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days.”
    “We’ll try to work something out.” Always working something out. Concord never comes naturally—first we have to butt heads and get pissed off. Each time you call I hope it’ll be different , Floria thought.
    Somebody shrieked for “oly,” jelly that would be, in the background—Floria felt a sudden rush of warmth for them, her grandkids for God’s sake. Having been a young mother herself, she was still young enough to really enjoy them (and to fight with Deb about how to bring them up). Deb was starting an awkward goodbye. Floria replied, put the phone down, and sat with her head back against the flowered kitchen wallpaper, thinking, Why do I feel so rotten now? Deb and I aren’t close, no comfort, seldom friends, though we were once. Have I said everything wrong, made her think I don’t want to see her and don’t care about her family? What does she want from me that I can’t seem to give her? Approval? Maybe she thinks I still hold her marriage against her. Well, I do, sort of. What right have I to be critical, me with my divorce? What terrible things would she say to me, would I say to her, that we take such care not to say anything important at all?
    * * *
    “I think today we might go into sex,” she said.
    Weyland responded dryly, “Might we indeed. Does it titillate you to wring confessions of solitary vice from men of mature years?”
    Oh no you don’t , she thought. You can’t sidestep so easily. “Under what circumstances do you find yourself sexually aroused?”
    “Most usually upon waking from sleep,” he said indifferently.
    “What do you do about it?”
    “The same as others do. I am not a cripple, I have hands.”
    “Do you have fantasies at these times?”
    “No. Women, and men for that matter, appeal to me very little, either in fantasy or reality.”
    “Ah—what about female vampires?” she said, trying not to sound arch.
    “I know of none.”
    Of course: the neatest out in the book. “They’re not needed for reproduction, I suppose, because people who die of vampire bites become vampires themselves.”
    He said testily, “Nonsense. I am not a communicable disease.”
    So he had left an enormous hole in his construct. She headed straight for it: “Then how does your kind reproduce?”
    “I have no kind, so far as I am aware,” he said, “and I do not reproduce. Why should I, when I may live for centuries still, perhaps indefinitely? My sexual equipment is clearly only detailed biological mimicry, a form of protective coloration.” How beautiful, how simple a solution , she thought, full of admiration in spite of herself. “Do I occasionally detect a note of prurient interest in your questions, Dr. Landauer?
    Something akin to stopping at the cage to watch the tigers mate at the zoo?”
    “Probably,” she said, feeling her face heat. He had a great backhand return shot there. “How do you feel about that?”
    He shrugged.
    “To return to the point,” she said. “Do I hear you saying that you have no urge whatever to engage in sexual intercourse with anyone?”
    “Would you mate with your livestock?”
    His matter-of-fact arrogance took her breath away. She said weakly, “Men have reportedly done so.”
    “Driven men. I am not driven in that way. My sex urge is of low frequency and is easily dealt with unaided—although I occasionally engage in copulation out of the necessity to keep up appearances. I am capable, but not—like humans—obsessed.”
    Was he sinking into lunacy before her eyes? “I think I hear you saying,” she said, striving to keep her voice neutral, “that you’re not just a man with a unique way of life. I think I hear you saying that you’re not human at all.”
    “I thought that this was already clear.”
    “And that there are no others like you.”
    “None that I know of.”
    “Then—you see yourself as what? Some sort of mutation?”
    “Perhaps. Or perhaps your kind are the mutation.”
    She saw disdain in the curl