He touched her throat. He felt the stirring of the pulse. A flush rose to her cheeks. "Show me why you haven't grown old during this last hundred years, Rhone, as I have."

Her face was near his. He could see the trembling in her lips, the enigmatic brightness of her eyes. "You're attractive," she whispered. "And that's odd, that a mongrel could be attractive."

"There are differences among the mongrels," Danton said. He moved his hands down her arms. She shivered a little. "And maybe there's a need in you that makes me seem something I'm not."

"That may be, yes. Maybe it isn't so easy to live forever. We have all you would think anyone would want here. But there are so few of us. And the men—always the same, with faces the same and walks the same and—"

"Then you really are the same Rhone, the Oligarch of a century ago?"

"Yes."

"And it's true, you never grow old?"

"It's true. We won't grow any older. And we'll never die."

She looked into his eyes and the seconds went by and time dissolved around Danton. And he thought: the lies I have told here—are they really a conscious effort to deceive? Do I really want, unconsciously, to become an Oligarch? Why not? He had wondered about it before. Immortality. A system depending on eternal warfare for its existence. Was this not his system after all?

"Come," she said, and took his arm. "I'll show you. You interest me. You're a diversion, soldier. I'll show you what we are."

They sat in a small spherical car. It made no noise. It slid silently over the smooth floor by working a simple lever around. It darted like a silver beetle. First she took him back to a place he remembered well. The Pit.

She didn't seem to see things actually. She talked with a calm detachment, and sometimes her thoughts seemed far away. Danton's thoughts weren't far away.

She was saying, "The war goes on outside the walls. Their culture is one of war, and that is all they know. We established it that way. We intend to keep it that way. You see this is the Pit; here the bodies come, the ones who have died. Here the bodies are sorted roughly onto the conveyor belts which take them to the 

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