Hastings, of all people! I nearly laughed aloud. Poor feckless Hastings was now the author of _my_ dialogues with Cave: I marveled at the ease with which the innumerable references to myself had been deleted. I began to doubt of my own existence. I asked if Hastings were still alive and was told that he too was long dead. I then asked again about Iris. “Some very exciting things have come to light,” said Butler. “Certain historians at the Dallas Center feel that there is some proof that she was Cave’s sister.” I was startled by this. “How could that be? Wasn’t she from Detroit? and wasn’t he from Seattle? and didn’t they meet for the first time in southern California at the beginning of his mission?” “I see you know more Cavite history than you pretend,” said Butler amiably. “That of course has been the traditional point of view. Yet as her influence increased in the world (in Italy, you know, one sees her picture nearly as often as Cave’s) our historians became suspicious. It was all perfectly simple, really: if she could exert nearly the same power as Cave himself then she must, in some way, be related to him. I suppose you know about the Miami business. No? Well, their Resident, some years ago, openly promulgated the theory that Cave and Iris Mortimer were man and wife. A great many people believed him and though the Chief Resident at Dallas issued a statement denying the truth of all this, Miami continued in error and it took our indoctrination team several years to get the situation back to normal. But the whole business _did_ get everyone to thinking and, with the concurrence of Dallas himself, investigations have been made. I don’t know many of the details but my colleague probably will. He keeps track of that kind of thing.” “If she is proven to be Cave’s sister will she have equal rank with him?” “Certainly not. Cavesword is everything; but she will be equal to him on the human level though his inferior in truth: at least that appears to be the Dallas interpretation.” “She was very active, I suppose?” “Right until the end. She traveled all over the world with Cavesword and, when she grew too old to travel, she took over the Residency of New York City which she held until she died. As a matter of fact, I have a picture of her which I always carry. It was taken in the last years.” He pulled out a steel-mesh wallet in which, protected by cellophane, was a photograph of Iris: the first I had seen in many many years. My hand shook as I held the picture up to the light. For a split second I felt her presence, saw in the saddened face, framed by white hair, my summer love which had never been except in my own dreaming where I was whole and loved this creature whose luminous eyes had not altered with age, their expression the same as that night beside the western sea ... but then my fingers froze; the wallet fell to the ground; I fainted into what I supposed with my last vestiges of consciousness to be death, to be nothing.