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ay, to you, 'greetings'. 'Gre tin' means 'let's fuck'
and...." my voice trailed off. "I see." I said.
Lar shrugged. "This thing is not important to us."
he said. "If you wish gre tin with someone," he
shrugged again, another human trait he had adopted for
me. "You do it. It does not matter."
"Why doesn't it matter? Don't you care who a
child's father is?" I realized I didn't know their word
for "father", though Lar knew what it meant.
Lar said, "The mother is the one who bears the
child. It does not matter who the fa-ther is. The
child is hers, not his."
"I see." I said. Matriarchal societies have
several analogues with human cultures in history. "So
it doesn't matter who you gre tin with, then?"
"It matters to me. I must like him or her." Lar
stood, approached me with a thrust to his hips. "I like
you."
I goggled. Lar and I had been honest with each
other, but this! But Lar was almost my only friend
among the Lati. What was I to do? My college classes,
some scant five years before, hadn't told me about how
to fight off an amorous advance from an alien!
But it had, I realized. The Krith were squidlike
creatures, but their form of greetings was, to put it
bluntly, to have sex with them, a brief enough affair
for the Krith with it
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