“I don’t know if you could call it perversion or not,” said the navigator. “Maybe there’s no such thing. “He looked down at the bills. “Might as well keep it. You earned it. You even did well.” He pulled himself erect and made a small, formal bow. “Good day, sir,” he said, with no mockery at all and climbed into the transport’s front seat. Etan watched the limo roll out of the breakdown lane and lumber away from him.
After a while he looked down. The money was still there at his feet, so he picked it up.
Just as he was getting back into his own vehicle, the console phone chimed. “We’ve got an early opening in our patrol pattern,” Surveillance told him. “So we can swing by and get you in ten minutes.”
“Don’t bother,” Etan said.
“Repeat?”
“I said, you’re too late.”
“Repeat again, please.”
Etan sighed. “There isn’t anything to rescue me from anymore.”
There was a brief silence on the other end. “Did you get your vehicle overhauled?”
“Yeah,” Etan said. “That, too.”
Like many people, I think about sex a lot, especially when it’s too early for lunch. I was thinking about sex quite a bit when I wrote this story because I was seven months pregnant and constantly hungry. For some reason, this made me think of Robert Sheckley’s fine and funny “Untouched by Human Hands,” which deals with the idea of one person’s meat being another’s poison—that is, on an alien planet, both the aliens’ meat
It goes further than that, as you’ll know if you’ve ever visited an adult bookstore and paid the browsing fee. It’s an educational experience. Personally, it’s all right with me and I will defend to the death any consenting adult’s prerogative to engage in whatever, but in terms of my own Weltanschauung, I don’t call some of that stuff sex. It’s a matter of personal taste for all of us and the idea of having that freedom restricted is far more repellent to my idiosyncratic sensibilities than any practices I may consider, ah, bizarre.
The key words above, I hasten to remind you, are
Anyway, being at the time a very pregnant and very hungry science-fiction writer, I started thinking that we humans probably wouldn’t call certain alien pleasures sex in terms of ourselves. We probably wouldn’t even recognize them for what they were. But what if they wanted to do it with us anyway? What if they
