Quick and unambiguous, the answer came back: “A male.”

Reatur was surprised at how relieved he felt.

Still, finding out that one human was respectably male did not mean they all were. The domain master thought about the two most often in company with Irv and picked one of their names. “Is Sarah a male or a mate?”

The long pause before Irv answered told Reatur what he had to know. He felt his arms droop. Irv must have realized there was a problem, for even when he did reply at last, his voice was much softer than Reatur was used to from him. “A mate,” he said.

“I was right, clanfather,” Ternat said.

“So you were, eldest.” Reatur’s voice was as heavy as Ternat’s. Intellectually imagining something was a long way from having it confirmed, especially when it was something as hard to believe as this. “Are any other humans mates?” the domain master asked Irv.

He had to try that one a couple of times before he was sure Irv understood it. The answer he finally got rocked him from mouth to feet. Half the humans were mates.

“Sarah and Pat and Louise?” Ternat echoed, as stunned as Reatur.

“Do you use them?” the domain master asked. That required more explanations before Irv saw what he meant, and then even more as the human tried to respond. Human ideas of society left Reatur even more confused than he had been; he had not thought that possible. He got the salient point, though. “You do mate with them.’?”

“Yes,” Irv said.

Reatur forgot his own earlier speculation. “How could you bring them along with you, then, to die far from more of their own kind?” he asked, appalled at the human’s callousness.

Despite Irv’s growing fluency with his language, Reatur took a while to grasp that his wild guesses had been somewhere close to right. From what the human said, his people’s mates did not necessarily bud when they coupled-”What’s the point of coupling, then?” Ternat said; Reatur hushed him-and did not die when they budded.

“How can that be?” the domain master asked. “The blood-”

“We made different, people and humans,” Irv began.

“A good thing, too. I wouldn’t want to look like that,” Ternat said. Though he privately agreed, Reatur waved his eldest to silence again.

Luckily, the interruption had not thrown Irv far off stride.

“Different inside, not just outside.”

“Different how?” Reatur persisted. When buds fell from a mate, they left holes. Blood had to gush through holes, he thought. Maybe human mates did not drop six buds at a time. But even if-wildly unlikely notion-they only dropped one, that should be plenty.

“Ask Sarah how different,” Irv said. “Sarah knows of bodies.”

“All right, I’ll do that.” Humans’ characters were still hard for Reatur to gauge, but Sarah struck him as being a very straightforward and competent male… The domain master flailed his arms-not a male! “Ask a mate?”

Irv spread his hand, a take-it-or-leave-it gesture humans used. “Sarah knows,” he said. “Sarah knows of bodies, well and not well.”

“A doctor?” Reatur said.

“Doctor.” Irv repeated the word several times.

Reatur used the same trick when he was trying to remember something. He was glad to notice any point of similarity with humans, now that this gaping gorge of difference had opened up. The idea of learning from a mate still jolted him, so he asked, “Do any other humans know of bodies?” “Pat does,” Irv said after a moment’s pause.

Wondering at his hesitation didn’t the fool human know what his friends were good for? the domain master said, “All right, I’ll ask him.” Then he stopped-from what Irv had said, Pat was no more male than Sarah. “I’ll ask one of them,” Reatur said lamely. One of these days, he added to himself.

“Irv, you should have spoken sooner of this-difference- between humans and people.” Ternat sounded accusing. Reatur had trouble blaming him, but hoped Irv could not read his tone.

If the human did, he hid it well. “How?” he asked. “You thought us like you, yes?”

“Yes,” Reatur said. “Of course,” Ternat agreed.

“We thought you like us,” Irv said. “Till Biyal, we thought you like us. After Biyal-“ The human stopped.

Reatur wished humans really changed colors or did something he could gauge to show what they were feelin8. The movements of their strangely placed mouths told a bit, but not enough, at least not for him. He would have given a lot right then to be inside Irv’s head, to know which words the human was choosing and which he was casting aside.

Irv finally resumed, “After Biyal, we knew you not like us. We not know what you think when you know you not like us, so we not say. Now you know, now we talk. Yes, Ternat?”

“Yes,” Reatur’s eldest said reluctantly. The domain master made sure he did not let his eyestalks wiggle. Irv had done a neat job of turning things around on Ternat. However weird humans were-and the more he learned of them, the weirder they got-they were not stupid. He would have to make sure he remembered that.

Ternat got the point, too. “From how far away do you come, to be so strange?” he asked.

“Very far away.” It was all the humans ever said.

Now that Reatur was beginning to get a feel for both how odd and how closemouthed they were, he wondered what surprises lurked behind those three self-evident words. “I believe it,” he said, and for the moment let it go at that.

“Fralk, one of the humans is outside,” a retainer said. “He wishes to speak with you.”

“Do you know what he wants, Panjand?” Fralk asked.

“No, eldest of eldest,” Panjand said stolidly.

Fralk suspected that the servant had not bothered to ask. He felt the muscles around his mouth tightening in annoyance. He did not have time for humans now, even if he was Hogram’s liaison with them. The domain master had given him enough other things to do to keep any three males busy.

“Will you see him, eldest of eldest, or shall I send him away?”

Panjand asked.

“I’ll see him,” Fralk said mournfully. He put his pen beside the cured hide on which he had been writing and stepped away from the table. “Put a few more drops of porjuice into that bowl of isigot blood to keep it from clotting,” he told Panjand. “I’ll finish up these notes in a while, after I’m done with the human.”

Panjand widened himself. “Yes, eldest of eldest.”

Fralk, meanwhile, was gathering effusiveness around himself as if it were one of the outer skins humans wore. He opened the door Panjand had shut. “Zdrast‘ye,” he said, and then peered with three eyes at the human standing in front of him. “Sergei Konstantinovich,” he finished after a barely perceptible pause.

“Hello, Fralk,” the human replied in the Skarmer tongue.

“How are you?”

His accent, Fralk thought, was improving. “Well, thank you. What can I do for you today?” He discarded some of his expansive manner; Sergei was as businesslike as Hogram.

The human proved his instinct right, coming straight to the point. “You use axes, knives from us to fight, all, Omalo across, ah, J’6 Ervis Gorge?”

“Well, of course,” Fralk said. “I told, ah, Shota all about that.”

“Not use for that,” Sergei said.

“What?” Fralk said, though he understood the human perfectly well. “Why not? You traded them to us; they are ours now. What business do you have telling us what to do with them?”

Sergei hesitated, then said, “Humans-more humans-across Ervis Gorge.”

Fralk felt his arms flap limply against his body as he took that news in. Humans were so strange that he had never imagined there being more of them. “How many more humans?” he got out at last, wondering if all the lands he knew were going to be overrun by the funny looking creatures. It was not a pleasant idea; he would not wish a plague of humans even on the Omalo. On second thought, maybe he would.

“Six.” Sergei held up fingers so Fralk could not misunderstand him.