From "Inheritor" ... two different fragments from one scene:
Not love, he said to himself. And then thought, with one of those flashes of insight his professional mind sometimes had, maybe they'd had such rotten luck with the love and man'chi aspect of relations because that word in Mosphei' blurred so many things together it just wasn't safe to deal with.
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So if their languages didn't quite match and the niches they made that said this person satisfies enough requirements to make me happy were just a little different-shaped in their psyches, the center of that design might match, leaving just the edges hanging off.
