"Are you saying that the Runa were the prey?" John asked, horrified.

Sandoz turned, face composed. "Of course. I believe that Jana'ata morphology is a form of mimicry, selected for during predation on Runa herds. Even now, Runa prefer to travel in large groups, with the smaller males and young in the center of the troop and the larger adult females on the outside. A hundred, two hundred thousand years ago, the resemblance between the two species was not nearly so striking, perhaps. But Jana'ata who could best blend in with the female Runa at the edges of the herd were the most successful hunters. The Jana'ata foot is prehensile." Sandoz paused, and again Giuliani saw the effort it took to go on. "I imagine the hunters simply fell in step with a female toward the back of the troop, reached out to snare her ankle, and brought her down. The more closely the hunter resembled the prey in appearance and behavior and scent, the more successfully he could stalk and kill her."

"But they cooperate now," Felipe said. "The Jana'ata rule, but they trade with the Runa, they work together—" He didn't know whether to be dismayed by the prehistory or uplifted by the present state of coexistence.

"Oh, yes," Sandoz agreed. "The relationship would certainly have evolved since those days, as would the species themselves. And all that is speculation, although it is consistent with the facts I observed."

Sandoz walked back to the table and sat down. "Gentlemen, the Runa fulfill many roles in Jana'ata culture. They are skilled in crafts and they are traders and servants, laborers, bookkeepers. Even research assistants. Even concubines." He expected the outcry, was prepared for it, had rehearsed his presentation of this topic, and he continued with emotionless thoroughness. "It is a form of birth control. Supaari VaGayjur explained this to me. As stewards of their world, the Jana'ata impose strict population controls. Jana'ata couples may have more than two children but only the first two may marry and establish families; the rest must remain childless. If later-born individuals do breed, they are neutered by law, as are their offspring."

They were speechless. It had seemed perfectly reasonable to Supaari, of course.

"Jana'ata of proven sterility, often neutered thirds, sometimes serve as prostitutes. But cross-species intercourse is, by definition, sterile," Sandoz told them coolly. "Sex with Runa partners carries no risk of pregnancy or even of disease, as far as I know. For this reason, Runa concubines are commonly used as sexual partners by individuals whose families are complete or who are not permitted to breed."

Felipe, shocked, asked, "Do the Runa consent to this?"

It was Mephistopheles who laughed. "Consent is not an issue. The concubines are bred to it." He looked at each of them in turn as they took in the implications and then hit them again. "The Runa are not unintelligent and some are marvelously talented, but they are essentially domesticated animals. The Jana'ata breed them, as we breed dogs."

29

VILLAGE OF KASHAN:

YEAR TWO

Supaari VaGayjur, they found, was an ideal informant, a man who moved with knowledgeable ease between the Runa and the Jana'ata, able to see both ways of life from a point of view that few in either society shared. Irony and objectivity formed the converging lines of his perspective. Shrewd and humorous, he saw what people did and not simply what they said they did, and he was well suited to the task of interpreting his culture to the foreigners.

Anne, shrewd and humorous herself, dated her affection for him from the moment he managed to tell Sofia that the scent of coffee was "agreeable," even as he was almost certainly thinking that the flavor was revolting. Alien savoir faire, Anne thought admiringly, as she watched him overcome what must have been a staggering shock. Laudable aplomb. What a guy.

It was Anne Edwards's greatest delight that humans and VaRakhati of both species shared basic emotions, for though she was a woman of highly trained intelligence, she passed all experience through her heart. As an anthropologist, she had loved the fossil Neandertals she studied with a ferocity that embarrassed her, considered them maligned and misunderstood because they were ugly. For her, their browridges and heavy bones receded into insignificance in comparison with their care for the infirm among them and their loving burial of the many children who died around the age of four. Anne had almost wept one day, in a Belgian museum, when it came to her that these children had probably died in springtime, replaced at the breast by younger siblings while still too small to withstand the rigors of the leanest season of the year without a mother's milk. What were physical differences, when one knew that such children were buried with flowers on boughs of evergreen?

So Anne looked beyond Supaari's claws and teeth, hardly cared about his tail, and took only anatomical interest in his prehensile feet, revealed when he was comfortable enough to remove his boots after dinner that first afternoon. It was his ability to laugh, to be astounded, to be skeptical and embarrassed, proud and angry and kind that made her love him.

He could not pronounce her name, simple as it was. She became Ha'an, and the two of them spent countless hours together in those first weeks, asking and answering as best they could thousands of questions. It was exhausting and exhilarating, a sort of whirlwind love affair that made George cranky and a little jealous. Sometimes, she and Supaari were overcome by the sheer strangeness of their situation, and they were reassured that they were both moved to laugh when this happened.

Despite this goodwill, they were often at an impasse. Sometimes Ruanja had no words to convey a Jana'ata concept that Supaari was trying to describe or Anne's vocabulary was too limited for her to follow the thought. Emilio sat at their sides, translating when his knowledge of Ruanja bettered Anne's, expanding his grasp of that language, getting a start on Supaari's own K'San language, which Emilio already suspected had a monstrously difficult grammar. Sofia participated as well, for her vocabulary included many trade terms and she already had some understanding of the commercial aspects of the Runa-Jana'ata relationship, although she'd previously assumed that the differences between the groups were simply those of country folk and city folk.

Marc was often called upon to sketch some object or situation in Runa life for which they had no words and which Supaari could elucidate, after he'd gotten over the initial surprise of seeing Marc's drawings. Once that hurdle had been jumped, Jimmy and George pulled up visuals on tablet screens for him. Supaari would sometimes be struck by parallels or would describe differences. "Here it is done in a similar manner," he would tell them, or "We have no such thing as that object," or "When this happens, we do thusly." When Anne judged Supaari ready to handle it, George modified a VR headset for him and began to show him the virtual realities of Earth. This was even more frightening to him than Anne had anticipated, and he tore the headset off more than once but kept going back to it with a horrified fascination.

D.W., his own self, never warmed to Supaari, but the Winchester eventually went back into storage. Yarbrough said little during the sessions with the Jana'ata but often suggested lines of inquiry for the following day after Supaari, yawning hugely, retired at second sundown. There were seven of them and only one of Supaari, so they held back, not wanting to make the encounter feel like interrogation. He, after all, was still coming to grips with the very idea that they could exist, that their planet could exist, that they had traveled an incomprehensible distance by means of propulsion he was wholly unprepared to understand, simply to learn about him and his planet. No such notion had ever entered his head.