What kind of twisted ethics drove Lotus Durona, to make of this girl an imitation-willing sacrifice? Who did Lotus think she was fooling? Only herself, apparently.

"Besides," said Lilly Junior. "I thought you liked that fat blonde. You were squirming all over her."

"Who?"

"Oh, that's right. That must have been your clone-twin."

"My brother," he corrected automatically. What was this story, Mark?

She was getting relaxed, now, reconciled to her strange captivity. And bored. She looked at him speculatively. "Would you like to kiss me again?" she inquired.

It was his height. It brought out the beast in women. Unthreatened, they became bold. He normally considered it a quite delightful effect, but this girl worried him. She was not his . . . equal. But he had to kill time, keep her in here, keep her entertained for as long as possible. "Well . . . all right. . . ."

After about twenty minutes of tame and decorous necking, she drew back and remarked, "That's not the way the Baron does it."

"What do you do for Vasa Luigi?"

She unfastened his trouser-strings and started to show him. After about a minute, he choked, "Stop!"

"Don't you like it? The Baron does."

"I'm sure." Dreadfully aroused, he fled to the chair by the little dining table, and scrunched himself up in it. "That's, um, very nice, Lilly, but it's too serious for you and me."

"I don't understand."

"Just exactly so." She was a child, despite her grownup body, he was increasingly certain of it. "When you are older . . . you will find your own boundaries. And you can invite people across them as you choose. Right now you scarcely know where you leave off and the world begins. Desire should flow from within, not be imposed from without." He tried to choke off his own flow by sheer will-power, half successfully. Vasa Luigi, you scum.

She frowned thoughtfully. "I'm not going to be older."

He wrapped his arms around his drawn-up knees and shuddered. Hell.

He suddenly remembered how he'd met Sergeant Taura. How they had become lovers, in that desperate hour. Ah, ambushed again by the potholes in his memory. There were certain obvious parallels with his current situation; it must be why his subconscious was trying to apply the old successful solution. But Taura was a bioengineered mutation, short-lived. The Dendarii medicos had stolen her a little more time with metabolic adjustments, but not much. Every day was a gift, each year a miracle. She was living her whole life as a smash-and-grab, and he heartily approved. Lilly Junior could live a century, if she wasn't . . . cannibalized. She needed to be seduced to life, not sex.

Like integrity, love of life was not a subject to be studied, it was a contagion to be caught. And you had to catch it from someone who had it. "Don't you want to live?" he asked her.

"I . . . don't know."

"I do. I want to live. And believe me, I have considered the alternative deeply."