"You belong here, Selda," I added. "The wind is a part of you, and the mountains, and the sea. You shouldn't have to live in the midst of all those people in the city. You belong here." She smiled faintly, looking up at me.
"You belong here more than I do, Baret," she said. "You came to us, not from the city, but from the hills."
We stood there, examining each other's eyes, for a long while. I wanted to take her in my arms, but I didn't. I looked away at last, back at the sea, puzzled and disturbed. I had never been aware of anything so fine as this before, nor of anything so painful. Suddenly I found myself wanting to be something, to do something--not for myself, but for her. It was strange.
"Come," she said at last, "we had better go back."
"I'd like to stay here forever," I answered moodily, glancing around a last time at the versatile horizon.
"So would I," she admitted. Then, in a low voice, she added, "But one can't. One has to follow one's program."
We returned to the airship, raid rose into the cool, thin air. I stood behind her on the way back, watching her slender body as she guided the plane. Once in a while she would turn her head and look up at me over her shoulder, then quickly look away again.
"Why is it," I asked her as we passed over the valleys and the river on our way home, "why is it that these hills have such a cultivated look--as though they had been laid out?" She glanced back, and smiled.
"They _have_ been laid out," she said. "The hills, and the rivers, and the tallest mountains have all been constructed by our landscape artists in order to achieve their various effects. Even the line of the sea has been determined and arranged by the artists."
"But why?" I said. "Wasn't it a frightful waste of energy?"
"It didn't seem so to us," she answered. "We had no further need to cultivate the land except in small patches, when we learned the secret of artificial food. And we wanted to have perfect beauty about us. So we remodeled the outlines of the earth, and eliminated the insects and the harmful animals and the weeds. We made the land clean and fine as it had never been before."
"It pleased us. Our instinct is to arrange and remodel things, to order our life so that we know what it is and what it will always be." She paused for a moment, and added in a low voice, "One is necessarily a determinist here."