She studied David Brown as he slept beside her. The strain and anxiety that had dominated his face just minutes before had been replaced by the carefree smile of a boy. Men are so simple, Franceses was thinking. Orgasm is the perfect pain reliever. I wish it were that easy for us.

She slipped off the small cot and put her clothes on again. Francesca was very careful not to disturb her sleeping friend. But you and I still have a real problem, she said to herself as she finished dressing, which we need to address quickly. And it will be more difficult because we are dealing with a woman.

Francesca walked outside her hut, into the black of Rama. There were a few lights near the supplies at the other end of the camp, but otherwise the Beta campsite was dark. Everyone else was asleep. She switched on her small flashlight and walked away in a southerly direction, toward the Cylindrical Sea.

What is it that you want, Madame Nicole des jardins? she thought as she walked along. And where’s your weakness, your Achilles” heel? For several minutes Francesca flipped through her entire memory bank on Nicole, at­tempting to find any personality or character flaw that could be exploited. Money’s not the answer. Sex. isn’t either, at least not with me. She laughed involuntarily. And certainly not with David. Your dislike for him is obvious.

What about blackmail!” Francesca asked herself as she drew near to the banks of the Cylindrical Sea. She remembered Nicole’s strong reaction to her question about Genevieve’s father. Maybe, she thought, if I knew the answer to that question… But I don’t

Francesca was temporarily stumped. She could not figure out any way to compromise Nicole des Jardins. By this time the lights from the campsite behind her were barely visible. Francesca extinguished her flashlight and very cautiously sat down to dangle her feet over the edge of the cliff.

Having her legs suspended above the frozen ice of the Cylindrical Sea brought back a suite of poignant memories from her childhood in Orvieto. At the age of eleven, despite the barrage of health warnings that assaulted her from every direction, the precocious Francesca had decided to start smoking cigarettes. Every day after school she would wind her way down the hill to the plain below the town and sit on the bank of her favorite creek. There she would smoke in silence, an act of solitary rebellion. On those lazy afternoons she would inhabit a fantasy world of castles and princes, millions of kilometers away from her mother and stepfather.

The memory of those adolescent moments produced an irresistible desire to smoke in Francesca. She had been taking her nicotine pills throughout the mission, but they satisfied only the physical addiction. She laughed at herself and reached into one of the special pockets of her flight suit. Francesca had hidden away three cigarettes in a special container that would preserve them in fresh condition. She had told herself before leaving the Earth that the cigarettes were there “in case of an emergency”…

Smoking a cigarette inside an extraterrestrial space vehicle was even more outrageous than smoking at the age of eleven. Francesca wanted to hoot with delight when she threw back her head and expelled the smoke into the Raman air. The act made her feel free, liberated. Somehow the threat repre­sented by Nicole des Jardins did not seem so serious.

While she was smoking, Francesca recalled the acute loneliness of that young girl stealing down the slopes of old Orvieto. She also remembered the terrible secret that she had kept locked forever in her heart. Francesca had never told anyone about her stepfather, certainly not her mother, and she rarely thought about it anymore. But as she sat on the banks of the Cylindri­cal Sea, the anguish of her childhood appeared to her in sharp relief.

It began right after my eleventh birthday, she thought, plunging back into the details of her life eighteen years before. ! had no idea what the bastard wanted at first She took another deep drag from her cigarette. Even after he started bringing me gifts for no reason.

He had been the principal of her new school. When she had taken her first full set of aptitude tests, Francesca had made the highest scores in the history of Orvieto. She was off the scale, a prodigy. Until then he had never noticed her. He had married her mother eighteen months before and fa­thered the twins almost immediately. Francesca had been a nuisance, an­other mouth to feed, nothing more than a part of her mother’s furniture.

For several months he was especially nice to me. Then Mother went to visit Aunt Carlo for a few days. The painful memories came fast, rushing like a torrent through her mind. She remembered the smell of wine on her stepfa­ther’s breath, his sweat against her body, her tears after he had left her room.

The nightmare had lasted for over a year. He had forced himself upon her whenever her mother was not in the house. Then one evening, while he was putting on his clothes and looking in the other direction, Francesca had smacked him in the back of the head with an aluminum baseball bat. Her stepfather had fallen to the floor, bloody and unconscious. She had dragged him into the living room and left him there.

He never touched me again, Francesca remembered, putting out her ciga­rette in the Raman dirt. We were strangers in the same house. From then on I spent most of my time with Roberto and his friends. I was just waiting for my chance. I was ready when Carlo came.

Francesca was fourteen during the summer of 2184. She spent most of her time that summer loitering around the main square of Orvieto. Her older cousin Roberto had just completed his certificate to be a tour guide for the cathedral in the square. The old Duomo, the chief tourist attraction of the town, had been built in phases, starting in the fourteenth century. The church was an artistic and architectural masterpiece. The frescoes by Luca Signorelli inside its San Brizio chapel were widely hailed as the finest exam­ples of imaginative fifteenth century painting outside of the Vatican mu­seum.

To have become an official Duomo guide was considered quite an accom­plishment, especially at the age of nineteen. Francesca was very proud of Roberto. She sometimes accompanied him on his tours, but only if she agreed beforehand not to embarrass him with her wisecracks.

One August afternoon, right after lunch, a sleek limousine pulled into the piazza around II Duomo and the chauffeur requested a guide from the tourist bureau. The gentleman in the limousine had not made a reservation and Roberto was the only guide available. Francesca watched with great curiosity as a short, handsome man in his late thirties or early forties climbed out of the back of the car and introduced himself to Roberto. Automobiles had been banned from upper Orvieto, except by special permit, for almost a hundred years, so Francesca knew the man must be an unusual individual.

As he always did, Roberto began his tour with the reliefs sculptured by Lorenzo Maitani on the outside portals of the church. Still curious, Fran­cesca stood just off to the side, smoking quietly, while her cousin explained the significance of the weird demonic figures at the bottom of one of the columns. “This is one of the earliest representations of Hell,” Roberto said, pointing at a group of Dantesque figures. “The fourteenth century concept of Hell involved an extremely literal interpretation of the Bible.”

“Hah!” Francesca had suddenly interjected, dropping her cigarette on the cobblestones and walking toward Roberto and the handsome stranger. “It was also a very masculine concept of Hell. Notice that many of the demons have breasts and most of the sins depicted are sexual. Men have always believed that they were created perfect; it is women who have taught them to sin.”