When he spoke, I assumed it was to the room's computer. But his voice went on-the amplified stars twinkling madly through the electronic glass, the moonlight falling on our naked shoulders like a cold blue robe. He was talking to me.

"I'm sorry, Dorothea," he was saying. "I am, as a long-lost poet once put it, a man adrift from his duties, a man awash in his world. I should have told you long before now, but did not. Why? Because it's horrible as well as beautiful."

He paused, so emotional, so crucified by remorse, and then: "When I was Out There, Dorothea, when I had the starlocks at my back and the universe at my feet, when I'd abandoned my home world as surely as if I'd died, I took an alien lover, Dorothea, and she bore me a son. I can't believe it myself, but it is true, and the time has come."

He was histrionic. He was heroic. He was playing to some great audience I couldn't see.

And he was lying.

They say the ones who go Out There-the diplos, greeters, and runners-come back liars because of what they've seen, because of the starlock sleep, because of what they dream as they make their painful slow way through the concentric rings of sequential tokamaks, super-pinches, marriages of light-cones, and miracles of winkholes. It is a sleep (the rumors say) filled with visions of eternal parallel universes, of all possible alternative worlds-where Hitler did and didn't, where Christ was and wasn't, where the Nile never flowed, where Jory never left, or if he did, I never went to sleep for him.

They are changed by it. They come back seeing what isn't, but what might have been, what isn't but is-somewhere. And because they come back liars to a world fifteen years older, there will always be jobs for any man or woman willing to be a diplo or greeter or runner. They are the lambs. They are sacrificed in our names.

Whether Jory's lies are universes he indeed perceives, or simply the handiwork of a pathology, I do not know. I do know that there are times when I enter his lies with him and times when I do not. There are even times when I love his lies, though it embarrasses me to say so. When we lie together on the little stretch of sand below our house and make a simpler love-the roll of the waves mercifully drowning out the sucking of the great factory pipes so nearby-I want those lies, ask for them in my own way, and he gives them to me: "Dorothea, my love, I have known women, insatiable women, women from a satyr's wildest dreams. I have known them in every port of the Empire-from Dandanek II to Miladen-Poy, from Gloster's Alley to Blackie's Hole, from the great silicon-methane bays of Torsion to the antigravity Steppes of Heart-and none of them can compare with the softest touch of your skin, with the simplest caress of your breath."

There are no ports like these. Not yet. No swashbuckling spacelanes, no pirates of the Hypervoid, no Empire. No romantic Frontier for the sowing of the human seed throughout galaxies so vast and wondrous that their glory must catch in your throat. It is, after all, a simpler, more mundane universe we inhabit.

But when he speaks to me like this, my world is suddenly grand, the ports as real as San Francisco, the women as lusty as legends, and I, a Helen of New Troy, with a strange and beautiful apple in my hand.

I could have answered him with "What was she like, Jory?" I could have entered that lie, too, and said, "Did you ever see your son, Jory?"

But this one hurt. It hurt too much.

"What do you mean, the time has come?" I asked, sighing.

He was turning away, toward the darkness of the hills behind our house.

"He is coming to live with us," he said.

I closed my eyes. "Your son?"

"Of course, Dorothea."

I hate him for it.

He knows how it hurts. He knows why.

We have encountered three races Out There. The first two-the nearest us in light-years-are indeed humanoid, offering (for some, at least) clear proof of the "seeding" theory of mankind's presence in this solar system. The third race, the mysterious Climagos, is so alien that instead of animosity and avarice we find in it a disturbing generosity-gifts like the energy fields, crystalline sleep, and the starlocks. In return, it has asked nothing but goodwill. We do not understand this. We do not understand it at all.

We have (we have decided) nothing to learn, nothing to gain, from the two humanoid species, the little Debolites and stolid Oteans. We ignore them, and are jealous of the attention the Climagos pay them. We are, it would seem, afraid of what these two humanoid species might eventually do with the Climagos' gifts. After all, we know well what it means to be "human."

"You haven't asked, but I will tell you anyway," he says.

He has followed me down to the tidepools, where I am trying to count the species of neogastropods and landlocked sculpins, to compare them against those listed in a wood-pulp book printed fifty years ago.

He seems sober, matter-of-fact. This means nothing.

Oblivious to the chugging of the factory behind him, he looks wistfully out to sea and says: "She was Otean, of course. Her thighs like tree trunks, her body a muscular fist. The sable-smooth hair that covered her glinted like gold in the sunset of their star. She was a child by their standards, but twice as old as I, and her wide dark eyes were as full of dreams as mine. That is how it happened: we both were dreamers. I'd been away too long."

It is a moving tale, in its own way convincing. Otus is indeed a heavy world, the atmosphere thick, the surface touched by less light than Earth. In turn, Otean eyes are more photosensitive, their bodies stockier, their lungs accustomed to richer oxygen. And although they are much more like us than the little Debolites are, they hate Terra; they cannot stand to be here even for a day, even in lightweight breathing gear. (Some say it is photophobia; others believe it is a peculiarity of the inner ear; still others, a vascularization vertigo.) "I was drunk on the oxygen mix of that world," Jory is saying now, "and never did smell the lipid alienness of her. My poor blind passion never stumbled the whole long night."

I remember something else that gives credence: the marks-the dozens of tiny toothlike marks on his chest, on the inside of his arms. They've been there since I can remember, though I've never asked about them, assuming, as I did, that they'd been left by the medical instruments that prepared him for his journey.

Abruptly, somberly, Jory says, "No, I never saw the boy. I left Otus long before he was born."

It is almost convincing. But not quite.

1. Humans and Oteans are able to copulate, but fertilization is impossible; the Otean secretions are toxic. And were a sperm cell to survive, it would not penetrate the ovum; and were it to penetrate, the chromosomes would fail to align themselves on the spindle.

2. Jory was never on Otus.

One day not long after he returned and I awoke, Jory said to me: "What does a man gain by winning the universe, if by doing so he loses himself? He can never buy it back once it is bartered away." He was quoting someone, I felt sure. But I didn't ask and he didn't explain.

He was quiet for a while, and then, voice hoarse with sorrow, he whispered, "They lied to me, Dorothea, just as they lie to us all," and he began to weep. I took him in my arms and held him. I did not let go.

That was the man I knew. I have not seen him since.

I have located four species of rock shell, but it has taken nearly five hours. According to the wood-pulp book, fifty years ago I'd have found four times as many, and in half the time.

The factory has been here for thirty-five, yet it denies its pipes have ever dumped oxygen-depleting wastes into the delicate littoral zone.

The liars are so nearby, Jory.

I recall something else now, too.

Four years ago, not long after we had the addition built, Jory received a tape in the mail. He never offered an explanation; I never asked for one. That is our way. But one day I heard it, and saw it.

I was passing his new room, the one he'd built for privacy. I'd never stopped before, but this time I did because I heard a voice.

It sounded innocuous enough-mechanical and skewed to the treble like a cheap computer voice. But when I tried to understand it, I realized that it wasn't a simvoice at all, that the language I was hearing was not of Earth.

When I reached the doorway, I stepped quietly inside and stopped.

Jory was seated at the screen, his back to me, and by the way he was staring I felt sure the screen held a face, a face belonging to the voice.

I took one step and saw the screen.

There was no face. Instead, an alien landscape filled the screen, violet crags and crimson gorges bathed by an unearthly light, the entire vision quivering like a bright, solarized rag.

The voice chattered on. Jory remained hypnotized. I left quickly, shivering.

That evening I pleaded with him again. All I could think of was the gorges, the eerie light, the quivering screen. I still believed that a child, however it came, would be able to banish such strangeness from the heart and soul of the man I loved, the man I thought I knew.

Despite the Climagos' greatest gift, very few humans have traveled Out There. As our technocrats learned long ago, the exploration of space is handled best by machines, not by flesh-and-blood liabilities.

There is one matter, though, that cannot be handled by mechanical surrogates-not, that is, without risk of diplomatic insult. That matter is Business-the political and economic business between sentient races and their worlds.

The leaders of Business understand the risks, and in turn, the diplos of interstellar politics, the greeters and runners of interstellar trade, and the occasional scope of interstellar R&D are all common men and women. All contract for the money (so they claim); all are commissioned with instant diplomatic or corporate rank in the departments of state, MNCs, and global cartels that hire them; and all have little computers implanted in their skulls.

To make them what they are not.

To make them what those back on Earth so need them to be.

"She was a Debolite, Dorothea." His agony is profound, his confession sincere, tortured. "Forgive me, please. I know few women would, but I ask it of you because you, more than most, should be able to understand." The pause is a meaningful one. "I shared a meal-skinned rodentia of some kind and a fermented drink made from indigenous leaves-with a committee of seven provincial demipharaohs. She was their courier. Later that night, she visited me in my quarters with an urgent-and I might add, laudatory-message from the Pharaohess Herself. I was intoxicated from their infernal tulpai, Dorothea. Otherwise, I'd never have been able to do what I did-to touch a body like that, so small and fragile, the face a clown's, the skin like taut parchment except where the slick algae grows."

He puts his head in his hands. He slumps forward. The scar is no longer red.

He says: "I saw the boy two years later. I could barely stand the sight of him."

He seems to collapse. "Dear God," he whispers. Quietly he begins to sob.

I get up. He is probably sincere. He probably believes what he is describing. Nevertheless, I blame him and with blame comes the hate.

1. Procreation is no more likely between humans and Debolites than it is between humans and sheep.

2. Jory was never on Debole.

3. Jory does not believe in the God whose name he takes in vain.

Debole is a small planet, and does not spin. Its inhabitants-fauna and flora alike-hug the twilight zone between eternal sun and endless night, and the thermal sanity which that zone provides. The Debolites are much smaller than humans, no larger in fact than the prosimians who scampered on Earth's riverbanks forty million years ago, grist for the gullets of larger reptiles. The black algae that feeds on the secretions and excretions of their skin helps insulate them from the cold, as do the arrangements of fatty deposits around their vital organs, deposits which give them a lumpy, tumorous look. And the natural violet pigment of their dermis protects them from ultraviolet agony.

The Debolites are five thousand years away from their own natural space age. Because they are, mankind couldn't be less interested. But the Climagos are interested. This puzzles us. What do they see?

I've taken the pheroma capsules, and try not to complain.

To keep our skin's bacterial succession intact, we have not bathed. Our exertions fill the air with a nightmarish brine, and I choke on it. The copulins are fiery ants behind my eyes, I am as nauseous as I've ever been in my life. (What was the dose this time? Which series did he use? Am I developing an allergy? Is there anyone who hates them as much as I do?) We are squirming like blood-crazed chondrichthy. Jory's breathing is stertorous from the olfactory enhancement, the steroid bombardments, and I am doing my best to emulate his passion despite the threat of peristalsis.

Suddenly, in the voice of a stranger, Jory says: "You'll choose not to believe me, as always. That is your right, Dorothea. But I must try to prepare you."

I shudder, shudder again. The room is warm, sickeningly so, but Jory's body has stopped moving. What will it be this time?

"She was a Climago, Dorothea. I use the term she to help you-to help us both-understand what happened. Don't bother insisting that such a thing is impossible, because it is possible-it indeed happened. The Climagos are a compassionate race. They gave humanity the starlock secret; they gave humanity crystalline sleep and energy fields. And they gave one lone man-me, Jory Coryiner-another gift as well."

He pauses, mouth open, his jaw struggling.

"I don't need to tell you what they look like. You know."

I say nothing, the nausea unending.

How could I possibly know? Those who come back with descriptions are liars, and there isn't a government on Earth that appears interested in dispelling the mysteries. Even the commedia claim they can't get stills or tapes-not even of those Climagos who visit Earth. (Are they so shy? Are they so archetypally terrible to behold that the teeming masses of Terra, were they to find out, would riot, destroy their own cities, demand an instant end to diplomatic relations?) But like everyone else, I've collected the descriptions-dozens and dozens of them. Chambered nautili with radioactive tendrils? Arachnoids cobalt-blue or fuchsia, or striped like archaic barber poles? Bifurcated flying brains? Systolic muscles with "gyroscope" metabolisms? Silicon ghosts? Colonial pelecypods looking more like death's-head skulls than clams? Which do you prefer, Jory?

"And you know, I'm sure," he is saying now, "how they've managed to survive on their hostile world for two hundred million years. I'm sure you know."

Perhaps I do. Perhaps I do not. I have heard the stories-and chosen to believe them-about those miracles of symbiosis, the Climagos. How their world is a litany of would-be predators, of knife-blade mandibles, deadly integuments, extruded stomachs that should have consumed every Climago on the planet a million times over-and would have were it not for the one trait that makes them not unlike us: a talent for adaptation, for cooperation, for helping and being helped.

It isn't simply cortical convolutions, though Climagos are certainly as intelligent as Terran cetaceans and pachyderms and Homo erectus, whatever "intelligence" may mean. It is the myriad ways in which they have learned to cooperate-to co-opt and thereby to best every other species on their home planet. The apelike things (so the stories go) who for aeons lent them their prehensile hands. The great saurians who provided them with locomotion and "gross environmental-manipulation capability." The mindless coelenterates who shared their nutrient flesh with them during drought and famine. And the endless others. The helpers, and the helped.

In return, the Climagos-telepathic, patient-provided the sensory information needed to lead the day-blind lizards to new species of prey, to keep the feathery simians one step ahead of their growing enemies, to help the eternal jellyfish foresee the impending changes in the great tidal inlets of the world.

"You can understand why it happened. She was a greeter, too-one of theirs-and I was a lone human. As a devout student of humanity, she understood what my solitude meant; she understood that in their social needs humans are not at all like Climagos, who do not fear loneliness, but are instead like the bottle-nosed dolphins of Earth, who suffer horribly when removed from their own kind."

He pauses now, averts his eyes and sighs. I smell half-digested food. I smell my own bile. The world swims.

"There was an aeon of need within her," he is saying, "the need to help, the need to cooperate, the need to court a creature who, under other circumstances, might have been a predator. And within me, there was an aeon of need as well-the need to find kin, a creature I would recognize by the most primitive of means."

I am still on my hands and knees, unable to move, the sickness darkening with a dread. Above me, Jory's eyes are the true purple of space, and the metallic breath of nausea moves through me like a toxic tide. It is the pheromas, yes, and the sweat, the androstenol, and all the others, but it is what I see too. Whether he knows it or not, I can indeed see his Climago greeter clearly. It is the version most often described. The horrible consensus.

I see a man so lonely, so crazy from his years of inhuman sleep, so twisted in his pent-up libidinal soul, that he can bring himself to touch it-a worm, a slug, its rolls of fat accordioned on a cartilaginous spine, its face (do I dare call it that?) a lamprey's, the abrasive bony plates, the hundreds of tiny sucking holes pulling the blood gently-like honey-from his chest, from the in-sides of his arms and thighs and- Somehow I get up. I stumble. I rush from the room.

The footsteps behind me are heartbeats.

When I reach the bathroom, the sickness comes out. The pheromas make it the odor of death.

Behind me, a voice, disembodied: "It wasn't like that at all," he whines. "Why can't you try to understand?"

I have started to cry.

"It was beautiful," he says, faithful that words can change it. "She made it beautiful. They are an incredibly beautiful people, Dorothea."

A moment ago, it was tears. Now, it is laughter. Here I am, kneeling in my own ambergris, as though worshiping a sunken bathtub, as though believing his most outrageous lie yet. The teeth marks, the rapture. Perhaps that, yes. But not the other.

Not a child.

I turn to him savagely. "And who carried the fetus for her? Some obliging surrogate, some Otean bound by diplomatic duty? If that strikes your fancy, Jory, just nod once and we'll tape it. But I'm puzzled, Jory. How will he reach us? The locks are far too slow. Is he coming in a taterchip can with tiny retrorockets? Or an FTL attache case? Climagos are small, you know."

He looks at me in amazement, his eyes like a child's. I could kill him and he doesn't even know it. And I would kill him, I'm sure, were there anything near me sharper than a dryer or a toothcan. This man-this man who for five years has shown so little interest in the woman he lives with, who has heard none of my pleas-now offers me lies for a moment's absolution.

He steps toward me, takes my arm. I twist my head in a snarl, but I do not pull away.

The look is still there. He shakes his head, horribly hurt. "There's a son, yes, Dorothea, and, yes, he's very small-as you surmised. He's more Climago than human-an alien, yes-but he's intelligent and caring and he has the capacity to love us. Can't you at least-"

"Stop it!" I scream, hands over my ears, the smell of my own body like dung.

He goes dreamy now. He turns slowly, stares at the closed windows. I will scream again; I cannot bear what he will say.

"There's a son, yes," he begins anew. "He isn't small at all. He's a mutant, Dorothea, barely alive, and he may not make it through the starlocks. He's a pitiful thing, and he deserves our compassion. He has a human head, a nudibranch's body; he whimpers like a human child, but chokes on his own excrement if held the wrong way. Climago scientists have been studying him for years, but I want him with me now, and his mother-decent soul that she is-agrees. The child is allergic to so many things there; perhaps he will fare better here. If he survives the trip. If we can love hi-"

I hit him. I hit him on the temple, over the scar, feeling the metallic edge of the thing the corporation put there. The thing that has helped make him what he is.

The skin splits at the metal. He flinches, grabs my wrist. The blood begins to ooze.

I'm screaming something now that neither of us understands.

He says calmly, "Accept it, Dorothea. He'll be arriving soon."

He leaves me in the bathroom, where I continue to cry.

I do not see him for days.