Aftershocks Read Free Page B

for them, one that matched a hot summer’s day in Los Angeles. Even shorts made him sweat more than he would have without them.
    Kassquit was naked, too. She’d never worn clothes, not after she’d got out of diapers. The Lizards—Ttomalss in particular—had raised her ever since she was a newborn. They’d wanted to see how close they could come to turning a human into a female of the Race.
    Jonathan shaved his head. Plenty of kids of his generation—girls as well as boys, though not so many—did that, aping the Lizards and incidentally annoying their parents. Kassquit shaved not only her head—including her eyebrows—but all the hair on her body in an effort to make herself as much like a Lizard as she could. She’d told him once that she’d thought about having her ears removed to make her head look more like a Lizard’s, and had decided against it only because she didn’t think it would help enough.
    She said, “I wonder if I will be allowed to meet him before he returns to the surface of Tosev 3. I should learn more about wild Tosevites.”
    With a chuckle, Jonathan said, “I think he would be glad to meet you, especially without wrappings.” The Lizards’ language had no specific term for clothes, which the Race didn’t use, but could and did go into enormous detail about body paint.
    “What do you mean?” By Earthly standards, Kassquit had a remorselessly literal mind. “Do you mean he might want to mate with me? Would he find me attractive enough to want to mate with?”
    “Of course he would. I certainly do.” Jonathan used another emphatic cough. He always praised Kassquit as extravagantly as he could. She unfolded like a flower when he did. He got the idea the Lizards hadn’t bothered—or maybe they just hadn’t known people needed such things. Whenever he thought Kassquit acted strangely, he had to step back and remind himself it was a wonder she got even to within shouting distance of sanity.
    And he hadn’t been lying. She was of Oriental descent; living in Gardena, California, which had a large Japanese-American population, he’d got used to Asian standards of beauty. And by them she was more than pretty enough. Her shaved head didn’t put him off, either; he knew plenty of girls at UCLA who shaved theirs. The only thing truly odd about her was her expression, or lack of expression. Her face was almost masklike. She hadn’t learned to smile when she was a baby—Lizards could hardly smile back at her—and it was evidently too late after that.
    She asked, “Would you be upset if I decided to mate with him?” She didn’t have much in the way of tact, either.
    To keep from examining his own feelings right away, Jonathan answered, “Even if he finds you attractive, I am not sure he would want to mate with you. He is concerned with his own mate down in the
Reich,
and does not know her fate.”
    “I see,” Kassquit said slowly.
    Jonathan wondered if she really did. She hadn’t known anything about the emotional attachments men and women could form . . .
till she started making love with me,
he thought. He hadn’t wanted to explain to the German spaceman the sort of sociological research project in which he was engaged. It was really more the Lizards’ project, not his. He was just along for the ride.
    He chuckled.
They brought me up here and put me out to stud.
He wondered how much they’d learned. He’d certainly learned a lot.
    He went over to Kassquit and put a hand on her shoulder. She squeezed him. She liked being touched. He got the idea she hadn’t been touched a whole lot before he came up to the starship. Touching was a human trait, not one the Race shared to anywhere near the same degree.
    “He will be going down to his not-empire before long,” Kassquit said.
    “Truth,” Jonathan agreed.
    “And you will be going down to your not-empire before long,” Kassquit said.
    “You knew I would,” Jonathan told her. “I cannot stay up here. This is your place,