“Well, your human act is better than some who were born that way. Don’t blame me because you did a good job.”
“You aren’t scared of me?”
Sass considered, and he waited in silence. “Not scared, exactly. I was startled, yes: your human act is damn good. I don’t think you could do that if you didn’t have some of the same characteristics in your own form. I’m not - I don’t - “
“You don’t want to be kinky and sleep with an alien?”
“No. But I don’t want to insult an alien either, not without cause. Which I don’t have.”
“Mmm. Perceptive and courteous, as usual. If I were a human, Sass, I’d want you.”
“If you were human, you’d probably get what you wanted.”
“Luckily, my human shape has no human emotions attached; I can enjoy you as a person, Sass, but not wish to couple with you. We mate very differently, and in an act far more… mmm… biological… than human mating has become.”
Sass shivered; this was entirely too clinical.
“But we do - though rarely - make friends, in the human sense, with humans. I’d like that.”
All those books gave her the next line. “I thought I was supposed to say that - no thanks, but can’t we just be friends?”
He laughed, seemingly a real laugh. “You only get to say that if you don’t make the proposal in the first place.”
“Fine.” Sass put out her hands. “I have to touch you, Marik; I’m sorry if that upsets you, but I have to. Otherwise I’ll never get over being afraid.”
“Thank you.” They clasped hands for a long moment: his warm, dry hands felt entirely human. She felt the pulse throbbing in his wrist. She saw it in his throat. He shook his head at her. “Don’t try to figure it out, Sass. Our own investigators - they’re not really much like human scientists - don’t understand it either.”
“A Weft. I had to fall in love with a damned Weft!” Sass gave him a wicked grin. “And I can’t even brag about it!”
“You’re not in love with me. You’re a young human female with a nearly new five-year implant and a large dose of curiosity.”,
“Dammit, Marik! How old are you, anyway? You talk like an older brother!”
“Our years are different.” And with that she had to be content, for the moment. Later he was willing to say more, a little more, and introduce her to the other Wefts at the Academy. By then she’d spotted two of them, sensitive to some signal she couldn’t define. Like Marik, they were all superb gymnasts and very good at unarmed combat. This last, she found, they accomplished by minute shifts of form.
“Say you grab my shoulder,” said Marik, and Sass obligingly grabbed his shoulder. Suddenly it wasn’t there, in her grasp, and yet he’d not shifted to his natural form. He was still right in front of her, only his hand gripped her forearm.
“What did you do?”
“The beginning of the shift changes the surface location and density - and that’s what the enemy has hold of, right? We’re not where we’re supposed to be, and we’re not all there, so to speak. In combat, serious combat, we’d have no reason to hold too tightly to the human form anyway.”
“Does it… uh… hurt, to stay in human form? Are you more comfortable in your own?”
Marik shrugged. “It’s like a tight uniform: not painful, but we like to get out of it now and then,” He shifted then and there, and Sass stared, fascinated as always.
“It doesn’t bother you?” asked Silui, one of the other Wefts.
“Not any more. I wish I knew how you do it!”
“So do we.” Silui shifted, and placed herself beside Marik. «Can you tell us apart?» The question echoed in Sass’s head. Of course. In their own form they hadn’t the apparatus for human speech. But telepathy? She pushed that thought aside and watched as Silui and Marik crawled over and around each other. No more brown eyes and green, although something glittered that might be eyes of another sort. Shapes hard to define, because they were so outlandish… fivefold symmetry? She finally shook her head.
“Not by looking, I can’t. Can you?”
“Oh yes.” That was Gabril, the Weft who had not shifted. “Silui’s got more graceful sarfin, and Marik immles better.”
“That might help if I knew what sarfin and immles were,” said Sass grumpily. Gabril laughed, and pointed out the angled stalklike appendages, and had Marik demonstrate an immle.
“Do you ever take heavyworlder shapes?” asked Sass.
“Not often. It’s hard enough with you; the whole way of moving is so different. They’re too strong; we can make holes in the walls accidentally.”
“Can you take any shape?”
Silui and Marik reshifted to human, and joined the discussion aloud. “That’s an argument we have all the time. Humans, yes, even heavyworlders, though we don’t enjoy that. Ryxi is easier than humans, although the biochemistry causes problems. Our natural attention span is even longer than yours, but their brain chemistry interferes. Thek - “ Marik looked at the others, as if asking a question.
“Might as well,” said Silui. “One of us that we know of shifted to Thek form. A child. He’d meant to shift to a rock, which any of us can do briefly, but a Thek was there and he took that pattern. He never came back. The Thek wouldn’t comment.”
“Typical.” Sass digested that. “So… you can take different shapes. How do you decide what kind of human to be? Are you even bisexual, as we are?”
“Video media, for the most part,” said Gabril. “All those tapes and disks and cubes of books, plays, holodramas, whatever. We’re taught never to choose a star, or anyone well-known, and preferably someone dead a century or so. And then we can make minor changes, of course, within the limits of human variation. I chose a minor character in a primitive adventure film, something about wild tribesmen on Old Earth. At first I wanted blue hair, but my teachers convinced me it wouldn’t do. Not for an Academy prospect.”
Silui grinned. “I wanted to be Carin Coldae - did you ever see her shows?”
Sass nodded.
“But they said no major performers, so I made my hair yellow and did the teeth different.” She bared her perfect teeth, and Sass remembered that Carin Coldae had had a little gap in front. She also noticed that none of them had answered her questions about Weft sexuality, and decided to look it up herself. When she did, she realised why they hadn’t tried to explain: four sexes, and mating required a rocky seacoast at full tide with an entire colony of Wefts. It produced free-swimming larvae, who returned (the lucky few) to moult into a smaller size of the adult form. Wefts were exquisitely sensitive to certain kinds of radiation, and Wefts who left their homeworlds would never join the mating colony. No wonder Marik wouldn’t discuss sex - and had that combination of wistfulness and amused superiority toward eager young humans.
By this time, some of her other friends had realised which cadets were Wefts, and Sass found herself getting sidelong looks from those who disapproved of “messing around with aliens.” It was this which led to her worst row in the Academy.
She had never been part of the society crowd, not with her background, but she knew exactly which cadets were. Randolph Neil Paraden, a senior that year, lorded it over all with any social pretensions at all. Teeli Pardis, of her own class, wasn’t in the same league with a Paraden, and once tried to explain to Sass how important it was to stay on the right side of that most eminent young man.
“He’s a snob,” Sass had said, in her first year, when Paraden, then a second-year, had held forth at some length on the ridiculousness of letting the children of non-officers into the Academy. “It’s not just me - take Issi. So her father’s not commissioned: so what? She’s got more Fleet in her little finger than a rich fop like Paraden has in his whole - “