the door of the tent, the Index carefully tucked under his arm, Shedemei was waiting for him.
"Did you want to be alone?" Zdorab asked.
"I wanted to talk to you, "said Shedemei.
Zdorab sat down, then set the Index aside so she wouldn't think he was impatient to use it - though of course she knew that he was.
"Dorova is our last chance," said Shedemei. "To return to civilization."
Zdorab nodded - not agreement, only a sign that he understood.
"Zodya, we don't belong here," she said. "We're not part of this. It's a life of endless servitude for you, a life in which all my work is wasted. We've done it for a year - we've served well. The reason for your oath to Nafai was to keep you from giving the alarm in Basilica back when it would have meant soldiers capturing him if you returned to the city. Well, that's hardly likely to happen now, don't you think?"
"I don't stay here because of my oath, Shedya."
"I know," she said, and then, despite herself, her tears came.
"Do you think I don't see how you suffer here?" he said. "We thought that having the outward form of marriage would be enough for you, but it isn't. You want to belong, and you can't do that as long as you don't have a child."
It made her furious, to hear him analyze her that way - clearly he had been watching and deciding what her "problem" was, and he was wrong. Or at least he was only half right. "It isn't about belonging," she said angrily. "It's about life. I'm nobody here - I'm not a scientist, I'm not a mother, I'm not even a good servant like you, I can't plumb the depths of the Index because its voice isn't as clear to me - I find myself echoing your wisdom when I talk to others because nobody can even understand the things I know - and when I see the others with their babies I want one of my own, I'm hungry for one, not so I can be like them but because I want to be part of the net of life, I want to pass my genes on, to see a child grow with a face half-mine. Can't you understand that? I'm not reproductively handicapped like you, I'm cut off from my own biological identity because I'm trapped here in this company and if I don't get out I'll die and I will have made no difference in the world."
Silence was thick in the air in their tent, when she was done with her impassioned speech. What is he thinking? What does he think of me? I've hurt him, I know - I've told him that I hate being married to him, which is not true really, because he is my true friend - who else in all my life have I been able to pour out my heart to, until him?
"I shouldn't have spoken," she said in a whisper. "But I saw the lights of the city, and I thought - we could both return to a world that values us."
"That world didn't value me any more than this one," said Zdorab. "And you forget - how can I ever leave the Index?"
Didn't he understand what she was proposing? "Take it," she said. "We can take the Index and hurry around the bay. We have no children to slow us down. They can't catch us. With the Index you will have knowledge to sell as surely as I have - we can buy our way out of Dorova and back to the wide world in the north before they can get this caravan back north to chase us. They don't need the Index - don't you see how Luet and Nafai and Volemak and Hushidh all talk to the Oversoul without the help of the Index?"
"They don't really need it, and so we aren't really thieves for taking it," said Zdorab.
"Yes, of course we're really thieves," said Shedemei. "But thieves who steal from those who don't need what they're taking can live with their crime a little more easily than thieves who take bread from the mouths of the poor."
"I don't know that it's the magnitude of the crime that decides whether the criminal can live with it," said Zdorab. "I think it's the natural goodness of the person who commits the crime. Murderers often live with their murders more easily than honest men live with a small lie."
"And you're