Alien Sex полностью

Debole is a small planet, and does not spin. Its inhabitants—fauna and flora alike—hug the twilight zone between eternal sun and endless night, and the thermal sanity which that zone provides. The Debolites are much smaller than humans, no larger in fact than the prosimians who scampered on Earth’s riverbanks forty million years ago, grist for the gullets of larger reptiles. The black algae that feeds on the secretions and excretions of their skin helps insulate them from the cold, as do the arrangements of fatty deposits around their vital organs, deposits which give them a lumpy, tumorous look. And the natural violet pigment of their dermis protects them from ultraviolet agony.

The Debolites are five thousand years away from their own natural space age. Because they are, mankind couldn’t be less interested. But the Climagos are interested. This puzzles us. What do they see?

I’ve taken the pheroma capsules, and try not to complain.

To keep our skin’s bacterial succession intact, we have not bathed. Our exertions fill the air with a nightmarish brine, and I choke on it. The copulins are fiery ants behind my eyes, I am as nauseous as I’ve ever been in my life. (What was the dose this time? Which series did he use? Am I developing an allergy? Is there anyone who hates them as much as I do?)

We are squirming like blood-crazed chondrichthy. Jory’s breathing is stertorous from the olfactory enhancement, the steroid bombardments, and I am doing my best to emulate his passion despite the threat of peristalsis.

Suddenly, in the voice of a stranger, Jory says:

“You’ll choose not to believe me, as always. That is your right, Dorothea. But I must try to prepare you.”

I shudder, shudder again. The room is warm, sickeningly so, but Jory’s body has stopped moving. What will it be this time?

“She was a Climago, Dorothea. I use the term she to help you—to help us both—understand what happened. Don’t bother insisting that such a thing is impossible, because it is possible—it indeed happened. The Climagos are a compassionate race. They gave humanity the starlock secret; they gave humanity crystalline sleep and energy fields. And they gave one lone man—me, Jory Coryiner—another gift as well.”

He pauses, mouth open, his jaw struggling.

“I don’t need to tell you what they look like. You know.”

I say nothing, the nausea unending.

How could I possibly know? Those who come back with descriptions are liars, and there isn’t a government on Earth that appears interested in dispelling the mysteries. Even the commedia claim they can’t get stills or tapes—not even of those Climagos who visit Earth. (Are they so shy? Are they so archetypally terrible to behold that the teeming masses of Terra, were they to find out, would riot, destroy their own cities, demand an instant end to diplomatic relations?)

But like everyone else, I’ve collected the descriptions—dozens and dozens of them. Chambered nautili with radioactive tendrils? Arachnoids cobalt-blue or fuchsia, or striped like archaic barber poles? Bifurcated flying brains? Systolic muscles with “gyroscope” metabolisms? Silicon ghosts? Colonial pelecypods looking more like death’s-head skulls than clams? Which do you prefer, Jory?

“And you know, I’m sure,” he is saying now, “how they’ve managed to survive on their hostile world for two hundred million years. I’m sure you know.”

Perhaps I do. Perhaps I do not. I have heard the stories—and chosen to believe them—about those miracles of symbiosis, the Climagos. How their world is a litany of would-be predators, of knife-blade mandibles, deadly integuments, extruded stomachs that should have consumed every Climago on the planet a million times over—and would have were it not for the one trait that makes them not unlike us: a talent for adaptation, for cooperation, for helping and being helped.

It isn’t simply cortical convolutions, though Climagos are certainly as intelligent as Terran cetaceans and pachyderms and Homo erectus, whatever “intelligence” may mean. It is the myriad ways in which they have learned to cooperate—to co-opt and thereby to best every other species on their home planet. The apelike things (so the stories go) who for aeons lent them their prehensile hands. The great saurians who provided them with locomotion and “gross environmental-manipulation capability.” The mindless coelenterates who shared their nutrient flesh with them during drought and famine. And the endless others. The helpers, and the helped.

In return, the Climagos—telepathic, patient—provided the sensory information needed to lead the day-blind lizards to new species of prey, to keep the feathery simians one step ahead of their growing enemies, to help the eternal jellyfish foresee the impending changes in the great tidal inlets of the world.