They returned to the car.

Lilith!

Manuel saw young androids taking their first shambling steps, and tumbling, and laughing, and getting to their feet and doing it better the second time. He visited a classroom where the subject being taught was bowel control. He watched slumbering betas undergoing personality imprints: a soul was being etched into each unformed mind. He donned a helmet and listened to a language tape. The education of an android, he was told, lasted one year for a gamma, two for a beta, four for an alpha. The maximum, then, was six years from conception to full adulthood. He had never fully appreciated the swiftness of it all before. Somehow the new knowledge made androids seem infinitely less human to him. Suave, authoritative, commanding Thor Watchman was something like nine or ten years old, Manuel realized. And the lovely Lilith Meson was — what? Seven? Eight?

Manuel felt a sudden powerful urge to escape from this place.

“We have a group of betas just about to leave the factory,” said Bompensiero. “They are undergoing their final checkout today, with tests in linguistic precision, coordination, motor response, metabolic adjustment, and several other aspects. Perhaps you would care to inspect them yourself and personally—”

“No,” Manuel said. “It’s been fascinating. But I’ve taken up too much of your time already, and I have an appointment elsewhere, so I really must—”

Bompensiero did not look grieved to be rid of him. “As you wish,” he said obligingly. “But of course, we remain at your service whenever you choose to visit us again, and—”

“Where is the transmat cubicle, please?”

2241, Stockholm. Jumping westward to Europe, Manuel lost the rest of the day. Dark, icy evening had descended here; the stars were sharp, and a sleety wind ruffled the waters of Malдren. To foil any possibility of being traced he had jumped to the public transmat cubicle in the lobby of the wondrous old Grand Hotel. Now, shivering, he walked briskly through the autumnal gloom to another cubicle outside the gray bulk of the Royal Opera, put his thumb to the chargeplate, and bought a jump to Stockholm’s Baltic side, emerging in the mellow, venerable residential district of Цstermalm. This was the android quarter now. He hurried down Birger Jarlsgaten to the once-splendid nineteenth-century apartment building where Lilith lived. Pausing outside, he looked about carefully, saw that the streets were empty, and darted into the building. A robot in the lobby scanned him and asked his purpose in a flat, froglike voice. “Visiting Lilith Meson, alpha,” Manuel said. The robot raised no objection. Manuel had his choice of getting to her flat by liftshaft or by stairs. He took the stairs. Musty smells pursued him and shadows danced alongside him all the way to the fifth floor.

Lilith greeted him in a sumptuous, clinging, floor-length high-spectrum gown. Since it was nothing more than a monomolecular film, it left no contour of her body concealed. She drifted forward, arms outstretched, lips parted, breasts heaving, whispering his name. He reached for her.

He saw her as a speck drifting in a vat.

He saw her as a mass of replicating nucleotides.

He saw her naked and wet and vacant-eyed, shambling out of her nursery chamber.

He saw her as thing, manufactured by men.

Thing. Thing. Thing. Thing. Thing. Thing. Thing.

Lilith.

He had known her for five months. They had been lovers for three. Thor Watchman had introduced them. She was on the Krug staff.

Her body pressed close to his. He brought his hand up and cupped one of her breasts. It felt warm and real and firm through the monomolecular gown, as he drew his thumb across the tip of her nipple it hardened and rose in excitement. Real. Real.

Thing.

He kissed her. His tongue slipped between her lips. He tasted the taste of chemicals. Adenine, guanine, cytosine, uracil. He smelled the smell of the vats. Thing. Thing. Beautiful thing. Thing in woman’s shape. Well named, Lilith. Thing.

She drew away from him and said, “You went to the factory?”

“Yes.”

“And you learned more about androids than you wanted to know.”

“No, Lilith.”

“You see me with different eyes now. You can’t help remembering what I really am.”

“That is absolutely not true,” Manuel said. “I love you, Lilith. What you are is no news to me. And makes no difference at all. I love you. I love you.”

“Would you like a drink?” she asked. “A weed? A floater? You’re all worked up.”

“Nothing,” he said. “It’s been a long day. I haven’t even had lunch yet and I think I’ve been going for forty hours. Let’s just relax, Lilith. No weeds. No floater.” He unsnapped his clothing, and she helped him out of it. Then she pirouetted before a doppler; there was a brief rising burst of sound and her gown disappeared. Her skin was light red, except for the dark brown of her nipples. Her breasts were full, her waist was narrow, her hips flared with the impossible promise of fertility. Her beauty was inhumanly flawless. Manuel fought the dryness in his throat.

She said sadly, “I could feel the change in you the moment you touched me. Your touch was different. There was — fear? — in it. Disgust?”

“No.”

“Until tonight I was something exotic to you, but human, like a Bushman would be, an Eskimo. You didn’t keep me in a separate category outside the human race. Now you tell yourself that you’ve fallen in love with a mess of chemicals. You think you may be doing something sick by having an affair with me.”

“Lilith, I beg you to stop it. This is all in your mind!”

“Is it?”

“I came here. I kissed you. I told you I loved you. I’m waiting to go to bed with you. Maybe you’re projecting some guilts of your own on me when you say—”

“Manuel, what would you have said a year ago about a man who admitted he’d been to bed with an android?”

“Plenty of men I know have been—”

“What would you say about him? What kind of words would you use? What would you think of him?”

“I’ve never considered such things. They simply haven’t concerned me, ever.”

“You’re evading. Remember, we promised that we wouldn’t play any of the little lie-games people play. Yes? You can’t deny that at most social levels, sex between humans and androids is regarded as a perversion. Maybe the only perversion that’s left in the world. Am I right? Will you answer me?”

“All right.” His eyes met hers. He had never known a woman with eyes that color. Slowly he said, “Most men regard it as, well, cheap, foul, to sleep with androids. I’ve heard it compared to masturbation. To doing it with a rubber doll. When I heard such remarks, I thought they were ugly, stupid expressions of anti-android prejudice, and I obviously didn’t have such attitudes myself, or I never could have fallen in love with you.” Something in his mind sang mockingly,Remember the vats! Remember the vats! His gaze wavered and moved off center; he stared intently at her cheek-bone. Grimly he said, “Before the whole universe I swear, Lilith, that I never felt there was anything shameful or dirty about loving an android, and I insist that despite what you’ve claimed to detect in me since my visit to the factory, I don’t have any such feelings even now. And to prove it—”

He gathered her to him. His hand swept down her satiny skin from her breasts to her belly to her loins. Her thighs parted, and he clasped his fingers over the mount of Venus, as fleeceless as an infant’s, and suddenly he trembled at the alien texture he felt there, and found himself unmanned by it, though it had never troubled him before. So smooth. So terribly smooth. He looked down at her, at her bareness. Bare, yes, but not because she had been shaven. She was like a child there. Like — like an android. He saw vats again. He saw moist crimson alphas whose faces were without expression. He told himself sternly that to love and android was no sin. He began to caress her, and she responded, as a woman would respond, with lubrication, with little ragged bursts of breath, with a tightening of her thighs against his hand. He kissed her breasts and clutched her to him. It seemed then that the blazing image of his father hovered like a pillar of fire in the air before him. Old devil, old artificer! How clever to design such a product! A product. It walks. It talks. It seduces. It gasps in passion. It grows tumescent in the labia minora, this product. And what am I? A product too, hey? A hodgepodge of chemicals stamped out from much the same sort of blueprint-mutatis mutandis, of course. Adenine. Guanine. Cytosine. Uracil. Born in a vat, hatched in a womb — where’s the difference? We are one flesh. We are different races, but we are one flesh.