“Yes, you do, Babnol.” Toroca’s tone was gentle. “I’m your friend.”
At last Babnol nodded. “All right. Soon, as you say, I will feel the urge to call for a mate.”
“Very soon, I’d warrant,” said Toroca.
“Exactly. And I do not want to couple.”
Toroca’s inner eyelids fluttered. “But why not?”
Babnol spread her arms. “Look at me. Look at me. I’m ugly.” A pause. “Deformed.”
“I don’t know what—” But Toroca stopped when he felt the warming that meant his muzzle was flushing blue. He tried again. “I don’t consider you ugly.”
“I’m a freak,” said Babnol. “A freak of nature. This pastak nose horn.” The swear word was one rarely spoken.
“I find it…” Toroca sought the appropriate word. “…intriguing.”
Babnol lifted her muzzle again, and at last Toroca understood that the gesture was not one of haughty arrogance, but rather a subconscious desire to reduce the apparent size of the horn. “It has not been intriguing to go through life with this defect, Toroca.”
Toroca nodded. “Of course. I didn’t mean to minimize your experience.”
“You yourself told me once about the work that was done with lizard breeding,” she said. “It demonstrated the inheritance of characteristics.”
Toroca looked blank.
“Don’t you see? My offspring might indeed be similarly deformed. I can’t risk that. I have to go away, to be alone, until after the mating urge passes. Then I can safely return to the company of others for another full year—for eighteen kilodays.”
“One is never completely safe. My mother was only sixteen kilodays old—well shy of her first year—when she was moved to mate with Afsan.”
“The risk is minimal at other times. It’s monumental now.” She paused again, then, wistfully: “I must leave right away. Goodbye, Toroca.”
“No, wait,” he said.
She hesitated, and, for a moment, it seemed as though she really did not want to go.
“You’re not a freak,” said Toroca. “You’re special.”
“Special,” she repeated, as if trying the word on for size. But then she shook her head.
“Look,” he said, “you know about my theory of evolution. It’s not the things that make us the same that increase our survivability. It’s the differences, the things that make us unique.”
“I’ve listened to you more attentively than that,” said Babnol. “A novelty can be either good or bad. A difference is just as likely—more likely—to be a bad thing.”
“Any difference that lets an individual survive to breeding age is, by definition, beneficial, or, at the very least, neutral.” He adopted a teacher’s tone. “To artificially remove yourself from the breeding population is unnatural.”
“All of our selection is unnatural, Toroca. The bloodpriests do for us what nature can no longer do: select who should live and who should die. It’s only because all egglings have birthing horns that the bloodpriest of my Pack did not realize I was defective. I’m just compensating for the error of that selection process.”
“You worry about the bloodpriest’s culling?” said Toroca.
“I suspect many people do. Seven died so that I might live. Only you, you who never underwent the culling, are probably immune from the self-doubt engendered by that process. I suspect that that is much more the real reason why people rarely speak of the bloodpriests. We avoid the topic not because it’s bloody—we’re carnivores, after all!—but rather because it makes is wonder about whether we really were the ones who should have lived.”
Toroca said nothing about how he, too, had wondered about the culling of the bloodpriest, how he had suspected that he would have not been allowed to live. He felt closer to Babnol ever.
“But you’re special,” he said again. And then, bolder, “Special to me.”
She looked up, perplexed.
“I like you, Babnol.”
“And I like you, Toroca.”
“I mean I like you a lot. I was hoping we could spend more together.”
“We already spend a good tenth of each day together, Toroca. That’s more than I spend with anyone, and, to be honest, as much as I can take. We need our privacy.”
Toroca shook his head. “Others need their privacy. I don’t.”
Her inner eyelids fluttered in puzzlement. “I don’t understand.”
He shrugged. “I don’t feel oppressed when others are around. I don’t feel claustrophobic, trapped.” He indicated the space between them. “I don’t feel territoriality.”
Babnol tipped her head to the side. “You don’t?”
“Nope. Never have.”
“But that’s—forgive me—that’s sick.”
“I feel fine.”
“No territoriality, you say?”
“None.”
“What’s it like?” she said.
“I have nothing to compare it with.”
“No, I guess not. But, then, how do you react if other people are around you?”
“If they are people I like, I want them to be closer.”
“But they move away.”
Wistfuclass="underline" “Yes.”
“How does that feel?”
“It hurts,” he said softly.
“I can’t imagine that,” Babnol said.
“No. I don’t suppose anyone else can.”
“And you want to be close to me?”
“Especially to you.” He took a step toward her. “There are perhaps seven paces between us now.” He took another step. “And now six.” Another. “Five.”
Babnol stood up straight, taking her weight off her tail. “I could come even closer,” he said. “How close?”
He stepped again, and then, boldly, once more. “Very close.” Only three paces between them now. Toroca felt his heart racing. Three paces: much greater proximity than protocol would normally allow, and yet, still a tremendous gulf. He lifted his left foot, moved another pace nearer.
Babnol’s claws popped out. “No closer,” she said, an edge in her voice. She shook her head. “What you’re saying is alien to me. Alien to all of us.”
Toroca spoke softly. “I know.”
Babnol looked uncomfortable. She backed off two paces. “I have to go.”
“No,” said Toroca. “Stay.”
“Soon,” she said, “my body will be crying for a mate. I to be alone when that happens. I have to go.”
“There’s nothing wrong with you,” said Toroca “A horn on your face? What significance does that have?” He spread his arms. “And there’s nothing wrong with me. I see what territoriality has done to our people. We’d be better off if more were free of it.”
Babnol said nothing.
“Stay. When it comes time for you to call for a mate, call for me.” He looked directly at her. “I would be honored.”
More silence from Babnol.
“The bloodpriests are currently in disrepute, so I hear, but even if they are reinstated and only one eggling gets to live from our clutch, I’m sure it would be special. Perhaps it would have a horn throughout life. Perhaps it would be less territorial than most. Those are wonderful things, not things to be avoided.”
Babnol’s tail swished slightly. “Your words are tempting,” she said at last.
“Then stay! Stay here. Stay with me.”
There was a long, long moment between them. The sun slid behind a silvery cloud.
“I’m sorry,” she said at last. “I have to do what I think is right.” She turned and walked away.
Toroca kept her in his sight until she was lost among the folds of the landscape.
For the first time in his life, he felt the urge to go out and hunt.
*35*