“They’re beautiful,” Gabriel said. “I don’t think I’ve seen their like before.” “They’re new,” she said, still smiling. “An Oscar Wilde original.” Gabriel could not help falling prey to the slightest hint of a frown, but he turned his head so that his visitor would not see it, and the phrase he murmured—“That posturing ape!”—was pronounced too softly for her merely human ears to discern.

Lest she ask him what he had said, and why, he was quick to add: “I have a vase somewhere. Should I put them in water, or do they require something more nourishing?” “Oh no,” she said. “They’re self-sufficient, provided that the atmosphere isn’t too dry. You can mount them on the wall if you don’t want them cluttering up a table.” Her gaze traveled around the walls as she spoke, offering silent comment on the fact that the apartment was unfashionably bare of vegetative decoration.

“That’s all right,” Gabriel replied, a little more stiffly than he would have liked. He handed them back to her while he went to search for the vase.

When they had first met, in the park, the woman had been delighted to find out who he was and what had brought him to the city. She had been fascinated to hear him talk about himself, and he had talked more freely to her than he had to anyone since the ninth and last of his bond marriages had come to the inevitable parting of the ways.

She had told him almost nothing about herself, but that was probably because she had little or nothing to tell. Given the presumable difference in their ages, it was only natural that she should be content to listen and learn. When Gabriel had told her that he had been twice rejuvenated, and how long ago his second rejuvenation had been, her eyes had grown wide.

“You must be one of the oldest men in the world,” she had said. “But you seem much better preserved than most others of your generation.” “I suppose so,” he had replied. “Many people—men and women alike—seem to come apart quite rapidly once the effects of their second full rejuve wear off, but I’ve been lucky, at least superficially. Internally, the balance of my organic and inorganic IT is way past critical. If I were to attempt another rejuve I’d very probably end up a vegetable, but if I can stay reasonably fit I can probably keep on getting older for another thirty years, and keep some faint echo of my fading looks until the day I die.” “You look wonderful,” she had assured him. “So wonderfully wise.” When he came back into the reception room the woman was standing at the window, exactly where he had been standing a few moments before. He hoped that she was admiring his handiwork—and that her admiration was not tainted by the slightest sadness. “Let me take the vase,” she said.

Gabriel surrendered his find with a vague gesture of apology for its mere adequacy. He had never believed the die-hard psychobiologists who had insisted that the aesthetic judgments which underlay sexual attractiveness were genetically hardwired so that the idea of beauty and the appearance of youth were inextricably tied together. He had scored too many notable successes in pick-up spots far less promising than Central Park to accept the apologetic argument that the attraction which the very young sometimes manifested for the very old was merely a matter of the momentary fascination of the extraordinary.

“It’s a fine view,” he said, nodding toward the softening skyline.

“It certainly is,” she replied. “The outline of the city is changing day by day, and you’re the man responsible.” “Only one of many,” he said, deeply regretting the duty of false modesty and hoping that she might contradict him.

“Oh no,” she said, right on cue. “You’re the one who’s actually doing it. You’re the deconstructor, the De-civilizer.” He was determined not to let the final noun distract from the effect of the compliment.

“Would you like a drink?” he asked.

“Oh no,” she said again. “I prefer making love without the aid of chemical stimulants—don’t you?” He did, but he knew that she would have assumed as much because of the way he dressed. He knew too that she would never have used a phrase like “making love” when talking to someone of her own generation. For a fleeting moment, he wondered whether she might be making a little too much effort, but then he smiled, realizing that she was only trying to make a good impression. Her eyes were wonderful, and the way she brushed her flowing tresses aside so that she could see him more clearly was nothing short of divine. No VE siren could ever replace the quotidian reality of her presence and the naive insouciance of her gesture. She placed the vase on the table in front of the sofa, carefully spreading the blooms. There had been a card hidden among them, and she plucked it out, standing it on its edge against the vase. There was something written on the card, but Gabriel made no attempt to read it. There would be time for that later.

“A long time ago,” Gabriel said, making the most of the phrase, “I wrote a thesis for my doctorate on the twenty-first-century Greenhouse Crisis. The rising sea levels forced New York’s citizens to fight a fantastic battle to preserve it from the flood, raising the entire island and remodeling the buildings so that the old streets became flood tunnels. In those days, New York was a symbol of United America’s defiance of the forces of nature: an embodiment of the determination of the Hundred States to survive the crisis and remake the world. Sometimes I can’t help thinking that it’s slightly disrespectful to the efforts of those twenty-first-century heroes to renounce the city’s heritage—and whatever motivates my paymasters, that’s not the spirit in which I’m working.

I’m trying to do as they did, to save the city and everything it has symbolized.” Silently he cursed himself for excessive pomposity, but the young woman seemed to mop it up.

“Yes,” she said. “I see. I understand what you’re saying—what you’re doing.” Gabriel felt a sudden moment of dizziness, which had nothing to do with the elevation of the thirty-ninth floor of the undeconstructed Trebizond Tower.

He realized that he could not now remember what complex chain of accidents and decisions had made him a master of demolition. He must have begun adult life as a historian, if he had indeed written the thesis he had glibly recalled, and must have continued it as a businessman enthusiastic for any opportunity.

Deconstruction was the pattern.into which his life had eventually fallen, but he no longer knew exactly how or why. It must have been the trail of profit and loss, not any special interest, which had led him into the specific line of business whose master he now was, but he had developed a passion for it nevertheless. He was an engineer, not a scientist, and he still knew next to nothing about the molecular biology of the bacterial agents which were his ultimate minions, but he loved the discretion and the artistry of their work.

Felling by artificial decay was neat as well as economical.

“Wouldn’t it be more satisfying, Gabriel,” one of his aides had recently asked him, “if you made as much money building things as you do tearing them down?” Would it? he wondered as he stared at his visitor’s beautifully guileless eyes.

He honestly didn’t know.

He rallied himself, blinking away the momentary hint of vertigo and breaking away from his companion’s gaze. On the far side of Central Park the rotting teeth were slowly and politely folding themselves away into their internal cavities. He had to remind himself that he was not at all like them; he was no ugly transient, fading into decrepitude for the last time. The presence of the lovely woman was adequate proof of that fact. She was authentically young, perhaps even a Natural, and yet she was here, ready to embrace him, to savor the thrill of being with a man who had done so much: a complete man.