"I'm not in love with you, Valiha,"

"Yes, you are. Even this part of you, the sane part, loves me with a Titanide's love: unchanging, but too large to give all of it to one person. You have told me so when you were crazy. You told me your sane self would not admit his love."

"He lied to you."

"You would not lie to me."

"But I'm here to be cured of all that!" he said, in mounting frustration.

"I know," she moaned, once more on the verge of tears. "I'm so afraid Gaea will cure you and you'll never know your love for me!"

Chris thought this conversation was as crazy as any he had ever heard. Maybe he was crazy: permanently. It was within the realm of possibility. But he did not want to see her cry, he did like her, and suddenly it did not make sense to resist her any longer. He kissed her. She responded instantly, alarming him with her strength and passion, then paused and put her mouth close to his ear. "Don't worry," she said. "I'll be gentle." He smiled.

It was not easy, but eventually he made the sling she needed to rest comfortably while her legs healed. Finding three poles long and strong enough among the stunted shrubs that passed for trees in the cavern took quite a while, but when he had them, he soon fashioned a tall tripod. There was just enough rope to make the sling and pad it with material from clothes they didn't need in the warm cave. When it was finished, Valiha carefully pulled herself up with her hands, and Chris positioned her legs through the loops. She settled down in it and heaved a sigh of contentment. Thereafter she spent most of her time with her front hooves dangling a few centimeters from the ground.

But not all her time. In the sling, it was impossible for them to make frontal love, and that activity quickly became an important part of their lives. Chris was soon wondering how he had survived so long without it, then realized that, of course, he hadn't, he had been making love with Valiha all along. Now he felt he would most probably have succumbed to despair and simply wasted away, starving in the midst of plenty. Even Gaea's milk tasted a little better, and he wondered if it was his mood and not Her Majesty's that made the difference.

Valiha was not like a human woman. It would have been pointless even to try to say if she was better or not as good; she was different. Her frontal vagina fitted him within lubricious tolerances too close to be the result of cosmic happenstance. He could almost hear Gaea chuckling. What a joke she had played on humanity, to arrange it so the first intelligent nonhumans the race encountered could play the same games humans played, and with the same equipment. Valiha was a vast, fleshy playground, from the tip of her broad nose across acres of mottled yellow skin to the softness just above the hooves of her hind legs. She was completely human-on a large scale-in the caress of her hands, the mass of her breasts, the taste of her skin and her mouth and her clitoris. And she was at the same time wildly alien in her bulging knees, in the smooth, hard muscles of her back, hips, and thighs, and in the imposing slither of her penis as it emerged moist from its sheath. When he kissed her in the hollow behind her expressive donkey ears, she smelled human.

He was at first reluctant to admit the presence of most of her body. He tried to pretend she existed from the head to the fore-crotch and ignored the sexual superabundance she contained. Valiha led him gently to experience the surprising possibilities of her other two thirds. Part of his hesitation was a lingering misconception he had fought when he found it in others and had not realized he shared: part of her body was equine, meaning she was part horse, and one does not become intimate with animals. He had to discard all that. He found it surprisingly easy. In many ways there was less equine about her than there was simian in him. Another hurdle had been stated early by Valiha herself: she was an androgyne-though gynandroid was the closer of two words never meant to cover Titanides. Chris had never been homosexual. Valiha made him see that it meant nothing when making love with her. She was all things, and it made no difference that her anterior organs were so huge. He had always known that coitus was only a small part of making love.

Titanide crutches were long, stout poles with padded crescents to fit the armpits, little different from the sort used by humans for thousands of years. Chris had no trouble making a pair.

At first Valiha walked only fifty meters before resting, then a similar distance back to the tent. Soon she felt she was able to handle more. Chris struck the tent and packed everything on his back. It was a large burden, especially the poles of her tripod sling. He would never have attempted it but for the low gravity. Even with that advantage it was hard.

Valiha walked by rolling her shoulders, lifting first one crutch, then the other, following with her hind legs. It put an unaccustomed strain on her shoulders, her human back, and the right-angle bend of her spine. Chris had no idea what her skeleton looked like in there; he was sure only that her vertebral structure must be very different from his to enable her to turn her head around and do some of the other improbable contortions he had seen. But she was enough like him to get backaches. The end of each day's journey found her grimacing in pain. The muscles in the bend of her back were like stiff cables. Massage was not enough, though Chris tried. In the end he had to pound her with his fists to give her any relief, as though he were tenderizing meat.

They toughened up, though both knew it would never get easy. For a while each trek was a little longer than the previous day until they reached a maximum Chris judged at about a kilometer and a half. Each day they passed many of the marks made by Robin in her earlier traverse. There was no way to tell how old they were and no use discussing what they both were thinking. By any accounting she should have been back with help long ago.

They struggled on, and each day the question grew larger in their minds.

Where was Robin?

It was no longer a matter of admitting Chris had been right. Robin knew that, had known it for quite a long time. She had had no business going off on her own in a place like this.

She tried once again to move her arm. This time she got some results: one finger twitched slightly, and she felt a rough texture beneath it. She swallowed carefully. One of her seemingly endless fears now was drowning in her own saliva. It could happen. Even worse things could happen. She might find, when she got her body back, that it was broken. In that case she would lie here in the dark forever, and while the bulk of that time would pass in peaceful nirvana, the first few weeks promised to be ugly.

How odd to realize that less than a year ago she had been nineteen, and fearless. It did not seem like such a great age, yet it was ancient for someone who could stumble tomorrow and fall a thousand meters to her death.

There was no reason death had to wait until tomorrow. While she lay helpless, the Night Bird could creep up on her and... do whatever it did to helpless witches.

Her breath caught in her throat, and she once more strained to turn her head just the few centimeters that would enable her to see if, as she suspected, the Night Bird was actually crouching on the ledge a few meters above her head. Once again she failed to see it, but a drop of sweat ran from her brow to sting her eye.

You were supposed to whistle, she remembered. Then: that's ridiculous. You're nineteen years old, maybe twenty already. You haven't been afraid of the Night Bird since you were six. Nevertheless, if she could have puckered, she would have warbled like a canary.