For Sylviana it was both comforting and painful to recall herself through books, and to reveal to Kalus for the first time, the beauty and torment of Man's elevated walk upon the Earth. That it should now be all but extinguished was to her an unspeakable and inexpressible tragedy. Yet she had learned from Ursula LeGuin years before (though at the time she had not understood it), that the only way to deal with the horror of a shattered past was to face it, and call it by its true name. And she told herself that in her heart, if nowhere else, lived the memory of much that was noble and good. For Kalus the various narratives, histories and philosophies, continued to open a whole new world before him. And though it was at times a pleasant and enlightening escape, on the whole his reactions to modern society were not unlike the woman's first impressions of the violent world outside their door. It held wonders, yes, and on occasion, profound beauty and wisdom. But the accounts of civil war, totalitarian regimes, torture, famine, real and effectual slavery, environmental pollution and industrial greed, excited in him the same horror that the imagined swarm of giant ants had once roused in Sylviana. Sometimes these responses troubled her, and she felt called upon to correct his deficiencies in perspective and defend her race. But at other times his naive and disbelieving comments cut frighteningly close to the truth. He accepted and took for granted none of the vast pretenses and self-important doctrines in which humanity clothed itself, and was therefore able to see a larger picture, or certainly a different one, than that which she was accustomed to. For to him Man was not the only, or even the most important species on the planet, let alone the center of the Universe, and sole concern of the Nameless. It was perhaps for this reason that he had not been shocked when Sylviana told him that the Earth revolved around the Sun, and not the other way around, or that the stars were themselves suns, parenting similar worlds of their own. To him Man was not the separate creation of a God unhappy or impatient with Nature. To his mind, if she understood him correctly, evolution was quite miraculous enough, and brought him closer to, rather than farther from, believing in a Universal being. And he assured her that nearly every animal was capable of some measure of thought and feeling, as real and meaningful to its existence, as the painful dreams and aspirations of men. At first he offered few opinions of his own, only gut-level reactions when they would not be silenced, which the woman-child must then decipher on her own. Not only did he feel unqualified to do so---the very word ‘philosophy' intimidated him, seeming a thing reserved for larger and more important persons---but also, some other sense told him that it was unwise to speak or pass judgment upon things he did not fully understand.