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"I don't want you to sleep. . . . Not for a long time," said Aquilegia.

She led the way from the dark veranda into the room, switching on the light. From there, arm in arm, slightly drunk, they walked slowly into the bedroom.

The next day Aubretia suffered from an increasing sense of restlessness. The blue gin had obliterated most of her memory of the previous night, and only the outline of her conversation with Aquilegia remained, a blank silhouette without detail. But there was disquietude beneath the surface of her mind. She found it difficult to concentrate on routine work.

Early in the morning she called in at the biophysics laboratory for news of Gallardia, but there was none. Her place had been taken by an immense, florid woman of indeterminate age, with glossy inflexible features that had probably been rejuvenated by plastic surgery. The Annex was empty, and it was as if the man had never existed.

The news releases of the night, stored in the memory bank, were unsensational. A giant sunspot was disrupting intercontinental radio communications; an elderly woman in China had produced parthenogenetic triplets (a minor miracle of applied cytology, Aubretia recognized); car exports were up by nearly one per cent on the previous year; and the government had modified one of the regulations concerning mortic revenue to stimulate voluntary induced parthenogenesis in older women. It was the formula as before, with the accent always on childbirth, whether artificial or induced.

But, according to Aquilegia (and Aubretia remembered this distinctly) there was no such thing as natural parthenogenesis. It was a myth, a fiction designed to cover up syste-