"Earl?" She was insistent. "Drink, Earl. Drink!"

Light and music. Shine and glitter and the sweet, brittle tinkling of endlessly ringing crystal. The perfume assailed his senses and turned his yearning into an impatient fire.

Pheromones, chemical messengers emitted by her glands to trigger his masculine response. An aphrodisiac against which there was no defense. A demand impossible for him to resist.

"You want me, my darling," she whispered. "You burn with need. Hold me, Earl. Hold me!"

Hold and feel the warmth, the softness and comfort which came from the union of parts, the completeness, the merging. To yield to the prime dictate built into the basic fabric of his being; the survival urge which overrode all else.

To mate. To die while mating-but to mate! The compulsion to procreate in which the individual was nothing more than the carrier of the precious and selfish genes; seed to be sown in a blaze of physical heat and a desire which rose to a crescendo, obliterating all caution, all restraint. A need which turned Dumarest into a rutting beast rewarding him with the intoxication of ecstasy.

In a small room which had once known exotic delights Cyber Okos experienced an intoxication of a different kind. It was always the same after rapport had been broken with the massed brains of central intelligence and the engrafted Homochon elements within his skull sank back into normal quiescence. A time in which the machinery of his body began to realign itself with mental control while he drifted in a dark void sensing strange memories and new concepts, scraps of data, novel outlooks. The overflow from other, distant intelligences. Intriguing glimpses of other worlds which he would never see but which were as real as any he had known.

A familiar experience-Okos had long been a servant of the Cyclan, but this time there had been something new.