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lost. I was spoiling her publicity plan, but she didn't look annoyed. She grinned down at me, with her head on one side and that ridiculous round gray hat with a feather in the side of it, and the blond curly hair pushing out underneath it—she was naturally fair, though she preferred parts that made her a brunette. And then she let herself go limp, and she came rolling off the fence in that old-fashioned gray cloth dress and knocked me flat to the ground.
    I was smitten even before I got up, and I knew it, but I wouldn't have done one thing about it. I have never been able to let people know how I feel. I have rationalized that, to the point where it does not usually bother me. Often, I insist it is a virtue. But not this time. I wanted Mary, but Mary was an unattainable prospect.
    It wasn't just my inability to speak. I knew, even if she didn't, that I was three times her age. That alone should have made the whole thing impossible. Not for Mary. I didn't realize it at the time, but things like that made no difference at all to her. She was so much in her own world, and that world was so far from reality, that age wasn't even a variable. When she did find out how old I was, she just said, "Well, that means I'll have at most fifty years of you, instead of a hundred."
    How do you reply to something like that?
    If you are a wise man, you don't even try. You grab the chance—it only comes once—and make the most of it.
    That first day, I began to arrest her. She talked me out of it in about two minutes and took me home to her apartment. I never left.
    I had no idea at the time how sick in the head she was. That emerged little by little, as we came closer. Maybe it was a lot more obvious to others than to me. I always had the blinders on—I still do. When an old friend of mine, Park Green, came to visit from the Moon, we went to see one of Mary's performances. I asked him what he thought of it, and he shook his head and said she was good but he could see the skull beneath the skin. I hated him for that, and I never told Mary; but he was right.
    That might have been the thing that limited her as an actress. She could play high drama, or artificial, mannered comedy, or broad farce—she was a wonderful comedienne, but she didn't much care for those parts. What she could not portray were simple people, because there was nothing simple inside her that she could build on. It limited her. She was always busy, always working, but in the end I know that she was disappointed with her reputation.
    You know, I honestly believe that I was good for Mary. In our years together she never had to go for official treatment. There'd be times when she went nonlinear, and when that happened I'd drop everything I was doing and stay with her constantly. And she'd come out of it. But those times became more and more frequent, and more and more severe.
    When she suddenly told me, without a day's notice, that she was going off for a lunar cruise, I was delighted. Mary was always at her best when she had a new environment to learn, something fresh to challenge her. She was becoming more and more upset by crowds—an odd omen for an actress, but I didn't read it. The Moon would offer plenty of peace and a change of pace.
    She went. She called once—to say that she was not coming back; she was heading for the Outer System. And that was all.
    I just about came apart.
    Four months later the Dancing Man appeared for the first time. And I came apart completely.
    * * *
    Bey lay back in his chair and looked up at Leo Manx. "Well?"
    "Good." Manx was examining his records. "Very good."
    "You have enough?"
    "Goodness, no." Manx was incredulous. "This is a start —the first iteration. Now we can perhaps begin to learn something about you and your relationship with Mary. Give me another couple of days. Then it may be time to worry about your little dancing friend."

CHAPTER 6
    "Entropy is missing information."
—Ludwig Boltzmann

    "Entropy is