“I don’t know,” he said, a little belatedly. “It’s an optical illusion. I can’t explain it.”

“You don’t know!” There was nothing mocking in her laughter, nothing contrived in her surprise. He was more than a hundred years older than she was; he was supposed to know everything that was known, to understand everything that could be understood. In her innocence, she expected nothing less of him than infinite wisdom and perfect competence. Men of his age were almost rare enough nowadays to be the stuff of legend.

He bowed his head as if in shame, then took a penitent sip from the wineglass as she looked up into his eyes. She was a full twenty centimeters shorter than he. Either height was becoming unfashionable again or she was exercising a kind of caution rare in the young, born of the awareness that it was far easier to add height than to shed it if and when one decided that it was time for a change.

“I gave up trying to hold all the world’s wisdom in my head a long time ago,” he told her. “When all the answers are at arm’s length, you don’t need to keep them any closer.” It was a lie, and she knew it. She had grown up with the omniscient Net, and she knew that its everpresence made ignorance more dangerous, not less—but she didn’t contradict him. She only smiled.

Silas couldn’t decipher her smile. There was more than amusement in it, but he couldn’t read the remainder. He was glad of that small margin of mystery; in almost every other respect, he could read her far better than she read him. To her, he must be a paradox wrapped in an enigma—and that was the reason she was here.

Women of Cathy’s age, still on the threshold of the society of the finished, were only a little less numerous than men of his antiquity, but that did not make the two of them equal in their exoticism. Silas knew well enough what to expect of Cathy—he had always had women of her kind around him, even in the worst of the plague years—but men of his age were new in the world, and they would continue to establish new precedents until the last of his generation finally passed away. No one knew how long that might take; PicoCon’s new rejuve technologies were almost entirely cosmetic, but the next generation would surely reach more deeply into a man’s essential being.

“Perhaps I did know the answer, once,” he told her, not knowing or caring whether it might be true. “Fortunately, a man’s memory gets better and better with age, becoming utterly ruthless in discarding the trivia while taking care to preserve only that which is truly precious.” Pompous old fool! he thought, even as the final phrase slid from his tongue—but he knew that Cathy probably wouldn’t mind, and wouldn’t complain even if she did. To her, this encounter must seem untrivial—perhaps even truly precious, but certainly an experience to be savored and remembered. He was the oldest man she had ever known; it was entirely possible that she would never have intimate knowledge of anyone born before him. It was different for Silas, even though such moments as this still felt fresh and hopeful and intriguing. He had done it all a thousand times before, and no matter how light and lively and curious the stream of his consciousness remained while the affair was in progress, it would only be precious while it lasted.

Silas wondered whether Cathy would be disappointed if she knew how he felt. Perhaps she wantedto find him utterly sober, weighed down by ennui—and thus, perhaps, even more worthy of her awe and respect than he truly was.

He placed his hand on her shoulder and caressed the contour of her collarbone. Her skin, freshly washed, felt inexpressibly luxurious, and the sensation which stirred him was as sharp—perhaps even as innocent—as it would have been had he never felt its like before.

A practiced mind was, indeed, exceedingly adept at forgetting; it had wisdom enough not merely to forget the trivial and the insignificant, but also that which was infinitely precious in rediscovery.

“It must be strange,” she said, insinuating her slender and naked arm around his waist, “to look out on the sea and the sky with eyes that know them so well. There’s so much in the world that’s unfamiliar to me I can’t begin to imagine what it would be like to recognizeeverything, to be completely at home.” She was teasing him, requiring that he feed her awe and consolidate her achievement in allowing herself to be seduced.

“That’s not what it’s like,” he said dutifully. “If the world stayed the same, it might be more homely; but one of the follies of authentic youth is the inability to grasp how quickly, and how much, everything changes—even the sea and the sky. The line left behind by the tide changes with the flotsam; even the clouds sailing serenely across the sky change with the climate and the composition of the air. The world I knew when I was young is long gone, and depollution will never bring it back. I’ve lived through half a hundred worlds, each one as alarming and as alien as the last. I don’t doubt that a dozen more lie in ambush, waiting to astonish me if I stay the course for a few further decades.”

He felt a slight tremor pass through her and wondered whether it was occasioned by a sudden gust of cool wind or by the thrust of her eager imagination. She had known no other world than the one into which recently acquired maturity had delivered her, but she must have had images in her mind of the various phases of the Crisis. It was all caught in the Net, if only as an infinite jumble of glimpses. Today’s world was still haunted by the one which had gone madly to its destruction—the one which Silas Arnett had helped to save.

She smiled at him again, as innocently as a newly hatched sphinx.

It’s not my wisdom which makes me attractive to her, Silas thought. She sees me as something primitive, perhaps feral. I was born of woman, and there was a full measure of effort and pain in my delivery. I grew to the age she is now without the least ability to control my own pain, under the ever present threat of injury, disease, and death. There’s something of the animal about me still.

He knew that he was melodramatizing for the sake of a little extra excitement, but it was true nevertheless. When Silas had been in his teens there had been more than ten billion people in the world, all naturally born, all naked to the slings and arrows of outrage and misfortune. Avid forces of destruction had claimed all but a handful, and his own survival had to be reckoned a virtual miracle. When Catherine Praill came to celebrate her hundred-and-twentieth birthday, by contrast, nine out of ten of her contemporaries would still be alive. Her survival to that age was virtually assured, provided that she did not elect to waste herself in submission to extravagant and extraordinary risks.

Silas looked up briefly, but the bird man was out of sight now, eclipsed by the green rim of the cliff. He imagined Catherine costumed with brightly colored wings, soaring gloriously across the face of the sinking sun—but he preferred her as she was now, soft and fresh and unclothed.

“Let’s go inside,” he said, meaning Let’s make love while the sunlight lasts, while we can revel in the fleeting changes of the colored radiance.

“Might as well,” she said, meaning Yes, let’s do exactly that.

Sexual intercourse never left Arnett deflated or disappointed. It never had, so far as he could remember. It might have done, sometimes, when he was authentically young, but in the fullness of his maturity lovemaking always left him with a glow of profound satisfaction and easeful accomplishment. He knew that this seeming triumph probably had as much to do with the gradual adjustment of his expectations as with the honing of his skills but he did not feel in the least diminished by that hint of cynicism. He believed with all sincerity that he knew the true value of everything he had—and his expert memory had scrupulously erased most of the prices he had been forced to pay by way of its acquisition.