'Yes?'
Hubert had remembered how the two had looked at him, and understood now that they had been considering him as someone intended to share their condition, understood, too what the Abbot must have wanted from them that evening. But there was no reason to explain this to Anthony. 'Just that they seemed sickly. Unsound, not...'
'That's no consequence of their alteration. Their fatness may have indeed come from overeating. It must be a temptation to them.'
'Why?'
'My dear Hubert, do please forgive me and sit down. Now, may I tell you anything more?'
'Yes, Anthony, if you will. I want to know about mating.'
'You said you knew enough.'
'Enough for papa, not for me.'
'Very well. Say how I can—'
'What happens? I said that about the alteration, didn't I? This is not so different. I've been told what goes where, and that something comes, and that the something will make a baby. But what I don't understand is why-I mean, why folk do it, why they want to do it. I see that they must if the human race shall continue, which is God's will. But then, as every-body knows, they'll mate even when they must wish as hard as they can that there'll be no baby.'
'True.' Anthony looked up from the drawerful of cravattas he was turning over. 'It's an instinct from our nature, and wonderfully strong. It doesn't touch our reason, so we can't talk of why as we do in other matters. Consider that we eat because if we fail to we die, but it isn't that that makes us eat, it's hunger, a feeling in us.'
'Is this like hunger, a feeling in us that makes us uncomfortable? Like thirst?'
'Well...'
'Does it grow until we can think of nothing else?'
'No.'
'I shall never understand.'
'I'm sorry, my dear, but I might as easily explain the colour red to a blind man.'
'So it appears. We might do better with what else I have to ask, if you're not tired of questions.'
'Of course not. Say, then.'
'You've done it, haven't you, Anthony? You've mated? Let's be straight—you've fucked a girl? I'll say nothing to papa, by Our Lady's crown.'
'See you keep your oath. Yes, I have.'
'So. Try to explain to me how it is.'
Anthony had been carefully tying a pale green cravatta at the looking-glass on his toilet-table; now he stopped doing this and turned to face his brother. 'Isn't it best that I don't?' he asked gently. 'It's a part of life that you can never meet with.'
'Then I must discover as much as I can from one who has met with it.'
'In Heaven's name, why? It could only—'
'I want to know where I'm placed. As far as I can. I beg you, dear Anthony.'
'If you must... Simply, it's the most intense pleasure the human body can feel.'
'Pleasure?'
'Of course pleasure. Why so surprised?'
'I'm not surprised. At least, I've heard it said before. But I can't-'
'No mystery there at all.' Anthony spoke sharply, but Hubert recognised that the sharpness was not directed at him. 'They do their best to keep it hidden.'
'Who are they?'
'Everyone in our polity. The priests, the accursed friars and monks—though they see to it they're in no ignorance themselves. The preceptors, even the surgeons. All those set in authority over us. The whole of Church and State in every land throughout the world.'
Hubert said nothing, not wanting to prolong this unhelpful digression.
'They conduct a tyranny and call it the Kingdom of God on Earth. Oh, let it go—there's one place they can never reach. That pleasure is safe.'
'Does it happen all the time, the pleasure? During the...'
'There is some all the time, but the big pleasure's at the end. When, as you said, something comes.'
'How long does it last?'
'A few seconds.'
'Oh.'
