Jellenhut: You mean each clanswoman only has one mate? You do not all mate together, at the bud-pond, each year?

Ian: No, we - er - mate separately.

Jellenhut: Each one on your own? But how could you possibly do that?

(Ian felt his face going red he was beginning to lose his anthropological detachment. When he had joined Coal Hill High School, he had never expected to have to explain the birds and the bees to a nine-foot alien whose idea of sex was an annual mass orgy.)