Thought, sensation—all one.

She woke in the pod. Shook her head, glanced at the visible display.

Only a few minutes had passed since she had last registered any sort of time at all.

Yet she knew what had happened.

And regretted that it was over.

And hated herself for feeling that way.

“It had me.”

Siloh began, “In a manner of speaking—”

“Against my will!”

Siloh looked judicial. “So you say. The recordings are necessarily only a pale shadow, so I cannot tell from experiencing them myself—”

Scornfully: “How could you anyway?”

“This discussion will not flow in that direction.”

“Damn it, you knew Sagittarius would do this!”

Siloh shook his head. “I cannot predict the behavior of such an architectural mind class. No one can.”

“You at least guessed that it would, would find a way into me, to… to mate with me. At a level we poor stunted humans can only approximate because we’re always in two separated bodies. It was in mine. It—They—knew that in the act of translation there are ways, paths, avenues….” She sputtered to a stop.

“I am sure that description of the experience is impossible.” Siloh’s normally impenetrable eyes seemed to show real regret.

Yeah? she thought. How would you know? But she said as dryly as she could muster, “You could review the recordings yourself, see—”

“I do not wish to.”

“Just to measure—”

“No.”

Abruptly she felt intense embarrassment. Bad enough if a man had been privy to those moments, but a Nought…

How alien would the experience be, for Siloh?—and alien in two different senses of the word? She knew suddenly that there were provinces in the landscape of desire Siloh could not visit. The place she had been with the Composite no human had ever been. Siloh could not go there. Perhaps an ordinary human could not, either.

“I know this is important to you,” Siloh said abstractly. “You should also know that the Composite also gave us, in the translation you achieved—while you had your, uh, seizure—the key engineering design behind the heliospheric defense.”

She said blankly, “The, uh, cylinders…”

“Yes, they are achievable, and very soon. A ‘technically sweet’ solution, I am told by the Prefect. Authorities—so far above us that they are beyond view—have begun the works needed. They took your information and are making it into an enormous construction at both poles of Jupiter. The entire remaining population of the Jovian Belt threw themselves into shaping the artifacts to achieve this.”

“They’ve been following… what I say?”

“Yours was deemed the most crucial work. Yet you could not be told.”

She shook her head to clear it. “So I wouldn’t develop shaky hands.”

“And you did not, not at all.” Siloh beamed in an inscrutable way, one eyebrow canted at an ambiguous angle.

“You knew,” she said leadenly. “What it would do.”

“I’m sure I do not fathom what you mean.”

She studied Siloh, who still wore the same strange beaming expression. Remember, she thought, it can be just as irritating as an ordinary man, but it isn’t one.