Nala comes to my rooms and says that she cannot see me tonight. Her mind is preoccupied; her interests are elsewhere, she is afraid to see me in this state of tension. “I think I’m getting more of my past,” she says, “I was having little jolts and flashes all day, just premonitory warnings, and now I feel that if I lie down and give myself to it, I will know everything. Tonight I will learn, if I only attend, how we got here.”

I remind her that it was she who begged me, not two nights ago, to rescue her from the enclosure before the memories became overwhelming. But she smiles bitterly in the old way and says that I am being sentimental. “Not now, not now you fool,” she says, “don’t you understand? There is a purpose to my rediscovering my past; it is a past shared by all of us and for all we know it may disclose exactly that information which we need in order to make a successful escape. We must take every possibility offered to us if we are to be free; who knows what I may learn?” Sexuality seems to have gone out of her this evening; she is drab and gathered in upon herself; I sense dryness. “Anyway,” she says, “anyway, the truth is that I want to know. Anything would be better than this uncertainty, and who knows if the plan will actually work? We cannot live in this enclosure forever deprived of a history and an outcome; at least let us have one. Or the other.”

I try to tell her briefly what has happened to me today but she is hasty and preoccupied; does not want to hear. “It is to be expected anyway,” she says. “Since you betrayed Plotar they probably sense weakness and think they can force all the information out of you quickly.”

“I did not betray Plotar.”

“Oh,” she says, looking at me shyly, quizzically. “Didn’t you? Because I take it for granted that you did. Of course you did. In fact, if I wasn’t so sure that you had betrayed him, I wouldn’t find you nearly so exciting.” She leaves me then, bent within herself, moving purposefully away from me, and it occurs to me that I know nothing of her, that everything that has happened between us is something as dim and unrecovered as that past which sweeps up like a screen before us now and then, the images always too faint to matter. I feel pains in my limbs. I return to my rooms. I try to bring these notes up to date but I cannot; I am too tired, in too much anguish and uncertainty; I feel the past slip away from me as the pad tumbles from my hands and I fall into a deep and exhausted sleep.