an hear her voice.
My real body is going through its routine work almost automatically but
my mind, my consciousness, is focused into my portrait in Lana's
gallery, and we are talking. And of course in the real world I am
talking too, but my associates can't see who I'm talking to, and it
would be useless to try to explain to them.

So I'm getting quite a reputation as a nut! Can you imagine that?

But why should I mind? My reality has a much broader and more complex
scope than the limited reality of my associates. I might be fired, or
even sent to a state hospital, except for the fact that Lana foresees
such problems and teaches me enough things in my field that are unknown
to Earth, so that my employers consider me too valuable to lose.

If this story were fiction the ending would have to be that I am in love
with Lana and she with me, and there would be a nice conclusive ending
where she comes back to Earth to marry me and carry me back to her
world, where we would live happily ever after. But the truth of the
matter is that I'm not in love with Lana, nor she with me. Sometimes I
think I am her favorite portrait, but nothing more.

But really, everything is so interesting. Lana's gallery where I hang,
the museum where there are new faces each time I look out, and new
voices when I can't see out, Aunt Matilda's sewing room where she is at
the moment, and all Sumac as she goes about her normal pattern of
living.

It is a rich, full life that I live, shifting here and there in
consciousness while my physical body goes about its necessary tasks, as
often unguided as not. (What a reputation I'm getting for
absent-mindedness, too!)

And out of it all has come a perspective that, when I feel it strongly,
makes me feel almost like a god. In that perspective all my portraits
(and there are many now, on many worlds and in many places on this
world!) blend into one. That one is the stage of my life. But not a
stage, really. A show window. Yes, that is it. A show window, where the
_watchers_ pass.

I live in a show window that opens out in many worlds and many places
that are hidden from me by a veil that sometimes grows thin, so I can
see through it. And from the other side of that veil, even when I cannot
see through it, come the voices of the watchers, as they pass by, or
pause to look at me.

And I am not the only one! There are others. More and more of them, as
Lana comes back on her photographic expeditions for t