'Oh, nothing really. Just curious.' She wished he would stop looking at her that way. 'Yes I have. Once, with Kalus. We..... It was peyote.' 'How much did you do?' 'Two buttons each. One right away..... Why are you laughing?' 'Two peyote buttons, and you think you've seen it all. Ha! That wouldn't be enough to open your pretty little eyelids.' She wondered why she suddenly felt restless and irritable. 'What makes you think it's only how much, and not how pure? Or maybe we just didn't need to have our whole consciousness blown away to get something meaningful from it.' She felt angry, defiant, and horribly uncomfortable. 'I could do LSD if I wanted to.' 'Could you now? We're going to find out.' She felt the touch of an icy hand inside her. 'What do you mean?' 'The wine is laced with it.' And the current closed over her head. * Kalus sat in the fore of the leering monolith, which lay just inside the rim of the oblong vale. The dwarfish Obelisk, like a pointed tombstone, lay swart and square in its center. Kalus remembered the first time he had come here, driven on by Sylviana's almost distracted haste to find others of her kind. AND TO ESCAPE, he thought bitterly, HER DEPENDENCE ON ME. It was here, beneath the monolith, that he had tried to cleanse and bandage the wound on her leg. The memory and sight of it, of blood on her beloved flesh, filled all his thoughts. Through the strong taste of pride and anger, a fresh and cutting sense of worry returned to him. The protective instinct was too strong inside him, and what they had shared, too deep. He thought of following after her, but did not know which way she had gone, and doubted Alaska's ability (as well as his own) to find and isolate her most recent trail among the layered and crisscrossing paths of the colonists. He could only wait, and watch the sun wheel the shadows around him. When the longer shadow of the Monolith joined that of the deeply carved Obelisk, locking together into a long sword of darkness upon the earth, it would be time. And she must come to him. But that remained at least two hours away. He looked down at the deerskin pouch, which had slipped from his shoulder and rested, half open, on the ground. Remembering one of its contents, he emptied it out onto a gray, porous stone before him. There, beside the wrapped hunting knife (which she now refused to carry), the whet-stone, and the flints for making fire, he saw them. Dryer, less green, but still potent in their otherworldly magic: the five remaining peyote buttons. He lifted one and turned it in his hand, wondering. It had helped him to understand once before..... Perhaps it would show him something now, which he could see no other way. Guided by an impulse he did not completely understand, and half against his better judgment, he put the first in his mouth, and chewed it. Then slaked his throat with water. Again. And a short time later, again. *