This seemed so immediately ridiculous to Tau-indi that they had to mind their manners and not laugh. Sexual attraction was simply a by-product of the need to exchange joys: like any powerful principle it could be deranged and made terrible, but it had nothing to do with flesh and signals! Even if, dwelling upon it, Kindalana did have a sort of magical effect on Tau lately.

“Farrier was quite the womanizer in school,” Cosgrad said, with no trace of jealousy or bitterness, an absence so marked that it was like an eclipse; you can see that something is in the way, concealing the truth. “With no one else around to keep an eye on him, I’ve got to be sure he doesn’t misbehave.”

Farrier winked at Tau. “If only he knew, Tau, that my students are the women I don’t pursue. One has to have principles, eh?”

Tau-indi wanted to ask Kindalana about all this, but the idea of bringing up sex meant they would have to ask Kindalana why she and Abdumasi were being so secretive, and that secret made Tau sick with rage.

*   *   *

NOW Tau-indi, too, went to war. It was a war against their friends.

In the morning and the evening they helped Cosgrad Torrinde catalog insects and plants, telling him about the ratoon rice that had once grown on the monsoon-plains south, and about the new development that had raised the farmers up to better crops. He was monstrously curious about everything—and Tau-indi did not use the word monstrous idly, because he was also stupidly rude. A field hand came up the hill with a machete wound, rotted and swollen, and Cosgrad insisted furiously that they had to wash it out with boiled water and put maggots in the wound—maggots! As if he’d never heard of botfly or nagana! Insects could never, ever be allowed to grow in anyone’s flesh.

“What does that mean?” Cosgrad struggled with the phrase Tau had just pronounced. “That didn’t sound like Seti-Caho, the words you just said.”

“A ut li-en?” Tau-indi shivered. “Yes, it means to grow in us, in the old tongue the Cancrioth used. We use those words when we speak of taboo parasites like botfly.”

“The Cancrioth, yes, that’s what I thought. Who were they?” Cosgrad hovered with his incredibly smooth paper and his charcoal pencil. “In Falcrest, see, there are legends of the Cancrioth—legends and, of course, rag-paper novels. We think of them as raiders, highly degenerate, bred to survive in tropical climes by a partial regression to the animal template.…”

“Degenerate, no.” Oh, the griots had always been so oblique about this topic! It was hard to teach, for fear of tearing a little hole in the mbo with the words, and letting in old power. “The Cancrioth were councilors and philosophers who ruled the continent of Oria before the Mbo. They gathered in Mzilimake, in the southern lands beyond the veldt, where the fish in the water glow with inner light, to study the heat that boils up in the uranium land.”