by Larry Niven
She laughed. Still straddling him, she ran her hands through her hair. “I’m young. I’ll heal.”
“You used an aphrodisiac on me.”
“Yes. Aphrodisiac. The pheromones were Peerssa’s suggestion.”
“What? Peerssa? I’ll kill him! He—and you! You used me like a bundle of reflexes, the pair of you!” He wanted to cry. “Not like something that thinks. It’s just like that damn cane.”
“Forget the damn cane! We have to have children. We’re the last ones. What do you want from me, Corbell?”
“I don’t know. Ask me when my head starts working again. I want Peerssa dead, I want Pierce the checker dead. Would he kill himself if you told him to?”
“He did what he had to. He has to make the State again. Corbell, isn’t this better than the cane? Isn’t it?”
“All right, it’s better than the cane.”
“Then what do you want? Will you mate with me without the pheromones? Shall I tell Peerssa to follow your orders?”
He wanted (he discovered) Mirabelle. He wanted the old ritual: dinner at a new restaurant recommended by friends, and brandy Alexanders afterward, and the king-size bed. They’d bought a water bed a little before the cancer came to tear up his belly. Now here he was on his back in cloud-rug, in a corridor outside an elevator, with the strangest of strange women. “Not your fault,” he said. “I want to go home.”
She shook her head. “I want to go home, too. We can’t. We have to build our home again.”
They were already doing that, Corbell thought. Maybe they’d even do it well. He said, “Even love stories aren’t the same. Pheromones! Jesus, what a way to save the world. Will you please fix that translator so it talks to me in your voice?”
“All right. Tomorrow,” said an old man’s voice.
“And put me in control of Peerssa, if you value my sanity. I’m sick of him running my life.”
“Now?”
“Tomorrow.” One more thing he would have liked to do. He would have liked to destroy the cane by smashing it repeatedly into Peerssa’s brain case. But they might need Peerssa and the cane against the Boys, if they came too soon.
So he rolled aside and looked for his loincloth…and then, changing his mind, he leaned close to Mirelly-Lyra and inhaled deeply. Uranus must have passed by now, and Earth was on its way into a wider orbit, and world-saving could wait until tomorrow. Maybe the pheromone perfume could be used judiciously, in much smaller quantities…
