"I accept your promises," she said.
He felt a tiny shiver rise up in him. Suppose her normspace form was even more hideous than her hyperspace form, which of course, was no longer hideous to him. Would his nerves be strong enough to bear it?
He held his breath as the vibrations began to slow down, the grays shimmering into substance, taking on all the colors of the rainbow and then flowing into one basic roseate hue. Bit by bit, the planes and shapes began to coalesce into the shape of....
A woman. The most beautiful woman he had ever seen. A woman next to whom even the dream of Lyddy paled into thin air.
And, momentarily, he became the Len Mattern of fifteen years back, standing there with his mouth agape. "But you said you'd be a monster...."
"To my people, Mattern," she smiled, "this form is as monstrous as ours is to your people. You change into our doubles in hyperspace; we change into yours in normspace. Had you kept the continuity of tradition that we have, you would know what we have always known—that xhind and human are different aspects of the same race. That is why you fear us, and we do not fear you."
Of course, he thought. How else could they understand us so well? How else could they find logic in our illogic and be able to condition us according to our human natures? And he smiled to think that all objection to the xhindi from the social angle was invalid. Monsters they might be, but not non-humans.
"Once I thought this appearance was monstrous, Mattern," the mbretersha went on, in the sweet voice which suited her now, "because I thought you and your kind were, though forms of our race, monstrous forms—not only without beauty, but without dignity or intelligence or compassion."
"Maybe you were right," he said.