Aton’s mind returned, horribly, to a similar scene. He did not want to remember it, but could not help himself. Once before he had found himself in a confined space with a woman, a minionette. Once before he had undressed.

“Tell me your name.” He had to destroy that memory.

“Misery,” her signal answered. He heard “Malice.” He saw again the bubble confine of the asteroid lodging—the spotel. The two of them had docked the shuttle, passed directly from ship’s lock to entrance lock and on into the lush private accommodation. He had doffed his skin-tight protective suit immediately, becoming naked before her in the half-light. Malice had been quiet and mechanical—hardly the sparkling creature he had captured so recently at the Xest outpost. She did not strip.

“Do you want to know my name?” Inane conversation, hardly visible in the coming night. Anything to kill that terrible recollection!

Misery answered: “If it pleases the master to tell it.”

“Damn!” he exploded, looking at the veil, seeing the blank mask of the space suit holding her beauty from him.

“You servile husk! Don’t you have any will of your own?”

He had spoken out loud, forgetting to signal; he knew no native could understand. But Misery responded with a beatific smile visible even through the dark veil.

Angry and alarmed, he tore off that veil. Had he been trapped into—

Her hair was dull, her eyes gray. She resembled more the Captain than the nymph. She was smiling still, but blankly.

I am a fool he thought. If she had understood my spoken words, she would not have smiled. This is a native girl, trained to react to harshness with a forgiving smile.

Yet the man who loved her had been tortured to death.

“You may think of me as ‘Stone Heart,’” he said, adopting the evident custom of the planet. He was still angry, as perhaps the native men were angry—at her, at the system she represented, the enormity of it and its somber mystery. At the awful memories this situation evoked by being unfairly similar.

“Why aren’t you beautiful?” Now he was being deliberately unkind, and his anger turned against himself. Must fury beget fury?

She only smiled.

“Take off your clothing,” he ordered. He could hardly see her now. “First light the candle. I want to see you.” She obeyed slowly.

Her body was glorious. The long hair flowed over shoulders and sculptured breasts, and his eye followed the fold of the space suit as it peeled away from her narrow waist and swelling hips and thighs. Alone with her, entire alone, for the first time—

But this is the memory! he thought. It is Misery I am looking at, not Malice! Not Malice. Not—

Not, not subject to the laws of any planet, but here, in the inviolate privacy of the spotel, the rented transitory lodging of newlyweds and wealthy travelers of space. A luxurious retreat, a luxurious body, unfettered at last.

Misery!