Aissur Aissur Rus made a noise that might have come straight from a wolf's throat. The translator rendered it with a sigh. Jennifer had some qualms about the translation; nothing that sounded so… carnivorous… had any business being merely a sigh. Aissur Aissur Rus said, "This subject is not easy for us to discuss, human Jennifer. It is also one we never thought could arise?as the Great Ones were believed to be extinct, surely the degenerate kwopillot had to be gone. Sadly, this now appears not to be the case."
"So what are kwopillot, and why do you keep calling them such nasty names?"
"Wait a minute," Bernard Greenberg put in, his eyes lighting up. "This has to do with sex, doesn't it? Otherwise you wouldn't mind so much talking about it."
"You are, as usual, astute, human Bernard," Aissur Aissur Rus said with another of those bloodthirsty-sounding sighs. "Indeed, the matter of the kwopillot does turn on sex, or more precisely on gender."
He paused, plainly not eager to go on without being prodded further. Jennifer looked at Greenberg in open-mouthed admiration. His shot in the dark had struck home?had it ever! If the Foitani were anything like most other species, they'd find sex worth fighting about no matter how technologically advanced they were. All at once, the Suicide Wars had a rationale that made some kind of sense.
Aissur Aissur Rus still stood silent. He looked big and blue and unhappy. Jennifer said, "May I ask, solely for the purpose of remedying my own ignorance, and with no desire to cause offense, what kwopillot do that other Foitani disapprove of?"
The variant of the trader's standard question paid off. Aissur Aissur Rus said, "You know that my race is unusual among intelligent species, in that we are born female and become male after our thirtieth year, more or less."
"You said so, once, yes," Jennifer agreed. "I didn't think much of it. We humans have found that intelligent races vary widely. Also?again I speak without intending to cause offense?Foitani are not sexually interesting to humans."
"The converse also holds, I assure you," Aissur Aissur Rus replied at once. He waggled his ears. "I thank you, human Jennifer. You have given me an idea so vile to contemplate that beside it the depravities of the kwopillot fade almost?not altogether, but almost?into insignificance."
Aissur Aissur Rus was the only Foitan Jennifer had ever suspected of owning a sense of humor. If he did, it was a nasty one, and he didn't bother with trying to speak inoffensively. She tried to match him irony for irony: "I'm glad I've given you something new and revolting to think about. Meanwhile, though, you'd started to explain what kwopillot were."
"I had not started yet," Aissur Aissur Rus said. "Indeed, I approach the task with considerable reluctance. You may perhaps have observed that we Foitani are somewhat reticent in discussing matters which pertain to the reproductive process. The Middle English term for such affectation of reticence, I believe, is Victorian, is it not?"
Jennifer stared at him. "That is exactly the word, Aissur Aissur Rus. I've thought it of your people myself. Now I have another reason for wishing you hadn't kidnapped me?I'd love to have seen the research paper you would have turned in. If you didn't outdo all the humans in my class, I'd be amazed."
"As may be," Aissur Aissur Rus said. "That, however, is at present irrelevant. Rather more to the point, one of the reasons we are as reticent as we are concerning reproductive matters is that they are relatively simple to disrupt among us."
"And kwopillot choose to disrupt them?" Greenberg pounced.
"Exactly so, human Bernard. For unnatural reasons of their own, they choose through hormonal intervention in the egg"?this was the first Jennifer had heard of Foitani coming from eggs?"to produce creatures… monsters might be a better word… male from birth. Even more outrageously, those born properly female, again by means of hormones, opt to retain their initial gender. That is what it is to be a kwopil?to be or to have been of the wrong gender for one's age."
"Why would anybody want to do that?" Jennifer asked, though she doubted she would get a rational answer. When it came to sex and gender, few intelligent races were rational.
Sure enough, Aissur Aissur Rus said, "Kwopillot act as they do because, being afflicted with perversity themselves, they wish to have others with whom to share it."
"Wait a minute," Greenberg said. "Suppose you have a male, uh, kwopil. What happens after he gets older than the age at which he was supposed to turn male anyway? Isn't he pretty much normal from then on?"
"No," Aissur Aissur Rus said. "For one thing, the hormone treatments which made him a kwopil leave their mark: he never smells as a proper Foitan should. For another, how could he be normal even were that not so, when he has spent all his previous life in a gender unnatural to that phase?"
"I see your point," Greenberg said slowly. So did Jennifer. No matter how refined the surgical techniques that changed them had become, transsexual humans were often pretty strange people. That might be an even greater problem for the Foitani, where the alteration was made before an individual ever saw the light of day, and where there was no natural equivalent of, say, a ten-year-old male.
She asked, "How do you know these things, Aissur Aissur Rus? Are there still kwopillot among you? You said they were extinct."
"Sadly, I overstated," Aissur Aissur Rus admitted. "Every starfaring Foitani world knows them, and many of those still sunk in planet-bound barbarism. The modification techniques, as I said, are far from difficult. Depraved and wealthy individuals, anxious only for their own degenerate gratification, generally create the first ones on a world. But once there are kwopillot on a world, they make more like themselves. In a way, it is understandable?who else but others of their kind would care to associate with them?"
Jennifer and Greenberg looked at each other. They both nodded. Humans made genetically engineered sex slaves every now and again, too. A year didn't go by without a holovid drama showing that kind of lurid story. Jennifer didn't know whether to be relieved or depressed that another race could act the same way.
Pawasar Pawasar Ras was talking to the gray-blue Rof Golani officer. He spoke too softly for Aissur Aissur Rus's translator to pick up what he was saying, but Jennifer heard one word she understood: kwopillot. When Pawasar Pawasar Ras said it, the Rof Golani Foitan's red eyes opened wide. So did his mouth, displaying his large, sharp teeth. The better to eat you, my dear, Jennifer thought. But where before the Rof Golani had wanted only to attack the Foitani from Odern, now this one listened attentively to everything Pawasar Pawasar Ras had to say.
"They both hate these kwopillot worse than they hate each other," Greenberg said.
Jennifer quoted the title of a Middle English noveclass="underline" "The enemy of my enemy?"
Greenberg knew the saying from which it had come. "Is my friend. Yes." He turned to Aissur Aissur Rus. "Obviously the Great Ones knew of kwopillot, too. Did they feel the same way about them as you do?"
"There can be no doubt of it," Aissur Aissur Rus said. "Because we normally find it distasteful in the extreme to discuss such reproductive issues, the speculation is not published, but many, I think, privately believe the kwopillot problem to have been a possible cause of the Suicide Wars. I am one of those, and not the only one here at the base."