Their love-making was so passionate that their lips remained constantly joined, and all of the tender explorations which accompany love were accomplished with the artful movements of hands that clasped and unclasped and darted with an eagerness that could not be restrained, to the most secret citadels of Aphrodite, and the pleasure gardens of Eros enshrined.
When the pulsing warm moment came when two become one the night seemed to hold its breath and only the woman's wild cry of ecstasy broke the stillness of the sleeping forest.
FOURTEEN
The long, blank-walled anteroom of the mating center was crowded to capacity with love-privileged men and women who had been granted short emergency leaves and were waiting to have their identification disks checked.
Teleman and Alicia stood very quietly in one corner of the large room, forcing themselves to remain calm and hardly glancing at the men and women about them.
They did not even allow their thoughts to dwell on the final stages of their almost miraculous escape—their unobserved ascent to a travel strip on the far side of the forest in the early hours of the morning, their journey on the strip in garments new to them, their self-consciousness when they glanced down at the insignia which proclaimed that their destination was a mating center and that they could walk openly in the sunlight as lovers, and pass a security guard or a Monitor without fearing that they would be stopped and questioned.
Had they wished they could have even paused and embraced openly on the strip, exchanging light, casual caresses, but that they had not done. Their love was neither light nor casual and the memory of the fulfillment which had come to them above a star-mirroring pool of still water was still too vivid and glorious to permit them to engage in the more superficial varieties of love-play.
Those varieties would occur later as a natural accompaniment of love, for even the deepest and most genuine love must have its lighter aspects, but for the moment they had been content to walk quietly on the strip hand in hand, their eyes shining with a memory-glow that had caused a few of the pedestrians to turn and stare at them in envy which they had not attempted to disguise.
They waited now with the glow still in their eyes, while the check-in security guard placed identity disks into a machine which quickly tested their genuineness and ejected them with a faint, whirring sound.