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the pilot’s seat, of all obvious places. It was a tiny white Bakelite box that might have been anything, a fuse relay, a power seat servomotor, a container of breath mints that had fallen down under there and been forgotten. I knew better. I found the tool kit and snipped its vicious little wires, swung the shuttle’s hatch shut, carried the bomb back with me through the gray rainy night and flung it into my compost heap. It’s there now, as I write. It may yet be live and deadly, it may have been ruined by the rain and the muck; but it will never kill Alec, which is all that matters.
    I came back and reentered paradise, slipping into the firelit room where my love slept safe. Third time lucky, mortal man, I thought.
    He woke when I climbed back in beside him, grumbled a little, reached out his arms to pull me in close and tucked me under his chin, just as Nicholas used to do. I lay awake awhile longer, fighting conditioning nightmares; but I know them for the false programmed things they are now, and they can’t scare me. I fell asleep at last, soothed by the rhythm of his heartbeat.
    We didn’t get out of bed for two full hours next morning. We did everything I’d ever done with Nicholas, who’d been amazingly adventurous for a late medieval fellow, and everything I’d ever done with Edward, who was a Victorian gentleman, which says all I need to say about his personal tastes. The bed sagged ever further toward a happy death.
    Then we got up and I made him breakfast.
    “I hope you like tacos,” I said, spooning the hot filling into corn tortillas. “This seems so inadequate! I seldom dine in the morning, myself, just a roll or something to keep the coffee from killing me. No tea, no kippers, no sardines even. Nothing for an Englishman, but then I never expected to meet one here.”
    “That’s okay,” said Alec. He accepted a taco and bit into it cautiously. “It’s not bad. What is it?”
    “Proteus Breakfast Bounty,” I told him with a sneer. “It approximates sausage. Not inspiring, but sustaining. The tortillas, at least, are real.”
    “I like ’em,” he said.
    “You are a gentleman,” I said, pouring him out a mug of coffee. I poured a cup for myself and sat down across the table from him. “Well, then. Here we are.”
    “Mr. and Mrs. Checkerfield’s Brunch Club,” he said. God, it sounded strange in my ears. Mrs. Checkerfield? Or Lady Finsbury! Pretty good for somebody who began life in a one-room hut, eh? Child of Spanish peasants who owned maybe two goats and three fig trees? Too surreal to contemplate. I took a careful sip of coffee and said quietly:
    “If you knew how often I’ve wished you were sitting right there—”
    “I can’t be what you wanted,” he said. “You must have wished for somebody a lot better looking, in shining armor.”
    “No. You yourself are the man of my dreams, senor. I think we’ve met before, in some previous lifetime.”
    “You believe in that stuff?”
    “Not really,” I said. “Do you?”
    He shook his head, wolfing down the last of the taco.
    “Were you raised in any religion?”
    “Nope,” he said. “I was always taught that’s for bigots and crazies. Not something you do if you’re going to be a respectable member of the House of Lords, which I’ve never been anyway so who cares, right? But, you know. My stepmother got into the Ephesians, and they’re kind of scary.”
    “That’s what I’d always read.”
    “You read, too? They do a lot of good, though, for poor girls, so I guess they’re okay. And my nurse was into something, I guess it must have been Orthodox Vodou. I think she
took me to some of their services when I was small. That was nice, I remember, all the dancing, and those bright people coming out of nowhere like that.”
    Yes indeed, Nicholas, I thought, you’ve come a long way.
    “Can I have another of those?” he inquired. Imagine someone actually liking Breakfast Bounty. But then I don’t suppose he’s ever