Human to Human by Rebecca Ore

tail.”
    “Karl!”
    “I haven’t spied. I called up human biology.”
    I was about to ask if the nursery group showed each other the various organs, but suspected that I really didn’t need or want to know.
    When Daiur came out, he held a towel over his chest.
    We waited for Tracy outside the female changing room.
    Then she came out, her little non-existent breasts covered, Daiur said, “Can I have that kind of bathing suit?” When he got to the pond, he dropped the towel, and I saw that he had four nipples, two lower ones very much smaller than the first pair up near his armpits. I remembered a guy in our high school who had extra chest buttons and felt a wave of sympathy, for both Daiur and the human I hadn’t seen in over a decade. Daiur saw me looking and said, “Most of us don’t have four.”
    Karl said, “Nobody cares how many you have, or where, or how they work. I told you that.”
    Daiur said, dropping his chest under water, “Karst people aren’t real people. Most real people only have two.”
    Tracy said, “We can all talk, so we’re all real people. That’s the Federation law even when the Federation doesn’t offer full citizenship to everyone who can talk.”
    She walked out into the pond until she was chest deep, then slid smoothly into a butterfly stroke, head above water all the time:
    Daiur swam out and dived under. He came up, laughing, with a fish in his hands. Suddenly, the fish belly squirted silvery babies. He screamed and dropped it.
    “They’re alien fish,” I told him.
    “Do they bite?” he asked, treading water, his hair wet and ruddy.
    “Only small things, like fingers,” Karl said. “How did you catch it?”
    Daiur raised the hand that had caught the fish and looked at it. “They bite fingers?”
    “Not hard,” Tracy said, with her hair still dry.
    Daiur went down under again and came up with a large thing that was either a small alligator analog or a very large near-salamander. His index finger was curled away from the thing, bleeding.
    “That will bite,” Tracy said. “You oughtn’t pick things up off the bottom.”
    “I know,” Daiur said, “but I couldn’t let it go.”
    I swam out, took the creature from him, and tossed it out into the pond. “You don’t bother them, they won’t bother you, Daiur.”
    His finger stopped bleeding as though he’d consciously constricted the veins. The beast could have bitten him harder than it did. I supposed the non-sapients in the pond got used to weird sapients dragging ’em out.
    Daiur said, “But it bit me. It scared me. I’ve got to get it out and…”
    Tracy said, “Must you? Is this urge inborn?”
    “I’ll take you to the infirmary if you want,” said.
    “I want to bite it back.”
    Karl said, imitating Tracy’s voice, “Must you?”
    Daiur’s eyelids puffed. He said, “You think…” The veins shrank back. “No, I can forget it. But who can we catch?”
    Karl smiled and began swimming toward Tracy.
    Daiur rolled under like a diving seal. Tracy went under, thrashing. Before I could swim out, she surfaced, sputtering.
    Karl and Daiur bobbed up just out of reach. “Your hair’s wet, Tracy,” Karl said. “Now it’s going to get all curly.”
    Daiur made the rubber band sound down in his throat, like a thin rubber band, not the broad thick ones his parents’ laugh sounded like.
    I said, “Your hair looks nice curly, Tracy.”
    She turned in the water and swam on her back, watching us. Then she sank and Karl went under.
    He came up coughing and then said, “She bit me.”
    Tracy said, “Not hard.”
    “Tracy, the water here isn’t too clean, so don’t open your mouth underwater, all right?”
    Daiur swam up to me and said, “I don’t want to be grabbed.” He clung to me, his legs wrapped around my arm, and shivered.
    “Are you cold?” I asked.
    “I want my daddy,” he said. “Let’s go home now.”
    “Why don’t we watch them swim?” I said. He pushed his torso away from me and