And so Aton told her about the green flowers that grew in the fields, waiting to love, and how when a person took one it loved him and stayed green as long as he lived, and survived on no more than the air and his presence, and how when the owner grew old enough to marry he gave his hvee to his betrothed and it lived if she loved him and died if her love was false, and if it did not die he married her and took it back to himself and did not test her love ever again, and how the hvee grew only on Hvee, the world named after it or maybe the other way around, in the ground, and was sent all over the human sector of the galaxy because people everywhere wanted to know they were loved, no matter what.

“Oh, yes,” she said, when he ran out of breath. “Love is the most painful thing of all. But tell me, young man—do you really know what it is?”

“No,” he admitted, for his words had been rhetoric, a rehearsal of adult folklore. He wondered if he had heard her description correctly.

The she said something else to him, something strange. “Look at me. Look, Aton, and tell me that I am beautiful.”

He looked obediently at her face, but all he could see were her black-green eyes and her hair, a fire and a smoke, burning and swirling in the wind. “Yes,” he said, finding unexpected pleasure in the saying, “you are beautiful, like the blaze upon the water when my father burns the swamp in the spring.”

She laughed with the light echo of her music, accepting the compliment on its own terms. “I am indeed,” she agreed. She reached out her hand and lifted his chin with her cool fingers so that he gazed into her eyes once more. The effect was hypnotic. “You will never see a woman as beautiful as I,” she said, and he found himself compelled to believe it absolutely, never to question it so long as he should live.

She let him go. “Tell me,” she said, “tell me—have you ever been kissed?”

“My aunt kisses me every time she visits,” Aton said, wrinkling his nose.

“Do I resemble your aunt?”

He examined her. Women hardly counted in the primogenitive genealogy of Hvee, and the aspect of his father’s sisters was lackluster. “No.”

“Then I shall kiss you now.”

She touched her fingers to his chin again and put her other hand on top of his head to tilt it sidewise a little. She held him, just so, and leaned forward to kiss him softly on the mouth.

Aton, seven, did not know what to do. He felt nothing, he was ever after to tell himself, dwelling on this moment; but that nothing he did feel he could not understand.

“Have you been kissed that way before?”

“No.”