Sister

How close can you ever be to another human being? How much can you love someone? And what has sex got to do with it? If that someone is not there, what can you do? In his earliest years Nicky found himself in a council of Indian Chiefs gathered to oversee his purchase of a friend's sister for a bag of marbles. But the girl did not agree. Later he found a sister, yet though he loved her he was not satisfied, and nuclear bombs cut short what happiness they had. A time came when he settled into a new crib in which a soul of amity, a jewel of strange and alien cut, already slept. Waking they peered from prismatic eyes, seeing their face in the corners of vision, the snout of a shiny black chitinous helmet, mandibles flexing sideways. But Y'y'yr was not the sister he sought.

Nicky was a name of his distant past when Melikaphkaz XIV sent him to confront the Valkyries, who were rampaging across the far stars of the empire in their Great Ships. The Emperor seemed to know more about his origins than he did himself. A royal marriage beckoned, but experience told him that should sister and wife coincide jealousies could be catastrophic.