It was a warm evening, more humid than Ulanbat, and the faxpad was centered in a grassy meadow surrounded by low hills. Twenty feet beyond the pad circle stood an ancient two-person, one-wheeled, open carriole, with an equally ancient servitor floating above the driver’s nook and a single voynix standing between the wooden tongues. It had been more than a decade since Daeman had visited Ardis Hall, but now he remembered the barbaric inconvenience of all this. Absurd, not having one’s home on a faxnode.

“Daeman Uhr?” queried the servitor, although it obviously knew who he was.

Daeman grunted and held out his battered gladstone. The tiny servitor floated closer, took the luggage in its padded cusps, and loaded it in the carriole’s canvas boot while Daeman climbed aboard. “Are we waiting for others?”

“You are the final guest,” replied the servitor. It hummed into its hemispherical niche and clicked a command; the voynix clamped onto the carriole tongues and began jogging toward the setting sun, its rusty peds and the carriole’s wheel raising very little dust on the gravel roadway. Daeman settled back on the green leather, rested both hands on his walking cane, and enjoyed the ride.

He had come not to visit Ada but to seduce her. This is what Daeman did—seduce young women. That and collect butterflies. The fact that Ada was in her mid-twenties and Daeman was approaching his Second Twenty made no difference to him. Neither did the fact that Ada was his first cousin. Incest taboos had eroded away long ago. “Genetic drift” was not even a concept to Daeman, but if it had been, he would have trusted the firmary to fix it. The firmary fixed everything.

Daeman had been visiting Ardis Hill ten years earlier in his role as cousin—and trying to seduce Ada’s other cousin, Virginia, out of sheer boredom since Virginia had all the attractiveness of a voynix—when he had first seen Ada nude.