"I am one who knows," he said. "I am one who knows that the days of aman are numbered and one who covets their dispositions as he feels them drawto a close."

"You are strange," said Sythia. "Have I pleased you?"

"More than anything else I have ever known," he said.

And she sighed, and he found her lips once again.

They breakfasted, and that day they walked in the Valley of the Bones.He could not distinguish distances nor grasp perspectives properly, and shecould not see anything that had been living and now was dead. So, of course,as they sat there on a shelf of stone, his arm around her shoulders, hepointed out to her the rocket which had just come down from out of the sky,and she squinted after his gesture. He indicated the robots, which had begununloading the remains of the dead of many world from the hold of the ship,and she cocked her head to one side and stared ahead, but she did not reallysee what he was talking about.

Even when one of the robots lumbered up to him and held out the boardcontaining the receipt and the stylus, and as he signed the receipt for thebodies received, she did not see or understand what it was that wasoccurring.

In the days that followed, his life took upon it a dreamlike quality,filled with the pleasure of Sythia and shot through with certain inevitablestreaks of pain. Often, she saw him wince, and she asked him concerning hisexpressions.

And always he would laugh and say, "Pleasure and pain are near to oneanother," or some thing such as that.

And as the days wore on, she came to prepare the meals and to rub hisshoulders and mix his drinks and to recite to him certain pieces of poetryhe had somehow once come to love.

A month. A month, he knew, and it would come to an end. The Faioli,whatever they were, paid for the life that they took with the pleasures ofthe flesh. They always knew when a man's death was near at hand. And in thissense, they always gave more than they received. The life was fleeinganyway, and they enhanced it before they took it away with them, to nourishthemselves most likely, price of the things that they'd given.

Sythia was mother-of-pearl, and her body was alternately cold and warmto his caresses, and her mouth was a tiny flame, igniting wherever ittouched, with its teeth like needles and its tongue like the heart of aflower. And so he came to know the thing called love for the Faioli calledSythia.

Nothing really happened beyond the loving. He knew that she wanted him,to use him ultimately, and he was perhaps the only man in the universe ableto gull one of her kind. His was the perfect defense against life andagainst death. Now that he was human and alive, he often wept when heconsidered it.

He had more than a month to live.

He had maybe three or four.

This month, therefore, was a price he'd willingly pay for what it wasthat the Faioli offered.

Sythia racked his body and drained from it every drop of pleasurecontained within his tired nerve cells. She turned him into a flame, aniceberg, a little boy, an old man. When they were together, his feelingswere such that he considered the _consolamentum_ as a thing he might reallyaccept at the end of the month, which was drawing near. Why not? He knew shehad filled his mind with her presence, on purpose. But what more didexistence hold for him? This creature from beyond the stars had brought himevery single thing a man could desire. She had baptized him with passion andconfirmed him with the quietude which follows after. Perhaps the finaloblivion of her final kiss were best after all.

He seized her and drew her to him. She did not understand him, but sheresponded.

He loved her for it, and this was almost his end.

There is a thing called disease that battens upon all living things,and he had known it beyond the scope of all living men. She could notunderstand, woman-thing who had known only of life.

So he never tried to tell her, though with each day the taste of herkisses grew stronger and saltier and each seemed to him a strengtheningshadow, darker and darker, stronger and heavier, of that one thing which henow knew he desired most.

And the day would come. And come it did.

He held her and caressed her, and the calendars of all his days fellabout them.

He knew, as he abandoned himself to her ploys and the glories of hermouth, her breasts, that he had been ensnared, as had all men who had knownthem, by the power of the Faioli. Their strength was their weakness. Theywere the ultimate in Woman. By their frailty they begat the desire toplease. He wanted to merge himself with the pale landscape of her body, topass within the circles of her eyes and never depart.

He had lost, he knew. For as the days had vanished about him, he hadweakened. He was barely able to scrawl his name upon the receipt profferedhim by the robot who had lumbered toward him, crushing ribcages and crackingskulls with each terrific step. Briefly, he envied the thing. Sexless,passionless, totally devoted to duty. Before he dismissed it, he asked it,"What would you do if you had desire and you met with a thing that gave youall the things you wished for in the world?"

"I would--try to--keep it," it said, red lights blinking about itsdome, before it turned and lumbered off, across the Great Graveyard.

"Yes," said John Auden aloud, "but this thing cannot be done."

Sythia did not understand him, and on that thirty-first day theyreturned to that place where he had lived for a month and he felt the fearof death, strong, so strong, come upon him.

She was more exquisite that ever before, but he feared this finalencounter.

"I love you," he said finally, for it was a thing he had never saidbefore, and she stroked his brow and kissed it.

"I know," she told him, "and your time is almost at hand, to love mecompletely. Before the final act of love, my John Auden, tell me a thing:What is it that sets you apart? Why is it that you know so much more ofthings-that-are-not-life than mortal man should know? How was it that youapproached me on that first night without my knowing it?"

"It is because I am already dead," he told her. "Can't you see it whenyou look into my eyes? Do you not feel it, as a certain special chill,whenever I touch you? I came here rather than sleep the cold sleep, whichwould have me to be in a thing like death anyhow, an oblivion wherein Iwould not even know I was waiting, waiting for the cure which might neverhappen, the cure for one of the very last fatal diseases remaining in theuniverse, the disease which now leaves me only small time of life."

"I do not understand," she said.

"Kiss me and forget it," he told her. "It is better this way. Therewill doubtless never be a cure, for some things remain always dark, and Ihave surely been forgotten. You must have sensed the death upon me, when Irestored my humanity, for such is the nature of your kind. I did it to enjoyyou, knowing you to be of the Faioli. So have your pleasure of me now, andknow that I share it. I welcome thee. I have courted thee all the days of mylife, unknowing."

But she was curious and asked him (using the familiar for the firsttime), "How then dost thou achieve this balance between life andthat-which-is-not-life, this thing which keeps thee unconscious yetunalive?"

"There are controls set within this body I happen, unfortunately, tooccupy. To touch this place beneath my left armpit will cause my lungs tocease their breathing and my heart to stop its beating. It will set intoeffect an installed electrochemical system, like those my robots (invisibleto you, I know) possess. This is my life within death. I asked for itbecause I feared oblivion. I volunteered to be gravekeeper to the universe,because in this place there are none to look upon me and be repelled by mydeathlike appearance. This is why I am what I am. Kiss me and end it."