“Basic indeed. I hope it has not been all a waste of time. Did you at least get the creature’s name?”

“Yes.”

“Well, speak then. What is she called?”

“Eeasassiwi. Strong-fisher. But that is not her name.” Enge hesitated before Ambalasi’s signed confusion, then spoke again with slow precision.

“We cannot say that it is her name.

“We must say instead that it is his name.

“Yes, that is right, this strong-fisher is a male.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

“What you are saying is a complete and utter impossibility.”

Ambalasi reinforced the strength of her statements with modifiers of infinite enlargement. Enge bowed beneath the weight of her rage and assertiveness, but did not alter anything.

“That may be as you say, great Ambalasi, for you are the wisest in the sciences of life. I am humble before your knowledge—yet I still know what I know.”

“How could you know?” Ambalasi hissed, her entire body atremble, her crest engorged and inflamed.

“I know in the simplest manner. The Sorogetso grew angry when I would not respond as it wished, made threatening gestures, one of which involved opening its sexual sac. I have seen what I have seen. It is male, not female.”

Ambalasi collapsed backward, suddenly pale, gasping aloud as her strong passions ebbed. There was no mistake; Enge had seen what she had seen. Her limbs twitched in confusion as she sought some meaning, some possible explanation. Her inescapable conclusions were logically correct, personally repulsive.

“If the creature made gestures of threat, and one of these gestures involved its sexual organs, I can only conclude that it must be the aggressor sex. Which in turn leads inescapably to the conclusion that . . .” She could not continue, but the movements of her limbs revealed the unavoidable conclusions. Enge spoke it aloud.

“The males here are dominant, the females at the most equal or possibly subservient.”

“How unacceptably loathsome! Not the natural order for Yilanè. In the case of lower animals, yes, it is possible, for they are senseless brutes. But intelligence is female, thought is female, the source of life, the eggs—they are inescapably female. The males provide the crude biological functions of supplying half the needed genes and all of the reflexive-boring prenatal care. That is all they are good for, they have no other function. What you have observed is preposterous, unnatural—and utterly fascinating.”