Father was caught while passing by my Mother. She didn't know what mating-lust perfume to send downwind towards him so he would be lured within reach of her tentacles. She had never smelled a mobile like him before. But he did have an odor that was similar to that of another kind of mobile, so she wafted that towards him. It seemed to work, because he came close enough for her to seize him with her extra-uterine tentacles and pop him into her shell.

Later, after I was born, Father radioed me—in Orsemay, of course, so Mother wouldn't understand—that he had smelled the perfume and that it, among other things, had attracted him. But the odor had been that of a hairy tree-climbing mobile, and he had wondered what such creatures were doing on a bare hill-top. When he learned to converse with Mother, he was surprised that she had identified him with that mobile.

Ah, well, he pulsed, it is not the first time a female has made a monkey of a man.

He also informed me that he had thought Mother was just an enormous boulder on top of the hill. Not until a section of the supposed rock opened out was he aware of anything out of the ordinary or that the boulder was her shell and held her body within. Mother, he radioed, is something like a dinosaur-sized snail, or jellyfish, equipped with organs that generate radar and radio waves and with an egg-shaped chamber big as the living room of a bungalow, a womb in which she bears and raises her young.

I didn't understand more than half of these terms of course. Nor was Father able to explain them satisfactorily.

He did make me promise not to pulse Mother that he had thought she was just a big lump of mineral. Why, I don't know.

Father puzzled Mother. Though he fought her when she dragged him in, he had no claws or teeth sharp enough to tear her conception-spot. Mother tried to provoke him further, but he refused to react. When she realized that he was a pulse-sending mobile, and released him to study him, he wandered around the womb. After a while he caught on to the fact that Mother was beaming from her womb pulse-stalk. He learned how to talk with her by using his detachable organ, which he termed a panrad. Eventually, he taught her his language, mobile-pulse. When Mother learned that and informed other Mothers about that, her prestige became the highest in all the area. No Mother had ever thought of a new language. The idea stunned them.

Father said he was the only communicating 

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