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The tentacle catches me in the gut. I'm on my back, gasping for air, and my client is on top of me.
He's the size of a buffalo. A shaggy pyramid of rage and testosterone, frothing at the mouth. Or at least the equivalent of testosterone. And the equivalent of a mouth.
I flinch aside just in time to avoid a pie-plate food as it slams to the deck. I look up and I'm under him. Tentacles like mucosal pythons flex a hands-breath from my nose. My eyes water with the smell of chlorine and fish and vanilla.
"Get up!"
It's the sound of an enraged elephant rampaging through a Polish wedding. The oom-pahs echo off the bulkhead, and the device in my right cochlea bellows in flabby English.
"Get up on your feet and fight me, if you would not be mine to abuse!"
My client's four main arms coil around my armpits, chest, and neck. "Not the nec—" I squeak before I'm airborne again. He's holding me up, shaking me, squeezing me. He's probably shouting at me, too, but I can't hear my cochlear implant over the pounding of blood in my ears. Either my client forgot where humans keep their brains, or he's too angry to care. My hands slip over the furry, slimy noose as I realize with real, bowel-loosening terror, that I've forgotten the safe word.
"Put him down, you brute!"
At least, that's what the other client is supposed to say. But I can't hear the Cultural Attaché. I can only assume things are going according to script when the Ambassador, whips me into a bulkhead again. It's padded and I know how to take a fall, but I'm still seeing stars as the he advances on his wife.
I gasp for air and the alien snorting resolves into translated English. "Why? Why, Culture? Do I not care for you? Do I not protect and please you?" The Ambassador's three heavy manipulator tentacles slither across the ground in a gesture of astonishment. "Why humiliate me so with this limp, gangly alien?"
"Gangly?" I mutter.
"Gangly."
"That can't be anything like what he actually said."
"Hey," my interpreter drops the Ambassador's blubbery basso and sniggers in my ear, "do I tell you how to do your job?"
"Yes."
"Only when you don't do it. Now get your skinny ass off the deck."
I groan to my feet. "The Cultural Attaché and I," I wince and rub my ribs, "are very happy together. We love each other, and we're going to run away togeth—"
An organ like a multibranched bullwhip coils around my ankle and hauls me back off my feet.
"Is this true!?" Booms the Ambassador, froth bubbles from his apical mouth. Ears like Japanese fans unfold and flutter along his flanks. The smell of chlorine gets stronger.
"Oh, my darling," coos my implant, now in the honeyed tones of a soap opera starlet, "It isn't. It isn't! I was only lonely." The Cultural Attaché coils too manipulators around the Ambassador's forelegs, stroking. "I was looking for attention, and I found it in the arms of this stiff, furless monstrosity."
"Oh come on."
"I do the best I can with the material I'm given," says the voice in my ear. "I'm kind of like the Cultural Attaché in that way. Who, by the way, said—" software cut in and again I'm hearing the voice of a society belle, "but, Ambassador, you'll always be my real man." I can almost see the eyelashes fluttering.
"Oh, Culture, how could I stay angry at you?" The Ambassador isn't frothing any more. He looms over the smaller hump-shape of the Attaché. That multi-pronged whip is still out, swaying like a sleepy cobra.
"Oh, Ambassador, how could I be unfaithful to you? Forgive me." The Attaché's own tentacles droop between her four columnar legs. The scent of vanilla grows stronger. "Make love to me."
"Only if you forgive me, my flower, my pet. Here," trembling tendrils spread. "Pluck for yourself one of my love-tentacles, that a part of me will be with you."
"I pluck it well, my protector." She tugs gently at the one of the fronds on the appendage.
He likes it. The Ambassador's four ear-fans flap spastically. "Oh yes, pluck it." His manipulator tentacles drape over the Attaché furry body.
She's flapping her ears, too. "Oh, oh, it's wriggling."
"Yes, pluck it!"
"Oh God, it's wriggling so much."
"Pluck it, you unfaithful slut!"
"Oh!"
"Pluck it!…Uh, Fred?" The voice changes again. "That was your cue."
I blink. "Oh, shit."
The Ambassador and his wife clutch each other, gurgling and foaming like rabid musk-oxen. The "love-tentacle" has separated from the whip-like hectococtylar array, and is now inching its way up the Attaché's writhing underside. I'm late.
Ribs aching, I haul myself to my feet and limp across the deck to where the Attaché quivers in the embrace of her husband/pet. I kneel and reach around a furry, columnar leg.
"Took you long enough."
I'm not if those words are hers, my interpreter's, or my boss cutting in on the circuit. "Sorry," I apologize to all of them, and shove my hand into the nest of tentacles.
"Oh, oh, there are two!"
I hold my breath and dig in deeper, trying to recall the anatomy diagrams. Where the hell is that damn pallial cavity?
"Oh, they're wriggling!" Waves of horripilation ripple the hairs under my cheek. Aha! There it is. A G-spot the shape of a hollowed-out cantaloupe, filled with what feels like heavy-ply carpet. And there, yes, the Ambassador's finger-sized hectococtylus. The love-tentacle squirms over the back of my hand and with enormous force of will, I do not snatch my hand back and pulp the verminous thing against the deck. I hold my position until—
Something snaps shut around my hand. Papillae like fat caterpillars trap my index finger and squeeze. Huston, we have Three-way.
The Attaché and the Amabassador bugle, a synthesized orgasmic moan oozes from my implant, and I realize, for the first time, that I hate my job.
Here I am, ribs aching, eyes watering, arm-deep in the vagina of an octopus the size of a Shetland pony. Somewhere along the line, I have made a terrible mistake with the direction of my life.
My dad was right. I should never have joined the Kinks.
***
"I hate to tell you this, pich, but it's a bit late for regrets."
"I know." I am slumped across the table in my tiny apartment, cheek pressed to the plastic, hair already dry from my stingy shower allotment, my nose full of chlorine, vanilla, and what's worse, Bozhidar's rákiya.
My interpreter knocks back a shot of the vile yellowish liquor and snorts through his nose. "You aren't qualified to do anything else on this ship."
"I know."
"You have to pay your support tax. At least until next port of call."
"I know."
"And I don't think Tasia would be impressed if you cut and ran."
I roll my eyes up to meet his. "Shut up."
"Drink up." Bozhidar taps the rim of my shot glass with a blunt finger.
"No thanks. I can smell it from here."
"Stíga," he says, "this is my best batch. I promise you won't go blind."
"It's still made from compost, man."
"The word is jíbre." Bozhidar takes another shot. "You know," he says once he's stopped wheezing, "it could have been worse. The Attaché might have really wanted to run off with you."
"Oh ha ha." Of course she had never actually wanted more than a quicky three-way. All of that stuff about loving me was scripted. Bozhidar should know, since he wrote most of the script. "Anyway it wouldn't have been elopement. If this was a deep operation, she would've inducted me into the harem."
"Rub you in perfume and pretend you're a girl?" Bozhidar strokes his short black beard. "I think I saw that movie."
"Oh yeah, makeovers and hot crypto-sex with the harem. And then big daddy Ambassador comes in and introduce you to his love-tentacle."
"All of which means things could have been worse." He pats me on the shoulder. "All you did was help put the spice back in an old lady's marriage."
I snort against the table. "The sort of thing a good oonkh friend would do. The hope being that the Cultural Attaché might feel slightly more friendly at the next committee meeting about trading drugs from oonkh-owned chemical factories on Mars."
Bozhidar, as usual, has a more elegant way of putting the situation. "To which she might feel more inclined to grant our species access if she thinks of orgasm when she looks at one of us. Rather than, you know, a shaved monkey in a bad suit."
"That's the theory," I sigh.
"Good thing she isn't a student of human physiognomy, because at her moment of climax, you looked like you were knee deep in a septic tank."
I roll my head around, press it against the cool plastic, groaning. "I am not cut out for this job."
Silence for a moment, punctuated by the clinking of glass and the gurgle of home-made medicinal spirit. "You, pich, remind me of a Bulgarian joke."
"You are a Bulgarian joke."
"And you an interstellar prostitute. Glass houses. Now, there once was a man," Bozhidar's accent, usually Hollywood-standard American, slides into an R-rolling Balkan burr. Derr wans wuss a men. "Dyávolât, the Devil, told the man he could have his dearest wish if only if he ate a whole torbá of salt. A torbá is a sack, Fred."
"For Christ's sake—"
He holds up a finger. "Mlâk. That means shut up. The man ate the salt, but when he got to the last spoonful, he said, 'no. I cannot do it. Keep your prize, because I can't eat any more salt.' Then, Dyávolât gets his nails and hammer—"
"I get it," I press my face into my plastic table. "I get the message."
"But the rest of the joke has so much more torture. Also, it makes fun of the Serbs and the Jews."
"Just give me some rot-gut." I say, hoping to stop him.
"Show some respect." Bozhidar says in his normal voice. "This is fine alcohol, refined from the very best…miscellaneous organic substances."
I drink, careful not to inhale the fumes. "You're telling me," I say past the burning in my gullet, "that I need to stick it out."
"At least until you manage to have sex with a human being. Like Tasia."
I can't think of anything intelligent to say about that.
"So when next shall we meet the lovely Turkinya?"
"She's German."
"She doesn't look German."
I roll my face enough to glare at him. "Do I look American? Do you call me 'the African?'"
"Eh. You Americans are so silly about race."
This isn't an argument I want to have. Again. "Tasia is brokering concessions for Martian pharma-tourism, so I'll see her at 10:00 tomorrow when we convene with the oonkh delegation."
"Maybe she and the Cultural Attaché can compare notes on your technique."
"Mluck."
"It's mlâk."
"Just give me another shot."
Glass clinks on glass, astringent booze gurgles. My hand fumbles around to grasp it, and I try to wash away the smell of chlorine and vanilla.
***
There is always a new frontier.
For sex, I mean.
Look at it this way: two centuries ago, interracial sex got people killed. Then it was same-sex sex, and then, the Light Cone engulfed us, the next big taboo was sex with aliens. You can bet we jumped into that one with both feet.
Because, just like with any frontier, there's money to be made out here, on the bleeding edge of the erotic.
Do I think my job is the central to Earth's diplomatic success? No. I'm not that arrogant. But I do think that without people like me, we'd be dead in the water, or maybe just dead.
The problem is, people don't respect you unless they think you're a person, too. And they won't think you're a person unless you can have sex with them. That's basic instinct to anything with genetic material it wants to pass to the next generation.
So when rational argument fails, and the linguists can't get a grip on the syntax, and a coronal flare impeller is aimed at the sun, it's time for us to go to work.
We're the Kinks.
~~~
So actually the picture is more of a placeholder for the description you see above. I saw this scene over the weekend, and everything---character, situation, worldbuilding---all came together. This, or something like it, will probably be the beginning of my next book.
I do have a main plot planned, but it'll be a murder mystery and I'm not sure yet who gets killed or why, or what bad thing the solving of the mystery will prevent.
In the mean time, though, I think I'll keep writing these little vignettes about Fred's job and his friends and co-workers. They're fun, and they're also a good excuse to teach myself more about the world while I overcome my writer's block with Tyrannosaur Queen (stalled out at 80% complete---I have to go back and rewrite some stuff and I don't wanna!). Hopefully I'll get one scene like this for each species (I've got five). So stay tuned.
~~~
Done while listening to: The River War, Only You can Save Mankind
~~~
More about this world: [link]
The gallery: [link]

Description
The tentacle catches me in the gut. I'm on my back, gasping for air, and my client is on top of me.
He's the size of a buffalo. A shaggy pyramid of rage and testosterone, frothing at the mouth. Or at least the equivalent of testosterone. And the equivalent of a mouth.
I flinch aside just in time to avoid a pie-plate food as it slams to the deck. I look up and I'm under him. Tentacles like mucosal pythons flex a hands-breath from my nose. My eyes water with the smell of chlorine and fish and vanilla.
"Get up!"
It's the sound of an enraged elephant rampaging through a Polish wedding. The oom-pahs echo off the bulkhead, and the device in my right cochlea bellows in flabby English.
"Get up on your feet and fight me, if you would not be mine to abuse!"
My client's four main arms coil around my armpits, chest, and neck. "Not the nec—" I squeak before I'm airborne again. He's holding me up, shaking me, squeezing me. He's probably shouting at me, too, but I can't hear my cochlear implant over the pounding of blood in my ears. Either my client forgot where humans keep their brains, or he's too angry to care. My hands slip over the furry, slimy noose as I realize with real, bowel-loosening terror, that I've forgotten the safe word.
"Put him down, you brute!"
At least, that's what the other client is supposed to say. But I can't hear the Cultural Attaché. I can only assume things are going according to script when the Ambassador, whips me into a bulkhead again. It's padded and I know how to take a fall, but I'm still seeing stars as the he advances on his wife.
I gasp for air and the alien snorting resolves into translated English. "Why? Why, Culture? Do I not care for you? Do I not protect and please you?" The Ambassador's three heavy manipulator tentacles slither across the ground in a gesture of astonishment. "Why humiliate me so with this limp, gangly alien?"
"Gangly?" I mutter.
"Gangly."
"That can't be anything like what he actually said."
"Hey," my interpreter drops the Ambassador's blubbery basso and sniggers in my ear, "do I tell you how to do your job?"
"Yes."
"Only when you don't do it. Now get your skinny ass off the deck."
I groan to my feet. "The Cultural Attaché and I," I wince and rub my ribs, "are very happy together. We love each other, and we're going to run away togeth—"
An organ like a multibranched bullwhip coils around my ankle and hauls me back off my feet.
"Is this true!?" Booms the Ambassador, froth bubbles from his apical mouth. Ears like Japanese fans unfold and flutter along his flanks. The smell of chlorine gets stronger.
"Oh, my darling," coos my implant, now in the honeyed tones of a soap opera starlet, "It isn't. It isn't! I was only lonely." The Cultural Attaché coils too manipulators around the Ambassador's forelegs, stroking. "I was looking for attention, and I found it in the arms of this stiff, furless monstrosity."
"Oh come on."
"I do the best I can with the material I'm given," says the voice in my ear. "I'm kind of like the Cultural Attaché in that way. Who, by the way, said—" software cut in and again I'm hearing the voice of a society belle, "but, Ambassador, you'll always be my real man." I can almost see the eyelashes fluttering.
"Oh, Culture, how could I stay angry at you?" The Ambassador isn't frothing any more. He looms over the smaller hump-shape of the Attaché. That multi-pronged whip is still out, swaying like a sleepy cobra.
"Oh, Ambassador, how could I be unfaithful to you? Forgive me." The Attaché's own tentacles droop between her four columnar legs. The scent of vanilla grows stronger. "Make love to me."
"Only if you forgive me, my flower, my pet. Here," trembling tendrils spread. "Pluck for yourself one of my love-tentacles, that a part of me will be with you."
"I pluck it well, my protector." She tugs gently at the one of the fronds on the appendage.
He likes it. The Ambassador's four ear-fans flap spastically. "Oh yes, pluck it." His manipulator tentacles drape over the Attaché furry body.
She's flapping her ears, too. "Oh, oh, it's wriggling."
"Yes, pluck it!"
"Oh God, it's wriggling so much."
"Pluck it, you unfaithful slut!"
"Oh!"
"Pluck it!…Uh, Fred?" The voice changes again. "That was your cue."
I blink. "Oh, shit."
The Ambassador and his wife clutch each other, gurgling and foaming like rabid musk-oxen. The "love-tentacle" has separated from the whip-like hectococtylar array, and is now inching its way up the Attaché's writhing underside. I'm late.
Ribs aching, I haul myself to my feet and limp across the deck to where the Attaché quivers in the embrace of her husband/pet. I kneel and reach around a furry, columnar leg.
"Took you long enough."
I'm not if those words are hers, my interpreter's, or my boss cutting in on the circuit. "Sorry," I apologize to all of them, and shove my hand into the nest of tentacles.
"Oh, oh, there are two!"
I hold my breath and dig in deeper, trying to recall the anatomy diagrams. Where the hell is that damn pallial cavity?
"Oh, they're wriggling!" Waves of horripilation ripple the hairs under my cheek. Aha! There it is. A G-spot the shape of a hollowed-out cantaloupe, filled with what feels like heavy-ply carpet. And there, yes, the Ambassador's finger-sized hectococtylus. The love-tentacle squirms over the back of my hand and with enormous force of will, I do not snatch my hand back and pulp the verminous thing against the deck. I hold my position until—
Something snaps shut around my hand. Papillae like fat caterpillars trap my index finger and squeeze. Huston, we have Three-way.
The Attaché and the Amabassador bugle, a synthesized orgasmic moan oozes from my implant, and I realize, for the first time, that I hate my job.
Here I am, ribs aching, eyes watering, arm-deep in the vagina of an octopus the size of a Shetland pony. Somewhere along the line, I have made a terrible mistake with the direction of my life.
My dad was right. I should never have joined the Kinks.
***
"I hate to tell you this, pich, but it's a bit late for regrets."
"I know." I am slumped across the table in my tiny apartment, cheek pressed to the plastic, hair already dry from my stingy shower allotment, my nose full of chlorine, vanilla, and what's worse, Bozhidar's rákiya.
My interpreter knocks back a shot of the vile yellowish liquor and snorts through his nose. "You aren't qualified to do anything else on this ship."
"I know."
"You have to pay your support tax. At least until next port of call."
"I know."
"And I don't think Tasia would be impressed if you cut and ran."
I roll my eyes up to meet his. "Shut up."
"Drink up." Bozhidar taps the rim of my shot glass with a blunt finger.
"No thanks. I can smell it from here."
"Stíga," he says, "this is my best batch. I promise you won't go blind."
"It's still made from compost, man."
"The word is jíbre." Bozhidar takes another shot. "You know," he says once he's stopped wheezing, "it could have been worse. The Attaché might have really wanted to run off with you."
"Oh ha ha." Of course she had never actually wanted more than a quicky three-way. All of that stuff about loving me was scripted. Bozhidar should know, since he wrote most of the script. "Anyway it wouldn't have been elopement. If this was a deep operation, she would've inducted me into the harem."
"Rub you in perfume and pretend you're a girl?" Bozhidar strokes his short black beard. "I think I saw that movie."
"Oh yeah, makeovers and hot crypto-sex with the harem. And then big daddy Ambassador comes in and introduce you to his love-tentacle."
"All of which means things could have been worse." He pats me on the shoulder. "All you did was help put the spice back in an old lady's marriage."
I snort against the table. "The sort of thing a good oonkh friend would do. The hope being that the Cultural Attaché might feel slightly more friendly at the next committee meeting about trading drugs from oonkh-owned chemical factories on Mars."
Bozhidar, as usual, has a more elegant way of putting the situation. "To which she might feel more inclined to grant our species access if she thinks of orgasm when she looks at one of us. Rather than, you know, a shaved monkey in a bad suit."
"That's the theory," I sigh.
"Good thing she isn't a student of human physiognomy, because at her moment of climax, you looked like you were knee deep in a septic tank."
I roll my head around, press it against the cool plastic, groaning. "I am not cut out for this job."
Silence for a moment, punctuated by the clinking of glass and the gurgle of home-made medicinal spirit. "You, pich, remind me of a Bulgarian joke."
"You are a Bulgarian joke."
"And you an interstellar prostitute. Glass houses. Now, there once was a man," Bozhidar's accent, usually Hollywood-standard American, slides into an R-rolling Balkan burr. Derr wans wuss a men. "Dyávolât, the Devil, told the man he could have his dearest wish if only if he ate a whole torbá of salt. A torbá is a sack, Fred."
"For Christ's sake—"
He holds up a finger. "Mlâk. That means shut up. The man ate the salt, but when he got to the last spoonful, he said, 'no. I cannot do it. Keep your prize, because I can't eat any more salt.' Then, Dyávolât gets his nails and hammer—"
"I get it," I press my face into my plastic table. "I get the message."
"But the rest of the joke has so much more torture. Also, it makes fun of the Serbs and the Jews."
"Just give me some rot-gut." I say, hoping to stop him.
"Show some respect." Bozhidar says in his normal voice. "This is fine alcohol, refined from the very best…miscellaneous organic substances."
I drink, careful not to inhale the fumes. "You're telling me," I say past the burning in my gullet, "that I need to stick it out."
"At least until you manage to have sex with a human being. Like Tasia."
I can't think of anything intelligent to say about that.
"So when next shall we meet the lovely Turkinya?"
"She's German."
"She doesn't look German."
I roll my face enough to glare at him. "Do I look American? Do you call me 'the African?'"
"Eh. You Americans are so silly about race."
This isn't an argument I want to have. Again. "Tasia is brokering concessions for Martian pharma-tourism, so I'll see her at 10:00 tomorrow when we convene with the oonkh delegation."
"Maybe she and the Cultural Attaché can compare notes on your technique."
"Mluck."
"It's mlâk."
"Just give me another shot."
Glass clinks on glass, astringent booze gurgles. My hand fumbles around to grasp it, and I try to wash away the smell of chlorine and vanilla.
***
There is always a new frontier.
For sex, I mean.
Look at it this way: two centuries ago, interracial sex got people killed. Then it was same-sex sex, and then, the Light Cone engulfed us, the next big taboo was sex with aliens. You can bet we jumped into that one with both feet.
Because, just like with any frontier, there's money to be made out here, on the bleeding edge of the erotic.
Do I think my job is the central to Earth's diplomatic success? No. I'm not that arrogant. But I do think that without people like me, we'd be dead in the water, or maybe just dead.
The problem is, people don't respect you unless they think you're a person, too. And they won't think you're a person unless you can have sex with them. That's basic instinct to anything with genetic material it wants to pass to the next generation.
So when rational argument fails, and the linguists can't get a grip on the syntax, and a coronal flare impeller is aimed at the sun, it's time for us to go to work.
We're the Kinks.
~~~
So actually the picture is more of a placeholder for the description you see above. I saw this scene over the weekend, and everything---character, situation, worldbuilding---all came together. This, or something like it, will probably be the beginning of my next book.
I do have a main plot planned, but it'll be a murder mystery and I'm not sure yet who gets killed or why, or what bad thing the solving of the mystery will prevent.
In the mean time, though, I think I'll keep writing these little vignettes about Fred's job and his friends and co-workers. They're fun, and they're also a good excuse to teach myself more about the world while I overcome my writer's block with Tyrannosaur Queen (stalled out at 80% complete---I have to go back and rewrite some stuff and I don't wanna!). Hopefully I'll get one scene like this for each species (I've got five). So stay tuned.
~~~
Done while listening to: The River War, Only You can Save Mankind
~~~
More about this world: [link]
The gallery: [link]