"The fact that any Nebulonian man would accept whatever I wanted the solution to be, if he could be mated to a Nebulonian princess, is part of it.  I wanted someone who wouldn't be that far below me - the sort of relationship where I didn't have an overriding sexual market value far in excess of my mate's, even if it meant appearing before them as a foreign refugee princess instead of a native wealthy princess.  There's also the point that Earth is one of the planets whose native men look much more masculine than a Nebulonian male can shift himself to look; Nebulonian men can't poke out their toes that far and don't have noses that long.  I might have been better off, in my life, if I'd abided in censorship and never found out what lay beyond my own world's sun, but the fact is I did find out and maybe learned it too young..."

"I have a sense that I'm not truly communicating my own thoughts, here.  Do you not find Earth's men dissatisfying to you, sometimes?  Is it hard to imagine that somebody a little more picky and proud would end up dissatisfied with all her planet's men and go looking around other stars instead?"

Ramona laughs to herself, remembering her friend at the bar suggesting a rich tentacle monster.

The idea was not completely without merit...

"So in a way, you're kind of enjoying that Jake won't just let you have your way, that he's fighting for something important to him? That adds to the appeal? Along with his long nose and toes, of course."

"I wouldn't say that I'm enjoying it, so much as that it's something that I need for the relationship to feel real to me at all.  I suppose that in the end maybe what ends up feeling real, is that I lose - but I'm still hoping for not-that."

"You mentioned that you know you're in the wrong, you started the relationship with a bunch of conditions that Jake wasn't aware of -- does that have any implications? Does it make you any more willing to compromise, to figure something out?"

"I'm not sure that's quite the way my species sees things?  It means that Jake doesn't injure my sense of righteousness, when he pushes back in the way that he does, only my sense of pride, which are different senses.  I know that I couldn't expect support from others if I tried to just subdue Jake to my own will, even leaving aside that I'm on his planet and not mine.  It means that I'm out to find a way we can be happy together rather than out for revenge."

Ramona makes a mental note NEVER to injure Zephyria's sense of righteousness.

Except wait. She has no idea how to avoid that.

"Juuuuust out of curiosity... since we are talking to each other across a cultural divide, and you're probably not used to so many direct, personal questions... have I done anything that's come close to offending your sense of righteousness? I'm not totally sure what you mean by that."

"The web of relations that has to exist in order for society to exist, rather than those relations which are about the triumphs and alliances between individuals.  If you broke your vows of honor as a therapist and so harmed me, that would injure my sense of righteousness.  It is not easy for us to be injured in that way by aliens, we would need to trust them first."

Ramona feels reassured, for now.

But also makes a mental note to think through how to keep herself from getting stabbed through the eye by someone's retractable poison claw in session one day, just by asking the wrong question.

This was not covered in human therapy school. She's been winging it, so far, and it's all worked out, but she doesn't want to press her luck.

"Okay, that's helpful, thank you."

"I want to go back to something you said a while back. It was just sort of an offhand comment but I realized I didn't understand it. We were talking about the idea of making several clones of you, and staggering when they were in heat, so Jake would always have a Zephyria to have sex with. You said something about that complicating questions of lineage. I suggested that all the other clones could be sterile, and then you said they'd become suidical."

"I realize I don't understand what you mean when you say lineage. I've been assuming you meant something very straightforward like we have in some places on Earth: there's a royal family, and the firstborn child assumes the title when their parent dies or abdicates, or some other rules of succession are followed. What does lineage mean on Nebulon?"

"It goes back to a time when Nebulon didn't have computers or genetic tests, the conditions of our ancestry under which our emotions evolved.  Today, in principle, it's possible for a woman to sleep with a man and use contraception and not have that complicate the future ancestry of her children at all.  But none of that changes how we feel about anything, any more than Earthlings would not care about the taste of their food so long as it contained the right sort of optimized nutritious slurry.  The way law works, the way custom works, the way my feelings work, for Jake to sleep with another woman complicates the lineage of Nebulonian royalty even if he used a 'condom'.  Which, to be clear, most Nebulonians wouldn't do in the first place--use contraception--because the people who'd do that have been weeded out of our race by evolution."

"I think I understand. You were programmed by evolutionary biology to feel... anger? revulsion? just wrongness?... if your mate has sex with someone else? And that feeling doesn't change at all even if the someone else is genetically identical to you, because you didn't evolve in a world with clones?"

"Loss of--status, pride, place--that I'm someone whose lineage doesn't matter and isn't worth tracking--that my children aren't meant to be saleable on the mating market to high-class suitors who are picky about their future spouses' genetic material.  A defining quality of Nebulonian royalty is that we're meant to be our species's repository of all the best genes, and you can tell exactly whose genes might've ended up in a kid."