Super Extra Grande (8 page)

Before you ask: Yes, I’ve tasted the stuff. I don’t have any weird homophobic prejudices about it. It really is delicious, with a slightly bittersweet taste. And I didn’t feel like I was violating any moral taboo when I tried it. Did women in the past feel like they were transgressing when they tasted caviar? Or a simple fried egg?

But, true—it doesn’t take an especially perverse mind to come to the lascivious conclusion that Cetians reach maturity through oral sex. And they sure do enjoy it.

Which adds more than a little kinkiness to their gorgeous looks.

And this is the “special nutritional treatment” that determines which larvae will later leave the water and which won’t. Only those that have “breastfed” on this remarkable liquid, which both nourishes and fertilizes, turn into the intelligent humanoid females. Who, as it happens, never need to copulate: even before their drastic change begins, they’re already carrying the spermatozoa that will, thirty or forty years later, fertilize their ova for their first, last, only, and lethal egg-laying.

The “milk” of the male both feeds and fertilizes them—even decades later.

It almost sounds like an ad for porn, doesn’t it?

That’s why an elfin Cetian has no functioning reproductive organs. She doesn’t have a vulva or a vagina. She doesn’t need one! Cetians never copulate, and they always die depositing their eggs…

Which is why I never took An-Mhaly’s infatuation with me seriously. I’m a practical sort, not into sterile platonic relationships or the impossible unrequited interspecies love affairs that infest our third-rate holoprograms, no matter how romantic the public finds them.

Call me machista and closed-minded, and maybe I am, but what good is a woman without her most important opening?

I know that having oral sex with a Cetian is one of the most common unadmitted fantasies among human males—and I understand perfectly well why! A three-forked tongue under complete voluntary control; a mouth without teeth, with rotating chewing plates of cartilage, not bone, in their place… It’s a little like sublimating the great masculine nightmare of the vagina dentata.

But what do you want? Maybe I’m old-school, but for me that sort of contact will never take the place of “the thing itself.”

Oral sex—like written sex—will never be anything but tender foreplay or a pathetic emergency substitute for real intercourse. Accept no substitutes. Forget about it. Sorry, but that’s how it is.

Calling each other milk cousins means that my former employee and Gardf here both ingested the nutritious “milk” that induced their metamorphosis into humanoids from the same male. Or at least think they did, for many experts still heatedly debate whether adults have any memory of their larval stage.

It goes without saying that this common experience unites Cetian society, which is obviously matriarchal and has nothing remotely like sexual dynamics (no, by all indications they are
not
a culture of rabidly lusty lesbians, as perversely attractive as the possibility may appear to a few hotheaded humans), by forming much more intimate clans than human consanguinity could ever create.

*

“Umm… Perdón about the mixup. So, cómo está An-Mhaly?” I finally manage to ask her silver-skirted twin, overcoming my natural initial embarrassment and the torrent of thoughts and memories that her words have unleashed in me.

The Galactic Community Coordinating Committee official flashes her huge yellow eyes at me in a way I’ve never seen any of her fellow Cetians do, but I can tell she’s signifying deep disapproval. At last she says with a sigh, “I won’t lie to you, Doctor Sangan. An está in bad shape. She’ll never get over tu… rejection. Su case is very talked-about en Tau Ceti.”

“Perdón,” I say, because I can’t say anything else. I say it with all my heart, though, I swear. “She was una asistente magnífica and an even better secretaria. Pero you have to entender, given our anatomical diferencias…”

“I do entiendo.” Gardf-Mhaly gives me another one of those stone-cold looks. “Though in el pasado that hasn’t stopped otros hombres from at least trying to consumar their amor imposible… Anyway, ella también entiende that you’d never have been able to join completamente, hablando físicamente. But el amor—don’t we know it bien!—goes beyond lo físico, even lo químico. Far beyond.” Her ears fold back, a sign of barely controlled rage. “Doctor Sangan, conoce usted the terrestrial myth of the mermaids? Surely que sí. Half-mujer, half-pez, they attracted hombres and then los frustraron porque they were anatómicamente incapable of mating, being fish that fertilized externamente. Debió have been hard en los hombres, I guess. But did los hombres ever wonder cómo se sentían las mermaids? Yo creo que An-Mhaly could explain it perfectamente well…”

When they go for it, Cetians can shock even extreme feminists, making them look moderate and wishy-washy by contrast. Though there’s no consummation, of course, one might suppose, or rather deduce, that within their clans they practice a certain very light and sublimated version of homoerotic sex—an idea that many XY humans, easily carried away by their imaginations, find attractive, even fascinating.

I guess the guys who only know a little about the species must imagine something like hundreds of beautiful, exotic girls caressing each other for hours and hours, gently and absent-mindedly, all of them piled up all over each other…

Maybe that’s how it really is. Or not. They don’t divulge any details, of course. And that’s their right, despite all the grumbling among interspecies medical experts that without more information, they’ll never be able to treat their traumas…

But I wonder if this Cetian (An’s occasional lover? her casual caresser?) isn’t simply dying of jealousy to think I aroused feelings in her unlucky milk cousin, feelings better saved for members of her own race—such as herself.

Or am I perhaps acting out the worst form of narcissistic machismo… Sangan Dongo, the irresistible supermacho of the Milky Way?

I hold my tongue for a couple of seconds, then repeat with sincere contrition, “De verdad que I am sorry. Yo nunca thought she’d take it tan badly.”

“Doctor Sangan, no tenemos doctores of the mind, lo que usted llama psychologists,” Gardf-Mhaly went on, looking down on me as the haughtiest queen might look upon the least tadpole in her pond. “We’ve never needed them… Pero with An we ahora believe we probablemente have to resort to uno for la primera vez. There have been a few… situaciones… en el pasado, of course, but su caso caused us to cuestionar whether the Arnrch-Morp-Gulch entailment isn’t a curse for nuestra raza rather than para el progreso. Perhaps no estamos and never will be listos to deal with una comunidad of intelligent species que all display algo we lack: intercourse heterosexual. Muchos de nosotros find it… perverso. I believe you may be familiar con la sensación. But there are siempre those such as the unlucky An que look upon such… uniones with wonder y envidia, leading to the tristes consequences of which estamos both aware.” She sighs, then unfurls her ears again in an obvious effort to appear friendly. “Pero I did not venir aquí looking for a debate sobre interspecies sexual relations, Doctor Sangan, solamente para your asistencia urgente. This is su chance to correct past errores. An-Mhaly needs you—as does otros former employee of yours, Enti Kmusa. Both have been perdidos in a small exploration vessel…”

“No way, esos dos together again?” I interrupt her, astonished. “Quién would have thought! It’s a cosmos pequeño, o no? I understand por qué I’ve been contacted, since both of them used to trabajar para mí. But if it’s sobre un shipwreck, that’s de verdad something for the local Galactic Community Coordinating Committee patrols, no para mí to take care…”

“No, Doctor Sangan,” Gardf-Mhaly peremptorily insisted. “There is no one major que you. Ellos están indeed shipwrecked. And ellos necesitan be rescued as rápido as possible, porque they nunca should have crashed—or rather, their crash is such a secreto que nadie can even be allowed to sospechar que it took place. Pero the fact es, the ship on which An-Mhaly and Enti Kmusa were viajando has fallen in Brobdingnag…”

*

Quite the coincidence.

With or without permission from Jonathan Swift and his Gulliver, Brobdingnag is the world where laketons live.

I first heard about the creatures when I was eight.

I was with my father on one of his typical expeditions, this time to study the peculiar hypnopedic teaching system used by a religious sect on Beta Sextantis.

The deluded people there had concocted an intricate theology rooted in the worst aspects of New Age ecomysticism; they worshiped living beings, the bigger the better, as organic expressions of the Great Cosmic Principle.

More recently I’ve worked for them, on several occasions, actually. Their faith may be ridiculous, but they pay well and on time.

Even back then, their temple-zoo, which cost I don’t even want to know how many millions of solaria to build, held a grendel, two juggernauts, and, in a tank big enough for a squadron of battleships to perform maneuvers in, a middling-sized tsunami… They were also building an enormous high-pressure enclosure with the idea of keeping a laketon, no less! An idea that made Dr. Matsumoto Sangan and his entire team laugh till they cried.

When I asked my father what a laketon was, he gave me an unforgettable mini lecture on biology that might well have been titled “Las características del Planet Brobdingnag y de sus Inhabitants los Laketons, the Largest Life Form en el Known Universe, Explaneado para Children,” and he got me to understand why he had laughed at the pretensions of those environmentalist mystics.

Brobdingnag is the only planet orbiting its primary star, a red dwarf. The star can’t be seen from Earth, being hidden precisely behind the supergiant Antares. Therefore ancient human astronomers never gave it a name. Even today many know it only as Swift-3.

Swift-3 is located in a zone rich in cosmic dust, comet formations, and protoplanets. Head towards the Juhungan domain until you figure out you can’t breathe the hydrogen there, then zoom past the Amphorians, where you can check to see if methane works any better for you, and at last you’ll reach the edge of the Cetian sector, where you can enjoy the oxygen you needed all along.

The primary star is small, but the planet is enormous, just a tad smaller than Neptune in humanity’s original solar system. As big as a planet can get before being categorized as a true gas giant. It even looks quite a bit like the gas giants: though it’s completely solid, it has four or five dozen satellites and several tenuous rings, like Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus.

Since the planet lacks a dense metallic core and is composed of fairly porous material, the gravity at its surface is “only” six times that on Earth—not past the limits of human resistance. We’re forced to withstand many more
g
’s than that on plenty of shuttle launches and descents from orbit… But it’s a very uncomfortable place to stay for any length of time. That’s why almost everyone prefers to use space elevators to enter or leave a planet, except when they are truly pressed for time—as I was when Governor Tarkon called me to search for his careless spouse’s damned wedding band…

The massive gravitational force of Brobdingnag, plus the fact that it’s the only planet orbiting a small primary in a sector full of dust, comets, and other space trash, means that its surface is constantly pounded by heavy meteor showers. The meteoroids that reach its surface usually weigh a few kilos, but more than a few have masses ranging from hundreds of kilograms to a ton or more.

The crew of the
Fancy Appaloosa
, the human exploratory ship out of New Plymouth that discovered Swift-3 and mapped Brobdingnag right under the Cetians’ noses, the system being much closer to the Cetian sphere of influence than to ours, named the planet less for its own size (much larger planets exist) than for the vast dimensions of its principle inhabitants: the laketons, for which this rain of cosmic debris is a sort of manna from heaven.

The astronauts got a real shock when they realized, gazing through their telescopes from orbit, that what they initially thought were large chemical lakes scattered across the giant planet’s desolate surface were… slowly moving.

Laketons are unicellular amoeboid creatures. Since their form constantly changes, it isn’t easy to determine their exact dimensions.

But they’re big.

In fact, all adjectives seem miserably small and inadequate to describe them.

One fact should be enough to convey their vastness: The largest laketon ever recorded, which the veterinarian biologists who study them sarcastically and affectionately named Tiny, rarely measures less than 250 kilometers (!) in diameter by 10 kilometers thick.

If its cytoplasm were the density of water, it would weigh approximately
250 trillion tons
. On Earth, that is. Given the gravity on Brobdingnag, you have to multiply that by six.

But actually, the protoplasm of a laketon is even denser than liquid mercury, which already weighs more than thirteen times as much as water.

I think that adds up to some
twenty quadrillion tons
. There are moons that weigh less.

Living
lakes
weighing trillions of
tons
. Laketons.

Just trying to imagine them is overwhelming.

And sort of humbling, too.

There’s no ship, no building, no artificial structure of any sort built by humans or any of the other “happy seven” intelligent races in the Milky Way that come close to their dimensions. Experts even think that the individual movements of a single laketon can cause minor fluctuations in the gravity of Brobdingnag and explain some curious irregularities in its orbit around Swift-3 that would have disconcerted Kepler.

And no one knows the upper limit on a laketon’s growth, if it has one. As living matter, it keeps growing larger and larger, slowly but surely. Tiny has grown a bit and put on some weight over the thirty-four years since the species was discovered. Today it’s about two hundred meters wider and half a trillion tons heavier than before.