“Sure you will. So let’s look again at what you’re objecting to on your own world, the way warriors deal with their women when they break the rules.”

“It’s demeaning, humiliating-”

“But absolutely painless,” Martha cut in. “There are worlds where lawbreakers are still executed. Worlds where they are still imprisoned for life. There are some worlds where the skin is whipped off their backs. And some worlds where advanced means are used to inflict excruciating pain without leaving a single mark. And that’s just a few of the little niceties you’ll find out there when you go hunting for your ideal mate. In comparison, what the Sha-Ka’ani do can only be considered merciful and harmless.”

“There are also worlds out there that aren’t so violent, worlds that don’t have so many ridiculous rules either.”

“You’ve been raised not to break the rules. Challen saw to that. So I don’t know what you’re really worried about.”

“Yes, you do, and I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”

As usual, Martha listened only to what she wanted to hear. “Did you ever wonder why your mother puts up with those punishments you’re so terrified of, that and everything else that she still objects to on that world?”

“Because she loves my father.”

“There’s that, yes, but there’s also the fact that he knocked her socks off the first time she saw him, and he continues to knock them off every time he takes her to bed. To have something like that to look forward to for the rest of your life is worth putting up with a few things you don’t like. And maybe what you don’t like isn’t even as bad as you think it is.”

“It’s not only that,” Shanelle mumbled.

“What was that? Did I hear that we’ve wasted all this time on only half of the problem?”

“Cut it out, Martha. If you know so much, then you know what the main problem is, and there isn’t any of your high-tech logic or reasoning to refute the fact that warriors don’t feel love. They feel lust, and a measure of caring for their lifemates, but they don’t experience love like women do. And before you throw it in my face that my father does, I happen to know how hard mother had to fight with him to get him to realize it and admit to it. And besides, father is an exception. There is no other warrior like him. Even my brother admits he doesn’t understand what father feels for mother. He’s never experienced it and he’s only half Sha-Ka‘ ani.”

Silence. Depressing silence. Why had she thought that Martha might be able to dispute that glaring fact of Sha-Ka’ani life? Martha had been studying and analyzing warriors for the past twenty years. If she couldn’t reassure Shanelle at this point, then there was no reassurance to be found. And Shanelle was not going to hook up with a man for life who could only offer her great sex-sharing and a little fondness. She wanted more. She wanted what her mother had found, but she wouldn’t find it on Sha-Ka’an.

“I don’t know about you, Shani, but I’m so excited about getting to see your world, I can barely contain it.”

Caris looked it, too, Shanelle noted, but she didn’t understand why her friend felt this way. Sha-Ka’an was not a world she would want to visit if she didn’t have a reason to. But she supposed a visit there became so enticing because it was forbidden to the average citizens of other worlds.

Caris confirmed that by adding for Yari’s and Cira’s benefit, “It was open for a while to tourism after Shani’s mother first discovered it. But a few idiots didn’t obey the local laws and ruined it for the rest of us. Now the planet is closed up tight with one of those Global Shields that prevent even the most sophisticated spacecraft from entering the atmosphere outside the designated Spaceport. If you want to land, you have to have permission from the Visitor’s Center, and you better be a Trade Ambassador or in a dire emergency, or you can forget it. Only the ambassadors are allowed there now, and even they can’t go any farther than the Visitor’s Center. Without your invitation, Shani, we would never have had this opportunity. I hope you know how much we appreciate it.”

Shanelle felt uncomfortable with that kind of gratitude. All she’d done was invite a few of her new friends home for a free vacation, since graduates didn’t have enough earned Exchange Tokens to afford to go off-planet, while she had a Transport Rover at her disposal, a spaceship big enough to accommodate a thousand people comfortably. It didn’t even need a crew, since Martha was capable of running the entire ship.

But Shanelle had invited only the three girls, Caris, Yari, and Cira. The two young men, Jadd and Dren Ce Rostt, Yari’s first and only sex-sharer, had invited themselves along, Jadd for deluded reasons and Dren for almost the same reason, because he couldn’t bear to be parted from Yari, sex-sharing being new and apparently wonderful for both of them.

Actually, they were inseparable, and they had been having a great deal of fun in the two weeks since they had left Kystran, and that could be taken both ways, since one of the Sha-Ka’ani expressions for lovemaking was “having fun.” It certainly made Caris and Cira jealous, and both had remarked that they intended to pounce on the first males they came across as soon as they landed. They had also both tried to interest Jadd in a little sex-sharing, but he had decided that if he couldn’t have Shanelle, he wouldn’t have anyone.

Shanelle had also been feeling a little jealous of Yari’s happiness, but not as much as the other two girls, since she didn’t know what she was missing out on, whereas they did. It was expected that every cadet would spend the first night after graduation getting acquainted with sex-sharing, and that was exactly what this group had done, all except Shanelle. She had spent graduation night with Garr Ce Bernn, who was presently in his third ten-year term as Director of Kystran. It was Garr who had got Shanelle into the World Discovery class as a favor to Tedra, and Garr who had got her into the Sec exercise class, too. He had, in fact, made the past nine months very easy and enjoyable for her. Anytime she got lonely, she was able to visit him, and he would cheer her up with stories about her mother, since Garr used to be Tedra’s boss.

She had had to make many adjustments, mostly in her way of looking at things, despite the fact that Martha had been her teacher for most of her life and had prepared her for such an advanced culture as Kystran’s. Because she had been an otherworld student, which was a rarity on Kystran, she hadn’t been required to live in the Learning Center complex like the rest of the students, so she had had daily dealings with Kystrani adults, and had learned that everything her mother and Martha had told her about Kystran was true.

The citizens really did look at lovemaking differently than the inhabitants of any other world. Sex-sharing, they called it, and because they’d discovered some healthful benefits from it, it was now mandatory for all citizens except students, to whom it was forbidden until graduation. They even had laws to govern it, it was such an integral part of their culture.

But their culture wasn’t Shanelle’s. Unfortunately, neither was her own culture, which was why she was having such a hard time dealing with the fact that she would have so little say in the choice of her lifemate, a man who would have complete control of her for the rest of her life, a man whom she was expected to obey, respect, and supposedly love. Fat chance, she thought, not once he started punishing her.

The only reason she hadn’t yet been mated for life was because Tedra had put it off by finding fault with every warrior Challen had considered. And then the pilot training had come up, and Tedra had got her way in that, too. But Tedra wasn’t going to be able to delay the momentous event much longer. Shanelle was two years past the average age for starting her own family. In fact, she might be returning home to find the decision already made.