“What are you afraid of?” she asked.

“What you’re wearing makes me nervous.”

“The slider?”

“If that’s what it’s called.”

“It’s what the sulidoror call it,” Seena said. “It comes from the central plateau. It clings to one of the big mammals there and lives by metabolizing perspiration. Isn’t it splendid?”

“I thought you hated the plateau.”

“Oh, that was a long time ago. I’ve been there many times. I brought the slider back on the last trip. It’s as much of a pet as it is something to wear. Look.” She touched it lightly and it went through a series of color changes, expanding as it approached the blue end of the spectrum, contracting toward the red. At its greatest extension it formed a complete tunic covering Seena from throat to thighs. Gundersen became aware of something dark and pulsing at the heart of it, resting just above her loins, hiding the pubic triangle: its nerve-center, perhaps. “Why do you dislike it?” she asked. “Here. Put your hand on it.” He made no move. She took his hand in hers and touched it to her side; he felt the slider’s cool dry surface and was surprised that it was not slimy. Easily Seena moved his hand upward until it came to the heavy globe of a breast, and instantly the slider contracted, leaving the firm warm flesh bare to his fingers. He cupped it in a moment, and, uneasy, withdrew his hand. Her nipples had hardened; her nostrils had flared.

He said, “The slider’s very interesting. But I don’t like it on you.”

“Very well.” She touched herself at the base of her belly, just above the organism’s core. It shrank inward and flowed down her leg in one swift rippling movement gliding away and collecting itself at the far side of the veranda. “Is that better?” Seena asked, naked, now, sweat-shiny, moistlipped.

The coarseness of her approach startled him. Neither he nor she had ever worried much about nudity, but there was a deliberate sexual aggressiveness about this kind of self-display that seemed out of keeping with what he regarded as her character. They were old friends, yes; they had once been lovers for several years; they had been married in all but the name for many months of that time; but even so the ambiguity of their parting should have destroyed whatever intimacy once existed. And, leaving the question of her marriage to Kurtz out of it, the fact that they had not seen one another for eight years seemed to him to dictate the necessity of a more gradual return to physical closeness. He felt that by making herself pantingly available to him within minutes of his unexpected arrival she was committing a breach not of morals but of esthetics.

“Put something on,” he said quietly. “And not the slider. I can’t have a serious conversation with you while you’re waving all those jiggling temptations in my face.”

“Poor conventional Edmund. All right. Have you had dinner?”

“No.”

“I’ll have it served out here. And drinks. I’ll be right back.”

She entered the building. The slider remained behind on the veranda; it rolled tentatively toward Gundersen, as though offering to climb up and be worn by him for a while, but he glared at it and enough feeling got through to make the plateau creature move hurriedly away. A minute later a robot emerged, bearing a tray on which two golden cocktails sat. It offered one drink to Gundersen, set the other on the railing, and noiselessly departed. Then Seena returned, chastely clad in a soft gray shift that descended from her shoulders to her shins.

“Better?” she asked.

“For now.” They touched glasses; she smiled; they put their drinks to their lips. “You remembered that I don’t like sonic snouts,” he said.

“I forget very little, Edmund.”

“What’s it like, living up here?”

“Serene. I never imagined that my life could be so calm. I read a good deal; I help the robots tend the garden; occasionally there are guests; sometimes I travel. Weeks often go by without my seeing another human being.”

“What about your husband?”

“Weeks often go by without my seeing another human being,” she said.

“You’re alone here? You and the robots?”

“Quite alone.”

“But the other Company people must come here fairly frequently.”

“Some do. There aren’t many of us left now,” Seena said. “Less than a hundred, I imagine. About six at the Sea of Dust. Van Beneker down by the hotel. Four or five at the old rift station. And so on — little islands of Earthmen widely scattered. There’s a sort of a social circuit, but it’s a sparse one.”

“Is this what you wanted when you chose to stay here?” Gundersen asked.

“I didn’t know what I wanted, except that I wanted to stay. But I’d do it again. Knowing everything I know, I’d do it just the same way.”

He said, “At the station just south of here, below the falls, I saw Harold Dykstra—”

“Henry Dykstra.”

“Henry. And a woman I didn’t know.”

“Pauleen Mazor. She was one of the customs girls, in the time of the Company. Henry and Pauleen are my closest neighbors, I guess. But I haven’t seen them in years. I never go south of the falls any more, and they haven’t come here.”

“They’re dead, Seena.”

“Oh?”

“It was like stepping into a nightmare. A sulidor led me to them. The station was a wreck, mold and fungoids everywhere, and something was hatching inside them, the larvae of some kind of basket-shaped red sponge that hung on a wall and dripped black oil—”

“Things like that happen,” Seena said, not sounding disturbed. “Sooner or later this planet catches everyone, though always in a different way.”

“Dykstra was unconscious, and the woman was begging to be put out of her misery, and—”

“You said they were dead.”

“Not when I got there. I told the sulidor to kill them. There was no hope of saving them. He split them open, and then I used my torch on them.”

“We had to do that for Gio’ Salamone, too,” Seena said. “He was staying at Fire Point, and went out into the Sea of Dust and got some kind of crystalline parasite into a cut. When Kurtz and Ced Cullen found him, he was all cubes and prisms, outcroppings of the most beautiful iridescent minerals breaking through his skin everywhere. And he was still alive. For a while. Another drink?”

“Please. Yes.”

She summoned the robot. It was quite dark, now. A third moon had appeared.

In a low voice Seena said, “I’m so happy you came tonight, Edmund. It was such a wonderful surprise.”

“Kurtz isn’t here now?”

“No,” she said. “He’s away, and I don’t know when he’ll be back.”

“How has it been for him, living here?”

“I think he’s been quite happy, generally speaking. Of course, he’s a very strange man.”

“He is,” Gundersen said.

“He’s got a quality of sainthood about him, I think.”

“He would have been a dark and chilling saint, Seena.”

“Some saints are. They don’t all have to be St. Francis of Assisi.”

“Is cruelty one of the desirable traits of a saint?”

“Kurtz saw cruelty as a dynamic force. He made himself an artist of cruelty.”

“So did the Marquis de Sade. Nobody’s canonized him.”

“You know what I mean,” she said. “You once spoke of Kurtz to me, and you called him a fallen angel. That’s exactly right. I saw him out among the nildoror, dancing with hundreds of them, and they came to him and practically worshipped him. There he was, talking to them, caressing them. And yet also doing the most destructive things to them as well, but they loved it.”

“What kind of destructive things?”

“They don’t matter. I doubt that you’d approve. He — gave them drugs, sometimes.”

“The serpent venom?”

“Sometimes.”

“Where is he now? Out playing with the nildoror?”

“He’s been ill for a while.” The robot now was serving dinner. Gundersen frowned at the strange vegetables on his plate. “They’re perfectly safe,” Seena said “I grow them myself, in back. I’m quite the farmer.”