I’ve been in the field ever since, over thirty years.
Rapture: In this context, probably meaning a religious experience of being transported to heaven. Some confusion here over his use of the article “the” instead of the more commonly expected, “a.” Other terms for this include “the final reward,” and “coming home.” See “euphemism.” Beyond that, the utterance resists translation.
For three weeks I’d been collecting information and tagging specimens in singles bars in the Old Town area of Sacramento when I ran into a Trosfrilla operative. My bioenhancements and cosmetic surgeries, some of them quite radical and painful, allowed me to pass as a male human. I had the more difficult task of studying females. Lasarént field operators disguised as females, using similar techniques in tagging males, reported as many as three or four specimens a night. One evening I attracted two females to my apartment at the same time, which nearly overloaded my scanning equipment, but other nights I only collected notes. In other countries, of course, we use practices appropriate for their cultures.
A converted riverboat, the Sleepy Jean Grill and Suds, permanently docked near the Port of Sacramento, was the next bar on my schedule. A place couldn’t be visited too often, or I might have to deal with a previous contact a second time. There is no scientific need to scan the subject twice once it has been tagged, but females I’d met previously often ruined my chances for a new encounter by talking until the bar closed. I parked in the lot, and crossed a gang-plank over the water to enter.
Inside, the bar stretched the length of the narrow room and was made of weathered barn planks, heavily varnished. Neon beer signs flashed behind Venetian blinds. No cover. A local hangout. Hard to get to if you didn’t know it was there. Grill behind the bar to the side, where a cook flipped burgers and fried potatoes. Lots of cooking odors, beer and a mossy undertone from the river. Red lights. A small dance floor flanked by large speakers at one end, a pair of pool tables at the other. Tables in between. In a larger singles bar I’d have better luck attracting someone, but I had plenty of data from those venues. Now I was more interested in atypical cases.
The lights caught my attention—they were nearly the hue of the spring time Lasarént sky—and the water smells reminded me of my birth den in the bank of the far Hydrash. Before the crowd arrived, I could feel the current flowing beneath the boat, rubbing the aged wood. As soon as I entered, I knew I would return. I took a table in the middle and asked the waiter for two place settings. It was one of several techniques to interest women, the empty chair. Some women can’t resist a single man, nicely dressed, aesthetically pleasing (we’d spent years perfecting attractive proportions in the lures—a fractionally small shift in eye placement, nose size or teeth arrangement can make a lure successful or a failure—my human face had been altered numerous times). She can’t resist if it’s obvious his date has not arrived.
The empty chair is a passive technique. It depends on the women coming to me, as do several other ruses such as reading a book, or taking notes. A tape recorder on the table will sometimes work, or a camera. What doesn’t work is looking unoccupied. A man who clearly just waits is shunned. Scanning the bar doesn’t work either. A man looking for a woman never finds her. There are active techniques too. Many of them. Almost all involve some pretense for conversation, not just, “Nice weather we’re having, don’t you think?” but anything that asks the woman to contribute something of her own. Even something as simple as, “Great jacket. Where’d you get it?” can be a beginning. After that, the evening scripts itself around drinks, dancing, more conversation until it’s obvious she is willing to come to my apartment. Often there needs to be an excuse to go, either to see the art prints, or to admire the view from the balcony, or to listen to music. Rarely will either of us be straight-forward: “Let’s go somewhere private for sex.” Humans are interesting in this behavior. Important matters to them aren’t discussed directly.
I’ve been among the humans for years, “sleeping together” numerous times. Never have I discussed my matters of importance. We have no middle ground.
“Sleeping together” does not involve sleeping. It is sex, often times on a bed (which is used for sleeping too!) but one female told me we’d “slept together” when we didn’t make it past the clothes closet. Fortunately the scanning equipment covers the entire area equally well.
I was part way through a salmon steak, which I’d developed a taste for, when the woman sat at my table.
“I hate to eat alone, do you mind?” she said. Blonde hair cut short. Dark eyes, hard to see the color in this light. According to human conceptions of physical beauty, I guessed that she didn’t have to eat alone often. She was almost six feet tall, my height. Slim. Plain, blue shirt worn loose. White pants. White boots tucked under the pant’s legs. Not standard dress for a singles place, but the Sleepy Jean wasn’t typical, as I said. Two motorcycle types at the bar watched her for a moment before turning back to their drinks.
“Not at all,” I said. “Have you ordered?”
She brushed hair off her forehead. “Don’t mind if I do.”
Normally, meeting a woman is not this easy. Even though the bars exist for social interactions, humans are wary at first. They don’t trust each other. It seemed clear to me, though, that this one was bound for my apartment, so I field-scanned her. A tiny unit on my wristwatch would tell me if she’d been tagged before and give me an overview of her suitability for our studies.
She was Trosfrillan, one of the other extrasolars, which explained her height. How they got a nine-foot tall, six limbed creature into this package amazed me. My modifications, painful as they were, were not as drastic.
“Damn!” she said, looking at her own watch.
We didn’t speak for a while. The Trosfrilla study humans in much the same manner as we do. They are interested in travel patterns. Mating rituals. Work/recreation ratios. Sleep/wake cycles. Biochemistry. The normal field data for any species. Past difficulties prevent us from sharing our findings, though there is now some effort to consolidate the work. Our races evolved on different planets in the same system. There had been wars in our past. We were competitors.
I looked around the bar again. The motorcycle guys hunched over their beers. A couple shot pool at a table at the bar’s far end. Beneath me, the floor moved subtly, responding to the river’s flow.
“My name’s Arlyss,” I said. My Lasarént name would damage a human throat.
“Trudy,” she said. “Have you been down long?”
“Off and on for thirty-some years. I haven’t been off-world for eleven years now.”
The waiter came by and took her order. I ate more salmon. The mimicked human gestures came almost naturally to me, often times revealing my emotions in ways I would never display when in my Lasarént body. I found myself smiling. It had been a long time since I had talked to someone without pretending. “Yourself?” I said, when the waiter left.
“Only five. I’d been doing Seleneological surveys when this opportunity came up. It was a change.” She shifted in her seat. “I’m uncomfortable in this form.”
I nodded. Gravity was wrong. Not all that different, only 1.2 heavier, but it was wrong. A different molten core beneath me. A different wash of magnetic influences. The stars at night, wrong.