Bud Sparhawk - Sam Boone's Appeal to Common Scents

Illustration by Kelly Freas

The acrid smell of the morning wake-up call pulled Sam Boone from a deep sleep. For a second only, the bitter smell reminded him of the mornings he had enjoyed a coffee and croissant at the Place Mal du Blanc in romantic New Orleans, back on Earth. He sighed, memories of mercurial Mimi and intense Ingrid lingered a moment at the fringes of his mind, the gentle caress of their hands on his…

Abruptly Sam came fully awake as a cadre of Scrofulosans crawled unheedingly across his chest, some occasionally brushing his face with their feathery antennae in curiosity. Sam rolled out of the path of the marching aliens and began untangling himself from his makeshift bed, a mismatched arrangement he had assembled from his kit to soften the floor of the passageway where he’d slept.

The silence of the aliens’ passage was broken only by the chitinous clicking of the Scrofulosans’ limbs rubbing against one another and scrabbling against the hard floor. Sam knew that their apparent silence was an illusion, since the Scrofulosans were constantly babbling on and on about the things that mattered most to them; religion, food, prayer, food, and what Halene/ether-four inhaled from Brimstone/whiff-of-sulfide the other night. The rank scent of their discussions wafted over him like the redolent stink of an open cesspool. How had he ever let Ahbbbb, his Pequodista agent, talk him into taking this stinking assignment?

“Hmmmm mmm mmmmbmmm,” Ahbbbb had hummed to him, the wormlike appendages on her head beating the sounds on the inflated membranes at her neck. “An easy job, one you can wrap up in a few days. It’s just a simple dispute over land rights, nothing complicated.” That was just before she stuffed him onto a small Earth freighter at StarPort One, Earth’s interstellar commerce hub.

The starport hardly lived up to its prestigious name since it was only used by the few departing humans outbound on one of Earth’s tiny ships. Most of the arriving Galactics simply parked their ships in orbit and flitted down to the principal tourist attractions by themselves, ignoring the costly, overly engineered, and woefully inadequate StarPort One, which didn’t even have a decent phloomb generator, for heaven’s sake!

Interstellar tourism was the primary source of Earth’s extra-solar revenues, which is to say hard Glax currency. Aliens came from throughout the Galaxy to see the wondrous sights that Earth had to offer, places incomparable to any other in the civilized Universe. Disneyland, Hoboken, and Kawasaki’s Sushi Bar and Ribs were the most sought after sights, although, it was reported by some of Earth’s returning traders, many of the Galactics were not keen on their young being exposed to such bad art, gross pornography, and wasteful pleasures as these three attractions. Which of the three had which attribute attached to it was still being argued extensively throughout the globe. Questioning the Galactics directly did no good whatsoever; most of the visiting aliens were unwilling to discuss humanity’s pointed questions on the matter. Some even blushed.

Nothing else on Earth seemed to attract the aliens in such numbers as these three famous/infamous sites. The exceptions were the few extraterrestrial scholars who apparently enjoyed going through Earth’s remaining bookstores, taking great and obvious delight in discovering back issues of Home Beautiful , Pipefitters’ Monthly, and Hustler. “Two percent,” they offered for every issue they could find and plunked down hard-edged Glax credits, more than enough to buy a shipment of the galactic technology that Earth desperately wanted. Even though no one had really understood what the “2 percent” meant they nevertheless accepted the offers as the scholars went off, clutching their purchases tightly in their various appendages.

Eventually boatloads of Glax currency started arriving, 2-percent royalty payments for the magazines which, Earth eventually learned, were the funniest things the galactic community had read in centuries—a record-busting mega-hit on every planet where they were shown! Booksellers around the world dug up every copy of every magazine they could find and began marketing them in earnest.

The fad for exotic literature paled after a few years, replaced by an avid and unaccountable interest in Reywas terminals, an Adanac novelty. In the meantime, humanity had discovered that they possessed certain skills much sought after by the Galactics: certain humans were seemingly able to craft agreements with a skill that left the alien races both amazed and astounded. As a result, there was a constant demand for those who had the vast knowledge and specialized training required, people who could face a host of strange beings without trembling and fear, and who would venture to far places. Sam Boone counted himself lucky to be among that tiny fraction of humanity who were chosen, even if his qualifications may have been more than somewhat dubious.

His claustrophobic time on the cramped Earth freighter, which was carrying a few thousand copies of Boy’s Life and a dozen gross of “NudieVue” swizzle sticks to a prospective client a few light-years away, was mercifully short. As soon as they reached the first extra-solar transfer station, Sam had been hustled to a Phlegmatian vessel of indeterminate age and, judging by its slapdash appearance, doubtful reliability. Sam climbed aboard with grave misgivings—there really wasn’t any option.

The Phlegmatians turned out to be a crew of scaly, horn-nosed creatures whose main pastime seemed to involve staring at each other for hours at a time, occasionally flicking their tongues. Sam theorized that the tongue-flicking was done solely to indicate that they were still alive, since they were otherwise immobile.

On alternative nights, the crew would project large holograms of other, scaly, horn-nosed Phlegmatians sitting around staring at each other. After a mercifully few hours of each such pointless dramatization, the show would be over and the projector shut off. Afterwards, the crew hissed at each other—Sssss ssst sss—“Wonderful depth,” his translator had interpreted their alien voices. “Quite rococo,” another would suggest, “although lacking traditional values.” Once, during a particularly long and immobile performance, a ripple of sibilant hisses ran through the crew, even before the show was over; “Innovative,” “Subtly sublime,” and “A post-aesthetic wonder.” Such was the exciting, glamorous thrill of galactic travel.

He managed to endure the five miserable weeks of staring and tongue-flicking and listening to the crew’s endless analyses of various shows involving other, equally immobile lizards, before he’d reached Scrofulous Five. “Thank God that that’s over,” he remarked as he pulled his kit together and made his way out of the vessel, thinking that nothing, nothing could be worse. He decided that he would have to insist that Ahbbbb book him only on luxury ships in the future instead of traveling on the cheap ships.

As he stepped from the hatch the stench of the Scrofulosan station nearly overpowered him. It smelled like a ripe garbage pit, overlaid with the delicate aroma of industrial waste. At first he thought that, perhaps, there was a problem with the atmospheric systems. But no, none of the hundreds of small, one meter tall, sticklike aliens seemed to be racing about in panic, nor did their jerky actions indicate that they were particularly alarmed, although how one could tell where aliens were concerned was ever in doubt.