Juan left early, in a cab. He hadn't said much all evening, although he had drunk much--Juan was often worried by Castillian melancholy. But something unusually dogged was at him tonight, evidently. Possibly some family crisis--Juan had an operatic extended family, subject to midnight alarums and excursions.

Susan choreographed her own departure at the cusp of nine.

She lived alone with her commensals, Cauldron Linn and Portland Bill. Commensals--or familiars. Cats do not live in our company, but in our presence. She fed them, and they ate with no particular gratitude. Someone once said that we live with cats so that we might savor the pleasure of petting a tiger. If that is so, then these particular tigers were lords of no jungle but old furniture, and beasts with no lairs but rumpled rugs from which they glared in undiminished green-eyed mystery--a lair of rugs is still a lair, and all cats demand to be taken seriously.

Susan left Linn and Bill to their dreams of sudden murder. She put on sweats, cleared a space, and practiced her third-degree form, paying particular attention to those moves she found difficult or believed she could execute more precisely. The third-degree form describes a star, and each point and each transit is exquisitely designed to flow into the next, magnifying the power of the past move and the next move. Most of the moves would never be used in actual combat, but were intended to extend ones skills far beyond what is needed. When skills are great, defense is easy--it explodes from knowledge.

There are one hundred and twenty-two moves in the third-degree form, a dance of mayhem with an unseen opponent. If the form is done well, the opponent is nearly visible to the discerning eye. Susan did it to the edge of her ability, three times. Three, because that was the limit of her strength, the precipice beyond which her trembling muscles would begin to betray her, and render her vulnerable. She would not be betrayed.

Each move must be executed fifty times, her instructor had told her, before the muscles remember. When the muscles remember, the mind can begin to learn. Fifty times to err, before knowing begins. True of anything--anything at all, and Susan had never learned anything that contradicted it. It was a shame, she thought, that our time is so limited that circumstance will not allow fifty errors to occur before one truth emerges. If truth is coming home, and if we must err so many times before truth is shown, then we can never, ever come home again, and we never will.

She shook her sweat-dripping head. Strange days. Strange life.

Susan's particular melancholia for this evening is finished, thank you, and now to the showers and soon to bed.