For the first time in his life, he knew what it felt like to have breasts. For the first time in his life, he knew what it was like to have one's internal organs quite differently shaped and arranged, buttressed and stressed by different muscles. The very faint background feel of man's internal arrangements, never questioned unless something goes wrong with them and they start to hurt, was not at all like the faint background feel that a woman has inside her. And when he concentrated on that feel, it was no faint background to him. It was surprising and upsetting. He withdrew his attention--hoping that he would be able to. Gratefully, he became conscious of his own body again. He was still _himself_ if he chose to be. Were the other seven still themselves? He reached into his mind--all of it, all eight separate intelligences that were combined within him. "Is anybody there?" he demanded. No answer--or nothing he could recognize as an answer. He drove harder and there still was none. It was annoying. He resented it as bitterly, he remembered, as in the old days when he had first been learning the subtleties of Ruin Appreciation. There had been a Ruin Master, his name forgotten, who had been sometimes less than courteous, had driven hard-- Another false memory! He withdrew and weighed it. Perhaps, he thought, that was a part of the answer. These people, these other seven, would not be driven. The attempt to call them back to consciousness would have to be delicate. When he drove hard, it was painful--he remembered the instant violent agony of his own awakening--and they reacted with anguish. * * * * * More gently, alert for vagrant "memories," he combed the depths of the eightfold mind within him, reaching into the sleeping portions, touching, handling, sifting and associating, sorting. This memory of an old knife wound from an Amok--that was not the Raincloud woman; it was a man, very aged. This faint recollection of a childhood fear of drowning--was that she? It was; it fitted with this other recollection, the long detour on the road south toward the sun, around a river. The Raincloud woman was the first to round out in his mind, and the first he communicated with. He was not surprised to find that, early in her life, she had feared that she might be Wolf. He reached out for her. It was almost magic--knowing the "secret name" of a person, so that then he was yours to command. But the "secret name" was more than that. It was the gestalt of the person. It was the sum of all data and experience, never available to another person--until now. With her memories arranged at last in his own mind, he thought persuasively: "Citizeness Alla Narova, will you awaken and speak with me?" No answer--only a vague, troubled stirring.