Midnight

and function was superbly regulated. Nature's work had been highly refined. Every organ, every system, every cell operated at a far higher efficiency, producing less waste, casting off waste faster than before, cleansing and rejuvenating itself every hour of the day. Grace knew that as well as he did.
    "I long for sleep," she said.
    "All you're feeling is the pull of habit."
    "Too many hours in the day now."
    "We'll fill up the time. The new world will be a busy one."
    "What're we going to do in this new world when it comes?"
    "Shaddack will tell us."
    "Meanwhile …"
    "Patience," he said.
    "I'm afraid."
    "Patience."
    "I yearn for sleep, hunger for it."
    "We don't need to sleep," he said, exhibiting the patience that he had encouraged in her.
    "We don't need sleep," she said cryptically, "but we need to sleep."
    They were both silent a while.
    Then she took his hand in hers, and moved it to her breasts. She was nude.
    He tried to pull away from her, for he was afraid of what might happen, of what had happened before, since the Change, when they had made love. No. Not love. They didn't make love any more. They had sex. There was no feeling beyond physical sensation, no tenderness or affection. They thrust hard and fast at each other, pushed and pulled, flexed and writhed against each other, striving to maximize the excitation of nerve endings. Neither of them cared for or about the other, only about himself, his own satisfaction. Now that their emotional life was no longer rich, they tried to compensate for that loss with pleasures of the senses, primarily food and sex. However, without the emotional factor, every experience was … hollow, and they tried to fill that emptiness by overindulgence: A simple meal became a feast; a feast became an unrestrained indulgence in gluttony. And sex degenerated into a frenzied, bestial coupling.
    Grace pulled him onto the bed.
    He did not want to go. He could not refuse. Literally could not refuse.
    Breathing hard, shuddering with excitement, she tore at his clothes and mounted him. She was making strange wordless sounds.
    Loman's excitement matched hers and swelled, and he thrust at her, into her, into, losing all sense of time and place, existing only to stoke the fire in his loins, stoke it relentlessly until it was an unbearable heat, heat, friction and heat, wet and hot, heat, stoking the heat to a flashpoint at which his entire body would be consumed in the flames. He shifted positions, pinning her down, hammering himself into her, into her, into, into, pulling her against him so roughly that he must be bruising her, but he didn't care. She reached back and clawed at him, her fingernails digging into his arm, drawing blood, and he tore at her, too, because the blood was exciting, the smell of the blood, the sweet smell, so exciting, blood, and it didn't matter that they wounded each other, for these were superficial wounds and would heal within seconds, because they were New People; their bodies were efficient; blood flowed briefly, and then the wounds closed, and they clawed again, again. What he really wanted—what they both wanted—was to let go, indulge the wild spirit within, cast off all the inhibitions of civilization, including the inhibition of higher human form, go wild, go savage, regress, surrender, because then sex would have an even greater thrill, a purer thrill; surrender, and the emptiness would be filled; they would be fulfilled, and when the sex was done they could hunt together, hunt and kill, swift and silent, sleek and swift, bite and tear, bite deep and hard, hunt and kill, sperm and then blood, sweet fragrant blood… .
    * * *
    For a while Loman was disoriented.
    When a sense of time and place returned to him, he first glanced at the door, realizing that it was ajar. Denny could have seen them if he'd come down the hall—surely had heard them but Loman couldn't make himself care whether they had been seen or heard. Shame and modesty were two more casualties of the Change.
    As he became fully oriented to the world around him, fear slipped into his heart, and he quickly touched himself—his face, arms, chest, legs—to be sure that he was in no way less than he ought to be. In the midst of sex, the wildness in him grew, and sometimes he thought that approaching orgasm he did change, regress, if only slightly. But upon regaining awareness, he never found evidence of backsliding.
    He was, however, sticky with blood.
    He switched on the bedside