“Well, I understand that.” Jonathan made the affirmative gesture. “But surely other Tosevites will be coming here to the starship.” Getting away from the personal, getting away from guilt he couldn’t help feeling at leaving someone with whom he’d been making love as often as he could, was something of a relief.

“I suppose so,” Kassquit answered. “But still, you must understand, you will be the standard of comparison. I will judge every other Tosevite I meet, every other male with whom I mate, by what I have learned from and about you.”

So he couldn’t get away from the personal after all. Stammering a little, he said, “That is a large responsibility for me.”

“I think you set a high standard,” Kassquit told him. “If I thought otherwise, I would not want to share this compartment with you and I would not want to go on mating with you, would I? And I do.”

She put her arms around him. She was as frank about what she liked as about what she didn’t. He kissed the top of her head. An American girl would have tilted her face up for a kiss. Kassquit didn’t. Kisses on the mouth, and especially French kisses, alarmed rather than exciting her.

They made love on the sleeping mat. It was harder than a bed would have been, but far softer than the metal flooring. Afterwards, Jonathan peeled off the rubber he’d worn and tossed it in the trash. He didn’t flush such things; he had no idea what latex would do to the Lizards’ plumbing, and didn’t care to find out the hard way.

Kassquit said, “I think I begin to understand something of Tosevite sexual jealousy. It must be close to what I felt when, after the colonization fleet arrived, Ttomalss began paying much less attention to me because he was paying much more attention to Felless, a researcher newly revived from cold sleep.”