“I am also a harpy, and my brain is living. The potion will affect these. It is not purely chemical; it is a magical ambience that can affect even a metal robot. Indeed, I am already feeling it; that is why I am pleading for detente between us.”
Lysander shrugged. “Whether I will love you I can’t say. But your arguments are persuasive. I want to save your planet too; I just didn’t care to be cynically coerced into it.” That was a half-truth, but it would do. “My anger is fading; let’s give love a try.” That was true; it seemed that the potion was already having its effect.
“I’m glad.” She leaned into him and kissed him. “We are not always free to choose our destinies or our emotions. I think we can make a good couple, and perhaps save the planet. Then neither of us will be sorry that it wasn’t natural.”
“But how can you be sure I don’t just tell you I love you, so that you won’t sick the harpies on me?”
“Unless you are immune to magic, there is no chance of that. Jod’e would have brought you to a similar chamber.”
“Jod’e would not have needed to.”
“When the fate of our world is at stake, the Adepts do not gamble. They chose her for you, and when she was lost, they chose me. I am not as good a choice, but will have to do; there was no one else convenient. Of course Jod’e will betray you to the Hectare, and they will know about the prophecy and the love, and probably that it is me you love. But we shall try to keep you out of their tentacles, until the prophecy is fulfilled.” She paused, gazing at him. “Now you may have the pleasure of using a woman you do not yet love, if you wish, or you may wait until you do. I am amenable to your preference. I have told you all that I know about this matter.”
She was certainly being candid! “What is your own preference?”
“Oh, I was hot for you when I first met you. Harpies are lusty creatures, being chronically male-starved. I loved it when you handled my legs! But you seemed destined for other things, so I resigned myself. I’d like to discover how many times and in how many ways it can be done in three days, with one man.”
“One man?”
“The limitation is male. If I had ten men here—“
“Oh.” He considered. He appreciated both her candor and her cynicism; it relieved him of confusion and conscience. He remembered how feminine even the complete robot Sheen had seemed; Echo was interesting despite what he knew of her. “Then let’s find out.”
She addressed him with a hunger that seemed even more intense than what Alyc had shown, and in a moment they were in the throes of sex, and in another moment beyond them. Her harpy aspect must indeed be hungry for male interaction! She was evidently ready to continue, but his interest faded, so they talked instead. Her attentions to him continued during the dialogue, restoring his interest more rapidly than would otherwise have been the case.
They continued with both sex and history, in stages and bouts and alternations and mixtures, and time passed both rapidly and slowly, simultaneously. It hardly mattered what Echo said; Lysander was increasingly interested merely in listening to her, and in having her listen to him. Their sexmaking became lovemaking, the passion less, the satisfaction more. Being with her was sheer pleasure, of a sort he had not experienced before.
“It is true,” he said at last. “I have not loved before, but I do love you.”
“And I love you,” she said. “It is magical in origin, but I think I could have loved you anyway, had you had any natural interest in me. Soon we can emerge, but let’s not hurry.”
Lysander was enjoying himself, but something was bothering him increasingly. He did not want there to be a lie between the two of them. He wanted their love to be perfect, and feared it could not be.
“There is something I must tell you,” he said.
“That you now believe in love potions? I know it, Lysander.”
“That I love you too much to deceive you,” he said grimly. “I must tell you the truth, though it destroy your love for me.”
“Too late for that. Three days have passed, and I am lost. You can only hurt me, you can not destroy my love.”
The gravity of his situation suddenly tormented him. “I can lie to you only if you ask me to. I would prefer to do that, so as not to hurt you.”
She gazed at him with understanding. “There really is something bad,” she said.
“There really is. Please, tell me to lie. It will spare us both pain.”
“Does it affect our mission to save our world?”
“Yes.”
“Then you must tell me. Maybe the Adepts had this in mind.”
“Maybe they did,” he agreed, realizing that if the Adepts had known about Alyc, they might have learned about him too. In that case, it would be pointless to conceal his mission longer. It would be better to come out into the open. Maybe the love potion was distorting his judgment, but it did seem to make sense. “But can we wait a little? Love is new to me, and I want to savor it before it is dashed.”
“No, you had better tell me now. I was never one to postpone either the best or the worst.”
“I am an agent of the Hectare.”
She shook her head. “But if you were, why would you tell me? If I said one word to my sister harpies...” She trailed off, her thought evidently bothering her.
“I did not tell you, or anyone else, not even the local Hectare administrators, because it is essential that no one be able to betray my mission. It is my assignment to infiltrate to the heart of the resistance, and then destroy it, so that there is no further threat to Hectare dominance. No coercion could have made me tell. But now I have to tell you, because our love can not be true if what you know of me is false. I am not just an android with a borrowed living brain. I am an android with a Hectare brain.”
She stared. “How can it help your mission to reveal this to me?”
“It can not. Now, if you will, assume your harpy form and kill me. I will not resist you.”
“Your love makes you do this?”
“Yes.” He smiled briefly. “I see now that the Hectare, having no direct knowledge of love, did not condition me against it. But I am a Hectare, a bug-eyed monster, in human form. Kill me now, because if you do not, you are unlikely to do it later.”
“I love a Hectare?” she asked, dumbfounded.
“You love the form of a human being. I knew you for what you were when love took me; you knew only a lie about me. You are not bound. Do your planet the most good you can. Kill me.”
“But if you love me, won’t you join my side? Maybe that’s what the Adepts want.”
“If you love me, will you join the Hectare?”
“I can’t do that!” she protested. “My world is my nature! All that I am, even the metal and plastic—I can not be untrue to that!”
“You have answered yourself,” he pointed out. “I am Hectare. I must serve my species.”
“If I do not kill you, you will betray our last source of resistance to the enemy?”
“Yes. That is my mission.”
“You can’t want to do that! You would not have told me, if—“
“I don’t want to do it, any more than you want to love your home world. It is in my nature to do it. Can you love me, knowing my nature and my mission?”
“If I see you about to betray my world, I will try to stop you,” she said.
“Is that an answer?”
“I do love you, despite what you have told me. I will not tell anyone, I will only try to stop you, and die if I fail.”
“You have no call to keep my secret. You should at least tell the Adepts.”
“I think they know. It makes it certain that you are the one the prophecy means. So I must believe that I am helping my world by keeping silent.”
Lysander found himself both surprised and unsurprised. If the Adepts truly believed the prophecy, then he could indeed be the one—because of what he was. Yet it had to require a great deal of faith on her part to trust in that. “Now we know we are enemies, or that we serve opposite sides. Can we still love each other?”