"Just a minute. I am a person of a race having two equal sexes. Equal in every way. Numbers, too—one man and one woman—" and he went on to explain to her, as well as he could, the sociology of Civilization.
"Incredible!" she gasped the thought.
"But true," he assured her. "And now are you going to lay off me and behave yourself, like a good little girl, or am I going to have to do a bit of massaging on your brain? Or wind that beautiful body of yours a couple of times around a tree? I'm asking this for your own good, kid, believe me."
"Yes, I do believe you," she marveled. "I am becoming convinced that ... that perhaps you are a person—at least of a sort—after all."
"Sure I am—that's what I've been trying to tell you for an hour. And cancel that 'of a sort,' too—"
"But tell me," she interrupted, "a thought you used—'beautiful.' I do not understand it. What does it mean, 'beautiful body'?"
"Holy Klono's whiskers!" If Kinnison had never been stumped before, he was now. How could he explain beauty, or music, or art, to this ... this matriarchal savage? How explain cerise to a man born blind? And, above all, who had ever heard of having to explain to a woman—to any woman, anywhere in the whole macrocosmic universe—that she in particular was beautiful?
But he tried. In her mind he spread a portrait of her as he had seen her first. He pointed out to her the graceful curves and lovely contours, the lithely flowing lines, the perfection of proportion and modeling and symmetry, the flawlessly smooth, firm-textured skin, the supple, hard-trained fineness of her whole physique. No soap. She tried, in brow-furrowing concentration, to get it, but in vain. It simply did not register.
"But that is merely efficiency, everything you have shown," she declared. "Nothing else. I must be so, for my own good and for the good of those to come. But I think that I have seen some of your beauty," and in turn she sent into his mind a weirdly distorted picture of a human woman. The zwilnik he was following, Kinnison decided instantly.
She would be jeweled, of course, but not that heavily—a horse couldn't carry that load. And no woman ever born put paint on that thick, or reeked so of violent perfume, or plucked her eyebrows to such a thread, or indulged in such a hairdo.