2312

“Not at all.” Grimmer and grimmer she sounded. “What, don’t you have anything in you?”

“In a way. I suppose everyone does,” he said reassuringly, though in fact he had seldom heard of a brain with as many interventions as hers. “I take some vasopressin and some oxytocin, as recommended.”

“Those both come from vasotocin,” she said authoritatively. “There’s just one amino acid of difference between the three. So I take the vasotocin. It’s very old, so old it controls sex behavior in frogs.”

“My.”

“No, it’s just what you need.”

“I don’t know. I feel fine with the oxytocin and vasopressin.”

“Oxytocin is social memory,” she said. “You don’t notice other people without it. I need more of it. Vasopressin too, I suppose.”

“The monogamy hormone,” Wahram said.

“Monogamy in males. But only three percent of mammals are monogamous. Even birds do better than that, I think.”

“Swans,” Wahram suggested.

“Yes. And I am Swan Second Swan. But I’m not monogamous.”

“No?”

“No. Except I’m faithful to endorphins.”

He frowned, but assumed she was joking and tried to go along. “Isn’t that just like having a dog or something?”

“I like dogs. Dogs are wolves.”

“But wolves are not monogamous.”

“No. But endorphins are.”

He sighed, feeling he had lost her point, or that she had. “It’s the touch of the beloved that stimulates endorphins,” he said, and left it at that. You couldn’t whistle the end of the “Moonlight Sonata.”

T hat night, as they slept in the tunnel on their little aerogel mattresses under their thin blankets, he awoke to find that Swan had moved, and was sleeping against him back to back. The resulting flood of oxytocin relieved his sore hips a little; this was how one could read it. Of course the urge to sleep with someone, the pleasure in sleeping with someone, was not exactly synonymous with sex. Which was reassuring. Across the floor indeed the three ferals were curled together like kittens. The tunnels were warm, often too warm, but right on the floor it got cold. Very faintly he heard her purring. Feline genes for same-yes, he had heard of it-people said it felt good, very like humming. Feel pleasure, purr, feel better: a positive feedback into more pleasure, loop, loop, loop, all at the pace of breathing, it sounded like when he listened to her. A different kind of music. Although he knew very well that sick cats sometimes purred at a momentary relief, or even as if hoping to feel better, trying to jump-start the loop. He had lived with a cat who had done that near its end. A fifty-year-old cat is an impressive creature. The loss of this ancient eunuch had been one of Wahram’s first losses, so he remembered its purr near the end as particularly pitiful, the sound of some emotion too crowded to name. A good friend of his had died purring. So now this purr from Swan gave him a little shiver of worry.

D own the tunnel after a sleep, groggy and dim. The morning hour. Whistle the slow movement from the Eroica, Beethoven’s funeral music for his sense of hearing, written as it was dying inside him. “ ‘We live an hour and it is always the same,’ ” he recited. Then the slow movement of the first of the late quartets, opus 127, variations on a theme, so rich; as majestic as the funeral march, but more hopeful, more in love with beauty. And then the third movement that followed was so strong and cheerful it could have been a fourth movement.

Swan gave him a black look. “Damn you,” she said, “you’re enjoying this.”

His bass croak of laughter felt good in his chest, a little hadrosauric. “ ‘Danger to him was like wine,’ ” he growled.

“What’s that?”

“The Oxford English Dictionary. Or that’s where I saw it.”

“You like quotations.”

“ ‘We have come a long way, we have a long way to go. In between we are somewhere.’ ”

“Come on, what’s that? A fortune cookie?”

“Reinhold Messner, I believe.”

He really was kind of enjoying it, he had to admit. Only twenty-five more days, more or less; it wasn’t such a big number. He could endure. It was the most iterative pseudoiterative he would ever live, thus interesting, as a kind of limit case of what he supposedly wanted. A reductio ad absurdum. And the tunnel was not so much a matter of sensory deprivation as it was sensory overload, but in very few elements: the walls of the tunnel, the lights running along its ceiling fore and aft for as far as they could see.

But Swan was not enjoying it. This particular day seemed worse than any before, in fact. She even slowed down, something he had never seen before, to the point where he had to slow down a bit to keep from getting well ahead of her.

“Are you all right?” he asked after waiting for her to catch up.

“No. I feel like crap. I guess it’s happening. Do you feel anything?”

In fact Wahram was sore in his hips, knees, and feet. His ankles were all right. His back was all right once he got walking. “I’m sore,” he admitted.