It was a good move. Though even now I’m not totally sure he’s exactly what we’d call a male if he were human, I’m quite certain he has absolutely no sexual interest in me.
Of course, one month later my formerly well-ordered professional schedule was in total chaos. Besides having no sense of humor, Laggorus have no talent whatsoever for office work.
Though, to tell the truth, I can’t complain. I don’t know how, but I’ve almost doubled my old client list…
Maybe orderliness is overrated after all.
“Boss Sangan, sludge, dos metros, front.” His screaking voice shakes me from my reflections.
I notice his dorsal pleats slowly distending.
What does that mean? Interpreting the emotions of a creature who doesn’t express his feelings through facial muscles is kind of complicated. Exhaustion? Or hope, maybe?
“Algo ring-shape inside. Me know us find already muchos fish bones. Now el corazón tell me something mucho good,” he declares.
Ah, it seems there is hope, then. I sip some water through my helmet’s built-in tube and slog through the mud (not actually mud, unfortunately) like a hippo in my excited rush to the spot he’s marked on the map.
You have to take a Laggoru seriously when he tells you his heart tells him something. After all, Laggorus have six hearts, not one. They also give birth to live young instead of laying eggs. Of course, they aren’t really reptiles. Most of the zoological categories we apply to fauna on Earth have no meaning in any other ecology in the galaxy. Our planet is not the measure of all things.
Just in case, I prepare myself for another disappointment, in the best Zen way.
“Seek y encuentra, hunt and captura. That’s what la vida is all about. Has it occurred alguna vez to you, mi esteemed colega Narbuk-Alr-Quamal-Tahlir-Norgai, that when tú vas hunting por algo o looking por alguien, you have todo tipo of disappointments, you take lots of decisiones equivocadas—but el verdadero joy of discovery solamente comes once? The hunt is therefore más importante than the result.”
After a short silence, the Laggoru quickly retracts his dorsal pleats, which I believe is a clear display of disapproving surprise, and replies, “No, Boss Sangan. Never me think esto. Sound estúpido. If hunt es más importante, why hunt algo? Maybe find it. Mejor hunt nothing, then never find nada, verdad?”
“Huh. Yo guess so,” I mumble, cursing his implacable logic as I point the vacuum hose towards the latest piece of sludge and pray to all the gods I don’t believe in, the gods of Earth and every other planet, that this will finally be Mrs. Tarkon’s damn wedding bracelet, not another sludge-covered fish vertebra.
I’m dying to get out of here…
If it’s the trinket, and her loving spouse keeps his promise, I’ll be a little richer than I was before.
Well, a lot richer, actually.
And why wouldn’t Mr. Tarkon do what he promised? You might think an ordinary veterinarian biologist wouldn’t pay attention to these things, but in lots of human colonial enclaves the governor is practically a god. The Amphorians hang around him for a reason: There are trade deals with Nerea only he can authorize.
Contraband deals, too…
Hmm, that’s an interesting thought. It might explain a lot… Is there any illegal substance trafficking or alien bribery going on around here? Wouldn’t shock me. Tarkon seems to have quite a budget at his disposal. Not unlimited, but pretty flexible at least. Locating me and getting me here from the other side of the galaxy in less than two hours couldn’t have been exactly cheap. A round trip in a private ship equipped with a González drive, a shuttle flight to the planet’s surface—fast, I don’t deny it, but I had to put up with eight brutal g’s for a few loooong minutes.
The orbital space elevator would have been more comfortable, but slower. And cheaper, too, plenty cheaper.
Not even counting details like the cost of a few tons of sedatives and laxatives, or the emergency bonus, my fees aren’t exactly modest.
They couldn’t be. Unusual expertise is expensive, and I’m unique.
The sign on my office door on Gea and my holonet ads all say the same thing: NOTHING IS TOO BIG FOR US.
As long as it’s alive…
I’m Dr. Jan Sangan, the “Veterinarian to the Giants.” The only veterinarian biologist or animal doctor in the whole galaxy, human or alien, who specializes in extremely large organisms.
Tsunamis clearly come under my purview. These little cuties, the symbols of Nerea, are the largest known aquatic life form in the galaxy. So far, at least.
Of course, there are much larger free-floating organisms in space. Genuine leviathans of weightlessness, such as the ten-kilometer-long threshers. And concholants, which can be up to twice that size. Not to mention the laketons of Brobdingnag, planetary leviathans that make even those titans of weightless space look tiny.
But, regardless, tsunamis are huge. Males of up to three kilometers long have been found. They owe their expressive name to the fact that when they swim rapidly or whip their tails in anger or in play, they make waves reminiscent of the waves caused by seaquakes on Earth.
Nerea, their home planet, is a giant ocean dotted with three or four archipelagos. The water is fifty kilometers deep in some parts. Good thing, too, because tsunamis would find even the Marianas Trench in the Pacific a tight squeeze.
Though tsunamis, like many living species in the galaxy, have no exact equivalent in the taxonomy of pre-González drive Earth zoology, they could be placed halfway between echinoderms and polychaete annelids.
That explanation should satisfy all the laymen, I’m sure.
You could also think of them as gigantic sea worms. Basically, they’re huge worms with segmented bodies covered in bony plates (articulated exoskeletons), legless, with multiple hearts (two per segment; as for Laggorus, heart attacks don’t cause these critters much more than mild discomfort), and so on and so forth. They are hermaphrodites and reproduce simply, without going through metamorphosis; females of reproductive age lay eggs that hatch into small versions of adult tsunamis.
Too large to be bothered by predators, tsunamis swim wherever they please, and when they’re hungry they simply open their cavernous circular mouths, filtering entire cubic kilometers of water through the sieve formed by their enormous teeth (their only function), then swallow everything trapped in the net. They are the Nerean equivalent of Earth’s blue whales, though they often swallow “planktonic” organisms half the size of a full-grown man.
At first, the new human colonizers on the planet were appalled by the amount of edible biomass these coldblooded behemoths were consuming and feared they would damage their fishing boats and ferries, so they tried to exterminate them with bombs, mines, and torpedoes.
But their exoskeletons proved so tough and their tissues regenerated so quickly and with such vitality that the colonizers soon realized it would take too many powerful bombs to destroy them all. The shockwaves alone would have destroyed much of the rest of the planet’s rich marine life, too.
Their next plan was to poison them, or engineer viral plagues specifically targeting tsunamis. Of course the Ecology Subcommittee of the Galactic Community would never have allowed anything so risky, biologically speaking. Also, luckily, someone realized in time that leaving thousands of tsunami corpses to decompose all at once would create a terrible hygiene problem. There simply aren’t enough scavenger organisms in the Nerean ecosystem to process that many enormous corpses at once. The risk of epizootic disease would be too great.