"What in the hell," breathed the general, staring down at the cube in his hands, which hummed softly inside its deep blue self.

"Don't ask me," cried the congressman, sinking into his chair. "She brought it!"

"I gathered as much," snapped the general. "I'm not blind."

He turned on Benita with his brows drawn together, obviously ready to pounce. "When, madam?

And where?"

"Well, actually," she said weakly, "it was Saturday. Day before yesterday. And I thought of taking it to the governor, but he's really such a flake. And then I decided the congressman, only evidently he wasn't authority enough, because it didn't say a word to him . . ."

"I'd only held it for a moment," murmured the congressman defensively, flushing angrily.

". . . and they didn't look like that, either," she concluded, rather annoyed at the fact.

"What do you mean?" the general demanded.

"The ones who spoke to me didn't look like people, and their ship was in the background, and they had a reference machine they used all the time when they talked to me."

"What do you mean they didn't look like people," snarled the general.

Her annoyance grew. "The beings who spoke to me were not humans, sir. I think they must change their appearance to be acceptable to whomever they are addressing."

"Meaning you would accept non-humans?"

She simmered down, thinking. "Well, I guess that's true, yes. I would. I watch a lot of crazy things on TV, so I've become used to the idea. And I've never been afraid of animals or bugs or things."

"Don't move," said the general, crossing to the congressman's desk, picking up the phone and punching in strings of numbers. He turned his back on them and mumbled into the mouthpiece, covering his mouth with his hand. The cube, left behind on the low table, began to squeal.

Benita picked it up and patted it into quiet.

"How much did they pay you?" asked the congressman.

"Five thousand dollars," she said, without a moment's hesitation. If they searched her purse or her hotel room, that's what they'd find, or what was left of it after she had paid for the airfare and the cabs and the hotel and three meals yesterday and one today. The other ninety-five thousand was in a safety deposit box rented first thing that morning, and the receipt and the key were hidden in her bra.

It had occurred to her that all that money might be confiscated by the powers that be and she might not get it back.

The general turned away from the phone and seated himself in the congressman's chair. "They're on the way over."

"They? Who?" asked the congressman.

"People from the Pentagon. They'll call the president's office and the FBI."

"Well," Benita said, heaving a sigh, "since you've got it all in order, I think I'll go get myself some lunch. I was so worried about putting this in the right hands, I hardly touched my breakfast . . ."

"Sit down," said the general.

"I beg your pardon!"

"I'm sorry, ma'am. If you're starving, we can send out for some sandwiches or something, but I want you here when the others arrive. They're going to have questions. I have questions."

"The people said the cube would give you all the answers and explanations. Certainly I can't."

"We'll still have questions. Just sit."

He was a man very accustomed to being obeyed, and Benita sat, annoyed at herself for doing so, no matter how important he was. She got annoyed like this with her relatives who were always telling her what she ought to do or had to do, because sometimes she said things to them that were rude, or things she thought in retrospect might have been rude, and the memory of rudeness made her cringe inside even when no one else remembered whatever it had been. Where did all that come from? She hadn't a clue, but it was why she liked the bookstore, the routines she knew best, customers who didn't know her from Eve and wouldn't presume to order her around or comment on her daily life.

Now, however, she was evidently to submit to being ordered. People arrived in waves, most of them wearing suits, some of them wearing uniforms. Sandwiches were provided, along with coffee and iced tea. The questions went on for the rest of that afternoon, well into the evening, moving from place to place depending upon the number of simultaneous questioners. Where had she hunted mushrooms? Find the place on this map. What kind had she found? What time of day? Where had she found the agaricus?

Was anyone else around? What had the ship looked like? Where did pleurotus grow? On and on. She drew maps of the place and sketches of mushrooms. Someone provided dinner, hastily catered in a meeting room.

Finally she was allowed to go back to the hotel to sleep, though they put someone on guard outside in the corridor. They took away the money she had left, just as she'd suspected, though they gave her a receipt.

On Tuesday, the questions continued at an office somewhere on the outskirts of the city.

"The money is good," the general told her at one point. "Not counterfeit. We're keeping the bills you were given just in case the lab people can come up with anything, but here's replacement currency.

Everyone seems to feel you're telling the truth. I don't suppose you'd mind taking a polygraph?"

"I would mind," Benita said belligerently. She had not slept well, and she had a headache. "I'm sure by this time you know all about me, where I work and what I do and who my family is. I hope you've honored my request not to tell my husband where I am, and if you've investigated me, you know why I ask that! You know I'm just an ordinary person, that I don't know anything special. I let people take blood yesterday just to prove I don't drink or smoke marijuana or take drugs or anything like that. Now I just want to do some sightseeing, and eat some good food and . . ." She paused, ending weakly, ". . . go home." Actually, she didn't mean that. Not that home, anyhow.

"The president would like to meet you."

"Oh, my," she mumbled, suddenly giddy. "Oh, my goodness. The president? Did you take the thing to him?"

"We did. It amplified its pronouncements, in case you're interested."

She whispered, "Are you allowed to tell me what it said?"

"It specified a place and a time for a personal meeting, which took place very early this morning. I wasn't there. Just the president and a few Secret Service people. The . . . people who showed up weren't the ones we saw on the cube. We think you're right. They change appearance depending on who they're talking to. You expected aliens, I would expect military personnel, the president would expect humanoids somewhat exotically dressed. Too much Star Trek in my opinion, but we're of different generations. They gave him another one of those cubes, for him to take to the Cabinet and the Congress, however the schedule works out. The president wants to ask how they struck you."

Her hand went to her cheek. The general looked away. "What impression they made on you," he said hastily.

She agreed, flushing. They took her in a stretch limousine. The Oval Office looked just like it did on TV. So did the president, and he was just as charming as she'd always thought, never mind all that other stuff that was nobody's business. Mami used to say, "Roosters crow and cocks doodle, and so long as they don't peck the hens, it's God's will." By the time he was through talking with Benita, she had told him all about the children being at school and what she did for a living, and how the aliens had seemed perfectly trustworthy.

"And they gave you money."

"I guess they figured it would take money for me to travel and stay in a hotel and buy meals and all."

"Ms. Alvarez, do you think they picked you at random?"

She started to say yes, then stopped. "No. Not really. I imagine they wanted someone without any ax to grind."

"In giving you money, were they hiring you to represent them?"

She didn't hurry with her answer. "That's what I told Congressman Alvarez. In a sense they did. They didn't ask me to misrepresent anything. They could have known a lot about me before they picked me.

They might have known I had a good reason to want to interrupt my life, the way it was. They told me they were ethical beings, and I think that was part of their ethic, not disrupting people's lives or forcing them to do anything against their will. They knew I couldn't get here to Washington without the money they gave me."

And an incentive to do it! Never mind the other ninety-five thousand dollars. She would think about that later. "If they wanted somebody just . . . ordinary, they'd almost have to provide the wherewithal, wouldn't they?"

"They didn't give you anything else?"

She furrowed her brow, remembering. "No . . . no, but they said they would do me a welcome reversal."

"What's a reversal?"

"Mr. President, I figured out they meant they'd do me a good turn. A good turn is a welcome reversal, isn't it?" Which she figured they already had, if the way she'd been coping for the last two days was any indication.

He nodded and thanked her. As she was about to leave, she turned to say, "If this all comes out, like in the newspapers, will you have to say who it was that talked to them first?"

He cocked his head, making a gesture that could mean yes, no, maybe, why?

"If you can ... if it comes out, if you can keep me out of it, Mr. President? That awful thing that happened to Princess Di. And then, that actor who killed himself, because of the terrible lies that paper told. Those men in Congress, the ones who'll spend more to destroy a political opponent than they will to feed the poor, you know who I mean, they'll probably try to use this against you, and that means they'll try to get hold of me. They're like leeches, those . . . people. Well, I'm having some family trouble of my own just now, and I'd just as soon not . . . not, you know, have my kids read about it in the newspapers."

He shook his head a little sadly, and she knew what he meant. He'd try. For what it was worth.

From Chiddy's journal Autumn. Thirteen. Stairs.

This is what the Pistach call a trialur, an evocative threeness. Autumn, because that is the season that best marks both ending and beginning. Any gardener will understand this. You will understand it, dear Benita. Though our acquaintance has been brief, one finds in you something charming, something one has not experienced before with others the Pistach have helped. If you were one of us, one would bring you worms from the home ground before one leaves you. You are other than us, so one writes this journal for you, instead, hoping, when the time comes, that you may receive these squirming lines spelling renewal where worms might not be welcome.

You and ton'i, we, met in autumn.

After autumn comes thirteen, because that is the age at which Pistach people are both ended and begun. And the last of the three is stairs, of course, seemingly endless flights of stairs that one climbs over and over during the thirteenth year, the year of selection. It is called a year, though it is occasionally shorter than that, or, as was true in to'eros case, my case, much longer.

One's thirteenth year begins on the day of one's twelfth birthday and continues until selection.

Selection takes as long as it takes, and one may not celebrate one's thirteenth year until the time of selection is done. Thereafter, that date becomes one's natal day, and at the end of the next year the count begins again at one. After one is selected, one no longer counts the years of undifferentiated childhood, only the years of being what one was meant to be.

The symbols of renewal were much emphasized the autumn ton, that is to say, I began that year.

(Since this account is meant for you, dear Benita, one who is unfamiliar with our language, ton, I, will use the tongue of you who will read except where our own is needed for clarity, or when one forgets.

Even Pistach forget. We are not perfect.) Perhaps the symbols that autumn were merely more noticeable than in previous years, but I seemed to see for the first time the shallow, woven-reed trays of flower bulbs before the gardener's kiosks, the piles of gnarled hisanthine roots wrapped in damp, green moss and tied with lengths of ever-life vine, the transparent jars of seed, the tools used to rake and chop fronds when they fall, the canvas sacks in which the mulch is kept until time for it to be spread around dry stems, covering the cold soil. Even perforated clay jars of worms, though it is considered slightly disreputable to buy worms. One has one's ancestral place, and after generations of dedicated care, one's land should have enough worms to share with the less fortunate. Still, some families have been selected away from the care of their home place for generations, though this speaks of negligence by the selectors, leaving the soil to impoverish itself and in need of a generation's attention before it can be returned to health.

It is customary for the far flung to return to home places in autumn, to visit the stelae of our loved ones and ancestors, to plant a corm of loral or a root of hisanthine in the soil where their ashes were spread, to spread sweet fern mulch there, and even, if one cannot go oneself, to send a worm or two from the home ground to the ground of those who were burned and spread far from home. Autumn wreaths are hung upon the stelae around which the ash-grounds are gathered, thus twining our departed ones into the circle that includes ourselves and those to come. One sees renewal wreaths everywhere in autumn, on doors and walls and over windows, always vine-shoots of evergrow twisted into a circlet and decorated with fruits, dried blossoms and leaves. Our family wreath that year was decorated with a traditional trialur: dried star-rays of spring hisanthine, dark green feathers of summer's fragrant loral, and the hard- skinned, silver-sheened autumn fruits of the red pomego. End and beginning. Beginning and end.

Since the thirteenth year is the one of selection, it is on the twelfth birthday that one is taken to the nearest stair of selection for the first time. The stairs are great slabs of polished igneous rock of crystalline texture, with a carved banister at either side and a railing up the middle. They are rather wide, though not particularly steep, and they are built, always, to rise along a hillside spiked with cupressa trees, for the slow-growing cupressa is a symbol of patience. The stairs go up to a terrace that stretches on either side in great widths of mosaic paving, balustraded on the downhill side and on the uphill side, on either side of the stairs, lined with the entryways and doors cast from an alloy of copper, one that has a lovely red-gold glow, the doors of the selectors. The stairs continue upward to another terrace, and another after that, and so on up to the final seventh terrace at the top of the hill. This apex is marked by an edifice, near ton'eros, my, home place, the edifice, the golden dome that stretches over the most sacred place of our people: the House of the Fresco.

Here, long ago, following our departure, some say expulsion, from our spiritual home, the aged Canthorel bid the masons among our people raise up a circular wall pierced on the east by three doors, and when they had done it, he set a crew to plaster the inner walls, beginning at the right side of the middle door and moving sunwise as he followed the plasterers with paints to illustrate the revelatory episodes of our history. The resultant work, we are taught, was inspired, infallible, and miraculously completed in a single day during which, some avow, the planet slowed its turning to lengthen the light.

When Canthorel laid down his brushes, daylight was no longer needed and night fell. He then commanded a dome to be reared above the whole, and when the keystone of the dome was set, Canthorel died. It is said his spirit went into the work, and it is certain his ashes lie at the center point of the sanctuary, in an earthen plot planted with fragrant vine.

In those early times, the sanctuary was approached by means of a road that twisted back and forth across the hillside. The stairs and terraces came later, to meet the needs of a growing population. Still later came replicas of the whole structure, stairs, terraces and Fresco House, though it would have been blasphemy to copy the Fresco itself, in every region and on every world we occupy. One's family lands are and have always been, however, in the verdant valley near the true, the only original Fresco.

Though every child knows this story from infancy, though many of us have played follow-on or quick-ball on the green meadows at the foot of the Fresco hill, one's first formal approach to the stairs comes as an awful, even terrifying event. I was surprised at my own tremors as we set out. I was dressed in the customary green, symbolizing a new shoot, a new stem. My inceptor was in gold, the house historian in formal brown, the receptors were draped in silver, the nootchi were clad in festive reds and yellows, the household campesi wore their leather aprons. All the younger children had been left at home.

Except for celebrants, only those who have climbed the stairs are permitted to climb the stairs, and only they may escort a celebrant on the first climb.

The choral finisi who habitually arrange themselves at the edges of the stairs all along the ascent were present in large numbers on my day. Since it was unlikely my parsimonious inceptor had paid them to sing, their presence indicated a busy day, with many candidates scheduled to ascend amid a consequent probability of largess. No matter how stingy, no inceptor would let an offspring ascend to the terrace without making some gift to the choristers, for they have jeering songs aplenty to direct at the niggardly. As it was, they sang me upward with our own nootch joining in the responses (ke had always fancied kerself a singer) while my inceptor handed out sufficient coin to sop their esteem. Though our climb was done with measured and dignified tread, as was proper, it was completed all too soon at the first terrace.

Inceptor and receptor gripped my arms, the proffe-historian readied licos, his writing instrument, one nootch, one campesi marched behind as ton'i veered to the left and approached the first columned entrance out of a dozen or so, all of them surrounding massive doors leading into the mountain. My inceptor knocked, as was proper.

"Who comes?" cried the brazen voice I had been warned to expect.

"An undifferentiated one," my inceptor called in a firm voice. "A candidate for selection, now come to the age of reason."

"So we all hope, Chiddy," muttered the receptor clutching my other arm, giving me a firm look. Ke wasn't my own receptor. My own receptor (though one should really not say or write or even, if one is very observant, think the words, "my own") had left the family earlier in the year for a time of specialized training. Ke had licked my eyelids tenderly and left me to the care of the nootch, for ke was retiring from receptorhood to go on to something else. Unlike the nootchi or the campesi or many other categories, receptors and inceptors were often picked for genetics alone, even when they had no inclination for the task. Those without inclination were allowed to change category later on. If one was selected as a nootch or a campes, however, it was considered permanent except in those rare cases where everyone agreed the selector had made an error. It did happen. We all knew it, and we all regretted the tragedy it caused. My receptor had been selected, as ke often said, for genetics alone. Ke certainly was not inclined to be a carer, as everybody knew, including the ket. That's what my old nootch often said about it. Everybody including the ket knows Tithy's no carer.

Sounds came from behind the door, rattlings and hangings and long, ominous hummings, like gigantic engines. At last the door opened and the voice called, "Enter."

I looked helplessly at my family, but they merely made shooing motions, as though I were a flosti they were shooing from the garden. I would rather have been a flosti, flying away to the top of a tree or anywhere else, but there wasn't a chance. The family was a solid phalanx between me and the stairs,- another family with another candidate was marching behind them toward the second door, and beyond them were still others headed farther down the terrace, the only comfort came from the nootch at the left, who gave me a little nod and a tiny smile. The open door was the only way out.

So, I did what every twelve-year-old has been doing since time immemorial. I entered.

Looking back on that time, the strangest part of it was that nobody seemed to care if I did well or not.

At home, when I was a child, people did care. Foot coverings were meant to be polished and put away.

Body covers were meant to be washed and smoothed and hung up. Sleeping and eating places were meant to be kept neat, and houses and people were meant to be kept clean. Animals were to be fed, persons were to be fed, in that order, and both persons and animals were to be kept healthy. All of this required attention and care, and it was important that one's tasks, whatever they were, should be done dependably and well. Wanting to do things had nothing to do with doing them. If things weren't well done, then one got a rap on the head from a proffe or inceptor, or one did without sweetness at meals, or one spent the whole day helping the campesi clean out the compost house.

Selection is different from that, as I soon learned.

The person behind the desk was clad in a dark brown robe. The person was to be referred to as selector, licos pronouns were third level, le and lie, and one was not to speak to lie until spoken to. So much I knew.

"Why is someone here?" selector asked.

"It is the time of selection," I said breathlessly.

"Is someone frightened?"

"I think so," I muttered. "A little."

"It will pass," said selector. "One may look back on this time as the easiest time of someone's life, for no one will discredit someone on teros behavior, no matter what it is. For this time, someone is to behave as someone likes, as someone is moved to do, as someone's inclinations guide. Understand?"

I did not understand, but I bowed, murmuring, "Mentor," to show I had heard. "Mentor" is a word that may be politely used to any older person of any caste who is instructing one.

The selector shuffled papers on the desk and came up with one that seemed applicable, for le looked at it as le said, "Tomorrow morning, someone will go to creche central and assist the manager in caring for the infants. Be there at the beginning of work hour."

There was only one reply allowed, as I well knew. "Yes, Selector."

The door behind me opened. I bowed, turned, and went out. The family had departed except for my nootch, and it was ke who took my hand and walked with me down the stairs. "What is Chiddy's first duty?" ke asked.

"Help the creche manager," I said, only then beginning to think how strange that was. Why the creche manager? "Why . . . ?" I started to ask, only to have ker fingers laid gently across my lips.

"Why not?" ker said.

I was to think of that over and over in the time that followed. Why not? Why not anything, or everything?