One after the next, he held his instrument near a pair of antennae and activated it. A magnetic field extended. The antennae stirred, following its variations with a sensitivity equal to that of the built-in meters, or better. He replaced it with an electrostatic field. The Tahirians cooed. Their manes dithered. Puffs of scent blew from glands in the skin.
He nodded. “Yes,” he said to himself in his mother tongue, “these organs are surely compasses and, I suspect, much else. Manifold are the works of God.”
The building clove. Mokoena came out, accompanied by Peter and a couple of other scientists. Zeyd forgot his experiment. “Ha, at last!” he called. “What did you get in there?”
She drew near him and halted. Her eyes were wide, her voice low. “They showed me their act of love.”
He caught his breath.
“Two adults performed it,” she told him, with a reverence he had seldom heard from her. “A holocinema, and anatomical diagrams on a flat screen, ran concurrently. They’ve finally learned how to do visual presentations that are comprehensible to us.”
“How —”
“A pair meets, mouth to mouth. They embrace, they speak with their manes, they kiss with their scents. Once I understood, I saw it was beautiful. It went on for — eleven minutes by my timer.”
“And the . . . reproduction?”
Mokoena stood silent, bringing herself back to mere science, before she replied in a more nearly academic voice. “I think both partners have to be in arousal. Pheromones . . . courtship, love. . . . Fluids flow between them, both ways, driven by sphincters and the tonguelets, which must be centers of sensation. The gonads release — gametes — that swim down the streams and fuse in the mouths. Then the zygotes swim up the other stream to a — womb? There are many of them, but only a single spot where one can attach and grow. Gestation takes about a Tahirian year. We’ve noticed what we supposed was a … birth outlet… on everybody. It is. At first the parent nourishes the young by regurgitation.”
Mokoena paused again. “I don’t know why they didn’t let you in too, when we’ve generally been together working with them,” she said. “Were they afraid of alarming you? They know nothing about how unlike we may be, inside as well as outside, and — I do have a vagina.”
Zeyd nodded. “It must make for a strange psychology, having the sex organ in the face. Where the newborn feed, too. And hermaphroditic —”
“That’s not the right word. We need a word for their sex.”
“Could this be why we haven’t seen any behaving like married couples?”
“I don’t know. How would a Tahirian married couple behave? It varied over Earth, you remember.” You remember. Mokoena went on quickly: “I can guess at communal or group rearing of the young.”
Zeyd reached for lightness. “Aren’t they curious about our methods?”
Mokoena relaxed and laughed. “Oh, my, yes! I have a feeling our pictures of it leave them puzzled. It’s too weird.”
Scantily clad, she stood with sweat running agleam down a frame that gravity stress had brought back to well-rounded slenderness, panther-dark, joyful. He deepened his voice. “The wondrousness of two sexes —”
“They would doubtless like to know the chemistry as much as we would like to know theirs.”
“We should give them a demonstration.”
“Who will volunteer?”
He grinned. “Well —”
She met his look head-on. “I don’t care to put on a show myself, Selim, not even in the interests of science. Perhaps especially not in the interests of science.”
He kept his composure. “Pardon me. No offense intended. But aren’t you free-spirited?”
“I never did anything that did not mean something more than fun. Good friendship, at the very least. And I never came between two others.” She turned from him to address her guides as best she could.