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to live. The Empyrium must be able to keep its secrets.
    “So I am forced to my own conclusion. You have explained , Prisoner Gilden, and explained again and again. But you have not told . Tell me now. Why did you do this, and throw away a life most valuable to the Mentor?”
    Arrin Gilden stared into darkness. He moved his weary head forward to rest it against the cool metal of the brace.
    “Could we have some light?”
    “I see no reason why not.”
    As the room brightened the Teller’s face slowly appeared a few feet from Gilden’s chair. If this was derived reality, the illusion was perfect. Gilden recognized a dreadful irony. The technology that would doom him to an endless lifetime of torture was the twin of the one that had caught him. No one in the Mentor’s entourage had discovered his tiny voyeur device, or even dreamed of its existence. It was Gilden himself, unable to leave the looped reality offered by the voyeur, who had been discovered. And even that might not have been fatal. Many people suffered from illusion lock. But the equipment in Gilden’s apartment had also been running its external display. Everyone on Earth knew the face of the Mentor Presumptive.
    “You have asked me many questions.” Gilden tried for the hundredth time to fathom the unreadable, the expression on the Teller’s face.
    “That is my function.”
    “I would like to ask you one.”
    “That is your privilege.”
    “Why are you a Teller? You seem a sincere woman, and a friendly one. Why do you pursue a profession that forces you to inflict torture and death?”
    The silence in the room lasted less than a second for Gilden. He knew that for the Teller, with total control over her time rate and his, the interval might be minutes or hours—long enough to consider the answer in detail, and match it to the Telling process.
    She was shaking her head. “I have no answer to that question. I do what I do.”
    “And I did what I did. I cannot explain, but I can tell.” Arrin Gilden’s eyes fixed on the Teller as he tried to see within himself. “I do not know why. I know that I had no choice. I could not help myself. I was compelled to observe, to find a way to observe. I believe I was good at it.”
    “From everything that I have been able to discover, you are the best. Certainly the best in the records of the Empyrium.” The lights brightened and yellowed. The chair with its wrist and ankle cuffs became a soft couch. The brace at Gilden’s head vanished.
    “Real reality.” The Teller’s voice dropped half an octave. Gilden found himself facing a dark-haired, smooth-faced woman not much older than his own twenty-five years.
    “When you stop explaining, and just tell, it makes things so much easier.”
    “How do you know when I am telling?”
    “I cannot force truth. But I can detect lies. Perhaps that is why I am a Teller.” She came across to sit next to Gilden on the couch. “And sometimes—very rarely—I can offer an alternative to eternal agony. This is such a time. You must leave Earth, and go to Lucidar.”
    She gazed at him with calm blue eyes. Gilden found himself unable to remember their color as it had been in that other reality.
    She smiled. The Teller had even white teeth, a mouth slightly asymmetrical, the left side higher than the right. “I am sure that I am not the first person to suggest that you are a mental cripple, a person who might have been helped in his youth but who is now incorrigible. Your role as voyeur is the most important thing in your life. That is a statement, not a question.”
    “It is not a statement. It is an understatement.” Gilden breathed deep and again looked inward. “Voyeurism is the only important thing in my life.”
    “Even so, you should have treatment. But not until your return to Earth—assuming, of course, that you do return.”
    “Treatment? Not torment?”
    “Perhaps. You will go to Lucidar on official business of the Mentor. If you succeed at that, you