't hurt you."

Slowly she walked toward him, poised, waiting for a hostile move. She
came within a few feet of him and then sank to her haunches, still
watching him, still poised.

She was as savage as the others. A graceful, dirty savage.

"You're really one of us?" she said. "You can't perceive?"

"No," he said. "I can't perceive."

"He's not like them," Mag said flatly. "If you'd ever been among them,
you'd know their ways."

"I've never seen a man before, up close," Lisa said.

Her eyes pleaded with him, and suddenly he knew why he pitied her. It
was because she felt helpless before him, and begged him not to harm
her, and thought of him as something above her, more powerful than she,
and dangerous. He looked across at her and felt protective, and it was a
new feeling to him, absolutely new. Because always before, around the
normals, even around his own parents and Walden, he had been the
helpless one.

He liked this new feeling, and wished it could last. But it couldn't. He
couldn't do as the old women expected him to, leave the valley and his
parents, leave the books and the museum and the ship, just to hide in
the hills like a beast with them.

He had come to find his people, but these three were not they.

"You two go on off and talk," Mag said. "We're old. We don't matter now.
You've got things to settle between you."

She cackled again and got up and went into the hut and old Nell got up
also and followed her.

The girl shivered. She drew back a little, away from him. Her eyes never
left his face.

"Don't be afraid, Lisa," he said gently. "I won't hurt you. I won't even
touch you. But I would like to talk to you."

"All right," she said.

They got up and walked to the end of the gorge, the girl keeping always
a few feet from him. At the boulders she stopped and faced him, her back
against a rock, her thin body still trembling.

"Lisa," he said. "I want to be your friend."

Her eyes widened. "How can you?" she said. "Men are friends. Women are
friends. But you're a man and I'm a woman and it's different."

He shook his head helplessly, trying to think of a way to explain things
to her. He couldn't say that he found her dirty and unattractive and
almost another species. He couldn't say that he'd searched the hills,
often thinking of the relationship between man and woman, but that she
wasn't the woman, that she never could be the woman for him. He couldn't
tell her that he pitied her in pe