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– and she enclosed him in her vitality and her strength. To us three watching, the contrast between the two young faces was a warning: hers, in spite of what she had to endure, so alive and commanding, his all drowse and yellow indifference.
    â€˜Nonni,’ she began, in what was at once evident to us as a deliberate attempt to rouse him, ‘Nonni, wake up, talk to us, you must keep awake, you must talk …’
    And, as his face showed the peevishness and irritation of his reluctance, she persisted, ‘No, no, Nonni, I want you to talk. You lived near here, didn’t you? Didn’t you? Come on, tell us!’ He shifted his head from side to side, and then turned it away from the pressure of her cheek on his, but his eyes opened and there was consciousness in them: he understood what she was doing for him.
    â€˜Where did you live?’
    He indicated with a weak lift of his head, which at once fell back against her shoulder, that it was somewhere there in front of us.
    â€˜And how? And what did you do?’
    â€˜You know what I did!’
    â€˜Go on!’
    Again he resisted her, with an involuntary movement that said he wanted only to slide away into sleep, but she would not let him, and he gasped out: ‘Before The Ice, it was there – there.’
    There
was now the plain of snow, undulating, cut by crevasses and sending up small eddies and whirls of snow.
    â€˜And you lived in a town down there, and it was one of our largest towns, and people used to come from all over the planet to visit it, because it was the only town like it? A new kind of town?’
    He struggled to evade her with irritable shiftings of his head, shutting his eyes, but again his will to live came back.
    â€˜The town was built there because these hills are full of iron. Under the ice here are the mine workings. A road goes from here to there – the best road on the planet, because of what it had to carry, heavy loads of ore, from which we made trucks to carry even more ore …’
    Here he seemed to drowse again, and Alsi said: ‘Please, Nonni.’
    â€˜Before our town was built and we began mining, there was no centre for making iron, though it was made in a small way everywhere. It was Canopus who told us to look for iron here, and what to look for, and then how to work it and mix it with other metals. It was clear to us that these metals we were making would change the way we all lived. Some people did not like what was happening. Some left our town again and went to live in other places where life had not changed.’
    â€˜And you, did you like it?’
    â€˜It seems that I must have, because I was going to be a worker in metals, like my parents. Both of them knew all the new processes. Just before The Ice I travelled with them, to a town not far from our ocean, and it was the first time I had seen anything different.’
    â€˜And how did it seem?’ said Alsi, teasing him, for she knew.
    â€˜It seemed to me charming,’ he said, full again of the youthful scornfulness he had felt, so that we all laughed, and he laughed too, since now he was able to look back and see himself. ‘Yes, it was so
pretty,
and so
soft.
With us everything was so much harder. Every day we had a new invention or discovery, and we were learning to make metals we hadn’t ever thought of. It seemed as if something quite new had happened to us, and we could not help but make new things and have new ideas. After that visit, I was glad to get back. And Canopus came again about then. Because we had seen how differently people lived in other parts of the planet, and we could make comparisons, we asked Canopus how things were on other planets. And suddenly our minds seemed filled with newness … we were stretched … we were much larger than we had been … we knew how many different ways there were of living, we talked about how species began and grew and changed – and died