Roselyn walked into the middle, and turned a slow circle, taking it all in. "It's very—"

"Sad? Egomaniacal? Tasteless?"

"No. Just that it could only belong to a boy."

Roselyn ran her hand along the back of the battered leather settee. She looked at Lawrence. He stared back.

The bottom of the door hadn't reached the ground before they were tugging frantically at each other's clothes.

"What do you do in here?" Roselyn asked afterward. She was lying along the settee, her head resting comfortably in his lap.

Lawrence was still having trouble with the concept of a naked girl in his den. The two factors simply didn't compute. Although, now he thought about it, having sex in here had been severely exciting. The forbidden fruit syndrome. "I don't do a lot. It's just somewhere that I can come and relax, be myself."

"Okay, I can understand that. There's times I wish my dearly beloved sisters never existed, and I was cooped up on a starship with them for a month. No escape. But what do you do, when you're being yourself?"

"Nothing really interesting, I guess. I used to be quite into electronics and stuff. That's what most of the junk is, I just haven't got round to fixing it all. I do a lot of homestudy in here. Play a lot of i-games."

"Like the Halo Stars?'

"That's a new one, actually." He stopped, slightly abashed. But then he did have a nude girl half sprawled over him. You couldn't get more personal than that. "When I was younger, I'd spend hours watching my favorite show up on the big sheet screen."

"What was it?"

"I doubt you've heard of it. Flight: Horizon."

Her nose wrinkled up. "I think I know the name. It's an old sci-fi show, isn't it?"

"Yeah. About a starship exploring the other side of the galaxy. Amethi only imported one series, though. I'll never know what happened to them, and if they made it home."

"Why didn't you send a message to the distribution company back on Earth? It can't cost that much to get the other series sent."

"I tried that a thousand times, but I never get any answer. I guess the company's folded."

"Nothing is ever lost from the datapool, that's why it's expanded beyond its homogeneity globe. It's not that the original network design was faulty, people just kept adding so much memory capacity that the interconnectivity broke down. There are whole sections that are almost autonomous, other sections don't know what's in them, or even that they exist If you need anything slightly quirky these days, you've got to load in a dozen different askpings and hope one of them finds a metalink for you. When I was looking up Amethi, some of the data took days to get back to me. Nothing mainstream, just the peripherals, early survey reports, startup finances, that kind of thing. Specialist stuff. There are even rumors about closedpools existing, sections that only have internal metalinks, and their AS controllers don't know they're no longer linked to the outside."

"That sounds crazy. You can't lose information in Amethi's datapool. One askping will find you anything."

"That's because it's still small. Earth's datapool breakdown was inevitable. There's too much data to be indexed in a single source, and the more the index is distributed the weaker the metalinks become. They're talking about giving it official subdivisions. Except, if you don't know where all the original data is stored, how are you going to rearrange it?"

"No wonder I couldn't get an answer."

"If you like, I can send a message to a friend I know. She can load an askping for the show."

Lawrence tumbled off the settee. He wound up kneeling in front of Roselyn, who was regarding him with intrigued amusement. "You can get the rest of the episodes for me?"

"We can find out if they exist, yes. Entertainment is still mainstream. Unless it's over a century old, of course. Even then, it's pretty easy."

"Please." He clamped his hands on her knees. "I would be eternally grateful, and I will sign that in blood."

"Humm." She pondered the notion for a moment, eyes unfocused on the ceiling. "There is one thing I'd like."

"It's yours."

She took hold of his hand and licked his fingers one by one, ending with a kiss at each tip. Then she began to move him slowly across her body until the place he touched made her gasp. "That," she murmured huskily. "I like that."

Every day for a week Roselyn went back to the Newton family estate after school. Sometimes they drove on the trike, but often they'd walk through the 'tweendome tunnels. It wasn't until the third day she was introduced to Lawrence's mother and brothers and sisters. He worried about the meeting a lot more than she did, wincing every time his mother was "nice" or asked a personal question; glaring at his siblings when they shouted a crass comment. Roselyn sailed through it with a grace he envied as much as he admired.

After that initial encounter was over, he wasn't obliged to bring her into the house every time, although it was made very clear she was to come to a meal whenever she was visiting. And it would be lovely to meet her mother for lunch one day. Soon.

"Parents," she sighed when Lawrence glumly relayed this latest development. "They never book themselves into the nursing home. They just stay home and embarrass their children."

He glanced up from licking her navel. "You know what'll happen, don't you? My mum will start introducing your mum to eligible men."

Roselyn shifted around. They'd put a blanket on the settee now; the leather used to stick to her bare skin. "I doubt it."

He heard the tension in her voice. "Sorry. You don't talk much about him."

"No." She let out a long breath. "I don't. There's not much to say. He was a great father, I loved him lots. Then one day he was gone, and everything I thought was my world went with him. And just when I thought my life was going to be completely shitty from then on, I came here." She pinched a roll of flesh around his waist, which made him squirm. "And there you were waiting for me."

"Something else we've got in common. My life was pretty shitty, too, until I met you. I don't mean it was as bad as you losing your father, no way. Mine was all self-inflicted, most of it, I guess. Easier to bring that to an end."

"Well, I'm going to inflict some more suffering on you."

"What?"

"Lawrence, I can't keep coming back here after school."

"Why not?" he asked, shocked. "Don't you like this?"