We Install by Harry Turtledove

went back to the seventh century CE—ancient days indeed—when the Byzantines and Arabs shared Cyprus for a while. The Snarre’t had precedents of their own. Jack Cravath didn’t know the details about those; he just knew there were some.
    And he knew codominium worked—as well as it worked, which often wasn’t very—only because all the alternatives that anybody could see were worse. His own alternatives were none too good right this minute, either. By choice, he would have closed his scooter dealership when the sun set and gone home to dinner with his newly pregnant wife. But that would have shown interspecies insensitivity. You didn’t do such things on Lacanth C, not if you had anywhere close to your proper complement of marbles you didn’t.
    He sat in his office instead, while darkness deepened around him. The ceiling lights began to glow a dull, dim orange. As far as anybody could tell, that amount and shade of illumination annoyed both races equally.
    In a little more than an hour, when it was full dark outside, he could legitimately close. Then he could use his IR goggles to get out of the interspecies business district in Latimer and back to the human residential zone, where such perverse curiosities as street lights were allowed. His stomach growled. Beverly’s good chicken stew tonight. He was hungry, dammit.
    He could watch the street from his dealership. Humans went by on scooters or, occasionally, on Snarre’i drofs or caitnops. Far more Snarre’t rode their beasts, but some of them sat on scooters. That was why—aside from law and custom—he kept the dealership open into their hours. Every so often, he did business with them. He wasn’t allergic­ to fattening up his credit balance, not even a little bit.
    That wasn’t the only reason he was always happy when he unloaded a scooter on a Snarre’. Drofs and caitnops creeped him out. They looked like nothing so much as Baba Yaga’s house, only with most of the house part gone: oversized yellow scaly legs with a platform for the rider and handholds through which he controlled his drof. Press here, and it went forward. Press here , and it stopped. Press here, and it turned right. Press here —left. Press here and here , and it opened its mouth so you could give it some yummy drof treats.
    He shivered. The Snarre’t had a technology that mostly matched and sometimes outdid humanity’s. But theirs was biotech from the ground up, with mechanical gadgets as relatively recent high-tech innovations. It wasn’t the way humanity had done things, but it worked.
    Caitnops and drofs did what they did about as reliably as scooters did the same thing. Human programmers and engineers had loudly insisted biocomputers could never come close to electronic gadgets … till the Snarre’t showed they were talking through their hats.
    For their part, the Snarre’t thought the idea of the Turing test was the funniest thing they’d ever heard. Of course computers were intelligent, as far as they were concerned. How not, when they were built from neurons? And the Snarre’t had left in the pain response, even amplified it, to make sure their servants didn’t turn into masters. Jack shivered again.
    He looked at his watch. Half an hour till he could bail out. He thought about chicken stew, and about Bev, and about the baby due in 270 days or so (talking about months was pretty silly on a world without a moon—Lacanth C’s year was divided into neat, tidy tenths). Beverly’d found out within hours that she’d caught. That was a Snarre’i-derived test; humanity’s reagents weren’t nearly so sensitive. He smiled. The baby would be their first.
    The door opened. Two Snarre’t walked in. Jack muttered under his breath. Bev wouldn’t be happy if he came home late. But she would if he made a sale. “I greet you,” he called to them in