(This was more like it, some small, remindful voice inside him said. This is more like the way it's suppose to be; with this, you can leave all that other stuff behind, the guilt and the secrecy and the lies; the ship and the chair and the other man… But he tried not listen to that voice.)

They'd met in a port bar. He'd just arrived and thought he'd make sure their alcohol was as good as people had said. It was. She was in the next dark booth, trying to get rid of a man.

You're saying nothing lasts forever, he heard the fellow whine. (Well, pretty trite, he thought.)

No, he heard her say. I'm saying with very few exceptions nothing lasts forever, and amongst those exceptions, no work or thought of man is numbered.

She went on talking after this, but he homed in on that. That was better, he thought. I liked that. She sounds interesting. Wonder what she looks like?

He stuck his head round the corner of the booth and looked in at them. The man was in tears; the woman was… well, lots of hair… very striking face; sharp and almost aggressive. Tidy body.

"Sorry," he told them. "But I just wanted to point out that "Nothing lasts forever" can be a positive statement… well, in some languages…" Having said it, it did occur to him that in this language it wasn't; they had different words for different sorts of nothing. He smiled, ducked back into his own booth, suddenly embarrassed. He stared accusatorily at the drink in front of him. Then he shrugged, and pressed the bell to attract a waiter.

Shouts from the next booth. A clatter and a little shriek. He looked round to see the man storming off through the bar, heading for the door.

The girl appeared at his elbow. She was dripping.

He looked up into her face; it was damp; she wiped it with a handkerchief.

"Thank you for your contribution," she said icily. "I was bringing things to a conclusion quite smoothly there until you stepped in."

"I'm very sorry," he said, not at all.

She took her handkerchief and wrung it out over his glass, dribbling. "Hmm," he said, "too kind." He nodded at the dark spots on her grey coat. "Your drink or his?"

"Both," she said, folding the kerchief and starting to turn away.

"Please; let me buy you a replacement."

She hesitated. The waiter arrived at the same moment. Good omen, he thought. "Ah," he said to the man. "I'll have another… whatever it is I've been drinking, and for this lady…"

She looked at his glass. "The same," she said. She sat down across the table.

"Think of it as… reparations," he said, digging the word out of the implanted vocabulary he'd been given for his visit.

She looked puzzled. ""Reparations"… that's one I'd forgotten; something to do with war, isn't it?"

"Yep," he said, smothering a belch with one hand. "Sort of like… damages?"

She shook her head. "Wonderfully obscure vocabulary, but totally bizarre grammar."

"I'm from out of town," he said breezily. This was true. He'd never been within a hundred light years of the place.

"Shias Engin," she nodded. "I write poems."

"You're a poet?" he said, delighted. "I've always been fascinated by poets. I tried writing poems, once."

"Yes," she sighed and looked wary. "I suspect everyone does, and you are…?"

"Cheradenine Zakalwe; I fight wars."

She smiled. "I thought there hadn't been a war for three hundred years; aren't you getting a little out of practice?"

"Yeah; boring, isn't it?"

She sat back in the seat, took off her coat. "From just how far out of town have you come, Mr Zakalwe?"

"Aw heck, you've guessed," he looked downcast. "Yeah; I'm an alien. Oh. Thank you." The drinks arrived; he passed one to her.

"You do look funny," she said, inspecting him.

" "Funny"?" he said indignantly.

She shrugged. "Different." She drank. "But not all that different." She leaned forward on the table. "Why do you look so similar to us? I know all the outworlders aren't humanoid, but a lot are. How come?"

"Well," he said, hand at his mouth again, "It's like this; the…" he belched."… the dustclouds and stuff in the galaxy are… its food, and its food keeps speaking back to it. That's why there are so many humanoid species; nebulae's last meals repeating on them."

She grinned. "That simple, is it?"

He shook his head. "Na; not at all. Very complicated. But," he held up one finger. "I think I know the real reason."

"Which is?"

"Alcohol in the dust clouds. Goddamn stuff is everywhere. Any lousy species ever invents the telescope and the spectroscope and starts looking in between the stars, what do they find?" He knocked the glass on the table. "Loads of stuff; but much of it alcohol." He drank from the glass. "Humanoids are the galaxy's way of trying to get rid of all that alcohol."

"It's all starting to make sense now," she agreed, nodding her head and looking serious. She looked inquisitively at him. "So, why are you here? Not come to start a war. I hope."

"No, I'm on leave; come to get away from them. That's why I chose this place."

"How long you here for?"

"Till I get bored."

She smiled at him. "And how long do you think that will take?"

"Well, he smiled back, "I don't know." He put his glass down. She drained hers. He reached out for the button to call the waiter, but her finger was already there.

"My turn," she said. "Same again?"

"No," he said. "Something quite different, this time, I feel."

When he tried to tabulate his love, list all the things about her that drew him to her, he found himself starting at the larger facts — her beauty, her attitude to life, her creativity — but as he thought over the day that had just passed, or just watched her, he found individual gestures, single words, certain steps, a single movement of her eyes or a hand starting to claim equal attention. He would give up then, and console himself with something she'd said; that you could not love what you fully understood. Love, she maintained, was a process; not a state. Held still, it withered. He wasn't too sure about all that; he seemed to have found a calm clear serenity in himself he hadn't even known was there, thanks to her.

The fact of her talent — maybe her genius — played a role, too. It added to the extent of his disbelief, this ability to be more than the thing he loved, and to present to the outside world an entirely different aspect. She was what he knew here and now, complete and rich and measureless, and yet when both of them were dead (and he found he could think about his own death again now, without fear), a world at least — many cultures, perhaps — would know her as something utterly dissimilar, a poet; a fabricator of sets of meanings that to him were just words on a page or titles that she sometimes mentioned.

One day, she said, she would write a poem about him, but not yet. He thought what she wanted was for him to tell her the story of his life, but he had already told her he could never do that. He didn't need to confess to her; there was no need. She had already unburdened him, even if he did not know quite how. Memories are interpretations, not truth, she insisted, and rational thought was just another instinctive power.

He felt the slowly healing polarisation of his mind, matching his to hers, the alignment of all his prejudices and conceits to the lodestone of the image she represented for him.

She helped him, and without knowing it. She mended him, reaching back to something so buried he'd thought it inaccessible forever, and drawing its sting. So perhaps it was also that which stunned him; the effect this one person was having on memories so terrible to him that he had long ago resigned himself to them only growing more potent with age. But she just ringed them off, cut them out, parcelled them up and threw them away, and she didn't even realise she was doing it, had no idea of the extent of her influence.