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pulled from each site," Ari said. "On site four, we probably lost over sixty
percent."
Morgan was lying on a couch, with a screen propped on his stomach. The
recording of Ari's face seemed to be shimmering at the end of a long tunnel.
The medical system had advised him it might be most of a tenday before he
recovered from the combined effects of sleeplessness, emotional stress, and
ultra-enhancement.
"I could have cut off her power within three or four hours if you hadn't
interfered," Ari said. "It took you eleven hours to destroy her vehicles--
eleven hours-- even after you started getting extra reinforcements from the
moon."
For the third time in less than a daycycle, Morgan was being given a rare
chance to hear Ari speak VA13. This time Ari was applying the full force of a
module that communicated graduated degrees of revulsion.
* * * *
Morgan had made no recordings of his private moments with Miniruta. The
EruLabi didn't do that. Pleasure should be experienced only in memory or in
the reality of the present, the EruLabi mentors had proclaimed. There was a
long period-- it lasted over two years-- when Morgan spent several hours of
every daycycle watching recordings of Miniruta's public appearances.
Savela could have helped him. He could imagine circumstances in which
Savela would have offered him a temporary bonding that would have freed him
from an emotion that seemed to blunt all his other feelings. Savela was no
longer friendly, however. Savela might be an EruLabi but she shared Ari's
opinion of his behavior.
Morgan believed he had averted the complete political breakdown of the
ship's community. But how could you prove you had avoided something that never
happened? People didn't see the big disaster that hadn't taken place. They
only saw the small disaster you had created when you were trying to avert the
big disaster. Out of the three thousand people on the ship, at least a
thousand had decided they would be happier without his company.
Once, just to see if it would have any effect on his feelings, Morgan
struck up a relationship with a woman with a BR-V73 body type. The woman was
even an EruLabi. She had never advanced beyond the second protocol but that
should have been a minor matter. Her body felt like Miniruta's when he touched
it. The same expressions crossed her face when they practiced the EruLabi
sexual rituals. There was no way he could have noticed any significant
difference when he wrapped himself around her in the darkness.
Ari's sexual enhancement was another possibility. Morgan thought about it
many times during the next two decades. He rejected it, each time, because
there was no guarantee it would give him what he needed. The enhancement only
affected the most basic aspect of sexual desire-- the drive for simple
physical release. It didn't erase memories that included all the hours that
had preceded-- and followed-- the actual moments when their bodies had been
joined.
He had made eight attempts to contact Miniruta during the three years
that had followed their miniature war. His programs still monitored the
information system for any indication she was communicating with anyone. A
style analysis program occasionally detected a message Miniruta could have
created under a pseudonym. Every example it found had been traced to a
specific, identifiable source. None of the authors had been Miniruta.
He had sent two queries to Madame Dawne. The second time, she had
appeared on his screen with hair that was so short and so red she looked like
someone had daubed her skull with paint. The language she had used had been
obsolete when the Island of Adventure had left the Solar System.
"Please do not think I am indifferent to your concern," Madame Dawne had
said. "I believe I can inform you-- with no likelihood of exaggeration or
inaccuracy-- that Miniruta finds your anxieties heartwarming. Please accept my
unqualified assurance that you can turn your attention to other matters.
Miniruta is a happy woman. We are both happy women."
Morgan had deleted the recording from his files two tendays after he
received it. He had given his profiling program a description of Miniruta's
latest transformation. Miniruta had changed her allegiance three times in the
last one hundred and fifteen years. There was a possibility her affiliations
were episodes in an endless cycle of unions and ruptures, driven by a need
that could never be permanently satisfied. The program couldn't calculate a
probability. But it was a common pattern.
In the meantime, he still had his researches. He had picked out three
evolutionary lines that looked interesting. One line had apparently filled the
same ecological niche the pig family had exploited on Earth. The others raised
questions about the way predators and prey interacted over the millennia.
They were good subjects. They would keep him occupied for decades. He had
now lived over three hundred years. Nothing lasted forever. He had his whole
life ahead of him.
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