Who Curses the devil?
The rain on Xon came down like Morse code, with dense strata of 10- and 20-meters dot-and-dash downpours delimited by 50 meter spaces. Even in the wet lair-houses like Delta by the Sea of the Red West the Kaalysti had rarely seen rain, and certainly nothing like what precipitated out of the thick Xon troposphere.
Ariel got up from their bed totally relaxed, from the top of her ears to the tip of her tail, more relaxed than she had been in ages, maybe in all six-squared orbits of Xon about her primary.
How long would that be in Earth years? she wondered. Thirty-six.
She had spent half her conscious life as a Kaalite, a member of a vaguely feline race that had evolved on the planet the current inhabitants called Grace. Ariel had long ago ceased to think of herself as a changeling, a human who had undergone a DNA metamorphosis while in stasis. She was of the Kaalysti, a little taller than most, fur a bit ruddier, face a little flatter, but a Kaalite, and an attractive one at that. Despite their imposing intellect Kaalites still appreciated physical attractiveness. It took Ariel years to find this out about her people, so much did their mental aspirations overshadow their primal nature. In fact, when she first encountered the Kaalysti and after the shine on her awe of them dulled a bit, she mischaracterized them as a bit cold and calculating. However, she understood the depth of her error in judgment as she experienced firsthand the depth of their passions. The Kaalysti are a race devoted to understatement, subtlety, nuance, and their emotional scale is so fine that volumes are held within a gesture, an utterance, a scent. By contrast, the sensations of her human past seemed coarse, crass, vague and unrefined, and thankfully distant.
Yet occasionally she did think human thoughts, calling up human memories in spite of herself. She had believed all traces of her former existence as an acolyte of the Church of the New Life had been erased, but there they were. The nanobots that had changed her body, and the Kaalite discipline that had changed her mind about so many things had failed to erase her memories of Earth. And for this some secret part of her was strangely glad, as painful as many of those memories were.
But at this moment on the inhospitable planet Xon, with its tympanic downpours, she was completely relaxed, having finally mastered the complimentary massage technique known as annaas with her lair-mate, her brok, Lree. The big male was even more terse than the average Kaalite; on Earth Lree would have tread the fine line between social awkwardness and aloofness. It had taken Ariel a long time to decipher his few words, even though she was completely fluent in the language of the Kaalysti. But it was about the time that she realized that physical attractiveness had a place in Kaalite relations that the proverbial light bulb turned on and she understood Lree's intentions. It was a flash of memory that did it, a spark of remembrance from when she first saw herself in her new form. When she had first seen her tail, protruding from her coccyx and extending to the floor—thin, lithe, sexy—Ariel wasn't sure then why that should be important to her. But Kaalites have very long attention spans in their very long lives, and their relationships tend to develop slowly. Lree was patient, waiting for the moment of self-realization he knew must bloom in her.