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Mouse curls up in Diane's lap, carefully positioning herself as she gets comfortable, laying her head on Diane's shoulder.
"Once upon a time, in a world that turned very slowly, so that the day was a year long and the night was another year, there lived a little boy named Orn. Orn was only two days old, which means he was four, and in the noon of his second day, a holiday of great celebration in this world, his mother gave him a beautiful silver ball. Orn loved the ball so much that he played with it almost all the time. When he wasn't playing with it, he kept it in the drawer of his nightstand, so it would not be lost.
"One day he went to the beach. He took the silver ball with him and played with it by the water. Then he made a mistake - he took it into the sea to play... it was so beautiful, the silver against the seafoam. A wave knocked him over and the ball flew out of his hands. The last he saw of it, it was floating away, out, out to the deep part of the sea.
"Orn cried and was inconsolable. He wanted his ball, he wanted it now, he would not rest till he had it back. So his mother told him a story. She said that his ball had floated all the way around the world... that the other side of the world was all dark, and that his ball had floated into the sky, which is contiguous to the sea, and now gave light to the whole dark half of the world."
Mouse listens, enraptured -- her eyes unfocused, her jaw slack with wonderment. Diane holds her tenderly.
"Orn still wanted it, but, at least his ball was doing a lot of good... he finally stopped crying and let his mother take him on picnics and to the playground and grew happier. Several months later, the sun began to set. the colors were astonishing. Orn could only dimly remember the sunrise a year earlier. Another month passed, and the sky slowly grew dark. Orn looked for his silver ball.. and finally.. it appeared! Far overhead, the tiny silver ball did indeed give light, though nothing like the sunlight.
"Orn was filled with happiness. His ball had returned... the night was his. This belief buoyed him for years and days, until as a young man he learned that the moon was very faraway and large. The utter disillusionment made him quite difficult to live with as a teenager - though he was not so revealing as to indicate why, and his parents simply assumed it was typical teenage rebelliousness.
"Finally, though, he went looking for the ball. After all.. if the moon was not it... then... it must be somewhere. Orn set off on voyage after voyage... he discovered huge continents his people had never even been to. As an adult, he became famous and rich. His voyages were as popular as Marco Polo's and as profitable as Cortez's. Though there were no wholesale slaughter of indiginous peoples, as the lands he discovered were much on a par when it came to war and technology as his own.
"Still, he never found the silver ball. Never. a tiny ball in the entire world, perhaps he was wrong to think he could find it. Finally he grew old... very old. Children and grandchildren gathered around. And in his age, the truths he had known all his life seemed to merge. In the half dreams of half life, as his final breaths slipped away, he knew the truth. It could be both his silver ball, and the faraway moon -- both at once. No contradiction: life was a mystery. "Ahh, my ball, at last," he breathed... and he died.
"The end."
Diane smiles as the girl slowly closes her mouth, absorbing the final sounds of the story's ending. Mouse gazes back at the Galliard.
"Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh," says Mouse finally, "Pretty pretty." She smiles too, like a beam of sunlight. Mouse likes stories.