As I reminisced, I saw that John-23 was waiting for me to say something a bit more profound. “I think it might be interesting to find a little more stability, I suppose. I’ve never had anything that lasts.”
“Nothing ever lasts,” John-23 said. I’ve seen him in occasional glooms like this ever since his accident.
“I can make it better for you. Anytime you give me the chance,” I said. “No charge.”
I had made the offer before, but never seriously, and John-23 knew it. I’ve known him long enough that I could select a bodily form that would make his hormones short-circuit. I could give him absolutely everything he had ever fantasized about, and he knows it.
But John-23 also has a wife and three kids back in the employees’ annex. His marriage is a good one, solid. He doesn’t need me mucking it up. He’s too good a friend, and I would never do that to him.
“Don’t tempt me,” he said. His voice was husky.
“Offer withdrawn,” I said, then deliberately shifted into another body that would look bulbous and ugly to him.
John-23 touched the pickup implant behind his ear, then nodded. “Gotta go. One of the Swelft guests is trying to take a shower but can’t figure out how to turn the water on. Those damned critters are so unintuitive! What’s complicated about turning a knob in the bathtub?” He stomped off, waving goodbye, but I could already see a new sense of purpose behind his movements.
John-23 likes his job, too. He just hates not being busy.
I sauntered through the pearlescent arches leading into one of the hotel’s primary bars. I wanted to share my energy, use it as synergy and keep the buzz going. I needed a pickup.
I was wearing a delicate, feathery body guaranteed to ring a few hormonal bells for a wide range of male hotel guests, and I could always alter my appearance at a moment’s notice anyway.
Since so many species operate on completely different circadian rhythms, nobody at the Hotel Andromeda particularly cares what time it is. All things at all times, that was their motto. At the bar itself, various organic and robotic bartenders consulted their databases to determine which substances were known to be intoxicating to which life forms.
I glanced around the bar, cataloging the customers, my prospects. Many of the species were familiar to me, some of them good tippers, some of them good lovers. Most were already with a companion. But I wanted something a bit more exotic, a bit of a challenge.
Then I saw it perched on a stool that had never been designed to accommodate its insectile frame. Metallic turquoise blue on its back casings and segmented legs, an ovoid head with gleaming silver domes for eyes, whip-like antennas—I had never seen its type before, which meant it was fairly rare. A challenge.
While staring at it, I consulted my Lexicon implant, waiting one second, then two as it searched for a match. I began to grow concerned and exhilarated at the same time. An unknown? Not quite. The listing popped up an image and a name—BORRAK. Very little data about the species. Just some specifics on their home world, temperature ranges, gravity—all the stuff that’s easy to gather from a few space probes, but nothing that demonstrated extended sociological study.
This excited me even more, especially after recalling my recent conversation with John-23. I could provide some new data for the Lexicon compilers, give them vital information about a mysterious species. The Lexicon pays handsomely for such contributions, which was enough of an incentive already, but it could also let me do something permanent, to make my mark on the galactic civilization.
Since the Lexicon entry gave so few useful facts, I was going to have to use my intuition and my skills to the fullest.
Drawing from the image in the Lexicon and extrapolating from what I could see hulking over the barstool, I altered my form into my best approximation of a Borrak. I made my exoskeleton a little brighter, the antennae more feathery, hoping I had made a correct guess about what the race found beautiful. I approached the Borrak, who seemed to be huddling in misery over a gelatinous intoxicant. All the better.
“Hello, potential companion,” I said in Basic dialect.
The Borrak turned and reared back in what could only be an expression of astonishment. Normally, I dislike chitinous beings; it’s impossible to read any expression on a brittle face—therefore more difficult to know when I’m doing something right—but their body language is usually more exaggerated. “Why are you here?” it said without any preamble.
“I would like to spend some time with you. Would that be acceptable?” I usually leave out all discussions of fees until after I have the client on the hormonal hook.
To my surprise, the Borrak drew itself up, bristling in an apparent defensive posture with perhaps a hint of dismay. “No, that would not be acceptable,” it answered. “I think it would be wisest if you remained far from me for the duration of your stay at the Hotel Andromeda. I would not want to be forced to engage you in mortal combat.”
Now that was a hell of a rebuff, but I couldn’t figure out what I had done wrong. The Borrak scrambled itself off the barstool in a dizzying ballet of segmented legs, then marched out of the bar.
Failure is certainly nothing new to me, and I can usually take it with a measure of grace. But I was preoccupied with trying to figure out what I had done wrong. I moved to a vacant table, changed form into something that would sit comfortably on one of the chairs, and pondered. Every race and every society has plenty of customs and taboos that usually make no sense to outside observers; perhaps I had inadvertently stepped on some insectile toes. Who could tell?
“Excuse me,” said a gruff, demanding voice with no undertones of politeness whatsoever, “you are a hookermorph. I saw you change. Don’t try to deny it.”
I turned to see a squat, froglike creature, powerfully built, with needle teeth and lips that stretched practically all around his head. A Rybet; I had served them before. They were not too difficult to work with, if you had a high tolerance for rudeness. You just had to be rude back to them. It turned them on.
“Hire me if you want. If not, get away from me. You want a price breakdown?”
“Come to my room. Now. I will pay your usual fee, and I wish to hire you for a different assignment.”
Maybe the day would have something interesting and unusual after all, I thought. I transformed into the body of a female Rybet, then waddled after him out of the bar.
Up in the Rybet’s room, we waded into shin-deep lukewarm water. Semi-mobile algae dribbled out of our way as we sloshed to two damp fungal mounds in the middle of the pool. Two dull red holographic suns shone from the dome roof of the room.
“Sit down,” he snapped, motioning with a stubby, flipper-like forearm.
“Why?”
“So I can tell you about my assignment, that’s why! Now listen.” He seated himself on one of the fungal mounds with a squelching sound. He puffed air into his lips, swelling them.
I splashed water upon myself to dampen my skin, then eased onto the vacant mound as far away from the Rybet as possible. “So talk!” I said.
“I need you to secure for me a sample of semen from a Hoojum. It’s very important. I’ll pay you a thousand credits.”
Not only was the Rybet rude, but he seemed at least partially insane. “A Hoojum! That’s tough. Why a thousand credits?”
“Never mind. I’ll pay you a hundred credits just for coming here now, and a thousand more if you can deliver a sperm sample.” He puffed his lips again, and his lantern eyes widened.
“I’ll try. Even assuming I can find a Hoojum getting one as a customer is no minor task.”
“An entire Hoojum tour group is on the transport arriving this afternoon. Remember, it’s worth a thousand credits.”
“I said I would try. Now stop nagging me!”
I pushed myself off the fungus mound and got ready to leave, but he leaped up and splashed in the water after me. “Wait!” he croaked. “I’m paying you a hundred credits for this visit. Give me something for it.”
&n
bsp; I sighed. At least it was fairly simple to service a Rybet.
Concentrating long enough to shift my internal organs, I generated, then pulled out a few handfuls of black sterile eggs into the lukewarm water. The egg mass looked like an island of black caviar surrounded by a wispy mass of the semi-mobile algae. The Rybet sloshed up to it and loomed over the eggs.
After he had spilled his milt over the cluster, he let out a long breath of satisfaction. “Ah, very pleasurable. Thank you very much.” He let his huge lips curve in a grotesque smile, then he remembered his rudeness again. “Don’t stare at me. Get out of here!” I sloshed back to the door portal, thinking of the thousand credits he had offered. Now all I had to do was find a Hoojum.
I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of watching the spaceliners arrive. All you see is a bright light as the ship, itself as big as the continents on many worlds, swings into orbit. Smaller chunks break off the liner’s main body and drop down like shooting stars to the transfer points at Hotel Andromeda.
Sometimes I like to go out to watch the descending cargo modules, each like a city in its own right, carrying thousands of staterooms, each pressurized with the occupants’ desired atmosphere. Watching the great mass of the dedicated module land that afternoon, I was reminded all too clearly of the flames, the groaning metal, the spouting death that John-23 had encountered right out here on the primary receiving bay. But extra safeguards had been designed in the decade since that accident, and I had nothing to worry about.
The hot air smelled of industrial pollutants, outgassing from rocket fuels, lubricants from the machinery that loaded and unloaded the immense containers. The air was filled with a cacophony of hissing and roaring and strident alarm blasts; I would have preferred even the bloop-bloop-bloop music of the Slugwumps.
Somewhere among the thousands of passengers on that dedicated module was a tour group of Hoojums. I just had to wait and watch.
Even without trying, the Hoojums succeeded in making everything difficult for me. It seemed to be a particular talent of theirs.
First off, they were a bunch of religious fanatics of the worst kind. They stuck together in a little pack, as if just daring anyone to persecute them. They all wore huge, billowy robes of violet and orange, embroidered with threads of eye-numbing intensity so that they looked like walking moiré patterns wherever they went.
The whole group would disappear for hours in prayer meetings and verse chantings. The few times I managed to catch one by himself, he rebuffed my advances completely. Five times. After following them around for three days without success, I decided it was time to change tactics.
I uploaded their version of holy scripture and scanned it into my forebrain. Pretty standard stuff, commonplace for all those religions that claim to have the One True Message. Of course, those types of fanatics never allow themselves to read scripture adopted by any other religion, so they never seem to notice all the similarities.
I did a context-insensitive search for the items I wanted in the massive book of writings. This sort never bothers with context when they want to quote something from a holy writing anyway, as long as the words prove the point they’re trying to make. So, armed with the appropriate verses to support my scheme, I waited to catch another Hoojum alone.
“Excuse me, brother,” I said, “but I need your help.” That line always gets them. He stopped dead in his tracks on his way to the front desk.
The Hoojum turned with a great whispering of his optical-illusion robes. He seemed surprised to find another one of his kind wandering the halls of the hotel. “You are not from our tour group.”
“I have fallen into the pit of sin, and I must find someone to help me climb out of it.”
I watched him shudder, possibly from the incredible favor I had just asked or from a personal revulsion at talking to a genuine sinner. Hoojums are primarily reptilian in features, with massive bony plates on the face, squarish teeth, and a ridged crest on top of the head. In order for me to read squeamishness through all that armor, his reaction must have been extreme indeed.
“I was just going to request some extra towels. We’re having a charismatic verse sing tonight. Perhaps if you join us—”
“No! I need you to help me. Now! Or I am forever lost.” He hesitated. “Please!” I added just the right begging tone to my voice.
He sighed, a long hiss, then took me aside. “Very well, my child. Tell me of your predicament.”
“Only if you promise to help me. There is only one way I can be saved.”
“I promise. Now tell me.”
“We had best go to my room, where I can speak of this in private. I am so ashamed, I do not want to risk anyone overhearing.”
He balked at that, and I could see him searching his mind for some sort of acceptable excuse. “You promised me,” I said. Finally, the Hoojum agreed.
John-23 had held this room for me for the last couple of days, as a special favor. Now it paid off. Inside, it was decorated in the bland grayness and muted lighting the Hoojums preferred in their accommodations—fewer worldly distractions that way, I suppose.
“I have been stranded in this hotel for too long, after foolishly fleeing from our homeworld,” I told the Hoojum. “I have found myself tempted. I have fantasized of sexual pleasures and perversions with any number of alien beings here. I might have acted out some of my desires… but after seeing your righteous group, I repented of my sinful thoughts, in horror at what I have been contemplating. But I must be cleansed.”
The Hoojum looked doubly squeamish. I clutched at his robe, and he flinched. “But what do you need me to do?”
“The scripture is clear on this point.” I allowed myself an inner smirk at that one. “To purge all sin from me, I must face the horrors of that which I had once considered. I must have sex with a complete stranger. Only then can I see how horrible it really is.”
The Hoojum’s jaw dropped open in total astonishment. “But not only that,” I pressed on, “but I must charge money for this act, so that I myself can experience the awful punishment of the lowliest of all beings—a prostitute!”
He gasped and choked and tried to break away, but my grip on his robe was firm. “Please! You promised! Do this in the name of the Deity and you will be exalted for all time.”
“But I must not!”
So, I hit him with the scriptures I had memorized, quoting verse after verse of the vague poetry that seemed to shore up my claim. He countered a few of them, but I came up with even more. In the end, I think I exhausted him with my piety, and he began to crumble under his own doubts.
When he took off the moiré robe, I was surprised to see a rather scrawny being underneath. The billowing cloth and their overlarge heads make the Hoojums look much more massive than they really are. I tried not to stare. He already seemed embarrassed enough.
The sexual act with him was mercifully brief, and he didn’t appear to enjoy it at all. He grudgingly paid me with his credit scanner, then fled my room, muttering prayers to himself. I wondered if the charismatic verse sing had started without him.
I transformed again into a more comfortable form, then secreted a carefully contained packet filled with Hoojum semen—a packet somehow worth a thousand credits to a Rybet.
In his own quarters, the Rybet leaped up and down with delight. “You got it!” He splashed off the fungus mound on which he had been napping and waded over to me, his huge mouth hanging open in delight. The semi-mobile algae could not move out of his way quickly enough, and wet green strands clung to his waist and thighs, slowly trying to flee back into the lukewarm water.
“How did you ever get it? Never mind. I don’t want to know. Just give it to me.”
“Give me my thousand credits first,” I countered. Even though I didn’t wear a Rybet form this time, I could still be rude.
“Fine, fine.” He dumped the money into my account with his credit scanner, and I handed the package over to him.
He held it up to the dim light of
the two simulated red suns and looked at the thick gray-blue liquid. “Looks right,” he said, bobbing his head up and down in a vigorous nod. “You can’t find details like the color of Hoojum semen in the Lexicon.”
“It’s real,” I said. “Now are you going to tell me what you want it for?”
In reply, he removed a thin, diamond-like needle from a pouch at his waist. The Rybet dipped the tip of the needle into the clotted Hoojum sperm, swirled it around a few times, then withdrew the needle. A single drop hung like a tiny, cloudy pearl on the point.
The Rybet closed his lantern eyes, took a deep breath of anticipation, then jabbed the needle into his fat lips.
His reaction was nearly instantaneous. He let out a loud keening sound from the bottom of his throat. “Yes, oh yes!” His eyes flung open wide, and his body shuddered so much he almost dropped the rest of the semen sample. He gulped in a deep breath. “Wow! This is fantastic!”
In my line of work you see a lot of strange things.
Then the Rybet began to jabber at me, stomping around in the wading pool so rapidly that he churned the surface into a froth. “Hoojum sperm is the most intense, stimulating drug we Rybets have ever found. It is so precious, so rare—and so marvelous! Just obtaining it is nearly impossible. What you’ve given me will be worth millions on the Rybet open market! Oh, you are marvelous, wonderful!”
He looked like he wanted to mate with me again. I think I preferred it when he was merely rude. “Here,” he said, grabbing for his credit scanner again. “Just to show how much this really means to me.”
Barely looking at his own stubby fingers, the Rybet punched another 200 credits into my account. At that point I decided to leave, before the drug’s euphoria wore off and his rudeness settled back in.
The mysterious Borrak was sitting on the same ill-fitting barstool as if waiting to pounce. I looked at its insectile form, wondering what I had botched so badly during my first attempt—after all, if I could succeed in seducing a repressed Hoojum and make him pay for the pleasure, what could possibly be so difficult about a Borrak? I summoned up the sparse Lexicon listing again, and immediately noticed the obvious.
Hotel Andromeda Page 24
