“No accounting for taste, I guess.” Halaavi elbowed me, and I laughed.

That night, an orgy broke out in the yurt. And I…the day had felt like a new start, a break with what I had been before. I joined it. I let the crush of bodies fold me in, envelop me. The gift poured out, and I lost myself, but it seemed all right this time. It was a pulsing thing, regulated like tides. I lost myself and came back draped in Vrala arms. The urge took someone else and pulled the gift over, and I lost myself again only to wake in the arms of someone else. Kishva and I seemed drawn together by some inexorable magnetism of the magic. Some fury of the gift brought us together over and over again, night after night. It took me some weeks before I realized I never found myself in Halaavi’s arms. Sex was a free thing, a wild thing, a rush of desire and acceptance among the Droma. They stuck fairly close to generational lines, but not exclusively. The Droma give themselves over to it, all of them. I had not seen them discriminate between partners. At first I thought them like the red elves—a culture which embraces an inclusive idea of sexuality. The Droma were biologically differentiated, just like everyone else, but like the red elves same-sex pairings were as common as opposite-sex pairings. But it was more than that. I knew that the Droma didn’t conceive of gender and gendered differences like I did, but it was only in living among them that I began to grasp how profound a difference this was between them and me. The lack of discrimination was not an indicator of fluid sexuality but of politeness. It wasn’t so much a preference for one kind of body over another so much as the idea that to say no to some people was impolite and to say yes to some others was just as impolite. It was a wholly different way of navigating sex. It took me some time to learn it. It took me some time to notice, for instance, that when sex broke out in the unpaired’s yurt, never once did I land next to Halaavi.

First it made me curious, and then it began to nag at me, and of course the rest picked up on my anxieties, and of course they gave me a wide berth. Halaavi brought it up, not me. I sat on the edge of camp, distracted, as annoyed that I’d sowed chaos with the rest as I was about this peculiar pattern. Halaavi came and sat next to me. “Vrala Ariah,” ve said. “You are troubled.”

“Yes.”

“Would you tell me why?”