Several times he tried to gently break away, but she kept holding him. After a while he didn't try anymore, and was beginning to entertain some wild notions. That was just in his mind; the rest of him was far ahead, to his consternation and embarrassment.

At last she wiped her eyes and moved a few inches away, keeping her hands lightly on his hips.

"Uh ... Robin, I don't know how much you know-"

"Enough," she said, glancing down between them. "You don't need to apologize for him. I know your friend down there leads his own life, and that a touch is enough to excite him. And that he may respond in spite of your own feelings in the matter."

"Ah ... actually, he and I are usually in pretty good agreement."

She laughed, and hugged him again, then looked up solemnly.

"You know it couldn't work, of course."

"Yeah. I know that."

"We're too different. I'm too old."

"You're not too old."

"Believe me, I am. Perhaps you shouldn't give me that back rub. It might be too difficult for you."

"Maybe I shouldn't."

She looked at him wistfully, then started up the stairs. She stopped, stood very still for a moment, then came back to stand on the last step. It put her on his level. She put her hands on his cheeks and kissed him. Her tongue darted around his lips, then she moved back and slowly dropped her hands.

"I'll be in my room for about an hour," she said. "If you're smart, you'll probably stay down here." She turned, and he watched the snakes play over her bare back as she mounted the steps, until she was out of sight. He turned and sat on the steps.

He spent a maddening ten minutes, getting up and sitting down again. No matter what, he couldn't go into the house in this condition. Rational thought was what was called for.

It was a situation that demanded cooling off. She was completely right. It could never work out. And once would be silly, she said that herself. Once wasn't enough with her, and once was all it could ever be with him. An experiment, and bound to turn out badly.

He looked up the stairs again. He could still see her trim backside.

"Well," he sighed, "it's been a long time since anybody accused me of being smart." He looked down at his lap.

"You knew it all along, didn't you?"

THREE

Valiha sat atop the hill overlooking Tuxedo Junction, near the wide scorch on the ground. Already, plants were sprouting in the ashes, growing around the white bones. Soon the place would be hard to find.

There were several human skulls. One was much smaller than the others.

Her hands were busy. She had begun with a broad, weathered plank and an assortment of carving tools. The thing was almost finished now, but she was only peripherally aware of it. Her hands worked, unguided. Her mind was far away. Titanides did not sleep except as infants, but they did go into a state of lessened awareness for periods of two or three revs. It was a dreamtime, a time when the mind could rove far and wide, into the past, into places it did not really want to go.

She relived her time with Chris. She tasted again the bitterness of him, the alien craving so deep in his soul that would deny her sharing her own body with those others she loved, the awful, extended goodbye-time when he had turned from wonderful-crazy to worms-in-the-head-crazy, the slow regaining of trust and the knowledge that it would probably never be the way it was. She touched once more her deep love for him, unchanged and unchangeable.

She thought of Bellinzona. The humans were sterilizing their home planet. To do this, they used weapons beyond her comprehension, weapons that could turn Hyperion into glowing glass. She had a thought she would not have entertained while awake. If she had one of those weapons, she would use it to sterilize Bellinzona. Many worthy people would die and that would be a shameful thing. But surely the good of such a deed would outweigh the evil. The wheel was her home. These visitors were a cancer eating out the heart of the wheel. There were good humans, certainly. But it seemed that if you got enough together in one place, an evil thing grew.

She thought it over again, and knew the people on Earth must be thinking the same thought. "This is not a good thing I do, but the good outweighs the evil. It is regrettable that innocents are killed... "

Valiha reluctantly gave up all thought of sterilizing Bellinzona. She would have to continue as she and other Titanides had been doing for many kilorevs now, battling the cancer cell by cell.

With that thought, Valiha passed from dream-time into real time, and noticed she had finished her project. She held it up to the light and surveyed it critically.

It was not the first time she had made one of these things. She didn't have a name for them. Titanides had never buried their dead. They simply threw them into the river Ophion and let the waters take them. They raised no memorials.

Titanides had no god but Gaea. They did not love her, but believing in her was not an article of faith. Gaea was as real as syphilis.

Titanides did not expect an afterlife. Gaea had told them there was no such thing, and they had no reason to doubt her. So they had no rituals for it.

But Valiha knew it was different for humans. She had watched the burial rites in Bellinzona. Always pragmatic, she was not prepared to say the rites were worthless. And she had thirteen bodies, all unidentified, with no way of telling what any of them might have believed out of the Babel of Earthly cults. What was a conscientious being to do?

Her response was the carving. Each one had been different, a sort of free-association of Valiha's incomplete understanding of human totems. This one had a cross on it, and a crown of thorns. There was a hammer and sickle, a crescent moon, a star of David, and a mandala. There was also an image of Mick ey Mouse, a television screen displaying the CBS eye, a swastika, a human hand, a pyramid, a bell, and the word SONY. Across the top was the most mystic symbol of all, which had been written on Ringmaster: the NASA logo.

It seemed good to her. The television eye was centered over the pyramid. It reminded her of another symbol that might go well: the letter S with two vertical slashes through it.

She shrugged, stood, and placed the sharpened end of the plaque on the ground. With her left fore-hoof she hammered it until it was firmly planted. She kicked the skulls until they were grouped around the plaque, then glanced at the sky. That didn't work, Gaea was up there, and Gaea was not worth speaking to. So she looked around her at the world she loved.

"Whoever or whatever you may be," she sang, "you might want to take these departed human souls to your breast. I don't know anything about them except one was very young. The others were, for a time, zombies in the service of Luther, an evil thing, no longer human. No matter what they may have done in life, they must have started out innocent, as do we all, so don't be too hard on them. It was your fault for making them human, which was a dirty trick. If you are out there somewhere, you ought to be ashamed of yourself."

She had not expected an answer, and she didn't get one.

Valiha knelt again and picked up her woodworking tools, placing them in her pouch. She kicked at the wood shavings and took one last look around the peaceful scene. She wondered once more why she did it.

She was about to head back to the Junction, but saw Rocky coming up the path toward her, so she waited for him. Thinking back, she realized she had come to a decision about his proposal during her dream-time.

He joined her and looked at her handywork without saying anything. He stood in solemn silence for a time, as he had seen humans do at graveyards, then faced Valiha.