My superiors will have to hear of this, but how am I supposed to put it in a report? Ttomalss wondered. How can I phrase it so that it does not reflect badly on Kassquit-or on me? Atvar would understand. He’d seen how things were on Tosev 3, and he had some notion of normal Tosevite sexual behavior. But most of the so-called experts here on Home had no direct experience with Big Uglies. They would be offended or disgusted-or maybe they would be offended and disgusted. Ttomalss didn’t want Kassquit punished for what was, to her, normal behavior. That wouldn’t be fair.

He stopped, so abruptly that a female in a blue wig that looked nothing like any real Big Ugly’s hair almost ran into him. She said something rude. He ignored her, which made her say something even ruder. He still paid her no attention. He stood there on the sidewalk in front of a meat market. If Kassquit’s behavior is normal for her, why are you getting so upset about it?

Because she took me by surprise. No, the answer there wasn’t very hard to find, was it? The Race did not approve of surprises or respond well to them-another reason Tosev 3 had caused it so many headaches. Males and females liked to know how everything worked, how all the pieces fit together, and exactly what their part was in the bigger scheme of things.

To the Race, Big Uglies sometimes seemed to act almost at random. Part of that was because Tosevites worried less about the future than did members of the Race. If they saw present opportunity, they grabbed with both hands. And their sexual and family ties made them do things inexplicable to the Race.

“Sexual ties.” Ttomalss muttered the words out loud. A male going by kept one eye turret on him till he passed out of sight. Again, the psychologist hardly noticed, though in other circumstances he would have been mortified to draw so much attention. He still didn’t know with which American male Kassquit had mated.

Only four candidates. Two of them had permanent mating contracts with females. Ttomalss had learned, though, that Big Uglies respected such contracts only imperfectly. And Jonathan Yeager had been Kassquit’s first partner, all those years before. Would they have returned to each other?

Or would Tom de la Rosa have forsaken his partner? As an ecological expert, de la Rosa was formidable. In sexual terms… Ttomalss had no idea what he was like in sexual terms.

He knew just as little about Major Frank Coffey in that context. Dark brown Big Uglies had a formidable sexual reputation among paler ones, but that reputation appeared to be undeserved. Under the skin, Tosevite subspecies were remarkably similar.

Then there was Sam Yeager himself. He had been mated, but his longtime partner was dead. Would he be looking for sexual opportunities now? How could a member of the Race hope to know?

You could ask him, Ttomalss thought. Then he made the negative gesture. The American ambassador would not get angry at the question. Ttomalss was reasonably sure of that. But Yeager would laugh at him. He was pretty sure of that, too. He was no more fond of making a fool of himself than anyone else of any species.

Just when he had decided he couldn’t make a reasonable guess about the candidates, he realized he hadn’t really considered all of them. Big Uglies occasionally became intimate with members of their own sex. Because of pheromones and crest displays, such behavior was much rarer among the Race. Could Kassquit have experimented with a female?

Kassquit could have done almost anything. What she had done, she knew and Ttomalss didn’t. He also had to admit to himself that he couldn’t figure it out from the evidence he had. Maybe a Big Ugly could have. He wouldn’t have been surprised. But, despite all his years studying the Tosevites, he was no Big Ugly himself.

He was glad of that, too. Imagine putting a sexual liaison ahead of an audience with the Emperor! If that didn’t prove how different the Tosevites were, what would?

He did his best to look on the bright side of things. Sooner or later, the truth would come out. His store of data would grow. The bright side turned darker. No matter how much data he had, would he ever really understand?

The Americans had been living in one another’s pockets ever since they got to Home. They had few secrets from one another. Keeping secrets wasn’t easy, and they hardly ever bothered. Even so, not everything got talked about right out in the open. Karen Yeager was probably the last one to realize Major Coffey and Kassquit had started sleeping together.

When she did, she was horrified. “Isn’t that treason or something?” she demanded of her husband.

“I doubt it,” he answered. “I can’t see Frank giving secrets away to the Lizards no matter what. Can you? It would take a lot more than a what-do-you-call-it-a honey trap, that’s what they say-to get him to do anything like that.”

Karen considered. Reluctantly, she decided Jonathan was right. She made herself an almost-vodka, chilling it with ice she’d fought so hard to win. “Well, maybe so,” she said. “But it’s still disgusting. She’s hardly even human.”

Jonathan didn’t say anything. That was no doubt smart on his part. Karen remembered, just too late, that he hadn’t found anything disgusting about sleeping with Kassquit. If men could, they would, or most of them would.

“She really isn’t,” Karen said, as if Jonathan had contradicted her.

“I know she’s not,” he answered uncomfortably. “But she does try. It makes her more… more pathetic than if she didn’t. Part of her wants to be-I think a lot of her wants to be. But she doesn’t know how. How could she, seeing the way she was raised? She’s crazy, yeah, but she could be a lot crazier. And you know what the saddest thing is?”

“Tell me.” Ominous echoes filled Karen’s voice.

Her husband usually heeded those echoes. Not today. He spoke as if he hadn’t heard them: “The saddest thing is, she knows how much she’s missing. And she knows she’s never going to get it-not from us, and not from the Lizards, either. How do you go on after you’ve figured something like that out?”

“She seems to have found some way to amuse herself,” Karen said.

“That’s not fair, hon,” Jonathan said. “If you hadn’t done anything for twenty years-and I don’t think Kassquit has, not since me-wouldn’t you grab the chance if it came along?”

Karen thought about twenty years of celibacy. Going without was easier for most women than for most men, but even so… “Maybe,” she said grudgingly.

No matter how grudgingly she said it, Jonathan had to know how big an admission that was. “Give her a break, will you?” he said. “She needs all the breaks she can get, and she hasn’t caught very many of them.”

“Maybe,” Karen said again, even more grudgingly than before. “But what about Frank? What’s he thinking? Is he thinking?”

“There are four women on this planet,” Jonathan said. “As far as I know, he’s never come on to you or Linda. If he has, nobody’s said anything about it.”

“He hasn’t with me, anyway,” Karen said.

“All right, then. Let’s figure he hasn’t with Linda, either,” Jonathan said. “Melanie Blanchard just got here. That leaves…” He didn’t finish the sentence, but he didn’t have to.

Every word he said made good logical sense. But this wasn’t a matter for logic-or it didn’t feel like one to Karen, anyhow. When she said, “It’s Kassquit!” she summed up everything that wasn’t logical about it.

Jonathan only shrugged. “I can’t do anything about it. I haven’t done anything about it, either, and you know darn well I haven’t. If you don’t like it, take it up with Frank. And good luck to you.”

He wasn’t often so blunt. Karen wished he hadn’t been this time, either. She said, “I couldn’t do that!”

“Okay, fine,” her husband said. “In that case, wouldn’t you say it’s none of your beeswax? And if it isn’t, what are you worrying about?”

“Talk about not being fair!” Karen exclaimed. “How long have you known without telling me?”

“A while,” he said, which told her less than she wanted to know. He went on, “If you watch them, you can kind of tell. It’s the way they look at each other when they think nobody else is paying any attention.”

Karen had always paid as little attention to Kassquit as she could while staying polite, or maybe even a little less than that. And she evidently hadn’t paid as much to Frank Coffey as she should have. “I still have trouble believing it,” she said.

“Oh, it’s true,” Jonathan said. “If it weren’t, why would Frank have started taking rubbers from the medical supplies?”

For that, Karen had no answer. She did wonder how her husband knew Coffey was doing that. Had he actually seen him? Or did he know how many he and Tom de la Rosa were likely to use, and figure the excess must have gone to Frank? Karen decided she wasn’t curious enough about that to ask.

She said, “I still don’t think it can be good for what we’re trying to do here. It’s… sleeping with the enemy, that’s what it is.”

“Sorry, hon, but I don’t think you’re right,” Jonathan told her. “Anything that keeps us from going nuts here is pretty good, far as I’m concerned. Kassquit’s no more Mata Hari than she is Martha Washington. If anybody gives anything away in pillow talk, she’s likely to be the one.”

He was altogether too likely to be right about that. Because he was, Karen didn’t try to contradict him. She just said, “The whole idea is repulsive, that’s all.”

Jonathan said nothing at all. No, sleeping with Kassquit hadn’t repelled him. That wasn’t anything Karen didn’t already know; after all, he’d done it before they were married. Since he hadn’t tried doing it since, she didn’t suppose she ought to mention it. But biting her tongue wasn’t easy.

In the face of that silence from her husband, she said, “I’m going down to the refectory. It’s just about time for lunch.”

“Go ahead,” Jonathan answered. “I’m not hungry yet. I’ll come down in a while. I’ve got some paperwork I need to catch up on.”

Maybe he did and maybe he didn’t. Karen wouldn’t have bet one way or the other. Plainly, though, he didn’t want to go on talking about Kassquit and Frank Coffey. Karen didn’t see what she could do about it short of ramming the topic down his throat. That wouldn’t accomplish anything but starting a fight. Life was too short… wasn’t it? With a twinge of regret, she decided it was.