granted that you were sent to him by the gods, more specifically by his ancestors, and he may be right, it's in the nature of gods to be unpredictable and suddenly do things they've never done before. Myself, though, I find that rational explanations always work out better, especially in papers I hope to get published. So the rational explanation is that you come from a real world, not from some heavenly never-never land. And since you can hop from world to world in a moment or a day, you could come from anywhere. But my family and I think you come from Lusitania."
"Well, I don't," said Wang-mu.
"And I'm originally from Earth," said Peter. "If I'm from anywhere."
"Aimaina thinks you come from Outside," said Grace, and for a moment Wang-mu thought the woman must have figured out how Peter came into existence. But then she realized that Grace's words had a theological meaning, not a literal one. "The land of the gods. But Malu said he's never seen you there, or if he did he didn't know it was you. So that leaves me right back where I started. You're lying about everything, so what good does it do to ask you questions?"
"I told you the truth," said Wang-mu. "I come from Path. And Peter's origins, so far as they can be traced to any planet, are on Earth. But the vehicle we came in -- that originated on Lusitania."
Peter's face went white. She knew he was thinking, Why not just noose ourselves up and hand them the loose ends of the rope? But Wang-mu had to use her own judgment, and in her judgment they were in no danger from Grace Drinker or her family. Indeed, if she meant to turn them in to the authorities, wouldn't she already have done so?
Grace looked Wang-mu in the eyes and said nothing for a long while. Then: "Good fish, isn't it?"
"I wondered what the glaze was. Is there sugar in it?"
"Honey and a couple of herbs and actually some pig fat. I hope you aren't some rare combination of Chinese and Jew or Muslim, because if you are you're now ritually unclean and I would feel really bad about that, it's so much trouble getting purified again, or so I'm told, it certainly is in our culture."
Peter, heartened now by Grace's lack of concern with their miraculous spaceship, tried to get them back on the subject. "So you'll let us see Malu?"
"Malu decides who sees Malu, and he says you're the ones who'll decide, but that's just him being enigmatic."
"Gnomic," said Wang-mu. Peter winced.
"Not really, not in the sense of being obscure. Malu means to be perfectly clear and for him spiritual things aren't mystical at all, they're just a part of life. I myself have never actually walked