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female; there was a characteristic signature that showed the gender unmistakably. A bright yellow, youthful Band. "I was about to disband!"
    "You wanted to disband?" Rondl asked, amazed. "To suicide?"
    "Suicide?" she asked blankly. "This storm interferes with communicatory light; I do not grasp your meaning."
    Indeed, he had not expressed it well. This was another concept largely foreign to the Band intellect. Plants and animals lacked sufficiently defined auras, so when their physical forms succumbed, they died. But Bands were not supposed to die, so could not suicide. Or so Bands believed. Rondl found he did not believe. So still the tantalizing oddities came, though he could not fathom their source. "Disbanding," he said. "I cannot believe any person would choose to disband."
    "You are a male," she retorted with a savage flash.
    "Oh—a romantic entanglement? I apologize for whatever the oaf did."
    "Oaf?"
    "Negative male."
    "You regret the action of another male?"
    "He was surely a very misguided individual to wrong a female as attractive as you." For she was indeed attractive; her personal magnetism had literally drawn him in. He was not clear on what qualities made a Band female pleasant to male perception, apart from raw attractive power, but she seemed to have these too.
    She spun out a bright flash of mirth. "You are a strange one!" Her color seemed to intensify. "Do you really like me?"
    "Yes," he replied, surprised. "But this is not to be regarded seriously; I do not know you."
    "You like me without knowing me?" Now she seemed intrigued, rather than confused.
    "Would I like you less if I knew you better?"
    "Another did."
    "Did like you less—or know you better?"
    "Yes."
    Yes to both, she seemed to mean. "I am not the same as that other." He paused. "At least I do not think I am. I do not know him, and I do not remember me."
    "Do not remember him , you mean."
    "Do not remember me . Before I came here. I—"
    "You don't remember! How can you come out here to the place of private thinking if you don't remember your problem?"
    "That is my problem. I do not know who I am, other than my name. I seem to have amnesia."
    "You poor creature. Yet I think I would exchange my situation for yours. I don't want to remember."
    "Let's trade!" he flashed.
    She radiated mirth again, her color and light making her seem like a little sun. "You want to obtain cause to disband? You must have been strange indeed before you lost your memory."
    "That's what I fear. I keep having inappropriate images, but I can't trace their derivation. I came out here and almost got consumed by a Trugd. Now I am lost; I don't know the way out of this region."
    "I will show you the way out," she said. "Let us introduce ourselves."
    "All I know is my name: Rondl."
    "I am Cirl. I am—you don't really want my history, do you? It's not very interesting."
    "It is bound to be more interesting than mine."
    "Let's just find our way out of here," she decided. She led the way up the line, forging through the dissipating storm with confidence. Rondl followed, glad he had saved her. He would have done it anyway, but this was an excellent benefit: a quick route out.
    Still, they needed to converse while traveling, because a noncommunicating Band was difficult to perceive accurately at any distance. The body of an individual became part of the background scenery; a ring visible but not obvious. A communicating Band, in contrast, compelled attention; all Bands were hypersensitive to incoming speech beams, and could receive them from a wider angle than they could transmit them. Rondl had seen Cirl when she flashed in despair as she plunged into the water. It was the difference between an inert object and an animated one. So now, in the diminishing but still-powerful tempest, they could lose track of each other if they did not each augment their visibilities by talking.
    "I am interested in your history," he flashed. "Tell me how you came to the point of