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myself—it was only the best I could do—but I can’t describe what happened when I handed it over.
    “I mean just that, Chip—I can’t describe it. Look, she couldn’t or wouldn’t talk. Whether she could hear or not I don’t know. And she might as well have been born without motor nerves in her face, or at least her cheeks, because not once did she ever smile.
    “Yet she stood looking at the dress when I shook it out, and perhaps her eyes got rounder. She didn’t move, so I held it up against her. She put those eyes on me and slowly brought her hands together in front of her. I nodded my head and smiled and told her to go ahead, put it on, it’s for you. And then she—”
    Grantham twisted his thick forefinger into and out of his beard, picked up a pebble, threw it, watching studiously.
    “—began to glow,” he continued. “This Arizona moon, in the fall, when the brush-fires shroud the sky … the moon’s up, full, off the hills and you can’t see it, and gradually you know it’s there. It isn’t a thing, it’s a
place
in the sky, that’s all. Then it rises higher, and the smoke blows down, and it gets brighter and brighter and brighter until—you don’t know how or just when—you realize you couldread a man’s palm by it. The kid did that, somehow. When whatever she felt was at peak you—sort of—had to squinch up your eyes to see her.” He punched the sand. “I don’t know,” he muttered.
    “She put up her hands to shuck out of the rag she was wearing and I turned my back. In a second she danced past me, wearing the blue-dotted dress. Her and that quiet, pock-marked, unsmiling little face, glowing like that, spinning like a barn swallow, balancing like a gull. Ever see a bird smile, Chip? A lily laugh? Does a passionflower have to sing? Hell. I mean, hell. Some people don’t have to say anything.
    “That was the first day I saw her do what I called her Yucca Dance. She stood on the cap of a rise in the yucca forest and the fresh damp buffalo grass hiding her feet. With her elbows close to her sides, her forearms stretched upward and her hands out, she just barely moved her fingers, and I suddenly got the idea—the still, thick stem, the branching of leaves, the long slender neck and crown of flowers.
    “I laughed like a fool and ran to the nearest cactus. I pulled two firm white blossoms and went and put them in her hair, and stepped back, laughing. Both of them fell out, and she made no attempt to pick them up. I caught her eyes then, and I got the general idea that I’d made some sort of mistake. I stumbled back, feeling like a damned idiot, and she went back into her trance, being a yucca awaiting the wind.
    “And when the wind came she made the only sound I ever heard from her, but for her footsteps. It was, in miniature, precisely the whispering of the leather leaves touching together. When the wind gusted, her whisper was with it, and she leaned with—with the—other—Chip?”
    I said, “Yes, Grantham.”
    “You don’t forget it, standing in her white dress with blue spots, rooted and spreading and stretched, whispering in the wind. Chip?”
    I answered again.
    “You know about the moth, Chip?”
    I said, “Pronuba yuccasella.”
    He grinned. It was good to see his face relax. “Good entomology, for a botanist.”
    “Not especially,” I said. “Pronuba’s a fairly botanical sort of bug.”
    “Mmm.” He nodded. “It doesn’t eat anything but yucca nectar, and the yucca blossom can be fertilized by no other insect. Chip, did you know a termite can’t digest cellulose?”
    “Out of my line.”
    “Well, it can’t,” said Grantham. “But there’s a bacterium lives in his belly that can. And what he excretes, the termite feeds on.”
    “Symbiosis,” I said.
    “Wonder how you’d get along,” he mused, “with folks who didn’t know as much as you do? Yes, symbiosis. Two living things as dissimilar as a yucca and a moth, and neither can live without the