_Know ... from ... back ... with ... blind ... priestesses_, Snake explained rapidly. _He ... ask ... me ... how ... to ... use ... jewels.. when ... you ... and ... Iimmi ... exploring ... and ... after ... that ... no ... listen ... to ... thoughts ... bad ... thoughts ... bad ..._ "But he--" Geo started. "He saved your life!" _But ... what ... is ... reason_, Snake said. _At ... end ..._ "You saw his thoughts at the end?" asked Geo. "What did he think?" _You ... sleep ... please_, Snake said. _Lot ... of ... hate ... lot ... of ... bad ... hate ..._ There was a pause in the voice in his head ... _and ... love ..._ Geo began to cry. A bubble of sound in the back of his throat burst, and he turned onto the pillow and tried to bite through the sound with his teeth, the tiredness, the fear, for Urson, for his arm, and the change which hurt. His whole body ached, his back hurt in two sharp lines, and he couldn't stop crying. * * * * * Iimmi, who had now decided to take the bunk above Geo, came back a few minutes after mess. Geo had just awakened. Geo laughed. "I found out what it was we saw on the beach that made us so dangerous." "How?" asked Iimmi. "When? What was it?" "Same time you did," Geo said. "I just looked. And then Snake explained the details of it to me later." "When?" Iimmi repeated. "I just took a nap, and he went through the whole thing with me." "Then what was it you saw, we saw?" "Well, first of all; do you remember what Jordde was before he was shipwrecked on Aptor?" "Didn't Argo say he was studying to be a priest. Old Argo, I mean." "Right," said Geo. "Now, do you remember what my theory was about what we saw?" "Did you have a theory?" Iimmi asked. "About horror and pain making you receptive to whatever it was." "Oh, that," Iimmi said. "I remember. Yes." "I was also right about that. Now add to all this some theory from Hama's lecture on the double impulse of life. It wasn't a thing we saw, it was a situation, or rather an experience we had. Also, it didn't have to be on the beach. It could have happened anywhere. Man, and his constantly diametric motivations, is always trying to reconcile opposites. In fact, you can say that an action _is_ a reconciliation of the duality of his motivation. Now, take all that we've been through, the confusion, the pain, the disorder; then reconcile that with the great order obvious in something like the sea, with its rhythm, its tides and waves, its overpowering calm, or the ordering of cells in a leaf, or a constellation of stars. If you can do it, something happens to you: you grow. You become a bigger person, able to understand, or reconcile, more." "All right," said Iimmi. "And that's what we saw, or the experience we had when we looked at the beach from the ship this morning; chaos caught in order, the order defining chaos."