"Of course, it isn't," he said, and he took two square sheets that looked like papyrus, and put them each in a bowl. "There is the question of what you did, or did not do, that you should be attacked."

"And what did you do, or not do, that you should be attacked?"

He was pouring a bluish-looking milk over the papyrus thing. His hands were too large for everything he handled, and Juba wondered, if his hand were on her wrist, if he could crush it. Or, being able to crush it, if he would take care not to.

"Oh--trade agreements, immigration agreements, how many space ships can go where--who can say what either side did when or where to begin it all? Nobody is _making_ it happen. Sometimes, perhaps. But not as far as this war is concerned. All I can say now is--O.K., for whatever reason I'm in a war. At this point, what can I do but kill or be killed?"

Juba mashed the papyrus into the milk with her spoon, as the man was doing. She took a bite. It tasted just like it looked.

"You could," Juba said, "refuse to have anything to do with it at all. You could simply go away and...." She stood up and the spoon clattered to the floor and she could feel the bowl of milk spill cold and sticky along her thigh. Because that's just what you can't do. You can't pull the thread of your life out of the general weaving.

She looked at her adversary, and he was as close to her as the darkness is to the evening.

"No," he said. "Life flows. A person's life or a civilization's life or all humanity's life. If it cannot flow forward it flows backward. Isn't that true? _Isn't_ it?"But she turned away from him, to recover herself a little. For she felt that he was right and her country and her foremothers were wrong and she was wrong and yet--she had made her choice last night, at the altar of Juno, and though she felt herself possessed by new understanding, she had to go on in spite of it, as though she fought wounded or blinded.

"You are perhaps right," Juba said. "I am only a woman and I do not know. But still, can you not take a few days from your war? Must you think always on that and never on anything else?"

He ate another of the paper things, not melting it first, and drank from the container.

"Look, Juba," he said, "I've been thinking on other things ever since I got here, but first I want to...."

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