"I'm okay," she said. "At least I've got this part down."

"You're getting better."

"No need to lie about it, Conal. I'm never going to be good at this."

He brought her in closer and they got their feet on the ground. Nova zipped by them and clambered across the narrow beach to stand, dripping, sleek and shiny, shaking the water from her short blonde hair. She bent to grab a towel and rubbed it vigorously over her head.

"I'll meet you back at the house," she said, and walked down the beach.

Conal looked away from her, to Robin, and saw she was looking at him.

"She's a hunk, isn't she," Robin said, quietly.

"I guess I was staring ... "

"Don't be bashful. I may be her mother, but I can appreciate a hunk when I see it."

"The funny thing is," Conal admitted, "I wasn't really looking at her as a girl. I mean, not sexually. I've been swimming with you two almost every day, you know, so I'm used to looking at her. She's just such an incredibly healthy animal. She sort of glows."

Robin was giving him a skeptical eye, so he played the role she expected, acting abashed and shaking his head as if caught in a lie. But it was a funny thing, and it was true. He could be around a naked Nova all day long and never have a sexual thought about her. There were attainable dreams and there were impossible dreams, and Nova was always and forever the latter. It was too bad, but there it was. So now they were working cautiously toward a mutual respect that was still just shy of true friendship, and he liked that just fine.

And it didn't interfere at all with his appreciation of her stupendous beauty. A world couldn't be all bad if it contained such a creature.

So then wasn't it just like him, he thought, to be felled in the midst of his pride by suddenly and unaccountably becoming uncomfortably aware of Robin as a woman.

Well, it was her own fault. She shouldn't have brought it up.

They waded ashore and dried themselves on the fluffy white towels from the Junction. Conal kept stealing glances at her. She sat on a big smooth rock and carefully dried between her toes, fastidious as a cat.

She sure didn't look forty. She looked ... thirtyish, he supposed, but at the low end. But age was a funny thing. You could be twenty-eight and a pasty, lumpy, draggle-tailed thing. Or you could be fifty-five with a firm, flat belly and the glow of health and laugh-wrinkles around your eyes.

Like the hair. Shaved off high and unnatural around one ear, the one that was centered in the odd pentagonal design. A real fright when you first saw it, but as time went by it was somehow right for her.

Like the snakes. Now there was something to put a guy off, those snakes coiling around one leg and one arm, one fat loop going under her breasts, and the heads facing each other. But when you'd seen it a few times, it was just Robin. More than that, it was a pretty thing in itself.

"Do you have a will?" he asked, rubbing his hair vigorously.

"A will? Oh, you mean for when I die. It wouldn't do much good in here, would it. No covens-or courts of law; whatever they have on Earth."

"I guess not. But when you die, those ought to be saved."

She grinned up at him.

"Like the snakes, do you? I wouldn't mind being skinned and tanned, when it's all over." She stood up, facing him. "Touch them, Conal."

"What do you-"

"Just touch them. Please." She held out her hand, and he took it.

Hesitantly, wondering if she was playing some kind of joke on him, he touched the end of the snake with his finger. It coiled three times around her pinky, so he traced that with a fingertip. It grew a little fatter as it crossed the back of her hand, then made three more loops around her forearm. He touched lightly along its length. Then three times around her upper arm. She turned and he drew his hand over her shoulder and down between her shoulder-blades, and she lifted her naked arm-the one without a tattoo-and kept turning beneath his hand until she faced him again, and he drew his fingertips up over her breast, down between the two of them, underneath, and then opened his palm and cupped the breast. She looked down at the hand. She was breathing deeply and evenly.

"Now the other," she said.

So he went down on one knee and touched her foot. The snake's tail started on the small toe. It made S-turns along the top of her foot, coiled around her ankle and looped twice around her calf. He traced it out, going slowly, feeling the firm, clever muscles beneath the skin, which was absolutely smooth. Her other leg, he noticed, had very fine hairs.

The snake swelled around her thigh. He traced it faithfully, reaching around her when it was out of sight. Then she turned again, and his hand went over her hip, across a buttock, and up her back once more. She lifted her arm and he reached under it and cupped her other breast from behind. He held it for a moment, then let go.

She turned and smiled sadly at him. Then she took his hand, lacing her fingers through his, and they walked side-by-side up the beach. For a long time he felt strangely content not to say anything. But the feeling couldn't last forever.

"Why?" he finally asked.

"I've been asking myself that question. I wonder if you've found a better answer than I did."

"Is it ... was it a sex thing?" Conal, he told himself, you are the soul of subtlety. Just take all your little problems to Conal, girls. He'll stomp through them with his hob-nail boots.

"Maybe. Maybe not as simple as that. I think I just wanted to be touched. Deliberately. You've touched me while you teach me to swim, and it wasn't the same ... but it disturbed me, how good it felt."

Conal thought it over.

"I'll rub your back for you. I know how."

She smiled at him. Her eyes were bright with tears, but she didn't look at all like she was about to cry. It was odd.

"Would you? I'd like that."

Again there was a time of silence. Conal could see the stairs leading up to the Junction, and was sorry they were there. He wished the beach were longer. He liked holding her hand.

"I've been ... very unhappy most of my life," she said, quietly. He glanced at her. She was watching her own bare feet pad through the sand.

"I haven't had a lover for about two years now. When I was a girl I had a new lover every week, like girls do. But none of them could stand me for long. After I came back from Gaea, I wanted one woman to live my life with. I found three of them, and the longest one lasted a year. So I decided I just wasn't cut out for pair-bonding. In the last five years I didn't make love because it felt good-it felt awful, once the sweaty part was over-but because it felt so bad not to make love. I finally gave that up and just went without sex entirely."

"It sounds ... awful," Conal said.

They were at the foot of the stairs. Conal started to go up, but Robin stopped, still holding his hand. He turned.

"Awful?" A tear went down her cheek, and she wiped it away with her free hand. "I don't miss the sex that much. What I miss is being touched. Being hugged. Holding somebody in my arms. Since Adam's been gone ... there hasn't been anyone to touch me."

She kept looking up at him, and he felt more nervous than he had felt since his first month on the weights. Conal was not awkward around women, but this one and her daughter were different, and it went beyond the fact that they were lesbians.

She squeezed his hand tightly, so he thought what the hell, and put his arms around her and turned his head slightly to kiss her. He saw her lips parting, then she turned her head away so he started to let go of her, but she had her arms around him by then, so he put his hands on her back in what he hoped was a fatherly way, and she started to move her hips against him, slowly, and press dry lips to his neck. All in all, it was about as gracefully done as two ten-year-olds paying forfeits on a game of spin-the-bottle, but when all the adjustments were made they were pressed close together from knees to shoulders, and Conal could feel her tears trickling over his chest. She was holding him tightly, and he nuzzled the top of her head while running his hands up and down the smooth curves of her back.