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graces. At the same time, he was aware that he was speaking to a hologram. A completely convincing one, but a midair laser projection all the same.
She reached up one hand and laid it gently on her breast. "Feels nothing," she said. "No nerves."
Tears came to his eyes. Self-pity, of course. That he would probably never have a woman more substantial than this one. If he tried to touch one, his caresses would be crude pawing. Sometimes, when he wasn't careful, he drooled and couldn't even feel it. What a lover.
"But I have eyes," she said. "And ears. I see everything in all the Hundred Worlds. I watch the sky through a thousand telescopes. I overhear a trillion conversations every day." She giggled a little. "I'm the best gossip in the universe."
Then, suddenly, she stood up, grew larger, closer, so that she only showed from the waist up, as if she had moved closer to an invisible camera. Her eyes burned with intensity as she stared right at him. "And you're a parochial schoolboy who's never seen anything but one town and one forest in his life."
"Don't get much chance to travel," he said.
"We'll see about that," she answered. "So. What do you want to do today?"
"What's your name?" he asked.
"You don't need my name," she said.
"How do I call you?"
"I'm here whenever you want me."
"But I want to know," he said.
She touched her ear. "When you like me well enough to take me with you wherever you go, then I'll tell you my name."
Impulsively, he told her what he had told no one else. "I want to leave this place," said Miro. "Can you take me away from Lusitania?"
She at once became coquettish, mocking. "And we only just met! Really, Mr. Ribeira, I'm not that sort of girl."
"Maybe when we get to know each other," Miro said, laughing.
She made a subtle, wonderful transition, and the woman on the screen was a lanky feline, sprawling sensuously on a tree limb. She purred noisily, stretched out a limb, groomed herself. "I can break your neck with a single blow from my paw," she whispered; her tone of voice suggested