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Cherenkov?"
    "The cartoonist? Boston-born?"
    "Yeah. Lives on We Made It, nowadays."
    "My great-great grandmother. We visited her once."
    "She gave me a severe case of whiplash of the heart, long ago. You could be her twin."
    Teela's chuckle sent vibrations bouncing pleasantly along Louis's vertebrae. "I promise not to give you a case of whiplash of the heart if you'll tell me what it is."
    Louis thought about that. The phrase was his own, created to describe to himself what had happened to him at that time. He hadn't used it often, but he'd never had to explain it. They always knew what he meant.
    A calm, peaceful morning. If he went to sleep now he'd sleep for twelve hours. Fatigue poisons were giving him an exhaustion high. Teela's lap was a comfortable resting place for his head. Half of Louis's guests were women, and many of them had been his wives or lovers in other years. During the first phase of the party, he'd celebrated his birthday privately with three women, three who had been very important to him once, and vice versa.
    Three? Four? No, three. And now it seemed that he was immune to whiplash of the heart. Two hundred years had left too much scar tissue on his personality. And now he rested his head idly and comfortably in the lap of a stranger who looked exactly like Paula Cherenkov.
    "I fell in love with her," he said. "We'd known each other for years. We'd even dated. Then one night we got to talking, and wham. I was in love. I thought she loved me too.
    "We didn't go to bed that night -- together, I mean. I asked her to marry me. She turned me down. She was working on a career. She didn't have time to get married, she said. But we planned a trip to Amazon National Park, a sort of one week ersatz honeymoon.
    "The next week was all highs and lows. First, the high. I had the tickets and the hotel reservations. Did you ever fall so hard for someone that you decided you weren't worthy of him?"
    "No."
    "I was young. I spent two days convincing myself I was worthy of Paula Cherenkov. I did it, too. Then she called and cancelled the trip. I don't even remember why. She had some good reason.
    "I took her out to dinner a couple of times that week. Nothing happened. I tried to keep from pressuring her. Chances are she never guessed the pressure I was under. I was going up and down like a yo-yo. Then she lowered the boom. She liked me. We had fun together. We should be good friends.
    "I wasn't her type," said Louis. "I thought we were in love. Maybe she thought so too, for about a week. She wasn't cruel. She just didn't know what was going on."
    "But what was the whiplash?"
    Louis looked up at Teela Brown. Silver eyes looked blankly back, and Louis realized that she hadn't understood a word.
    Louis had dealt with aliens. By instinct or by training, he had learned to sense when some concept was too foreign to be absorbed or communicated. Here was a similar, fundamental gap in translation.
    What a monstrous gulf to separate Louis Wu and a twenty-year-old girl! Could he really have aged that drastically? And if so, was Louis Wu still human?
    Teela, blank-eyed, waited for enlightenment.
    "Tanj!" Louis cursed, and he rolled to his feet. Mud spots slid slowly down his robe and dripped off the hem.
    Nessus the puppeteer was holding forth on the subject of ethics. He interrupted himself (quite literally, speaking with both mouths, to the delight of his admirers) to answer Louis's query. No, there had been no word from his agents.
    Speaker-To-Animals, similarly surrounded, sprawled like a great orange hill across the grass. Two women were scratching at the for behind his ears. The odd kzinti ears, that could expand like pink chinese parasols or fold flat against the head, were spread wide; and Louis could see the design tattooed on each surface.
    "So," Louis called to him. "Was I not brilliant?"
    "You were," the kzin rumbled without stirring.
    Louis laughed inside himself. A kzin is a fearsome beast, yes? But who can fear a kzin