The Lani People by Jesse F. Bone (types of ebook readers txt) 📕

Mixed emotion! Ha! The author of that cliche didn’t even know its meaning! Kennon strode furiously down the dusty road toward Station One trying to sublimate his inner conflict into action. It was useless, of course, for once he stopped moving the grim tug-of-war between training and desire would begin again, and no matter how it ended the result would be unsatisfactory. As long as he had been able to delude himself that he was fond of Copper the way a man is fond of some lesser species, it had been all right. But he knew now that he was fond of her as a man is of a woman—and it was hell! For no rationalization in the universe would allow him to define her as human. Copper was humanoid—something like human. And to live with her and love her would not be miscegenation, which was bad enough, but bestiality which was a thousand times worse.

Although throughout most of the Brotherhood miscegenation was an unknown word, and even bestiality had become a loose definition on many worlds with humanoid populations, the words had definite meaning and moral force to a Betan. And—God help him—he was a Betan. A lifetime of training in a moral code that frowned upon mixed marriages and shrank appalled from even the thought of mixing species was nothing to bring face to face with the fact that he loved Copper.

It was odd, Kennon reflected bitterly, that humans could do with animals what their customs and codes prohibited them from doing to themselves. For thousands of years—back to the very dawn of history when men had bred horses and asses to produce mules—men had been mixing species to produce useful hybrids. Yet a Betan who could hybridize plants or animals with complete equanimity shrank with horror from the thought of applying the same technique to himself.

What was there about a human being that was so sacrosanct? He shook his head angrily. He didn’t know. There was no answer. But the idea—the belief—was there, ingrained into his attitudes, a part of his outlook, built carefully block by block from infancy until it now towered into a mighty wall that barred him from doing what he wished to do.

It would be an easier hurdle if he had been born anywhere except on Beta. In the rest of the Brotherhood, the color of a man’s skin, the shape of his face, the quality and color of his hair and eyes made no difference. All men were brothers. But on Beta, where a variant-G sun had already caused genetic divergence, the brotherhood of man was a term that was merely given lip service. Betans were different and from birth they were taught to accept the difference and to live with it. Mixing of Betan stock with other human species, while not actually forbidden, was so encircled with conditioning that it was a rare Betan indeed who would risk self-opprobrium and the contempt of his fellows to mate with an outsider. And as for humanoids—Kennon shuddered. He couldn’t break the attitudes of a lifetime. Yet he loved Copper.

And she knew he did!

And that was an even greater horror. He had fled from the office, from the glad light in her eyes, as a burned child flees fire. He needed time to think, time to plan. Yet his body and his surface thoughts wanted no plans or time. Living with a Lani wasn’t frowned upon on Flora. Many of the staff did, nor did anyone seem to think less of them for doing so. Even Alexander himself had half-confessed to a more than platonic affection for a Lani called Susy.

Yet this was no excuse, nor would it silence the cold still voice in his mind that kept repeating sodomite—sodomite—sodomite with a passionless inflection that was even more terrible than anger.

The five kilometers to Station One disappeared unnoticed beneath his feet as he walked, and he looked up in surprise to see the white walls and red roofs of the station looming before him.

“Good Lord! Doc! What’s got into you?” the stationmaster said. “You look like you’d seen a ghost. And out in this sun without a helmet! Come inside, man, before you get sunstroke!”

Kennon chuckled without humor. “Getting sunstroke is the least of my worries, Al,” he said, but he allowed Al Crothers to usher him inside.

“It’s odd that you showed up right now,” Al said, his dark face showing the curiosity that filled him. “I just had a call from Message Center not five minutes ago, telling me to have you call in if you showed up.”

Kennon sighed. “On this island you can’t get away from the phone,” he said wryly. “O.K., where is it?”