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worse than I expected.
    An itch on top of the head made Kassquit scratch. Very, very short hair rasped under the not-quite-claws at the tips of Kassquit’s fingers. Hair was another nasty thing about the Tosevite body. I wish I did not have any, Kassquit thought. Smooth is bad. Hairy is even worse. Emperor be praised that I do get clipped regularly. I wished I could die when the hair started sprouting here and there on my body. Having to get my head clipped is humiliation enough. Add these other spots and it is almost too much to bear.
    Ttomalss had been reassuring about that, too. The Race’s research proved it was normal among Tosevites of about Kassquit’s age. But it was not normal aboard the ship. It made Kassquit even more abnormal here.
    What would I do without Ttomalss? Kassquit wondered. The male had been a guide, a teacher, a mentor, a hearing diaphragm to listen, for all of Kassquit’s life. A hearing diaphragm to listen? I will not think about the strange curls of flesh at the sides of my head, nor about the holes inside them with which I hear. I will not think about them. I will not.
    Trying not to think about something worked as well as that usually did. Kassquit touched an ear, then gave it a painful yank. Maybe I should have these clipped. It would not be too hard, and it would make me look a little closer to the way I should.
    Ttomalss had not wanted to put a mirror in Kassquit’s compartment. His argument had been that looking at such a different face would only lead to discontentment. “I will be more discontented if you do not treat me as if I were part of the Race,” Kassquit remembered saying. “If I were a member of the Race, I would have one.” Ttomalss had yielded; it was the first argument Kassquit had ever won from him.
    The technician who had installed the mirror in the compartment had treated Kassquit like a member of the Race, all right. He had fastened it at a level that would have been perfect for a member of the Race. Kassquit had to stoop to see anything but the paint marking this unsatisfactory body’s unsatisfactory torso.
    Stooping, Kassquit thought, This is how I look. I cannot do anything about it. Small eyes, white with dark center, folds of skin at their inner corners narrowing them further still, without nearly the angle of vision the Race enjoyed. Kassquit had had strips of hair above them, too—Tosevite signaling organs, Ttomalss called them—but those strips got clipped with the rest. A projection below and between the eyes that housed the nostrils. An absurdly small mouth with mobile soft tissue around it and a wildly variegated set of teeth inside.
    Out came Kassquit’s tongue for a critical examination. It needed criticizing, all right, being short and blunt and unforked. Again, and not for the first time, Kassquit wondered whether surgery could correct that flaw.
    “What is the use?” Kassquit said, straightening once more. “What is the use of any of it? They can cut this and clip those and maybe do some other things, too, but it will not help, not really. I will still look like—this.”
    Maybe Ttomalss had been right. Maybe the mirror should have stayed out. In the end, though, how much would it have mattered? I am a Tosevite. I wish I were not, but I am. With or without a mirror, I know it.
    Kassquit went over to the computer terminal, put on false fingerclaws, and returned to the earlier game. But it didn’t engross, as it had before going in to see Felless. Reality has a way of breaking in, Kassquit thought. The best thing about the computer is that it does not know—or if it does know, it does not care; it really does not care—I am a Tosevite. That is one of the reasons it is so much fun. As far as the computer is concerned, I am as good as anybody else. How can I go on believing that, even imagining that, after meeting a female straight from Home?
    “Home,” Kassquit said again, making the word a drawn-out sigh of longing. I know what to do. If I