Excerpt:
Afterwards, she was taken down to the sea.
She didn't feel too well, so she sat on a rock down where the sand was wet and scrunched her bare toes in and out of the cool surface.
She turned away, looked toward the water, and hunched her shoulders a little. "I think it was awful," she said. "I think it was pretty terrible. Why did you show it to me? He was just a little boy. What reason could they have possibly had for doing that to him?"
"It was just a film," he said. "We showed it to you so you would learn."
"But it was a film of something that really happened."
"It happened several years ago, several hundred miles away."
"But it did happen; you used a tight beam to spy on them, and when the image came in on the vision screen, you made a film of it, and—But why did you show it to me?"
"What have we been teaching you?"
But she couldn't think, and only had the picture in her mind, vivid movements, scarlets, and bright agony. "He was just a child," she said. "He couldn't have been more than eleven or twelve."
"You are just a child," he said. "You are not sixteen yet."
"What was I supposed to learn?"
"Look around you," he said. "You should see something."
But the picture in her mind was still too vivid, too bright.
"You should be able to learn it right here on this beach, in the trees back there, in the rocks, in the bleached shells around your feet. You do see it; you just don't recognize it." Suddenly he changed his tone. "Actually you're a very fine student. You learn quickly. Do you remember anything about telepathy? You studied it months ago."
