William Tenn - Venus and the Seven Sexes

“You are Hogan Shlestertrap of Hollywood California U.S.A. Earth, come to bring us out of the dark maw of ignorance, into the bright hatchery of knowledge. I am nzred shafalon, descended from nzred fanobrel who met your ancestors when they first landed on this planet, appointed by the late nzred nzredd to be your technical adviser.”

He sat perfectly still, the little opening in his head—mouth, they call it—showing every moment a wider and wider orifice.

Feeling flattered and encouraged by his evident interest, I continued into my most valuable piece of information. How valuable it was, I did not then suspect:

“It is written in the Book of Sevens:

“When Plookh meets Plookh, they discuss sex. A convention is held, a coordinator selected, and amid cheers and rejoicing, they enter the wholesome state of matrimony. The square of seven is forty-nine.”

Silence. Hogan Shlestertrap conjugated rapidly with his bottle.

“Pensioned off,” he muttered after a while. “The great Hogan Shlestertrap, the producer and director of ‘Lunar Love Song,’ ‘Fissions of 2109,’ ‘We Took to the Asteroids,’ pensioned off in a nutty fruitcake of a world! Doomed to spend his remaining years among gabby mathematical spiders and hungry whatchamacallits.”

He rose and began pacing, an act accomplished with the lower tentacles. “I gave them saga after saga, the greatest stereos that Hollywood ever saw or felt, and just because my remake of ‘Quest to Mars’ came out merely as an epic, they say I’m through. Did they have the decency—those people I picked out of the gutter and made into household names—did they have the decency to get me a job with the distribution end on a place like Titan or Ganymede? No! If they had to send me to Venus, did they even try to salve their consciences by sending me to the Polar Continent where a guy can find a bar or two and have a little human conversation? Oho, they wouldn’t dare—I might make a comeback if I had half a chance. That Sonny Galenhooper—my friend, he called himself!—gets me a crummy job with the Interplanetary Cultural Mission and I find myself plopped down in the steaming Macro Continent with a mess of equipment to make stereos for an animal that half the biologists of the system claim is impossible. Big deal! But Shlestertrap Productions will be back yet, bigger and better than ever!”

These were his memorable words: I report them faithfully. Possibly in times to come, when civilization among us shall have advanced to a higher level—always assuming that the present problem will be solved—these words will be fully understood and appreciated by a generation of as yet unborn but much more intellectualized Plookhh. To them, therefore, I dedicate this speech of the Great Civilizer.

“Now,” he said, turning to me. “You know what stereos are?”

“No, not quite. You see only one of us has ever conversed with humans before this, and we know little of their glorious ways. Our Book of Twos is almost bare of useful information, being devoted chiefly to a description of your first six explorers, their ship and robots, by the nzred fanobrel. I deduce, however, that stereos are an essential concomitant of an industrial civilization.”

He waved the bottle. “Exactly. At the base of everything. Take your literature, your music, your painting—”

“Pardon me,” I interposed. “But we have been able to build none of these things as yet. We are chased by so many—”

“I was just spitballing,” he roared. “Don’t interrupt my train of thought. I’m building! Now, where was I? Oh, yes—take your literature, music and painting and you know what you can do with them. The stereos comprise everything in art; they present to the masses, in one colossal little package, the whole stirring history of human endeavor. They are not a substitute for art in the twenty-second century—they are the art of the twenty-second century. And without art, where are you?”

“Where?” I asked, for I will admit the question intrigued me.

“Nowhere. Nowhere at all. Oh, you might be able to get by in the sticks, but class will tell eventually. You’ve got to romp home with an Oscar now and then to show the reviewers that you’re interested in fine things as well as money-making potboilers.”

I concentrated on memorizing, deciding to reserve interpretation for later. Perhaps this was my mistake, perhaps I should have asked more questions. But it was all so bewildering, so stimulating…

“The stereos have gone a long way since the pioneering sound movies of medieval times,” he continued. “Solid images that appeal to all five senses in gorgeous panoramas of perception.”

Hogan Shlestertrap paused and went on with even more passion. “And wasn’t it said that Shlestertrap Productions had their special niche, their special technique among the senses? Yes, sir! No greater accolade could be accorded a stereo than to say it had the authentic Shlestertrap Odor. The Shlestertrap smell—how I used to slave to get that in just right! And I almost always succeeded. Oh, well, they say you’re just as good as your last stereo.”

I took advantage of the brooding silence that followed to clack my small tentacle hesitantly.

The emissary looked up. “Sorry, fella. What we’ve got to do here is turn out a stereo based on your life, your hopes and spiritual aspirations. Something that will make ’em sit up and take notice way out in Peoria. Something that will give you guys a culture.”

“We need one badly. Particularly a culture to defend us against—”

“All right. Let me carry the ball. Understand I’m only talking off the top of my mind right now; I never make a decision until I’ve slept on it and let the good old subconscious take a couple of whacks at the idea. Now that you understand the technical side of stereo-making, we can start working on a story. Now, religion and politics are dandy weenies, but for a good successful piece of art I always say give me the old-fashioned love story. What’s the lowdown on your love-life?”

“That question is a trifle difficult to answer,” I replied slowly. “We had the gravest communicative difficulties with the first explorers of your race over this question. They seemed to find it complicated.”

“A-ah,” he waved a contemptuous hand. “Those scientific bunnies are always looking for trouble. Takes a businessman, who’s also an artist, mind you—first and last an artist—to get to the roots of a problem. Let me put it this way, what do you call your two sexes?”

“That is the difficulty. We don’t have two sexes.”

“Oh. One of those a-something animals. Not too much conflict possible in that situation, I guess. No-o-o. Not in one sex.”

I was unhappy: he had evidently misunderstood me. “I meant we have more than two sexes.”

“More than two sexes? Like the bees, you mean? Workers, drones and queens? But that’s really only two. The workers are—”

“We Plookhh have seven sexes.”

“Seven sexes. Well, that makes it a little more complicated. We’ll have to work our story from a—SEVEN SEXES?” he shrieked.

He dropped back into the chair where he sat very loosely, regarding me with optical organs that seemed to quiver like tentacles.

“They are, to use the order stated in the Book of Sevens, srob, mlenb, tkan, guur—”

“Hold it, hold it,” he commanded. He conjugated with his bottle and called to a robot to bring him another. He sighed finally and said: “Why in the name of all the options that were ever dropped do you need seven sexes?”

“Well, at one time, we thought that all creatures required seven sexes as a minimum. After your explorers arrived, however, we investigated and found that this was not true even of the animals here on our planet. My ancestor, nzred fanobrel, had many profitable talks with the biologists of the expedition who provided him with theoretical knowledge to explain that which we had only known in practice. For example, the biologists decided that we had evolved into a seven-sexed form in order to stimulate variation.”