showed scaffolding bars and the localised gravity generators along one side of the now apparently vertical docking pipes, and the thorny bronze immensity of the Shamrock docked way down beneath them. The décor didn’t comply with the style of the Archers’ ships, nor the salvage station in which he’d whiled away his prison sentence. The surfaces were decorated with twisted chrome and abstract mosaics.
The corridor was not well lit, but Rh’Arrol still shuttered its wide golden eyes against the light as it moved out into the corridor on its spindly legs. Plates of metal armour covered the coarse, light blue hair of the crown, neck and back. Pendent, furry ears and paired prehensile tentacles hung from the back of the head above the jaw. The face had the countenance of a snake, but with a furry muzzle and cleft upper lip with V-shaped nostrils. The smock and armour exposed a pronounced sternum and four short thighs. The knees were naturally protected by keratinous plates, and the lower legs, inky blue-black and glossy like plastic, terminated in thickly clawed toes.
“What sex are you?” Wolff asked it, taking his hand away from his ear. He leant his weight on his injured leg and winced.
“I am ale, and you?” Rh’Arrol made a loud spitting noise, turning its head from side to side, trying to ascertain the dimensions of the corridor with some sort of echo-location.
“I’m male. Ale? How many genders does your species have?”
“Six.”
“Six? Doesn’t that pose a few problems as far as breeding’s concerned?”
“No. Unlike your species we not particularise.”
“Gregarious as well, I suppose.”
“The advantage being that gene pool is triply enriched.”
Wolff looked at the clock attached to his belt. It would likely take Jed more than an hour to remove Taggart’s program. “Steel and Flame, how do you mate with five other individuals at once?”
“I not, that would be silly,” the morran retorted. “I relay .” The morran had begun to make its stumbling way along the wall of the corridor, feeling with its tentacles. Wolff followed.
“Relay?”
“In your species, male mates with female, she give birth. In my species, male mates with me, I mates with semale, semale mates with emale, emale mates with gremale, gremale mates with female, and female give births.”
“Does that make you a him or a her?”
“Neither, sirrah. Me’s an aem or an ae .”
“Oh,” said Wolff. “I suppose your other sexes are e and se and gre, then?”
“Correct.”
“Are there many females and gremales, and fewer of the sexes toward male?”
“Oh, yes.” The morran assumed a strutting pace, its head still turned away from the light. “I am rare. and there are only five males in Carck-Westmathlon, and me’s had sex with all of them.”
“Carck-Westmathlon? Is that the circumfercirc’s name?”
Rh’Arrol clicked distractedly to aerself. “No, just the name of this quarter.”
“I see.” Wolff smiled. “And do the men who live here call it that?”
“It is not entirely a morran word. Carck and mathlon yes, but West is a word from the vocabulary of your species. Carck means ‘free’ in your language. Math means ‘large in scope’, and lon means ‘of water.’”
“Western free place of big water?”
“Big place of free water, fact. Pay rent. Forty leagues in height, thirty in depth, and a-hundred-and-nine in span. History has it that this void construction was one of the first to cycle waste products through modified bacteria in order to purify water and generate feedstock to go toward new synthesis.”
“You seem very well educated,” Wolff commented. Incongruously so. Half of Rh’Arrol’s speech seemed to be quoted from textbooks, the other half an uneducated morran attempt to speak the language of men.
“Oh yes.” Proud colours tainted Rh’Arrol’s chromatic quills. “Me’s writing a book on genealogy and the lineage of morrans on Carck-Westmathlon.” The morran was