"No!"
Moon's shout caused her mother to peer at her over her glasses. "I mean," the girl added swiftly, "you know what happens to the studs. They go wild!"
Her mother nodded, acquiescing to the fact of life. Dehorned Taur males who had not been castrated were valuable to ranchers, because they were how the ranchers kept their female Taurs in calf. But an uncastrated, dehorned male quickly lost that placid good temper that marked the Taur race, along with those vestiges of intelligence that made them good slaves. A breeding male had to be kept caged. The females he mounted were always at risk. Often they came out of the breeding pen wounded and bleeding—sometimes even killed, for the fury of the studs was legendary. And no human could ever go near one again, until the physical decline that began with the dehorning reduced the Taur to a raving, raging wreck that it was a kindness to put away.
"I know," her mother sighed. "And it wouldn't keep him alive very long anyway—you're lucky if you get two seasons out of a Taur stud before you have to put him down, and then you can't even sell the meat."
"I don't want that to happen to him either!"
Molly Bunderan said soothingly, "I know you don't, dear, but some things can't be changed. When the males mature they have to be castrated and dehorned; that's the rule."
"Thrayl wouldn't be any trouble!"
Her mother shook her head. "You hear stories," she said darkly. "Adult male Taurs and human girls—"
"That's ridiculous!" Moon flared. "How could such stories be true? Nobody's ever kept an adult unaltered male Taur!"
"Where there's smoke there's fire," her mother said wisely. "Why, just a couple of years ago, over toward Amarillo, there was that young bull Taur they burned alive—"
Moon shuddered. "I know the story," she said grimly. "I don't believe he did anything. And Thrayl would never hurt me, you know that!"
Her mother turned from the steaming pots to gaze at her tenderly. "I know it's hard for you, Moon dear. I blame myself. I should never have let you make a pet of him."
"But he's gentle," Moon begged. "He loves me—not in any ugly way."
"We'll talk about it later," Mrs. Bunderan promised. She patted her daughter's shoulder in awkward sympathy . . . but in her heart Mrs. Bunderan was sure Moon's reasons for objecting to the idea would never matter to her father. What those reasons might really be Molly Bunderan did not even want to think.
She turned back to the practical job of running her part of the ranch. "Vegetables," she said. "What would you like tonight, Moon? Peas and carrots, and a salad? Go find Leesa and tell her to bring in whatever you like."
But she knew that whatever the girl had for dinner that night, the taste would be ashes in her mouth.
Half an hour later the men came back from their work at the ends of the ranch. Their hover dropped into the courtyard with a flurry of dust and squawking chickens. The first thing on the agenda was baths for all of them, then they had dinner.
They all ate at once—that was one of the great advantages of having Taur females, like their house Taur, Leesa, to wait on table. The meal was Taur steaks, with vegetables from the little garden the Taur females tended for them. Leesa served them silently, then curled up at the foot of the table to wait for orders, like any good dog.
Moon avoided the female Taur's eyes. It had always been hard for Moon, as a child, to eat the meat of the Taurs they raised, but her father had laughed at her and her mother had insisted, and gradually Moon Bunderan had learned to turn off that part of her mind. Tonight was harder. When the meal was over Moon quickly put the dishes in the washer and slipped out of the house. Her brothers went off in the aircar for an evening in the town.
Then Molly Bunderan sat down with her husband to talk over cups of coffee. He looked tired, she thought. With the boys he had been out in the aircar, inspecting the herds at the far reaches of their land. "Too much rain," he told her. "The streams are up, and we're going to have flooding if we get another big storm. And—" he shook his head—"this afternoon the whole herd was spooked by something. Even the cows took an hour or so to quiet down—God knows what it was."
"We had a little flurry here, too," Molly Bunderan told her husband.
He nodded, considering that, then shrugged. "Well, that's Taurs for you," he said. "They were all all right when we left, anyway. Even the young bulls."
His wife took a deep breath. "That—that brings up something I want to talk to you about," she told him.
Then, when she had her husband's full attention, she told him her worries about Moon and her pet, Thrayl. "We never should have kept the Taur so long," she said, blaming herself. "It was all right when he was little. She played with him like a doll, remember? Bathing him. Dressing him up. It just seemed like a sweet, little-girl kind of thing. But now—"
He nodded. "Where is she now?"
"Where else? Out talking to him in his pen."
Mr. Bunderan took a long, slow sip of his coffee. Then he said: "It's too bad, Molly, but we don't have any choice in the matter, do we?"
"It's just that she's so attached to the animal," his wife said.
"And there's no better time than now to end it. No, Thrayl's getting too mature. He's got to go off to be fattened.
Next time we have a shipment for the feedlots." He glanced up at the date clock on the wall to see when that might be, then nodded. "There's a shipment tomorrow," he said heavily, "and that's as good a time as any."
The human poet sang on, while the aiodoi listened kindly through the more perfect music of their own everlasting singing:
"Let's talk about whether the universe is symmetrical.
"We all hope it will turn out that way, but if we want to find the truth about that, first we have to establish some universal frame of reference. That's where those people we were talking about at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow—Heller, Klimek, Rudnicki—come in. They discovered that this universal frame—or rigging vector field, as it is sometimes called—sounds so much like the old idea of an 'ether,' you remember, that they refer to it as a neoether. But, whatever you call it, you have to have some frame from which to measure whatever symmetries may be.
"It turns out that the larger the frame, the better the case looks for symmetry.
"In fact, although velocities of individual stars within galaxies, and of individual galaxies within clusters, vary very widely, the velocities of massive galaxies at the center of clusters vary quite linearly with their red-shift distances, at least within the error bars for measurement. This (say Heller, Kli-mek and Rudnicki) means that there is indeed some indication of an overall law that describes both nuclear particles and the largest bodies in the universe, for the correspondence is to the velocities of fundamental particles—and that, they say, is 'one more proof of Nature's kindness toward Earthly cosmolo-gists.'
"We'll talk about some of those other proofs before long because, trust me on this, class, before you get through you're likely to think that we human beings have indeed had some special gifts from—Nature. Or God. Or Whoever it is you want to credit with doing the things that make it possible, or even maybe inevitable, that people like you and me could sit in this room discussing them now."
To the aiodoi that was a pleasing song, but not a new one, for they had heard that song forever, and would go on hearing it forever, for that was known to be the nature of great songs always.