Maybe anthropoid, at most. Or better yet, gynecoid.
Now, I still found her pretty—but only in the same way I might think a purebred horse or a tiger is handsome. Still doesn’t mean I’d want to go to bed with them. For the record.
Sure, I must have been swayed by knowing that any attraction I felt for her would be doomed to fail. If her six splendid breasts wowed me (to make matters worse, she always kept them on gloriously open display, Cetian style), if they gave me the harebrained thought I might get intimate with her… No, better not even think about it.
Some hook-ups are, shall we say, just plain physiologically impossible.
Not her fault, I admit. It’s just sheer bad luck that her exotic biology is incompatible with ours. But you know, you can’t squeeze blood from a turnip.
Or inject a turnip with blood, if you’re a donor…
That’s where my problems began.
Enti and An-Mhaly could be (and indeed were!) outstanding secretaries and well-disciplined assistants. They were physically strong and didn’t gag at the sight of blood, guts, or other disgusting bodily fluids from any species of oversized creature. But regardless. They were still female.
So what happened next was entirely my fault, no one else’s.
I should have seen it coming. Women (and by extension, apparently all female humanoids, or gynecoids, in general) are like cats, or like the marbusses of Mizar that all women love so much: When you call them they don’t come, and when you don’t call them, there’s no way to get rid of them.
Professional gigolos are well acquainted with this paradox. They take advantage of it with what they call the “inaction strategy” or “boredom as bait” or something along those lines. And they say it always works.
I guess there’s some strange part of the female psychology that simply can’t stand being ignored by a male, interpreting it as a personal insult or a challenge they have to confront, come what may, whatever it takes.
Even if what it takes is joining forces with someone who might be her worst imaginable enemy under other circumstances.
As a result, what a coincidence! Both assistants fell in love with me (or told me they did) just a few months after they started working together.
I later came to believe it was a conspiracy, something they’d agreed on.
Because each of them declared their love to me within a few hours of the other.
Kind of suspicious, don’t you think?
Though I suppose they’d deny it, even if you boiled them alive.
Jan Amos Sangan Dongo, the most eligible bachelor alive, chased by the greatest beauties of two species.
Ha.
Must have been my good heart, I guess. Because if it was my body, forget about it.
I’m well aware that I have the body of a troll. And a face not even a troll would touch.
Me, a Don Juan.
Ha.
That’s right. I never tried to kindle any kind of romance with my two assistants—and now I realize that might have been a terrible mistake. I probably should have at least traded a few double entendres with them, commented on how physically attractive they were… I don’t know, anything but pretend I didn’t find any sexual charm in either of them.
Which, to start with, wasn’t even close to true.
In general, my opinion is that love and work don’t mix. My parents taught me as much, without even resorting to words.
But I don’t want to think about my parents now.
And hey, it’s not like I was a saint. A man can’t live on bread alone, especially not if he’s a veterinarian biologist… as some of my clients can attest. (Cetians apart, of course.)
But the office was the office, and my assistants were my assistants, nothing more.
Human or Cetian, no discrimination.
My policy: Don’t shit in the dining room.
So, since I wasn’t interested in having either of them as a partner (or to be honest, since I didn’t think it was in the cards—I maybe could have had a crazy one-night stand with Enti Kmusa, but I’d have been crazy to even think about it with An-Mhaly), and since, in spite of all their feminine solidarity, the two “hopelessly in love” females were starting to act jealous of each other, especially around me, I decided to make a clean break and simply get rid of them both. No explanations. A triangle is a pretty precarious geometrical figure.
Naturally, I had to give them each a hefty severance package for firing them without notice. Plus, for the Cetian—this is one of the downsides of the Galactic Community Coordinating Committee and its painstakingly achieved interracial equality!—a substantial bonus for “xenophobic discrimination” and “psychological distress.”
I guess it wasn’t all that much. Poor kid even tried taking her own life after I rejected her.
I felt terribly guilty for several days, until I found out it’s a fairly common practice among her race. In some ways the Cetians remind me of the samurai from ancient Japan on Earth: they often prefer death to dishonor.
Aha! Okay, then. Learning that fact made me feel a little better.
Only a tiny bit better, though, to tell the truth.
The whole business, with all the subsequent complications over the Cetian, left me so paranoid about the idea of “assistants” (female or not, because in this era of galactic sexual liberation and interspecies pansexuality, you never know) that I worked solo for the next few months. And in my field, working without a good assistant isn’t hard, it’s impossible.
The worst of it was that, going overnight from two assistants to none, my productivity took a nosedive. My client list, too. Robots can help a little in certain situations, of course, but nothing takes the place of a capable assistant with gumption. Especially not a secretary-assistant, and a fairly bright one, like Enti or An-Mhaly.
Even less both of them at once.
That’s how things were going for me when the Laggoru, Narbuk-Alr-Quamal-Tahlir-Norgai, contacted me over the holonet one day.
He rubbed me the wrong way right from the start with his clumsy mangling of Spanglish. And when he admitted to having no experience as a secretary or a lab assistant, not to mention the “minor detail” that, even though he’s a Laggoru, he’s pretty uncomfortable around animals in general (a generous description of his strange zoophobia), I was tempted to tell him then and there, “Gracias, but don’t call me, mejor yo te llamo, y don’t hold your breath.”
But no other candidates tried out for the job, he needed it urgently, and I was just as desperate to find an assistant who, even if he wasn’t a model of efficiency, at least wouldn’t start making uncomfortable erotic passes at me…
These are strange times. One of the downsides of galactic integration is that some intelligent races have practically turned interspecies sex into a sport. Kerkants, for example. They can hardly create a family anymore without “cohabiting” with at least two different rational species first. No matter what sort of air they breathe.
But Laggorus, being traditionalists, still strongly disapprove of such promiscuity.
Must be because they have six or eight sexes (it still isn’t completely clear), none of which corresponds directly to the male or female of humans or any other species. Some believe that not even the Laggorus themselves fully understand their baroque system of sexual castes and sub-castes. Wouldn’t surprise me.
I didn’t care exactly which sex Narbuk belonged to. Just so long as he was equally uninterested in my sex.
Be that as it may, Narbuk-Alr-Quamal-Tahlir-Norgai came for an interview with his future employer with little hope of getting the job… But the fact is, whether because I needed an assistant so badly, or because he was even taller than I am, or because he immediately admitted to being misogynistic and heterosexual, he started work for me that same day.