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as I could testify from many painful nips. I chewed on paper, they chewed on me. The asymmetry was nasty. All of us were ready for solid food. We were all in fact ready to throw in the towel on family life, and Mama discerned this through her vapors at last. Our flashing incisors must have seemed to her like glimmers of light at the end of the long maternal tunnel. Lured by that light she rose to the task of teaching us to get by without her, setting us up so she could split and go off and lead the life of a swinger again.
     
    Our education was simple and practical. Two by two we tagged along behind Mama on her trips up top, where we were expected to learn by observing her technique. There was not going to be any more easy slurp and guzzle: from now on we would confront an entirely new style of existence. Anthropologists regard hunting and gathering as the most primitive stage of civilization, but ours was even lower than that. Call it scrounging and scraping. It was almost entirely night work. The basic positions were crouch, skulk, and hunker. The sustaining moves were creep, scurry, and dart. When my turn came I was paired with Luweena. I was pleased with this, since she had always treated me with indifference, offering me neither nips nor drubs, which was all to the good, since she was of large athletic build and once during a melee had bitten off most of Shunt’s ear. I had always been aware - and wary - of her build, but that night, just as we were starting out, I noticed for the first time how furry she was behind. It was not only her teeth that were growing. Preoccupied as I was with my explorations, I had let this new development slip up on me, but now the view of her furry cheeks bobbing in front of me became utterly distracting, and I felt toward her a sudden violent anger.
     
    With Mama in the lead we crept under the cellar door and out into the world. I had thought of myself as being better prepared than any of the others for what we would encounter outside. It was I after all who had spent many hours sitting in my Balcony gazing out across the shop toward the front window. I had seen something of the world in that window - people and cars passing and part of the building across the street. Once I saw a policeman on a horse, and once it rained. But stepping out into the night street behind Luweena and Mama I knew right away that my picture of the world, limited and rectangular as it was, bore scarcely any resemblance to the enormity of the thing itself. I felt like an earthling stepping out onto the surface of Jupiter. We stepped out onto a hard black desert. The streetlight directly above us hung like a sun in a black sky. From somewhere, perhaps the streetlight, came a faint high-pitched scream that was painful to the ears and in the long run maddening in its persistence. On both sides, crumbling four-story buildings loomed like the walls of a vast canyon. Even at that early stage of my education I had read enough to formulate ‘vast canyon of loneliness.’ I formulated it and shivered. Now and then a car passed with blazing eyes, and the floor of the desert shook. It was very cold, and something like an icy comb was running through our fur. It was wind. Luweena, of course, with her more limited background, ought to have been even more amazed than I was. I would have expected her to cringe or at least gape in wonder or be in some way flabbergasted, and I was shocked to see her just sniff the air and trot off after Mama as though she regarded walking on Jupiter as a perfectly normal thing to do. As for me, I was still sheltered by my relative ignorance, and only a vague disquiet gnawed at the margins of my mind.
     
    We went in single file, moving fast and staying as close to the buildings as we could, up Cornhill and then down a narrow alley. I brought up the rear. The alley was dark and had the same smell as under RESTROOM, but stronger. There must have been some kind of food there, for I could hear Mama