The brackish, polluted water of the stream came into view.

His hands and arms were in front of him, crawling. At the water’s edge he stopped and stared at those bleeding arms, hands. What a tableau they made with the icy ground and filthy water.

“Pol.” Gyde’s voice a caress.

Pol slipped into the water and let it take him away.

Jill managed to get Cargha to take her to the spaceport in the air car. He had relatively little tolerance for pleading. The tarmac was hot and bright with a mid-sky sun when they landed, and Nate was a tiny figure next to the scale of the ship. He was lying just under its monstrous red-lacquered belly. He wasn’t moving.

Jill ran to him, somehow managing to reach him despite the fact that she could hardly breathe. His white T-shirt was burned away over his stomach and underneath was a black-and-red wound about the diameter of a grapefruit, centered in the soft flesh of his belly.

His face was still and utterly white. His long black lashes, two crescents sweetly resting on his cheeks, cut her heart neatly in two.

She dropped to her knees, next to his body, and had the distinct realization that her life was over, that some vital part of herself, one that was far more interesting and important and wonderful than any other part of her, had just been shut down forever. A feeling of pressure, intense and painful and suffocating, built and built inside her. Then she sucked in a gigantic gasp of air and expelled it with a choked wail that turned into racking, heaving sobs. The sobs shook her entire frame, each one coming out so hard, and so fast, that it pushed out the one in front of it violently, like an army of warriors leaving the womb.

Her fingers clutched blindly at his ruined shirt. She could not see for the tears, could not hear for the wails coming out of her mouth. Something had finally broken inside Jill Talcott, and she felt emotion now all right; she felt it all. Too late.

Or maybe not. Someone was touching her arm, some cold—but living—hand, a human hand, Nate.

She tried furiously to clear her eyes. Through veils of salt water and swollen lids, she saw him looking up at her—pale and obviously in pain, but alive all the same and even looking rather amazed at her display.

“Jill. Shhhh. It’s okay.”

She stared at his bloodied stomach in surprise and began ripping back the T-shirt fabric. The laser wound was ugly and wide, but it was not all that deep. She could see what looked like cauterized skin and even muscle. It was a terrible wound, but it was possible that it hadn’t penetrated to his internal organs. He might live.

Cargha was standing beside her, watching her with the absorbed, faintly repulsed expression of a scientist studying the mating rituals of weird bugs.

“Point-oh-five-seven millimeters,” he said. “That’s the depth required to kill a zerdot. This cannot be construed as a failure, because it must be statistically impossible that zerdots would mutate within the next two-point-two million years to the point where…”

Jill tuned him out. Her sobs had subsided to the point where she could almost breathe again, but there was a heaviness deep inside her chest. Nate was rubbing her arm, his teeth gritted tight in pain.

“You know,” he told her shakily, “people always wonder what it would be like to be at their own funeral. Well, I guess I just found out. Freaky.” Despite his words, there was something new in his eyes—a recognition of what her tears had meant, a question.

“Oh, Nate!”

She collapsed beside him, lying down next to him right there on the asphalt. He turned his head to look at her.

“Hurts like a son of a bitch,” he confided.

“Oh, sweetie, I know.”

She reached up a hand to stroke his face, that amazingly beautiful face. His expression changed as she touched him; his eyes darkened. She couldn’t bear that look in his eyes, never had been able to bear it, but this time, instead of turning away, she turned into it. What freedom, to allow herself to turn into it! She kissed him.

“Nate.” She said it for the pleasure of acknowledging that it was really him. His lips were so soft it was like drowning, and his kiss was as sweet as she remembered—god! The nights she had lain awake not wanting to remember! She kissed him with every bit as much intensity and abandon as she had felt in her grief.

When she finally released his mouth he groaned and pushed her away with a quivering laugh. “Jesus. Have you ever tried having a jones and a six-inch hole in your abdomen? There’s a definite conflict of interest going on down there.”

“Oh god, I’m sorry!” She felt herself go red. “Cargha, we need to get Nate inside, now. And we’ll need painkillers, and antiseptic.”

Cargha was still observing them with mild disgust. His lids came down over the goo on his eyes. “ ‘Painkiller.’ Curious idea. It is very much a dark planet concept. We do not require such things. This injury is easily remedied by reassembling the energy of the tissues. There are repair devices in most of the facilities. If you go—”

“You’ll take us to the nearest facility in the car. Now.”

She started to get up, preparing to help Nate to his feet. He stopped her with a hand on her arm. “Jill. Just promise me one thing.”

“You’re going to be fine,” she reassured him, giving him a brave smile. Now that he’d stopped her getting up, her fingers were unable to resist the texture of his hair. “You heard him. And don’t forget, this planet is lucky.”

“Yeah, tell me about it,” Nate said, giving her a smoky look. “But that’s not what I meant. Promise me—”

“I don’t care about the wave technology,” she insisted. “Really, Nate, you’ve been right about this whole thing. I think we can get back to Earth, but when we do—”

“Jill!” he interrupted, impatiently.

“What, Nate?” Her fingers, which found playing with his hair much more satisfying than playing with each other, were now exploring the baby soft skin on his neck. How on earth had she resisted this temptation for the past two years? What kind of masochist did that? It was like starving to death in a room laid with a gourmet feast—a gourmet feast that was trying its damnedest to leap down your throat. She must have been mad.

“I want you to promise,” Nate said, “that as soon as we fix this hole in my stomach, which will hopefully be in the next five minutes, because it really does sting like a bitch, you’ll kiss me like that again. In private. For about a year.”

“Mmmm,” Jill said, feeling herself melt.

Cargha sighed.

The woods were silent. The only light was the begrudging dregs of a half moon. If there had been activity here recently, men in long coats wandering in and out—scraping bark, studying the ground, taking soil samples—you would not know it now. The trees, silvery gray, slept the long sleep of fibrous things. Nocturnal insects trapped lesser insects; small mammals with night-glow eyes tracked them in turn and had their own deep fear of talons and swooping wings. The higher order of man was absent, leaving the woods to simpler, though not necessarily more innocent, rhythms.