“This is very strange.” Our eyes remained locked together, and Akili seemed happy enough – but I still felt I should have been hunting for some way to make everything a thousand times more intense.

I said, “I know why this feels wrong. Physical pleasure without sex—” I hesitated.

“Go on.”

“Physical pleasure, without sex, is generally classified as—”

“What?”

“You’re not going to like this.”

Ve thumped me in the ribs. “Spit it out.”

“ Infantile. ”

Akili sighed. “Okay. Exorcism time. Repeat after me: Uncle Sigmund, I renounce you as a charlatan, a bully, and a fabricator of data. A corrupter of language, a destroyer of lives.”

I complied – then I wrapped my arms around ver tightly, and we lay there with our legs entwined, heads on each other’s shoulders, gently stroking each other’s backs. The whole futile sexual charge I’d felt since the fishing boat was finally lifting; all the pleasure came from the warmth of vis body, the unfamiliar contours of vis flesh, the texture of vis skin, the sense of vis presence.

And I still found ver as beautiful as ever. I still cared about ver as much as ever.

Was this what I’d always been looking for? Asexual love?

It was a disquieting notion – but I thought it through calmly.

Maybe all my life I’d unconsciously swallowed the Edenite lie: that everything in the perfect, harmonious modern emotional relationship somehow flowed magically out of beneficent nature. Monogamy, equality, honesty, respect, tenderness, selflessness – it was all pure instinct, pure sexual biology, taking its unfettered course – despite the fact that all those criteria of perfection had changed radically from century to century, from culture to culture. The Edenites proclaimed that anyone who fell short of the glowing ideal was either willfully fighting Mother Gaia – or had been corrupted by a traumatic upbringing, media manipulation, or the deeply unnatural power structures of modern society.

In fact, the ancient reproductive drives had been hemmed in by civilizing forces, inhibited by cultural strictures – and pressed into service to create social cohesion in countless different ways – but they hadn’t actually changed in tens of thousands of years, and they contradicted current mores, or were silent, just as often as they supported them. Gina’s unfaithfulness had hardly been a crime against biology … and whatever I’d done to drive her away had been a failure of purely conscious effort – a lack of attentiveness that any Stone Age ancestor would have found second nature. Virtually everything which modern humans valued in relationships – over and above the act of sex itself, and some degree of protectiveness toward their partners and offspring – arose by a separate force of will. There was a massive shell of moral and social constructs wrapped around the tiny core of instinctive behavior – and the pearl bore little resemblance to the grit.