s left in the cosmos, for have you thought
that the Change Winds may have died at their source? We may never reach
another cosmos, we may drift forever in the Void, but who of us has been
Introverted before and who knows what we can or cannot do? We're a seed
for a new future to grow from. Perhaps all doomed universes cast off
seeds like this Place. It's a seed, it's an embryo, let it grow."

She looked swiftly at Bruce and then at Sid and she quoted, "'Come, my
friends, 'tis not too late to seek a newer world'."

* * * * *

I squeezed Sid's hand and I started to say something to him, but he
didn't know I was there; he was listening to Lili quote Tennyson with
his eyes entranced and his mouth open, as if he were imagining new
things to put into it--oh, Siddy!

And then I saw the others were looking at her the same way. Ilhilihis
was seeing finer feather forests than long-dead Luna's grow. The
greenhouse child Maud ap-Ares Davies was stowing away on a starship
bound for another galaxy, or thinking how different her life might have
been, the children she might have had, if she'd stayed on the planets
and out of the Change World. Even Erich looked as though he might be
blitzing new universes, and Mark subduing them, for an eight-legged
_Fuehrer-imperator_. Beau was throbbing up a wider Mississippi in a
bigger-than-life sidewheeler.

Even I--well, I wasn't dreaming of a Greater Chicago. "Let's not go
hog-wild on this sort of thing," I told myself, but I did look up at the
Void and I got a shiver because I imagined it drawing away and the whole
Place starting to grow.

"I truly meant what I said about a seed," Lili went on slowly. "I know,
as you all do, that there are no children in the Change World, that
there cannot be, that we all become instantly sterile, that what they
call a curse is lifted from us girls and we are no longer in bondage to
the moon."

She was right, all right--if there's one thing that's been proved a
million times in the Change World, it's that.

"But we are no longer in the Change World," Lili said softly, "and its
limitations should no longer apply to us, including that one. I feel
deeply certain of it, but--" she looked around slowly--"we are four
women here and I thought one of us might have a surer indication."

My eyes followed hers around like anybody's would. In fact, everybody
was looking around except Maud, and she had the silliest look of
surprise o