I was hurt.I was hurt. "I don't know the words in Lati for 'man' and 'woman. And the way you have acted when I say, to you, 'greetings'. 'Gre tin' means 'let's fuck' and...." my voice trailed off. "I see." I said. Lar shrugged. "This thing is not important to us." he said. "If you wish gre tin with someone," he shrugged again, another human trait he had adopted for me. "You do it. It does not matter." "Why doesn't it matter? Don't you care who a child's father is?" I realized I didn't know their word for "father", though Lar knew what it meant. Lar said, "The mother is the one who bears the child. It does not matter who the fa-ther is. The child is hers, not his." "I see." I said. Matriarchal societies have several analogues with human cultures in history. "So it doesn't matter who you gre tin with, then?" "It matters to me. I must like him or her." Lar stood, approached me with a thrust to his hips. "I like you." I goggled. Lar and I had been honest with each other, but this! But Lar was almost my only friend among the Lati. What was I to do? My college classes, some scant five years before, hadn't told me about how to fight off an amorous advance from an alien! But it had, I realized. The Krith were squidlike creatures, but their form of greetings was, to put it bluntly, to have sex with them, a brief enough affair for the Krith with its quick squirt of sperm into the female's sexual opening. But humans had to copulate with them at every meeting, or face explusion from their culture. Morals vary from planet to planet, even among humans. I had to be sure. "I like you, too." I said. "But I'm not sure...." Lar looked exasperated. "I have watched your body when we swim together. I have watched your eyes. You watch me. Do you not want me?" Want a beautiful teenaged boy? Man, that is? "Of course I want you." "Then that is enough." Lar said, and kissed me. I kissed him back, stooping down to match faces with him (Lati stand only five feet high), and I felt his tongues slide into mine. I matched his two slender tongues with my bigger one, and felt them wrap around my tongue as they were more prehensile than ours. |