I love you, Malice, and you are mine.

Misery!

Why don’t you respond, Malice?

Memory—

Why are you silent?

Malice—

Why have you withdrawn? Are you ill? Malice, Malice—

But she was in radiant health, hair burning, burning, eyes never so deep; natural; normal, except that she seemed to have no awareness of him.

Speak to me!

She would not. What unseen hand had placed a spell upon her, made her mute, in the hour of triumph? Had some post-hypnotic state been invoked, some command inflicted by an unknown enemy intent on his destruction? Was it now his duty to break her out of it, a sleeping beauty, with a single splendid kiss?

He kissed her, but she did not wake to him. Her lips were mushy, unresponsive.

Or was a greater effort required? Should he make love to her?

When he had not yet given her the hvee?

He took her in his arms, one elbow beneath her shoulders, the other under her knees, carried her limp body to the couch, and spread it out.

Misery! With a terrible shock Aton wrenched himself back to the present. Misery lay on the straw pallet, nude and lovely, open to the caress of his hands. He had thought his Malice to be unique, but here was a duplicate form, one of dozens in this village alone, and hundreds, thousands on the planet. He had mistaken the standard attributes of the species for beauty, duping his emotion all his life.

Misery smiled again, twisting her body in pleasure.

How strange that this woman, the one he did not desire, reacted so positively to his careless touch, while Malice—

Malice—was it amnesia? Yet she showed no distress, no alarm, no confusion. She saw him, recognized him—but as an article of furniture, not as a man. She was not catatonic, nor did she collide with him when she moved.

Could her love for him have failed? Had it ever existed at all? Her bright hair and measureless eyes denied both. Her love was strong. It had to be for him; the minionette did not glow in the company of the wrong man. She would never have come with him, without love.

She had been a captain in space, enormously capable. Never would she do a thing without excellent reason. There had to be a motive. Did she know something that he did not? Something that she was unable to tell him?

He had a vision of the elemental drama for children: behind the lock there stands a criminal, blaster in hand, about to rob and ravish the heroine. At the entrance is her love: muscular, handsome, intelligent. But if she makes known her plight, that lover will be the first to die. And so she must be silent, and try to signal to him in some manner that the hidden intruder will not intercept. If she is able to convey the message, however obscurely, the resolution is assured.