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By Root 1235 0

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 wanted to 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 recognize everything, 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.