a woman--and it was hell! For no rationalization in the universe
would allow him to define her as human. Copper was humanoid--something
like human. And to live with her and love her would not be
miscegenation, which was bad enough, but bestiality which was a thousand
times worse.

Although throughout most of the Brotherhood miscegenation was an unknown
word, and even bestiality had become a loose definition on many worlds
with humanoid populations, the words had definite meaning and moral
force to a Betan. And--God help him--he was a Betan. A lifetime of
training in a moral code that frowned upon mixed marriages and shrank
appalled from even the thought of mixing species was nothing to bring
face to face with the fact that he loved Copper.

It was odd, Kennon reflected bitterly, that humans could do with animals
what their customs and codes prohibited them from doing to themselves.
For thousands of years--back to the very dawn of history when men had
bred horses and asses to produce mules--men had been mixing species
to produce useful hybrids. Yet a Betan who could hybridize plants or
animals with complete equanimity shrank with horror from the thought of
applying the same technique to himself.

What was there about a human being that was so sacrosanct? He shook his
head angrily. He didn't know. There was no answer. But the idea--the
belief--was there, ingrained into his attitudes, a part of his outlook,
built carefully block by block from infancy until it now towered into a
mighty wall that barred him from doing what he wished to do.

It would be an easier hurdle if he had been born anywhere except on
Beta. In the rest of the Brotherhood, the color of a man's skin, the
shape of his face, the quality and color of his hair and eyes made no
difference. All men were brothers. But on Beta, where a variant-G sun
had already caused genetic divergence, the brotherhood of man was a term
that was merely given lip service. Betans were different and from birth
they were taught to accept the difference and to live with it. Mixing of
Betan stock with other human species, while not actually forbidden, was
so encircled with conditioning that it was a rare Betan indeed who would
risk self-opprobrium and the contempt of his fellows to mate with an
outsider. And as for humanoids--Kennon shuddered. He couldn't break the
attitudes of a lifetime. Yet he loved Copper.

And she knew he did!

And that was an even greater horror. He had f