by Yoss
It must be our civilization’s fault, with its peculiar and violent history, I guess. Few intelligent species have attained space travel with as many visible racial differences among themselves as we have.
When “my black panther” started losing clients for me through her flagrant xenophobia, I thought about firing her, but after considering her other valuable qualities I decided instead to hire another girl to help with the non-humans…
Nobody can accuse me of being intolerant and intransigent, or of denying people a second chance.
I think I picked a good one, and in fact it all seemed like smooth sailing at first. An-Mhaly was a Cetian, and like almost all Cetians she was nearly as tall as me, but also as pleasant as a professional flight attendant and as delicate as a porcelain doll, with a fascinating smile. As if that weren’t enough, her beautiful contralto voice went perfectly with her height.
Like all Cetians, of course, she also had yellow eyes with no visible pupils, skin that went purple or mauve when she got excited, a retractile spiny crest on the top of her head, a three-forked tongue in a toothless mouth that harbored one of the most complex and efficient mastication systems in the galaxy, and six plump mammary glands.
The first time you see a Cetian female, it’s impossible not to think of the old joke (dating back to before the González drive, you know) about one guy who asks another guy, “Te gustan your women con lots of tits?” The other guy says, “Not really. Más than three son sort of a turn-off, pa’ decirte la truth.”
I later learned that, because of a whole bunch of details that a simple human boor like me can’t even appreciate, other Cetians consider An to be an extraordinary beauty. But as for me, I wouldn’t have cared if she’d won Miss Galactic Community. Long story short, I didn’t find her bosomy abundance all that stimulating, erotically speaking. Quite the contrary.
If I’d been a thirsty baby I might have thought differently, of course…
Call me a racist if you must… but the truth is, even though her species is the closest to human of any in the Galactic Community (according to interspecies medical specialists, at least, and they should know, eh?), I’ve always thought that calling Cetians “humanoids” stretches the meaning of the word too far.
Maybe anthropoid, at most. Or better yet, gynecoid.
Now, I still found her pretty—but only in the same way I might think a purebred horse or a tiger is handsome. Still doesn’t mean I’d want to go to bed with them. For the record.
Sure, I must have been swayed by knowing that any attraction I felt for her would be doomed to fail. If her six splendid breasts wowed me (to make matters worse, she always kept them on gloriously open display, Cetian style), if they gave me the harebrained thought I might get intimate with her… No, better not even think about it.
Some hook-ups are, shall we say, just plain physiologically impossible.
Not her fault, I admit. It’s just sheer bad luck that her exotic biology is incompatible with ours. But you know, you can’t squeeze blood from a turnip.
Or inject a turnip with blood, if you’re a donor…
That’s where my problems began.
Enti and An-Mhaly could be (and indeed were!) outstanding secretaries and well-disciplined assistants. They were physically strong and didn’t gag at the sight of blood, guts, or other disgusting bodily fluids from any species of oversized creature. But regardless. They were still female.
So what happened next was entirely my fault, no one else’s.
I should have seen it coming. Women (and by extension, apparently all female humanoids, or gynecoids, in general) are like cats, or like the marbusses of Mizar that all women love so much: When you call them they don’t come, and when you don’t call them, there’s no way to get rid of them.
Professional gigolos are well acquainted with this paradox. They take advantage of it with what they call the “inaction strategy” or “boredom as bait” or something along those lines. And they say it always works.
I guess there’s some strange part of the female psychology that simply can’t stand being ignored by a male, interpreting it as a personal insult or a challenge they have to confront, come what may, whatever it takes.
Even if what it takes is joining forces with someone who might be her worst imaginable enemy under other circumstances.
As a result, what a coincidence! Both assistants fell in love with me (or told me they did) just a few months after they started working together.
I later came to believe it was a conspiracy, something they’d agreed on.
Because each of them declared their love to me within a few hours of the other.
Kind of suspicious, don’t you think?
Though I suppose they’d deny it, even if you boiled them alive.
Jan Amos Sangan Dongo, the most eligible bachelor alive, chased by the greatest beauties of two species.
Ha.
Must have been my good heart, I guess. Because if it was my body, forget about it.
I’m well aware that I have the body of a troll. And a face not even a troll would touch.
Me, a Don Juan.
Ha.
That’s right. I never tried to kindle any kind of romance with my two assistants—and now I realize that might have been a terrible mistake. I probably should have at least traded a few double entendres with them, commented on how physically attractive they were… I don’t know, anything but pretend I didn’t find any sexual charm in either of them.
Which, to start with, wasn’t even close to true.
In general, my opinion is that love and work don’t mix. My parents taught me as much, without even resorting to words.
But I don’t want to think about my parents now.
And hey, it’s not like I was a saint. A man can’t live on bread alone, especially not if he’s a veterinarian biologist… as some of my clients can attest. (Cetians apart, of course.)
But the office was the office, and my assistants were my assistants, nothing more.
Human or Cetian, no discrimination.
My policy: Don’t shit in the dining room.
So, since I wasn’t interested in having either of them as a partner (or to be honest, since I didn’t think it was in the cards—I maybe could have had a crazy one-night stand with Enti Kmusa, but I’d have been crazy to even think about it with An-Mhaly), and since, in spite of all their feminine solidarity, the two “hopelessly in love” females were starting to act jealous of each other, especially around me, I decided to make a clean break and simply get rid of them both. No explanations. A triangle is a pretty precarious geometrical figure.
Naturally, I had to give them each a hefty severance package for firing them without notice. Plus, for the Cetian—this is one of the downsides of the Galactic Community Coordinating Committee and its painstakingly achieved interracial equality!—a substantial bonus for “xenophobic discrimination” and “psychological distress.”
I guess it wasn’t all that much. Poor kid even tried taking her own life after I rejected her.
I felt terribly guilty for several days, until I found out it’s a fairly common practice among her race. In some ways the Cetians remind me of the samurai from ancient Japan on Earth: they often prefer death to dishonor.
Aha! Okay, then. Learning that fact made me feel a little better.
Only a tiny bit better, though, to tell the truth.
The whole business, with all the subsequent complications over the Cetian, left me so paranoid about the idea of “assistants” (female or not, because in this era of galactic sexual liberation and interspecies pansexuality, you never know) that I worked solo for the next few months. And in my field, working without a good assistant isn’t hard, it’s impossible.
The worst of it was that, going overnight from two assistants to none, my productivity took a nosedive. My client list, too. Robots can help a little in certain situations, of course, but nothing takes the place of a capable assistant with gumption. Especially not a secre
tary-assistant, and a fairly bright one, like Enti or An-Mhaly.
Even less both of them at once.
That’s how things were going for me when the Laggoru, Narbuk-Alr-Quamal-Tahlir-Norgai, contacted me over the holonet one day.
He rubbed me the wrong way right from the start with his clumsy mangling of Spanglish. And when he admitted to having no experience as a secretary or a lab assistant, not to mention the “minor detail” that, even though he’s a Laggoru, he’s pretty uncomfortable around animals in general (a generous description of his strange zoophobia), I was tempted to tell him then and there, “Gracias, but don’t call me, mejor yo te llamo, y don’t hold your breath.”
But no other candidates tried out for the job, he needed it urgently, and I was just as desperate to find an assistant who, even if he wasn’t a model of efficiency, at least wouldn’t start making uncomfortable erotic passes at me…
These are strange times. One of the downsides of galactic integration is that some intelligent races have practically turned interspecies sex into a sport. Kerkants, for example. They can hardly create a family anymore without “cohabiting” with at least two different rational species first. No matter what sort of air they breathe.
But Laggorus, being traditionalists, still strongly disapprove of such promiscuity.
Must be because they have six or eight sexes (it still isn’t completely clear), none of which corresponds directly to the male or female of humans or any other species. Some believe that not even the Laggorus themselves fully understand their baroque system of sexual castes and sub-castes. Wouldn’t surprise me.
I didn’t care exactly which sex Narbuk belonged to. Just so long as he was equally uninterested in my sex.
Be that as it may, Narbuk-Alr-Quamal-Tahlir-Norgai came for an interview with his future employer with little hope of getting the job… But the fact is, whether because I needed an assistant so badly, or because he was even taller than I am, or because he immediately admitted to being misogynistic and heterosexual, he started work for me that same day.
It was a good move. Though even now I’m not totally sure he’s exactly what we’d call a male if he were human, I’m quite certain he has absolutely no sexual interest in me.
Of course, one month later my formerly well-ordered professional schedule was in total chaos. Besides having no sense of humor, Laggorus have no talent whatsoever for office work.
Though, to tell the truth, I can’t complain. I don’t know how, but I’ve almost doubled my old client list…
Maybe orderliness is overrated after all.
“Boss Sangan, sludge, dos metros, front.” His screaking voice shakes me from my reflections.
I notice his dorsal pleats slowly distending.
What does that mean? Interpreting the emotions of a creature who doesn’t express his feelings through facial muscles is kind of complicated. Exhaustion? Or hope, maybe?
“Algo ring-shape inside. Me know us find already muchos fish bones. Now el corazón tell me something mucho good,” he declares.
Ah, it seems there is hope, then. I sip some water through my helmet’s built-in tube and slog through the mud (not actually mud, unfortunately) like a hippo in my excited rush to the spot he’s marked on the map.
You have to take a Laggoru seriously when he tells you his heart tells him something. After all, Laggorus have six hearts, not one. They also give birth to live young instead of laying eggs. Of course, they aren’t really reptiles. Most of the zoological categories we apply to fauna on Earth have no meaning in any other ecology in the galaxy. Our planet is not the measure of all things.
Just in case, I prepare myself for another disappointment, in the best Zen way.
“Seek y encuentra, hunt and captura. That’s what la vida is all about. Has it occurred alguna vez to you, mi esteemed colega Narbuk-Alr-Quamal-Tahlir-Norgai, that when tú vas hunting por algo o looking por alguien, you have todo tipo of disappointments, you take lots of decisiones equivocadas—but el verdadero joy of discovery solamente comes once? The hunt is therefore más importante than the result.”
After a short silence, the Laggoru quickly retracts his dorsal pleats, which I believe is a clear display of disapproving surprise, and replies, “No, Boss Sangan. Never me think esto. Sound estúpido. If hunt es más importante, why hunt algo? Maybe find it. Mejor hunt nothing, then never find nada, verdad?”
“Huh. Yo guess so,” I mumble, cursing his implacable logic as I point the vacuum hose towards the latest piece of sludge and pray to all the gods I don’t believe in, the gods of Earth and every other planet, that this will finally be Mrs. Tarkon’s damn wedding bracelet, not another sludge-covered fish vertebra.
I’m dying to get out of here…
If it’s the trinket, and her loving spouse keeps his promise, I’ll be a little richer than I was before.
Well, a lot richer, actually.
And why wouldn’t Mr. Tarkon do what he promised? You might think an ordinary veterinarian biologist wouldn’t pay attention to these things, but in lots of human colonial enclaves the governor is practically a god. The Amphorians hang around him for a reason: There are trade deals with Nerea only he can authorize.
Contraband deals, too…
Hmm, that’s an interesting thought. It might explain a lot… Is there any illegal substance trafficking or alien bribery going on around here? Wouldn’t shock me. Tarkon seems to have quite a budget at his disposal. Not unlimited, but pretty flexible at least. Locating me and getting me here from the other side of the galaxy in less than two hours couldn’t have been exactly cheap. A round trip in a private ship equipped with a González drive, a shuttle flight to the planet’s surface—fast, I don’t deny it, but I had to put up with eight brutal g’s for a few loooong minutes.
The orbital space elevator would have been more comfortable, but slower. And cheaper, too, plenty cheaper.
Not even counting details like the cost of a few tons of sedatives and laxatives, or the emergency bonus, my fees aren’t exactly modest.
They couldn’t be. Unusual expertise is expensive, and I’m unique.
The sign on my office door on Gea and my holonet ads all say the same thing: NOTHING IS TOO BIG FOR US.
As long as it’s alive…
I’m Dr. Jan Sangan, the “Veterinarian to the Giants.” The only veterinarian biologist or animal doctor in the whole galaxy, human or alien, who specializes in extremely large organisms.
Tsunamis clearly come under my purview. These little cuties, the symbols of Nerea, are the largest known aquatic life form in the galaxy. So far, at least.
Of course, there are much larger free-floating organisms in space. Genuine leviathans of weightlessness, such as the ten-kilometer-long threshers. And concholants, which can be up to twice that size. Not to mention the laketons of Brobdingnag, planetary leviathans that make even those titans of weightless space look tiny.
But, regardless, tsunamis are huge. Males of up to three kilometers long have been found. They owe their expressive name to the fact that when they swim rapidly or whip their tails in anger or in play, they make waves reminiscent of the waves caused by seaquakes on Earth.
Nerea, their home planet, is a giant ocean dotted with three or four archipelagos. The water is fifty kilometers deep in some parts. Good thing, too, because tsunamis would find even the Marianas Trench in the Pacific a tight squeeze.
Though tsunamis, like many living species in the galaxy, have no exact equivalent in the taxonomy of pre-González drive Earth zoology, they could be placed halfway between echinoderms and polychaete annelids.
That explanation should satisfy all the laymen, I’m sure.
You could also think of them as gigantic sea worms. Basically, they’re huge worms with segmented bodies covered in bony plates (articulated exoskeletons), legless, with multiple hearts (two per segment; as for Laggorus, heart attacks don’t cause these critters much more than mild discomfort), and so on and so forth. They are hermaphrodites and reproduc
e simply, without going through metamorphosis; females of reproductive age lay eggs that hatch into small versions of adult tsunamis.
Too large to be bothered by predators, tsunamis swim wherever they please, and when they’re hungry they simply open their cavernous circular mouths, filtering entire cubic kilometers of water through the sieve formed by their enormous teeth (their only function), then swallow everything trapped in the net. They are the Nerean equivalent of Earth’s blue whales, though they often swallow “planktonic” organisms half the size of a full-grown man.
At first, the new human colonizers on the planet were appalled by the amount of edible biomass these coldblooded behemoths were consuming and feared they would damage their fishing boats and ferries, so they tried to exterminate them with bombs, mines, and torpedoes.
But their exoskeletons proved so tough and their tissues regenerated so quickly and with such vitality that the colonizers soon realized it would take too many powerful bombs to destroy them all. The shockwaves alone would have destroyed much of the rest of the planet’s rich marine life, too.
Their next plan was to poison them, or engineer viral plagues specifically targeting tsunamis. Of course the Ecology Subcommittee of the Galactic Community would never have allowed anything so risky, biologically speaking. Also, luckily, someone realized in time that leaving thousands of tsunami corpses to decompose all at once would create a terrible hygiene problem. There simply aren’t enough scavenger organisms in the Nerean ecosystem to process that many enormous corpses at once. The risk of epizootic disease would be too great.
Taking all of this into consideration, plus the “friendliness” that made them tourist attractions (many visitors pay good money to experience the thrill of swimming with these titans—while wearing ultraprotective suits, of course; the “frolicsome” creatures never attack anything too big to swallow, and we humans are a little large for them, but you might as well guard against a chance swipe of the tail that could almost send you into orbit, right?), not to mention their status as the planet’s unique and iconic species, the human colonizers finally decided to let the tsunamis continue happily scarfing down most of the seafood on their planet.
