“Cosgrad,” Farrier clapped him on the shoulder. “Have you started talking about squid yet? This man can’t go a week without bringing up squid.”

Cosgrad blinked three or four times. Tau couldn’t tell if he was trying to control himself, or steel himself to fight back. “Tau would like you to be their tutor,” he said. “How would you like that, Farrier?”

And he fixed Farrier with a look of such challenge and conviction, such utter doubt in the man’s good faith, that Tau was instantly fascinated. What did this mean? What did Cosgrad think Farrier would do, or fail to do?

Farrier sighed. “I’m sorry, Tau. Kindalana’s already asked me to tutor her, and I simply felt it wouldn’t be seemly. If I refused her, then accepted you, how would it look?”

“Why?” Tau asked, utterly bemused. “How could it be unseemly to tutor someone?”

Farrier looked at Cosgrad. His smile was, for the first time, fake. “Some people,” he said, “believe that men have impulsive flesh, and that this flesh responds to signals emitted by women. Particularly women in their earliest fertility. I am twenty-two, and Kindalana is nineteen. We’re both … highly charged. In some people’s eyes it’s already too much that I stay in her home.”

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.