“Strip,” she said.

“It seems so mechanical this way. Cold. Isn’t sex supposed to be preceded by courtship, soft lights, whispering, music, poetry?”

“Then youdo know a little about it.”

“A little. I’ve read their books. I know the rituals. The peripherals.”

“We can try the peripherals. Here: I’ve turned down the lights. Take a floater, Thor. No, not a scrambler — not the first time. A floater. Fine. Here’s a little music, now. Undress.”

“You won’t tell anybody about this?”

“How silly you are! Who would I tell?” Manuel? Darling, I’ll tell him, darling, I’ve been unfaithful to you with Thor Watchman!” She laughed giddily. “It’ll be our secret. Call it a humanizing lesson. Humans have sex, and you want to be more human, don’t you? I’ll discover sex to you.” She smiled archly. She tugged at his clothes.

Curiosity seized him. He felt the floater going to work in his brain, lifting him toward euphoria. Lilith was right: the sexlessness of alphas was a paradox among people who claimed so intensely to be fully human. Or was sexlessness as general among alphas as he thought? Perhaps, busy with the tasks set for him by Krug, he had simply neglected to let his emotions develop? He thought of Siegfried Fileclerk, weeping in the snow beside Cassandra Nucleus, and wondered.

His clothes dropped away. Lilith drew him into her arms.

She rubbed her body slowly against his. He felt her thighs on his thighs, the cool taut drum of her belly touching his, the hard nodes of her nipples brushing his chest. He searched himself for some trace of response. He was uncertain about what he found, although he could not deny that he enjoyed the tactile sensations of their contact. Her eyes were closed. Her lips were parted. They sought his. Her tongue slid a short distance between his teeth. He ran the palms of his hands down her back, and on a sudden impulse dug the tips of his fingers into the globes of her buttocks. Lilith stiffened and pushed herself more intensely against him, grinding now instead of rubbing. They remained that way for some minutes. Then she relaxed and eased away from him.

“Well?” she asked. “Anything?”

“I liked it,” he said tentatively.

“Did it excite you, though?”

“I think so.”

“It doesn’t look that way.”

“How can you tell?”

“It would show,” she said, grinning at him.

He felt impossibly absurd and awkward; he felt cut off from his own identity, unable to return to or even to see the Thor Watchman he knew and understood. From the first, almost from the time of leaving the Vat, he had regarded himself as older, wiser, more competent, more confident, than his fellow alphas: a man who comprehended the world and his place in it. But now? Lilith had reduced him in half an hour to something clumsy, naive, foolish … and impotent.

She put her hand to his loins. “Since your organ hasn’t become rigid,” she said, “obviously it wasn’t very exciting for you when I—” She paused. “Oh. Yes. Now do you see?”

“It happened when you touched me.”

“That isn’t awfully surprising. So you like it, then? Yes. Yes.” Her fingers moved cunningly. Watchman had to admit that he found the sensation interesting, and that sudden startling awakening of his maleness in her hands was a remarkable effect. But yet he remained outside himself, a detached and remote observer, no more involved than if he were attending a lecture on the mating habits of Centaurine proteoids.

She was close against him, again. Her body moved, sliding from side to side, writhing a little, quivering with a barely suppressed tension. He clasped her in his arms. He ran his hands over her skin once more.

She drew him to the floor.

He lay atop her, bracing himself with knees and elbows so that his full weight would not descend on her. Her legs surrounded him; her thighs clamped tight against his hips; her hand slipped between their bodies, seized him, guided him into her. She began to thrust her pelvis up and down. He caught the rhythm of it shortly, and matched her thrusts with thrusts of his own.

So this is sex, he thought.

He wondered how a woman felt about having something long and hard pushed into her body like that. Evidently they enjoyed it; Lilith was gasping and trembling in what seemed like delight. But it struck him as an odd thing to covet. And was pushing yourself into a woman all that thrilling? Was this what the poetry was about, was this what men had fought duels over and renounced kingdoms for?

After awhile he said, “How will we know when it’s over?”

Her eyes opened. He was unable to tell whether there was fury or laughter in them. “You’ll know,” she said. “Just keep moving!”

He kept moving.

The motions of her hips grew more violent. Her face became twisted, distorted, almost ugly; some sort of interior storm had broken and was raging within her. Muscles throbbed randomly throughout her body. At the place where he was joined to her, he could feel her grasping him with playful inner spasms.

Abruptly he felt a spasm of his own, and ceased to catalog the effects their union had produced in her. He closed his eyes. He fought for breath. His heart raced frantically; his skin blazed. He tightened his grip on her and pressed his face into the hollow between her cheek and her shoulder. A series of jolting impacts rocked him.

She was right: it was easy to tell when it was over.

How fast the ecstasy drained away! He could barely remember now the powerful sensations of sixty seconds ago. He felt cheated, as though he had been promised a feast and had been given only dream-food to eat. Was that all? Like the surf trickling away after a brief surge of tide? And ashes on the beach. And ashes on the beach. It is nothing at all, Thor Watchman thought. It is a fraud.

He rolled free of her.

She lay with her head lolling back, her eyes closed, her mouth slack; she was sweat-dappled and wan-looking. It seemed to him that he had never seen this woman before. A moment after he had left her, her eyes opened. She propped herself up on one elbow and smiled at him, almost shyly, perhaps.

“Hello,” she said.

“Hello.” He looked away.

“How do you feel?”

Watchman shrugged. He searched for the right words and could not find them. Defeated, he said, “Tired, mostly. Hollow. Is that right? I feel — hollow.”

“Normal. After coitus every animal is sad. Old Latin proverb. You’re an animal, Thor. Don’t forget it.”

“A weary animal.” Ashes on the cold beach. The tide very low. “Did you enjoy it, Lilith?”

“Couldn’t you see? No, I suppose you didn’t. I enjoyed. Very much.”

He put his hand lightly on her thigh. “I’m glad. But I’m still baffled.”

“By what?”

“The whole thing. The pattern, the constellation of events. Pushing. Pulling. Sweating. Groaning. The tickle in the groin, and then it’s over. I—”

“No,” she said. “Don’t intellectualize. Don’t analyze. You must have been expecting more than is really there. It’s onlyfun , Thor. It’s what people do to be happy together. That’s all. That’s all. It’s not a cosmic experience.”

“I’m sorry. I’m just a dumb android who doesn’t—”

“Don’t. You’re a person, Thor.”

He realized he was hurting her by his refusal to have been overwhelmed by their coupling. He was hurting himself. Slowly he got to his feet. His mood was wintry; he felt like an empty vessel lying in the snow. He had known a flash of joy, he thought, right at the moment of discharge; but was that instant of lightning worth anything if this dreary gloom always came afterward?

She had meant well. She had wanted to make him more human.

He lifted her, pulled her against him for a moment, kissed her glancingly on the cheek, cupped one of her breasts in his hand. He said, “We’ll do this again some time, all right?”

“Whenever you say.”

“It was very strange for me, the first time. It’ll get better. I know it will.”