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are moving. All wrong, of course. The stars don’t move; it’s the Earth. (Sorry, didn’t you know that? Oops. Forget I spoke)
    It’s the same with us and Time. We don’t change. Things move past us, but we’re fixed. I think I may have been young once, for twenty years, the blink of an eye; it was over so quick I didn’t notice and certainly can’t remember. I shall never be older than I am now, except in a dressing-up body. Of course I can look like anybody or anything I want, to anyone else; I can’t see myself, for obvious reasons, except in a mirror or a glass darkly, and I never bother. Everybody and everything else blossoms and flourishes like leaves on a tree, and withers and perishes, but naught changeth me; so what would be the point?
    Pol once said something interesting. If you don’t travel, you don’t arrive.
    So, yes; my mother and my father, my brothers, sisters, uncles and aunts have all had plenty of time to get used to me. And even now, they can’t stand me for more than five minutes. Am I really that bad?
    “N O ,” MY MOTHER said.
    There were tears in my eyes. “You’re just saying that.”
    “You’re really not that bad,” she said, “compared to the rest of us. No worse.”
    “No better?”
    She snapped her fingers and the Loom of Destiny vanished. “This is all because you’ve been spending time with mortals,” she said. “It doesn’t do anyone any good. Look at Pol. All those dreadful mortal females. It makes him sulky and sarcastic.”
    “No better than any of the others?”
    She shrugged. “What’s so special about being better?” she said. “It’s not like they give prizes for it.”
    I looked at her for quite some time. Then I said; “Thank you. That’s all I needed to know.”
    “Is it? Did I say something clever?”
    I nodded. “Purely by accident. I think I’ll go now.”
    I could feel her relax. “It’s not that I don’t like having you home,” she said. “It’s just—”
    “Yes.”
    She smiled at me. “I’m glad we understand each other.”
    “Y OU ’ RE BACK ,” HE said.
    The T thing again. Three weeks had passed, in his timescale, since I stormed off in my huff. Since then he’d traversed four hundred miles of impossibly difficult terrain—towering mountain passes, impenetrable jungles, rivers in spate, fever-haunted marshes. Along the way he’d acquired two mules, laden with supplies and equipment. I vanished them irritably. He looked at the space where they’d been, and sighed.
    “Against the rules,” I said.
    “No. The rule was, no porters or other humans.” “The rule changed.”
    “Ah.”
    He looked round to see what he’d got left. I glared at him, but he didn’t notice. “You’ve got on fine without me, by the look of it.”
    That got his attention. “It’s been hell,” he growled at me. “I nearly died three times. I got swept away crossing a river, I lost my footing climbing a sheer cliff and ended up trapped in a crevasse, and I trod in quicksand.”
    “You’re looking well on it.”
    “A caravan of No Vei heard me screaming, and they pulled me out. They fed me and gave me new clothes, since I’d lost absolutely everything. When I told them what I was trying to do, they told me I must be mad and gave me two mules laden with supplies.” He paused. “I assume you’re going to tell me that was all you, watching over me.”
    I’d been about to. “I knew you could look after yourself,” I said. “For the easy stages of the journey.”
    Another sigh. “Did you have to take everything?”
    “You won’t need things now I’m back,” I said. “You’ll have me instead.”
    H E ’ D LET HIS hair grow long. It suited him.
    He’d lost all the maps in the quicksand, of course, so I had to tell him the way. I have to concede, I didn’t exactly cover myself in glory in my capacity as navigator. Things look different from the air—gradients, for example, and depths of rivers and thickness of ice, and you don’t