Free Sassinak by Anne McCaffrey, Elizabeth Moon

with you; the whole way of moving is so different. They're too strong; we can make holes in the walls accidentally."

    "Can you take any shape?"

    Silui and Marik reshifted to human, and joined the discussion aloud. "That's an argument we have all the time. Humans, yes, even heavyworlders, though we don't enjoy that. Ryxi is easier than humans, although the biochemistry causes problems. Our natural attention span is even longer than yours, but their brain chemistry interferes. Thek—" Marik looked at the others, as if asking a question.

    "Might as well," said Silui. "One of us that we know of shifted to Thek form. A child. He'd meant to shift to a rock, which any of us can do briefly, but a Thek was there and he took that pattern. He never came back. The Thek wouldn't comment."

    "Typical." Sass digested that. "So . . . you can take different shapes. How do you decide what kind of human to be? Are you even bisexual, as we are?"

    "Video media, for the most part," said Gabril. "All those tapes and disks and cubes of books, plays, holodramas, whatever. We're taught never to choose a star, or anyone well-known, and preferably someone dead a century or so. And then we can make minor changes, of course, within the limits of human variation. I chose a minor character in a primitive adventure film, something about wild tribesmen on Old Earth. At first I wanted blue hair, but my teachers convinced me it wouldn't do. Not for an Academy prospect."

    Silui grinned. "I wanted to be Carin Coldae—did you ever see her shows?"

    Sass nodded.

    "But they said no major performers, so I made my hair yellow and did the teeth different." She bared her perfect teeth, and Sass remembered that Carin Coldae had had a little gap in front. She also noticed that none of them had answered her questions about Weft sexuality, and decided to look it up herself. When she did, she realized why they hadn't tried to explain: four sexes, and mating required a rocky seacoast at full tide with an entire colony of Wefts. It produced freeswimming larvae, who returned (the lucky few) to moult into a smaller size of the adult form. Wefts were exquisitely sensitive to certain kinds of radiation, and Wefts who left their homeworlds would never join the mating colony. No wonder Marik wouldn't discuss sex—and had that combination of wistfulness and amused superiority toward eager young humans.

    By this time, some of her other friends had realized which cadets were Wefts, and Sass found herself getting sidelong looks from those who disapproved of "messing around with aliens." It was this which led to her worst row in the Academy.

    She had never been part of the society crowd, not with her background, but she knew exactly which cadets were. Randolph Neil Paraden, a senior that year, lorded it over all with any social pretensions at all. Teeli Pardis, of her own class, wasn't in the same league with a Paraden, and once tried to explain to Sass how important it was to stay on the right side of that most eminent young man.

    "He's a snob," Sass had said, in her first year, when Paraden, then a second-year, had held forth at some length on the ridiculousness of letting the children of non-officers into the Academy. "It's not just me—take Issi. So her father's not commissioned: so what? She's got more Fleet in her little finger than a rich fop like Paraden has in his whole—"

    "That's not the point, Sass," Pardis had said. "The point is that you don't cross Paraden Family. No one does, for long. Please . . . I like you, and I want to be friends, but if you get sour with Neil, I'm—I just can't , that's all."

    By maintaining a cool courtesy towards everyone that turned his barbs aside, Sass had managed not to involve herself in a row with the Paraden Family's representative—until her friendship with Wefts made it necessary. It began with a series of petty thefts. The first victim was a girl who'd refused to sleep with Paraden, although that didn't come out