Aaron turned and leered at the rest of them. " ‘Scuse us," he said. His great, corded arms lined around her waist. He exhaled and lifted her onto his shoulders so that her belly button was inches from his nose.

Jessica giggled "Don't you dare bite-" and then uttered a shocked and somewhat dreamy "Oh!!?" as he began walking backward to his hut.

With a brief and bleary cheer, the rest of them returned to their party.

There was something in Justin that felt... out of place. He walked down to the water's edge and stood alone to watch the moonglade dancing in the surf. Aaron was brilliant, handsome, athletic. And wrong for Jessica. He was sure of that, utterly certain, but for no reason he knew. It was just wrong-somehow. Justin didn't much appreciate the thoughts and feelings nipping around the edges of his mind.

Katya came up behind him and slipped her arms around his waist.

"What're you thinking?"

North of them, two days across a warm gray sea, was the continent. He hoped it was far enough away. He wanted to be with Jessica, but if she and Aaron were going to be together... maybe it wouldn't be such a good idea for him to be there.

He could hardly tell Katya-

"What if," she said, her sharp little teeth gnawing at his ear, "I took you back to my hut, and made violent love to you?"

"I'd consider that a right friendly thing to do," he said. A file flashed through his mind, all of Katya's preferences and pungencies, all of the ways she moved and whispered, her small guidances and encouragements and the many happy little bits of erotic filigree she superimposed upon a very basic act.

He hadn't really made up his mind, but she'd gone a good distance toward making it up for him. She took his hand and led it along a row of wooden huts built back from the waterline. They were lashed together with rope and stilted against the seasonal rising of the tides.

The wood was a bamboo-like shoot transplanted from south of Isenstine a decade before. The south had less direct access to water-and therefore grendels hadn't razed it so thoroughly. The bamboo-like shoots were delicious for their first two years, and then hardened into something light and strong, almost ideal for building of houses or boats. The second-to-last house in the row was Katya's. She held the door open and beckoned him in.

Social interactions were an ongoing experiment on Avalon. Pregnancy was no issue: all children were welcome. Those who chose not to become pregnant could do so with near hundred-percent certainty, and if they missed, the fetuses could be removed to an artificial womb more safely and painlessly than any therapeutic abortion in the twentieth century. So Cassandra had told them; but it had never been tested. The social pressure to have children was high, and so far every girl who became pregnant had become a mother.

There was no venereal disease. Those life-forms had been left behind on Earth. The threats that had shaped human sexual mores for much longer than human history were missing on Avalon. In a very real sense, all Avalon was one family.

There in the shadowed confines of Katya's shack, she stripped off her clothes and stood, naked, challenging Justin with the cant of her hips. Her black hair fell softly to the tips of her shoulders. Her body was full, and ripe, and lovely.

Moonlight slanted in through the blinds, throwing bars across her as she walked to him. With many little kisses and whispered endearments, she began the process of seduction.

Jessica...

The thought flitted across his mind, then was gone. A sudden fierceness took him. He gathered her up in one arm and flung her back upon her bed, a pile of undulating artificial fur that purred as their weight sank upon it.

Distantly came the roar of the surf. Wave crests scattered the light of a single full moon, and bathed their bodies in pale light as they made love... or something like love... on that bed.

And as he threw his head back, panting as Katya's fingers kneaded his flesh, he stared mindlessly at the window. The moon was adrift. That was Nimue, the smaller, closer moon. You could tell time by Merlin; it crossed the sky every six days. Nimue moved too fast for telling time.

The moon looked back at him and it wasn't quite round. It wasn't the moon that Justin's distant ancestors bayed at, beating drums and singing songs, holding their newborn infants high to bathe in its light, for a thousand generations before the birth of civilization. Although it was the only sky he had ever seen...

It was alien to him.

There is a rhythm between human beings, as well. As steady and strong as a heartbeat is the rhythm that men and women find with one another.

And in a social service so willingly and pleasurably provided, in this brief mingling of flesh and fluids, this joining of warm moist membranes in the service of health and convenience...

There is a moment, near the peak of it all, when logic falls away, and breath grows sharp, when the eyes meet, and you can see through each other, through all the little social barriers...

Down, down to the place where a bit of hindbrain still thinks that this is about something.

Isn't this about making babies, it whispers.

Isn't this the continuation of life? And aren't children vulnerable things, helpless before the cold and the predators? And isn't this act really about the rest of your life? And your children's lives? And your children's children's... ?

Isn't there a part, a place, a tiny, lone voice somewhere deep inside that asks if this couldn't, shouldn't, can't mean something more? That looks into the eyes of each and every partner, and asks, in its own way .

. .

Are you the one?

"Carolyn was taking care of me, not Mom. Mom wouldn't let anyone touch her. I saw her stop crying, and then she toppled out of the chair. A bunch of the grown-ups picked her up and ran her into the hospital, and I don't know what happened after that." Katya stirred in his arms. "I wasn't alone after that. They moved me right into Dad's place."

"I spent a lot of time there too."

"I remember."

"You were hell's wrath with a grendel gun." She'd beaten him in the exercises, Justin remembered. "Did Carlos start you early?"

She laughed. "Yeah."

"That outhouse we all built when we were, what, twelve?"

"About then. Geometry lessons," Katya said.

"Don't remember what we had in school that year, but that's how I learned carpentry. Katya, I must be slow of thought. Why did anyone want a classic outhouse?"

"Hendrick took a skeeter and lofted it to a peak in the mountains. Coffee pickers use it. There's not another outhouse in the universe with a view like that."

"What did it feel like? I grew up with two mothers-"

"I had a great many," Katya murmured. "Not just Dad's guests. Mary Ann and Sylvia, Carolyn, Rachael Moskowitz. Dad would skeeter off to find special rock, wood, crystals, bones; or he didn't want me underneath when he was welding. It must have been like that for the Bottle Babies, don't you think?"

"You're not like them."

"No." Katya shuddered. Why did she do that? But her drowsy voice trailed off.

He turned onto his side. She snuggled up behind him, his buttocks tucked against the furred thatch of her groin, her hand reaching around to cup the recent instrument of her pleasure.

They had never spoken of a future together.

The moon was looking Justin in the face. Not Man's moon. He listened to the surf. His surf, but not his ancestors'. Shorter, quicker waves striking with more force in the stronger gravity...

But moon and surf belonged to his children, and his children's children, for generations to come.

The act of love so recently performed there, in that bed, carried its own rhythm, born in the eternal search for the Now. The search to end the lonely "I." The endless search, conducted eternally, by every human being, throughout each isolated lifetime.