“Oh, sure, yes,” Mejox said. “But for right now if I see one more big furry coat—”
“It ought to make you feel at home, fossil-boy,” I said. As our friendship had renewed, so had the teasing.
“Somewhere out there on that planet,” Mejox said, “there is an animal with long ears. Preferably a smelly animal with unpleasant habits and long ears. And I think it’s a priority to find one, so that I won’t be at a conversational disadvantage.”
I laughed; Soikenn sighed. “When you two are on your way back to Nisu, promise me you’ll both spend the last ten years practicing not talking that way. I know it’s all a game to you, you’ve grown up equal and comfortable with each other all your lives, but—”
‘“It could get us killed back home,’” we said in unison.
She laughed and put an arm around both of us, “I have said that pretty often, haven’t I? I’m sorry. Anyway, we have a hundred more images to process, if you aren’t tired.”
“Never,” Mejox said. “Insane but not tired, that’s us.” We worked over the pictures silently for a long time; again there was nothing but desert, rock, ice, and the limb of one tall tree. In one picture from a tree, we did find one small animal being swallowed by a long, thin, legless one. At first we thought the thin, legless one was just another tree limb. “I’ve never seen anything like that no-legger before, but it’s creepy,” Mejox said. “I hope there’s nothing big enough to do that to us.”
“Oh, if there is, you have four expendable old people to try it out on,” Soikenn said.
Mejox snorted. “Osepok is too tough to swallow, Poiparesis isn’t enough meat, Kekox is bitter, and I like you. Let’s get the last images done-”
I was about to leave them to finish the set out together—I usually did, since Soikenn and Mejox had a lot more patience for the fiddling process of imaging than I did—when I saw something forming in one image and stuck around.
The picture came from a probe that had landed in the desert in the north part of the Hook. Where we had collected days and days of pictures of sand, rock, and sky, suddenly here was a big animal—almost a bodylength and a half long, probably more than a bodylength tall at the shoulder, and the ugliest, most graceless beast that had ever gone on four legs. It had an apparent huge upward crook in its spine, a strange swaying neck, a long head with thick lips, and ridiculously big feet on silly long thin legs. It seemed to be covered with long matted brown hair. It was staring at the probe with an expression of such vacant stupidity that all of us burst out laughing.
“You’re in luck, Zahmekoses,” Mejox said, “this one has short ears, too.”
* * * *
More probes landed on Setepos. It was still more than half a year until we got there, but now we were entering the inner part of Kousapex’s surrounding cloud of cometoids; we even took a look at one through our telescopes and radars once, but it looked exactly like every other cometoid, a soft ball of snow with rocks and chunks of iron in it.
Shortly after that, one of our probes came down in an open meadow in the middle of a forest, near a stream, in the eastern part of the Bug. We cataloged dozens more animals in a short time. To Mejox’s delight, one smallish animal that hopped on its hind legs turned out to have long ears; he promptly named it a “zahmekoses” in my honor. A few days later a probe in the equatorial part of the Triangle, hanging from the tree where its parachute had caught, sent us a picture of a hair-covered, flat-faced creature which looked for all the world like a freeze-dried half-scale Palathian except that it hung by its long tail from the branch; I named it the “mejox,” returning the favor. The girls told us that if we ever named anything after them, we’d be sorry.
We were now mostly past the worst of puberty; it was no worse than being occasionally irritable and depressed. Mejox and Otuz’s dark adult fur had come in, and Mejox had a really rather splendid top crest. My adult muscles (such as they were—even for a Shulathian I was always going to be thin) were coming in, and Priekahm’s hips had widened. By the time we landed, if we hadn’t been given reversible sterilizations, we’d have been ready to have children; as it was Priekahm and Mejox did a lot of “practicing,” making a lot of noise about it, and Otuz and I very quietly were doing the same.
Both the Palathian adults were outraged by Otuz and me, but only annoyed by Priekahm and Mejox, however much they believed in equality in principle. If Priekahm was willing to be a concubine (or less than one, since there would be no ceremony), it was after all just “part of the nature of Shulathian females, they’ve got to have all the sex they can and their own males can’t keep up” as we heard Osepok say— timing it so that Soikenn would heat it. So although they wished Mejox would “get serious” and form a couple with Otuz, they generally just regarded the situation as a typical young Palathian male having fun before settling down. What it might mean to Priekahm, I think, never occurred to them.
Poiparesis and Soikenn were humiliated by it all, of course, since from their view Priekahm was behaving like the stereotype. And Mejox and Priekahm seemed to go out of their way to be noisy and public about their affection.
The situation was very different for Otuz and me. I don’t know what arguments were used or who was on what side, but it was clear that all of the adults were very uncomfortable about a Shulathian male paired off with a Palathian female. Kekox barely spoke to me at all. Osepok remained close to Otuz and was always very carefully polite to me, but I could feel her anger.
Soikenn tried so hard to be friendly and accepting that she made all four of us children uncomfortable, but at least we could get along with her whenever we weren’t in couples; one on one, or with just the girls or just the boys, she was usually fine, but when we were in couples—which was almost always—in some ways she was worse than any of the other adults because she tried, which let us find out what she was actually thinking.
She never tried to speak to either Otuz or to Mejox about the cross-racial connections, which told us more plainly than words that she didn’t think our Palathian friends could be trusted. That alone would have been enough to alienate me and Priekahm, but worse yet was that whenever Soikenn spoke to us it was in two voices. She would keep telling us that the idea of mating across racial lines didn’t bother her (when obviously it did) and that she was only concerned with what people on Nisu would say or might do after we got back—as if fifty-seven years into the future was even really worth thinking about. And when she said “People on Nisu will say that...” she might as well have said “I think ...” because that’s how it seemed to us—with her constant talk of Priekahm being regarded as a slut and as having disappointed all of Shulath by becoming a concubine, and her equally frequent reminding me that I was apt to be killed by a mob of angry Palathians on my return.
In many ways it was easier to endure Captain Osepok’s reaction to it all—which was to pretend that she heard and saw nothing, even when she would sometimes catch Otuz and me fooling around in the lab. Still, even the barest acknowledgment would have helped us feel like we were still accepted, and we never saw any acknowledgment from Osepok.
Kekox stayed silent, glaring, and angry, for many eightdays, speaking to none of the younger generation. After a time we almost forgot he had ever talked to us, for if at all possible he left any chamber we entered and seemed to be spending as much time as he could in his own chamber.
Then during one second work shift, he went into the gym when Priekahm was in there, working out by herself. Later she said she was surprised to see him at all, but even more surprised when he spoke to her; her first thought was that perhaps he wanted to make amends and be friends.
Then he pushed her against the wall, said, “Let’s see what Mejox sees in you,” and reached between her legs.
“Stop it!”
“I know you like it. I hear the noises you make with Mejox every day. I’m just getting a share for myself—”
“I like it with Mejox! Not with you! Stop it!”
“You just
have romantic notions because he’s your first, so you think it’s him, and not what you’re doing.” Kekox’s voice was calm, warm, and friendly, Priekahm said later, even as he pinned her hands over her head and began to stroke her copulatory organ. “You and I both know you like it. You just relax now and—”
Priekahm screamed, bit him on the shoulder, and got a hand free to smash into his face. He fell backward, clutching his bitten shoulder. “Creator burn out your womb, I only wanted some fun—”
Soikenn burst in, saw everything at once, and ran to get between them. “Leave her alone!” Her shout was even louder than Priekahm’s scream, and that brought the rest of us.
Kekox was panting and angry, so much so that my first thought was that he was going to spring on Soikenn. “I just want some of what Mejox has been getting all the time. And if it was such a big deal to you, Soikenn, you’d still be taking care of my needs—”
Soikenn all but spat on him. “Is that what we are to you? Slaves? Breeding animals?” She turned to face the rest of the crew. “Well, you’ve all guessed it I’m sure. Kekox just tried to force Priekahm. He seems to think that Shulathian females should all be at his service all the time.”
Kekox seemed about to reply, but Poiparesis grabbed him by the elbow and said, “You’d do better not to say anything right now.” There was something about his tone—not angry, not challenging, but completely firm—that seemed to take all the fight out of Kekox, and he left with Poiparesis. They were in Poiparesis’s chamber for a tenth of a day; occasionally we could hear Kekox’s raised, angry voice coming from there, but mostly we heard the endless reasonable drone of Poiparesis, sounding the way he always did when he was trying to find a way to peace.
But that was later. While the rest of us were still trying to figure out what was happening, Soikenn dragged Priekahm off to her chamber, and the captain took Mejox up to the cockpit.
Priekahm said afterwards that Soikenn gave her an endless lecture of the familiar—about how she had brought this attack on herself by her carrying on with Mejox, that if she couldn’t see that Palathian males were just animals from Mejox’s behavior, surely this would convince her. She used a lot of old Shulathian standard phrases like “living up to our freedom” and “working through an unjust world to a better one” and the old “maybe in a hundred years” phrase.
After a while she seemed to run out of energy, and Priekahm said, “I’m ready to live free now. And I can. There are just four of you in my way. That’s all. Why don’t you get out of it and let me live the way you say you believe in?”
Soikenn’s voice was flat and bitter. “You got to where you are today because you stood on the shoulders of generations past—Shulathians who were conquered, robbed, enslaved, and fought their way to equality. You owe it to your race—”
“And do you suppose Kekox owes it to his race to keep me in my place?”
Soikenn didn’t speak for a long time, then finally said, “Look. Don’t take this wrong. We know people are equal. But like and equal are not the same thing. Palathians aren’t like us. And one way they aren’t is that when it comes to sex they are animals, and mean animals at that. What you just saw is typical Palathian male behavior—”
“Is that how Kekox took you?” Priekahm asked. Soikenn swung a hard slap at her, but Priekahm caught the blow before it landed and forced the older female’s arm back to her side. “No more of that, either. You’d better get used to the idea that I’m grown up now. If you had so little respect for him, if you always thought he was a dangerous animal, why did you have sex with Kekox for so many years?”
Soikenn was silent; Priekahm said later that it was at that moment that she knew that she had won, but not what she had won. Nevertheless she pressed her advantage. “Now understand me. By the time we return to Nisu—if we ever do—everything may have changed anyway. You won’t be there to see it. And we’ll be old. And we are not going to live our whole lives to fit the judgment of people who will see us when our lives are almost over. And especially we are not going to drag your old stupid ideas about how the races should relate into our lives!”
“I’m sorry I tried to slap you,” Soikenn said.
Priekahm said that even though she knew Soikenn hadn’t really listened to a word, she choked down her rage and said, “I don’t like the way this makes me feel, Soikenn, but I can’t let you or the other adults treat us this way anymore. You wanted to make new, better people. Well, that’s what I am. That’s what my friends are. Kekox’s response is more honest—at least he just hates us and tries to hurt us, which means he sees us. But we don’t exist to be what you want us to be. We just exist. We are what we are. You worked hard to make us without prejudices—now you’ll just have to live with people who won’t put up with your prejudices. Is that clear?”
Soikenn gestured assent. It looked like she might cry, so Priekahm left then. When she was telling us about it later, Otuz asked what Soikenn was crying about, and Priekahm just made a noncommittal gesture and said, “Probably everything. People do cry, you know, when the whole world turns upside down. Even when it needs to be turned upside down.”
I have no idea what Poiparesis said to Kekox in his chamber while all this was going on. Otuz and I just did our work in the lab and avoided conversation of any kind. Mejox spent the time doing piloting drills with Captain Osepok in the cockpit; he said, “She kept running me through all the standard drills the ship’s computer had, trying to get my deviation from perfect down to zero, but when I would miss, she’d just say ‘better next time’ or ‘that’s all right, it’s the stumble before the big leap’ or things like that.”
Toward the end of the practice, with the last meal of the day drawing near, Mejox said, Osepok had said, “A lot of times when you just don’t want to think about something, when there is nothing you can do and the waiting is just unbearable, it helps to demand a lot from yourself, to do or learn more than you thought you could, and just let your concentration get you through the bad time. It’s how I’ve lived for years.” Then—and his voice had a tone of awe in it—she had ripped off a perfect simulated landing, right down to a touchdown with zero force.
“And she said,” Mejox added, ‘“See what enough unhappiness can do for you—I hope you never have to develop this much skill.’ You know, I think she has probably been practicing toward perfection ever since Kekox started with Soikenn, all those years ago. Captain Osepok is probably the only person in the universe who can do perfect landings ...”
We had been sitting in Mejox’s chamber—a tiny space, but at least we could close the door—and comparing notes, trying to figure out what we would do now. But now the bell sounded for the last meal of the day, and we all looked at each other uneasily.
Someone tapped on the door. Otuz opened it—it was Poiparesis. Without being asked, he stepped inside and closed the door. “I think we’ve had the last incident of that kind,” he said without preliminaries. “Of course things are still very tense. And I know that you were entirely in the right and Kekox was entirely in the wrong, Priekahm, but I don’t think you’ll get an apology from him immediately. I thought you should all know that all the adults are planning to behave themselves at dinner.”
“We’re not going to cause an uproar,” I said. “As long as it’s understood that Kekox was the cause of all the trouble.”
“Understood by me, and I think by the captain, anyway,” Poiparesis said. “Maybe even by Kekox, and I’m working on that.” We noticed he didn’t mention Soikenn, but no one brought it up. “And everyone has agreed that we’ll keep a lid on it. I was hoping you would be willing to do the same.”
“Zahmekoses already said so,” Mejox said.
Poiparesis gestured agreement. “So he did. All right, then. Thank you.”
At evening meal all the adults were very subdued, and all of us were very nervous, but speaking.
That evening, I was studying some distant-star gravimetrics in the smaller computer lab when Kekox came in. H
e sat down, looked at me, and said, “Well.”
“Hello,” I said. I kept working. If he had anything to say, I should probably let him say it, but I wasn’t expecting anything worth hearing.
He sat a long moment, then said, “I just want to ask you something. Poiparesis has assured me that it’s something I have no business asking and that you will take offense, but it is something I badly want to know.” His voice was too quiet and reasonable—he must have been extremely upset. The computer lab was dead still. The only motion was the pale blue curves on the screen, marking the rise and fall of distant star gravity as the ship traversed the space between the stars.
Every curve was as smooth as theory predicted it should be. All the animations showed smooth rise and fall. I let the moments click away, watched the distant stars roll over and over through the pale blue curtain of braking photons, and listened to Kekox shifting in his seat. Probably I had some hope he wouldn’t talk at all.
It was so long before he spoke that I almost jumped when he did. “I just want to know . . . This, uh, involvement between you and Otuz. Is it a serious one? I mean, since Priekahm and Mejox are so protective about her . . . being exclusive . . . Poiparesis insists on calling it her ‘chastity’ . . . well, is your reason for all this you have been doing with Otuz, perhaps, that you don’t have a normal sexual outlet with your own kind? Or are you perhaps being deliberately offensive, either to me or to Mejox? Or is it some kind of. . . well, some kind of perverse attraction for . . . well, I just wanted to know why.”
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