"You okay, Hutch?"

She jumped, thinking that Kellie had come up behind her, but the voice was on the link.

"I'm fine," she said. "Be back in a minute."

A tide of inexpressible well-being rose through her. She took the pistil in her hands, drew it against her cheek, and luxuriated in its warmth.

The flower moved.

The soft sheaths of the petals brushed her face. She inhaled the sweet green scent, and the burden of the last few days dropped away.

She rubbed her shoulders and cheek against the blossom. Closed her eyes. Wished that she could stop time. Felt a tide of ecstasy sweep through her. She came thoroughly alive, rode some sort of wave, understood she was living through a moment she would remember forever.

She rocked slowly in the flower's embrace. Fondled the pistil. Felt the last of her inhibitions melt.

The blossom moved with her. Entwined her. Caressed her.

She got out of her blouse.

The outside world faded.

And she gave herself to it.

She was drowning when the voices pulled her back. But they were on the link and far away. Of no concern. She let them go.

Everything seemed far away. She drank the sensations of the moment, and laughed because there was something perverted about all this, but she couldn't quite pin it down and didn't really care. She just hoped nobody walked out of the woods and saw what she was doing.

And then she didn't care about that either.

She wasn't sure precisely when the light grew harsh, when the erotics switched off and the sheer joy vanished and she was simply looking out of a cave, as if she were buried somewhere back in her brain, unable to feel, unable to control her body. She thought she was in danger, but she couldn't rouse herself to care. Then something was tugging at her, and the voices became urgent. There was a great deal of pulling and shoving. The petals gave way to the hard earth, and she was on the ground. They were all kneeling around her and Kellie was applying ointment, telling her to keep still, assuring her she'd be okay. "Trying to punch out a tree?" asked MacAllister, using the coital expression of the moment. "I don't think I've ever seen that before."

The blossom lay blackened and torn. Its fragile petals were scattered, and the pistil was broken. She was sorry for that.

"Come on, Hutch, talk to me."

The other flowers swayed in sync. Or was it a breeze causing the effect?

Her neck, arms, and face burned. "That's quite a ride," she said. And giggled.

Kellie looked at her disapprovingly. "At your age, you should know better."

"It must put out an allergen," said Nightingale. "Apparently pretty strong stuff."

"I guess." Hutch still felt detached. As if she were curled up inside her brain. And she was resentful.

"I think you're a little too big for it," Nightingale explained. "But it was doing its damnedest when we got here."

"Why do I hurt?" she asked.

"It tried to digest you, Hutch."

Kellie was finished with the medication, so they activated her suit. That had the effect of getting her a supply of air with the peculiarities added by the environment filtered out. The sense that everything was funny and that they should have let her alone began to fade. She held out her arms and looked at dark patches of skin.

"Enzymes were already working when we took you out," said Kellie.

"Psychotic flower," she said.

Chiang laughed. "And oversexed Earth babes."

Her clothing was in tatters, and Nightingale produced one of the Star jumpsuits they'd recovered from the lander. "It looks big, but it's the smallest we have."

She was shivering now. And embarrassed. My God, what had she been doing when they found her? "I can't believe that happened," she said.

"Do you remember your first rule?" asked Nightingale.

"Yeah." Nobody goes off alone.

She couldn't walk. "Some pretty good burns there," said Kellie. "We'd better stop here for the night. See how you are tomorrow."

She didn't object when they carried her back. They laid her down and built a fire. She closed her eyes and recalled an incident when she'd been about thirteen, the first time she'd allowed a boy to get inside her blouse. It had been in a utility shed out back of the house, and her mother had walked in on them. The boy had tried to brazen it out, to pretend nothing had happened, but Hutch had been humiliated, had gone to her room and thought the world was about to end, even though she'd extracted a promise that her father would not be told. This in return for a guarantee that it would not happen again. It hadn't. At least not during that summer.

She felt a similar level of humiliation. Lying with her eyes closed, hearing no conversation because everyone was off-channel so as not to disturb her, she listened to the fire and to the occasional sound of footsteps, and wished she could disappear somewhere. Her reputation was demolished. And with MacAllister here, of all people. He'd eventually write an account of all this, and Hutch and the blossom could expect to show up on Universal News.

Was there anybody else, she wondered, in the whole history of the species, who had tried to make it with a plant?

It was dark when she woke. The fire had died down, and she could see Kellie seated on a log nearby. The flickering light threw moving shadows across her features.

The giant blossom had shown up in her dreams, part terrifying, part exhilarating. For a while she lay quietly, thinking about it, hoping to assign the entire experience to fantasy. But it had happened.

She decided that she would sue the Academy when she got home.

"You awake?" Kellie asked.

"Reluctantly."

She smiled and kept her voice low. "Don't worry about it." And, after a moment: "Was it really that good?"

"How do you mean?"

"You looked as if you were having a great time."

"Yeah. I guess I was." She pulled herself up. "How late is it?" Morgan was directly overhead, getting bigger all the time. Half the giant world was in shadow.

"You're changing the subject."

"What can I tell you, Kellie? I just lost control of everything."

Kellie stirred the fire. Sparks rose into the night. "A big pitcher plant. It's a strange place."

"Yeah, it is."

"It could have happened to either of us. But everyone understands." She looked at Hutch's right arm. "You should be all right in the morning." Apparently during the encounter Hutch had succeeded in getting altogether out of her clothes. She had burns on both legs, her right arm, her pelvic area, waist, breasts, throat, and face. "You were a mess when we brought you back here," Kellie added with a smile.

Hutch wanted to change the subject. "We lost a little time today."

"Not really. We did all right. Randy was done for the day anyhow."

Hutch stared off into the darkness. She could see the outlines of the giant blossoms against the sky. "Randy thinks they have eyes," Kellie said.

She shuddered. Hutch had been assigning the experience to a simple programmed force of nature. But eyes. That made it personal.

"Maybe not exactly eyes," she continued, "but light receptors that are pretty sophisticated. He says he thinks the local plant life is far beyond anything we've seen elsewhere."

Hutch didn't like being so close to them. She felt violated.

"He thinks they may even have a kind of nervous system. He's looked at a couple of the smaller ones. They don't like being uprooted or dissected."

"How do you mean, they don't like it?"

"The parts move."

"They sure do," she said.

The Edward J. Zwick arrived in the Maleiva area without fanfare. Canyon looked at Morgan's World through the scopes, and at Deep-six, and felt sorry for the people trapped on the ground.

Zwick was named for a journalist who'd been killed while covering one of the numerous border wars in South America at the end of the century. Its captain was a thirty-eight-year-old former Peacekeeper named Miles Chastain. Miles was tall, lean, quiet. Something in his manner made Canyon uncomfortable. The man always seemed so serious.