Goose bumps rise along my forearms and the back of my neck feels cold. I realize—no, see—in that instant, that Aenea’s mission, whatever it is, is doomed to failure. She and I are both going to be captured, interrogated, probably tortured, and executed. My promises to the old poet on Hyperion were so much wasted breath. Bring down the Pax, I had said. The Pax with its billions of faithful, millions of men and women in arms, thousands of warships… Bring back Old Earth, I had agreed. Well, I had visited it.

I look out the window to see the sky, but there is only the rock wall in the moonlight and the slowly cohering shadow character of the Buddha’s name, the three vertical strokes like ink on slate-colored vellum, the three horizontal strokes flowing around and together, making three white faces in the negative spaces, three faces staring at me in the dark. I had promised to protect Aenea. I vow that I will die doing that.

Shaking off the chill and the premonition, I go out onto the Meditation platform, clip to a cable, and hum thirty meters across the void to the platform below the top terrace where Aenea and I have sleeping pagodas. As I climb the last ladder to the highest level, I am thinking—perhaps I will sleep now. I made no notes on this in the diskey journal. I remember it now as I write it. Aenea’s light was out. I was pleased—she stayed up too late, worked too hard. The high work scaffolds and cliff cables were no place for an exhausted architect.

I stepped into my own shack, slid shut the shoji door, and kicked off my boots. Things were as I had left them—the outer screen wall slid back a bit, moonlight bright across my sleeping mat, the wind rattling the walls in its soft conversation with the mountains. Neither of my lanterns was lit, but I had the light from the moon and my memory of the small room in the dark. The floor was bare tatami except for my sleeping futon and a single chest near the door that held my rucksack, few food items, beer mug, the rebreathers I’d brought from the ship, and my climbing gear: there was nothing to trip over.

I hung my jacket on the hook near the door, splashed water on my face from the basin on the chest, and stripped off my shirt, socks, trousers, and underwear, stuffing them into the ditty bag in the chest. Tomorrow was laundry day.

Sighing, feeling the premonition of doom I’d felt in the meditation pavilion now fading into simple fatigue, I walked over to the sleeping mat. I have always slept naked except for when in the Home Guard and during my trip in the Consul’s ship with my two friends.

There was the slightest of movements in the darkness beyond the bright stripe of moonlight and, startled, I dropped into a fighting crouch. Nakedness makes one feel more vulnerable than usual. Then I realized—A. Bettik must have returned early. I unclenched my right fist.

“Raul?” said Aenea. She leaned forward into the moonlight. She had wrapped my sleeping blanket around the lower part of her body, but her shoulders and breasts and abdomen were bare. The Oracle touched her hair and cheekbones with soft light. I opened my mouth to speak, started to turn back toward my clothes or jacket, decided not to walk that far, and dropped on one knee to the sleeping mat, pulling up the futon’s sheet to cover myself. I was not a prude, but this was Aenea. What was she…

“Raul,” she said again, and this time there was no question in her voice. She moved closer to me on her knees. The blanket fell away from her.

“Aenea,” I said stupidly. “Aenea, I… you… I don’t… you don’t really…”

She set her finger on my lips and removed it a second later, but before I could speak she leaned closer and pressed her lips where her finger had been.

Every time I had ever touched my young friend, the contact had been electric. I have described this before and always felt foolish discussing it, but I ascribed it to her… an aura… a charge of personality. It was real, not a metaphor. But never had I felt the surge of electricity between us as in this instant.

For a second I was passive, receiving the kiss rather than sharing in it. But then the warmth and insistence of it overcame thought, overcame doubt, overcame all of my other senses in every nuance of the word, and then I was returning her kiss, putting my arms around her to pull her closer even as she slid her arms under mine and ran strong fingers up my back. More than five years ago for her, when she had kissed me farewell at the river on Old Earth, her kiss had been urgent, electric, filled with questions and messages—but still a sixteen-year-old girl’s kiss. This kiss was the warm, moist, open touch of a woman, and I responded to it in an instant.

We kissed for an eternity. I was vaguely aware of my own nudity and excitement as something I should be concerned about, embarrassed about, but it was a distant thing, secondary to the expanding warmth and urgency of the kisses that would not stop. When finally our lips came apart, feeling swollen, almost bruised, wanting to be kissed again, we kissed each other’s cheeks, eyelids, forehead, ears.

I lowered my face and kissed the hollow of her throat, feeling the pulse against my lips there and inhaling the perfumed scent of her skin.

She moved forward on her knees, arching her back slightly so that her breasts touched my cheek. I cupped one and kissed the nipple almost reverently, Aenea cupped the back of my head in her palm. I could feel her breath on me, quickening, as she bowed her face toward me.

“Wait, wait,” I said, pulling my face up and leaning back. “No, Aenea, are you… I mean… I don’t think…”

“Shhh,” she said, leaning over me again, kissing me again, pulling back so that her dark eyes seemed to fill the world. “Shhh, Raul. Yes.”

She kissed me again, leaning to her right so that we both reclined on the sleeping mat, still kissing, the rising breeze rattling the rice-paper walls, the entire platform rocking to the depth of our kiss and the motion of our bodies.

It is a problem. To tell of such things. To share the most private and sacred of moments. It feels like a violation to put such things into words. And a lie not to.

To see and feel one’s beloved naked for the first time is one of life’s pure, irreducible epiphanies. If there is a true religion in the universe, it must include that truth of contact or be forever hollow. To make love to the one true person who deserves that love is one of the few absolute rewards of being a human being, balancing all of the pain, loss, awkwardness, loneliness, idiocy, compromise, and clumsiness that go with the human condition. To make love to the right person makes up for a lot of mistakes.

I had never made love to the right person before.

I knew that even as Aenea and I first kissed and lay against each other, even before we began moving slowly, then quickly, then slowly again. I realized that I had never really made love to anyone before—that the young-soldier-on-leave sex with friendly women or the bargeman-and-bargewoman-when-the-opportunity-why-not? sex that I had thought had explored and discovered everything to do with the subject was not even the beginning.

This was the beginning. I remember Aenea rising above me at one point, her hand hard on my chest, her own chest slick with sweat, but she was still looking at me—looking at me so intensely and so warmly that it was as if we were connected intimately by our gaze as surely as by our thighs and genitals—and I was to remember that instant every time we made love in the future, even as I seemed to be remembering forward to all those future times even during these first few moments of our intimacy.

Lying together in the moonlight, the sheets and blankets and the futon curled and thrown around us, the cool wind from the north drying the sweat on our bodies, her cheek on my chest and my thigh across her hip, we kept touching each other—her fingers playing with the hair on my chest, my fingers tracing the line of her cheek, the sole of my foot sliding up and down the back of her leg, curling around her strong calf muscles.