"The bathroom ?"

"Yep." I kiss him again, and suddenly I'm not sure this is a good idea at all. "Where we're going to get in the shower together, and wash each other, and talk. Can't go to bed smelling of office work, can we?"

"Shower—" His monosyllables aren't his most appealing attribute: I kiss him into silence, shivering with alarm at my own responses.

"Now."

THINGS do not go according to plan.

The plan seemed simple enough. Get Sam on board again. Doing that, holding a proper conversation with him, was another matter with the ever-present risk of being overheard. But if you disguise your suspicious activities as something expected of you, while only the dumb listener bots are online, you've got a good chance of doing it undetected. The dumb listeners aren't good for much more than keyword monitoring, and the cabal is sufficiently short on spare bodies that they can't monitor everything we say all the time.

So call me naive, if you like. I figured that as a married couple, one of us pretending to seduce the other and then dragging them into a shower—lots of nice white noise to confuse audio tracking, sheets of water to make it hard to lip-read, and an excuse to stand really close together—would be a pretty good way of evading surveillance.

What I didn't consider was that when I stand too close to Sam my skin tingles, and I feel warm and needy in intimate places. And what I especially didn't consider is that Sam is horribly conflicted but has corresponding urges. He's human, too, and we both have certain needs, which we've been trying to ignore for much too long.

Sam does as I ask him, and about halfway up the stairs I realize that I'm going to lose control if we do this. I nearly tell him to stop, but for some reason my mouth doesn't want to open. He puts me down on the bathroom carpet and stands too close. "What now?" he asks, a quiet tension in his voice.

"We, um, undress." Without realizing quite how, I find my hands are already working on his trouser belt. When I feel him begin to unbutton my blouse, I shudder, and not with fear. "Shower."

"This isn't such a good—"

"Shut up."

"You'll become, uh, pregnant."

"Won't." Worry about it later . I run my hand around his back, feeling the thin man-fur that runs up the base of his spine, and I lean closer. "Not worried anymore."

"But." I feel him unzip my skirt. Hands on my thighs. "Surely."

I kiss him to make him stop. We're down to underwear. "Shower. Now. " My teeth are chattering with a rising tide of need that threatens to wreck what's left of my self-control.

We're in the shower cubicle, wearing our underwear, and I dial the pressure up to maximum and the temperature to fusion. His tongue—garlic and honey and a hint of something else, of him. Arms around each other, we stand under the spray, and I feel the tension in his back. He's got an erection, of course. Why am I still wearing anything? Moments later I'm not. And a moment after that I'm crunched against the wall, my knees drawn up, gasping at the size of him inside me.

"You want to talk . . ."

The entire universe is in here. I wrap my arms around him and latch on to his lips, hungrily. I want to talk, but right now I've got higher priorities.

"Opening ceremony."

"Yes?"

"On a MASucker. Yes!"

"Yes . . ."

"Only one T-gate out. Six gigs to next star system. If we break connection, bad guys can't pay up on scorefiles. Breaks carrot side of dictatorship, no payoff for compliance. Yes . . ."

"Overthrow the—the?"

He heaves like the wild sea. I'm lost on him, abandoned. At first when I was Reeve, the idea of pregnancy horrified me. Then Hanta tweaked something, and it was no big deal. Now I just don't care anymore: It's survivable, and if it's the cost of having Sam right now, I'll pay. I want to focus, to plan, but we've gotten carried away. Sam is pounding away with no subtlety, and he knows better, which means he's lost on the ocean, too. If we can find each other and cling together through the night, who knows? "Sam, I, I want you to—"

"Oh!" A moment later, a quieter "oh!" And a sensation of spreading warmth that drives me to grind against him until everything goes away, and I become the ocean for a few eternal seconds.

THINGS don't go according to plan, but they go strangely well. After the first mad flush of lust, we collapse in the shower, then soap each other off thoroughly. Sam doesn't cringe away from my hands this time but seems quiet, thoughtful. I kiss him, and he responds. After a while I begin to feel as if my skin's about to fall off: I can barely see thebathroom for steam. "Let's dry off and go to bed," I suggest, feeling another little jolt of worry.

"Okay." Sam turns the shower head to OFF and opens the cubicle door. It's cold out there. I shiver, and for a wonder he wraps his arms around me.

"Are you feeling comfortable?" I ask hesitantly. "I mean, with this?"

He thinks for a moment. "I'm comfortable with you."

"But—"

He kisses the back of my head. "It's you. That makes it easier."

There's nothing left to divide us: We know exactly how fucked up we are. We've had such disastrous misunderstandings already that there's nothing left to come. Sam freaks at the idea of being human and male and large? Yes. I have problems with the idea of pregnancy, and there're no contraceptives in YFH-Polity? Sure. We're past all that. It's all going to be very simple from now on.

So we towel each other dry and I take his hand and together we go to the bedroom, where presently we make love again, tenderly and slowly.

THE next morning, I stumble downstairs late, disheveled and happy, to find there is a letter waiting for me on the front hall carpet. It's like a bucket of cold water in the face. I pick it up and carry the piece of paper into the kitchen and read it while the coffee machine gurgles and chugs to itself.

To: Mrs. Reeve Brown

From: The Polity Administration Committee

Dear Mrs. Brown

It is now four months since your arrival in YFH-Polity. In this time, numerous changes have taken place in our little community, and we will shortly be commencing Phase Two of the experiment in which you agreed to participate.

Accordingly, may I extend to you an invitation to our first Town Meeting, to be held at City Hall on Sunday morning in place of the regularly scheduled Sunday Service. The meeting will explain the forthcoming Phase Two changes, and will be followed by a service of thanksgiving, to be conducted by the Very Reverend Dr. H. Yourdon in the cathedral.

Yours truly . . .

This puts a new perspective on things, doesn't it? I shake my head, then take the two coffee mugs back upstairs. On my way I snag the identical-looking letter with Sam's name on it.

"What do you think?" he asks, when he's had time to read it.

"I think it's exactly what it sounds like." I shrug. "Things are getting bigger, new faces, new scenery—this ‘cathedral' they're opening! You can't run a town the way you run a parish of a couple of hundred people, can you? No way can everybody know each other. So they'll need a different intergroup score mechanism to keep people behaving themselves. To account for the anonymity of cities, the sight of familiar strangers."

His cheek twitches. "I'm not sure I like the sound of that."

"Oh, it can't be that bad," I assure him, rolling my eyes.

"Can't it?"

I nod. "No." A thought strikes me. "Listen, can you get away from the office for lunch?"

"What, you mean . . . ?"

"Yes. Drop by the library about one o'clock, and we'll go eat together." I smile at him. "How does that sound?"

"You want me to—" He works it out. "Yes, I can do that."

"Good." I lean close and kiss him on the cheek. "Be seeing you."