WHEN THE HANDSOME man invited me to come to his hotel room after dinner, I didn’t know what it meant. I didn’t know the difference. It was probably a language problem; my translatomat wasn’t good at picking up the nuances. Sure, if anybody had asked me, I’d have said it had something to do with sex. Because sex was in everything, sex was everything, here on Ammans World. All the travel brochures, all the advertisements said so. I’d accepted his invitation to dinner because I thought he was sexy, a term we used a lot in the aliens’ dormitory where I lived, and I thought being sexy was nice. He was handsome, kind, charming, and about thirty, just the kind of native that looks nice and sexy to a seventeen-year-old alien.
Every word of our conversation at dinner was nice and sexy, I thought. I was proud of having dinner with a real, adult native. I was pleasantly conscious of my voice speaking, of my clothing,
