Venus and the Seven Sexes

by William Tenn

  “I saw him last leaping from bough to bough in the fifth widest forest with a lizard-bird just a talon’s length behind him. If he has not yet ascertained the justification of the Hope, any tkan should be able to guide you to his present lair. Meanwhile, I think I know where the flin flinn has most recently dug.”

  He scampered to a mass of rocks and scratched at the ground near the outermost one. The heavy body of an old flin shortly appeared at the mouth of the hole he made. I rolled over and told the flin flinn of Shlestertrap’s requirements.

  The doddering burrower examined his broken claws nervously. “The chiefs of the other sexes will probably want to convene above ground. I know how important this stereo is to our race, but I am old and not at all agile—and this is the Season of Wind-Driven Rains—and the great spotted snakes are ravenous enough below the surface—”

  “And it will shortly be the Season of Early Floods,” I interrupted him, “when only tkann will have time for conversation. Our civilizing must begin as soon as possible.”

  “What have you to fear, old one?” the blap jeered. “A snake would find you tough and almost without flavor!”

  Flin flinn edged back into his hole. “But not until he had experimented in a regrettably final fashion upon my person,” he pointed out gloomily. “I will communicate with the new mlenb mlenbb—their moist burrows connect with ours again. Where might we meet do you think, O coordinator who gathers human wisdom?”

  “In the sheltered spot at the base of the sixth highest mountain,” I suggested. “It will be fairly safe during the next great wind. And consider, in the meantime, which is the living flin most fitted to represent our race in this our first stereo. Tell the mlenb mlenbb to do likewise.”

  After the sound of his claws had diminished in the under distance, the blap and I moved back to the giant fern. It is written in the Book of Ones: A bush nearby is worth two in the by and by.

  “The only other sex-chief whose whereabouts I griggo,” the tree-dweller observed, “is the new nzred nzredd. He is in the marsh organizing the coordination of the next cycle.”

  “The nzred tinoslep that was?”

  “Yes, and little did he relish his honors! Plentiful rose his complaints to High Hope. Vainly he insisted he was still in the very prime of coordination—that he had a good many novel arrangements yet within him. But all know of the pathetic hybrids produced in the last tinoslep cycle. You have heard, I suppose—”

  And he told me the latest septuple entendre that had been making the rounds.

  I was not amused. “Beware, scratcher of bark, of ridicule at the expense of him whom your coordinator obeys! Another blap may fill your place in the chain, while you gaze morosely at unhatched eggs. The nzred tinoslep, that was, organized mighty cycles in his time and now uses accumulated wisdom in the service of all the Plookhh, unlike the blap blapp and the flin flinn who have the responsibility of a lone sex.”

  Record this speech well, my nzreddi. Thus it is necessary to constantly impress upon the weaker, more garrulous sexes the respect due to coordination; else families will dissolve and each sex will operate in ungenetic independence. The nzred must ever be a Plookh apart—yes, yes, even in these shattering times of transition should he maintain his aloofness jealously. Even at present there are good reasons for him to do so—Please! Allow me to continue! Save these involved questions for another session, you who are so recently hatched, I know there are now complications…

  The blap hastened to apologize.

  “I meant no ridicule, none at all, omnipotent arranger of births! I thoughtlessly passed on a vulgar tale told me by an itinerant unattached guur who should have known better. Please do not tear me from the fins of the finest srob that I have ever known and the most delightful flin that ever brotched in a burrow! The nzred koreon is already displeased with me for two baby blapp I varied to the point of extinction, and now—”

  Something coughed wetly behind us and we both leaped for the lowest frond of the fern. The blap streaked to the top of the plant and thence to a long-extending bough of a neighboring tree; I bounced off the leaf and into the marsh with powerful strokes of my helical tentacle. Behind me, the giant toad sorrowfully rolled his tongue back into his mouth.

  I went my way fully satisfied: this blap would not mock nzredd again for many cycles.

  The leader of my sex was surrounded by young nzredd in the weediest section of the marsh. He dismissed them when I approached and heard my recital.

  “This meeting-place you suggested to the flin flinn—the land sexes may find it very easily, but what of the srob srobb?”

  “A little stream has pushed through to the base of the sixth highest mountain,” I informed him. “It isn’t very wide, but the leader of the srobb should be able to swim to the sheltered place without difficulty. Only the mlenb mlenbb will be at a disadvantage there because of the stream’s newness.”

  “And when is a mlenb not at a disadvantage?” he countered. “No, if a stream is there, the sheltered place will serve us well enough—during a wind, in any event. You have ordered things wisely, nzred shafalon; you will yet survive to be a nzred nzredd when your more thoughtless contemporaries are excreta.”

  I waggled my tentacles at this praise. To be told that I would escape assimilation long enough to be nzred nzredd was a compliment indeed. And to think I am at last chief of my sex and yet still able to coordinate effectively! Truly, our race has been startled by civilization—to say nothing of its highest manifestation, The Old Switcheroo.

  “You need a tkan,” the nzred nzredd went on; “I believe tkan tkann has a satisfactory one for you. The tkan gadulit is the sole survivor of an attack of tricephalops upon his matrimonial convention (I must remember that the gadulit name is now available for use by new families). He has fair variation. Suppose you meet him and introduce him to the chain if all else is good in your own judgment. As soon as the sex-chiefs have met and approximated this odd business of Beauty Contests, we will assemble the individuals selected and you may escort them to awesome Shlestertrap. And may this stereo lead quickly to the softness of civilization.”

  “May it only,” I assented fervently, and went to meet the new tkan. He was variable enough for all normal purposes; the guur shafalon found him admirable; and even our mlenb, stodgy and retiring as he was, admitted his fondness for the winged member. The tkan was overwhelmed at being admitted into the shafalon family, and I approved of his sensible attitude. I began to make plans for a convention—it was time to start another cycle.

  Before I could communicate with my srob, however—he always swam a good distance from land during the Season of Wind-Driven Rains—the tkan tkann flew to inform me of the sex-chiefs’ choices and lead me to them. I regretfully postponed the initiation of offspring.

  The Plookhh selected by the Beauty Contests were the very glory of our race. Each was differentiated from the other members of his sex by scores of characteristics. United in one family, they might well have produced Superplookhh.

  With infinite graciousness, the tkan tkann told me that I had been considered most seriously for the nzred protagonist—only, my value as Shlestertrap’s assistant being primary, another was selected in my place. “No matter,” I told the chief as he soared away, “I have honors enough for one Plookh: my books runneth over.”

  The gasping srob represented the greatest problem and the tkan-character volunteered to fly him directly to the dome without waiting for the rest of us so that the finny one would not dry up and die. Then, with the nzred-character and the blap-character carrying the plant-like guur between them, we began our ascent of the tenth highest mountain.

  Although the Season of Wind-Driven Rains was almost over, there were even more great spotted snakes than before crawling upon the dome; and, grappling with their morbid coils, were more slavering dodles than I remembered seeing at one time; even a few brinosaur ranged about now, in anticipation of the approaching Season of Early Floods. I deduced, in some surprise, that they c
onsidered the human a palatable substitute for Plookhh.

  I had gone ahead of my little band since I knew the terrain better and was more likely to attract Hogan Shlestertrap’s attention. This was fortunate, for we had not worked halfway up the mountain before we were feverishly eluding what seemed to be the entire fauna of Venus. They poured off the dome in a great snapping, salivating horde, pausing occasionally to gouge or tear at their neighbors, but nonetheless pursuing us with a distressing concentration. I found additional cause to be grateful for the wise choices of the sex-chiefs: only really diversified Plookhh with the very latest survival characteristics could have come through that madness of frustrated gluttony unscathed. Relatively unscathed.

  It was only necessary for me to cross once in front of the robot in the outer compartment of the dome. Gridnik-fast, the beam poured out and captured me, swinging thence to the rest of my elite family and carrying all of us through the open space of the dome which seemed to be materializing shut almost before we were inside.

  I was particularly grateful, I recall, since the beam had snatched me from between the creepers of the largest sucking ivy I had ever stumbled upon. A helical tentacle is all very well, but it does not help over-much when one is too busy evading three lizard-birds to notice what lies in wait upon the ground.

  One of the robots had already constructed a special tank for the srob, and he also rapidly found some soil into which the guur could root sighingly.

  “That a real plant?” Shlestertrap inquired. He had changed from his previous covering into a black garment becomingly decorated with red splotches which disguised his dome-shaped middle protuberance in a way I could not quite fathom. On his head, he now wore what he called a cap with the visor pointing behind him—a custom, he explained, which was observed by stereo people in deference to their ancient greats.

  “No, it is a guur, the Plookh which relies most on blending into its surroundings. Although it does derive some nourishment photosynthetically, it is not quite a vegetable, retaining enough mobility to—”

  “A guur, you call it? Helpless, huh? Got to be carried over the threshold? Keep still—I’m thinking!”

  I throbbed out a translation. We all froze into silence. The srob, who had lifted his head out of the tank to survey the dome, began to strangle quietly in the open air.

  Finally, Shlestertrap nodded and we all moved again. The mlenb flapped over and pushed the srob, who had become insensible, back under the surface of the tank.

  “Yep,” said our civilizer. “It adds up. I have the weenie. A little too pat for an artistic stereo, but I can always dress it up so no one will know the difference.” He turned to me. “That’s the big gimmick in this business—dressing it up so they can’t tell it’s the same thing they’ve been seeing since they got their first universal vaccination. If you dress it up enough, the sticks will always go nuts over it. Maybe the critics will make cracks, sure, but who reads the critics?”

  Alas, I did not know.

  Much time passed before I had extended conversation with the human again. First, it was necessary for me to teach English to the first Plookh thespians so that they could follow Shlestertrap’s direction. Not very difficult, this: it simply required a short period of concentrated griggoing by the seven of them. I could now give them much terminology that even my ancestor, nzred fanobrel, had not been able to use; unfortunately, a good deal of Shlestertrap’s phrase-shadings remained as nothing but unguessable semantic goals, and when it came to many attitudes and implements used exclusively upon Earth—we could do nothing but throw up our tentacles and flippers, our vines and talons, in utter helplessness.

  Some day, however—not us, but one of our conceivable descendants, perhaps—we will learn the exact constituents of a “thingumajig.”

  After learning the language, the other Plookhh were taken in charge by the robots—the same friendly creatures who would leave the dome occasionally to forage the fresh pink weeds that were essential to our diet—and told to do many incomprehensible things against backgrounds that varied from the artificially constructed to the projected stereo.

  Frequently, Shlestertrap would halt the robots in their fluid activity with booms and cameras and lights, turn to me and demand a significant bit of information about our habits that usually required my remembering every page of all our Books of Numbers to give an adequate reply.

  Before I could finish, however, he generally signaled to the robots to begin once more—muttering to himself something like: “Oh, well, we can fake up a fair copy with more process work. If it only looks good, who cares about realism?”

  Then again, he would express annoyance over the fact that, while some of us had heads, the mlenbb and nzredd had torso-enclosed brains, and the guur were the proud possessors of what the first ship’s biologists had called a “dissolved nervous system.”

  “How can you get intriguing close-ups,” Shlestertrap wailed, “when you don’t know what part of the animal you want in them? You’d think these characters would get together and decide what they want to look like, instead of shortening my life with complications!”

  “These are the most thoroughly differentiated Plookhh,” I reminded him proudly. “The beauty contest winners.”

  “Yeah. I’ll bet the homely ones are a real old-fashioned treat.”

  Thus, gently and generously, did he toil on the process of civilizing us. May his name be revered by any Plookhh that survive!

  My only real difficulty was in gaining more knowledge. The robots were rather uncommunicative (we have not yet resolved their exact place in human affairs) and Hogan Shlestertrap explained that a genius like himself could not be bothered with the minutiae of stereographical mechanics. That was left entirely to his metallic assistants.

  Nevertheless, I persisted. My hunted race, I felt, expected me to gather all knowledge to which I was exposed for the building of our own technology. I asked Shlestertrap detailed questions about the operations of the sound robot who deftly maneuvered the writhing, almost-live microphone booms above the actors and scenery; I pestered him for facts on the great smell-camera with its peculiar, shimmering olfactory lens and its dials calibrated pungently from rose-constants to hydrogen-sulphide-constants.

  Once, after a particularly long session, I came upon him in a compartment composing the score for our stereo. I had always found this music vaguely stimulating if obscure of use, and I was very curious as to how it was made.

  This, let me say to his glory, he explained very patiently. “See, here’s a sound-track of a Beethoven symphony and there’s one of a Gershwin medley. I run off bits of each alternately into the orchestrator and flip the switch like so. The box joggles and bangs it around for a while—it can make more combinations than there are inches between here and Earth! Finally, out comes the consolidated sound-track, and we have a brand-new score for our stereo. Remember the formula: a little Beethoven, a little Gershwin, and lots and lots of orchestration.”

  I told him I would never forget it. “But what kind of machine makes the original Gershwin and Beethoven strips? And can either of them be used in any way under water against the brinosaur? And exactly what is involved in the process of the orchestrator joggling and banging? And how would we go about making—”

  “Here!” He plucked a book from a table behind him. “I meant to give you this yesterday when you asked me how we connect tactions to the manipulating antenna. You want to know all about culture and how humans operate with it, huh? You want to know how our culture fits in with nonhumans, don’t you? Well, read this and don’t bother me until you do. Just keep busy going over it until you have it cold. About the most basic book in the place. Now, maybe I can get some quiet drinking out of the way.”

  My thanks poured at his retreating back. I retired to a corner with my treasure. The title, how inspiring it looked! Abridged Regulations of the Interplanetary Cultural Mission, Annotated, with an Appendix of Standard Office Procedures for Solarian Missions.

  M
ost unhappily, my intellectual powers were not yet sufficiently developed to extract much that was useful from this great human repository of knowledge. I was still groping slowly through Paragraph 5, Correction Circular 16, of the introduction (Pseudo-Mammalian Carnivores, Permissible Approaches to and Placating of for the Purpose of Administering the Binet-plex) when a robot summoned me to Shlestertrap’s presence.

  “It’s finished,” he told me, waving aside a question I began to ask regarding a particularly elusive footnote. “Here, let me put that book back in the storeroom. I just gave it to you to keep you out of my hair. It’s done, boy!”

  “The stereo?”

  He nodded. “All wrapped up and ready to preview. I have your friends waiting in the projection room.”

  There was a pause while he rose and walked slowly around the compartment. I waited for his next words, hardly daring to savor the impact of the moment. Our culture had been started!

  “Look, Plookh, I’ve given you guys a stereo that, in my opinion, positively smashes the gong. I’ve locked the budget out of sight, and I’ve worked from deep down in the middle of my mind. Now, do you think you might do a little favor for old Shlestertrap in return?”

  “Anything,” I throbbed. “We would do anything for the unselfish genius who—”

  “Okey-dandy. A couple of busybodies on Earth are prancing around and making a fuss about my being assigned to this mission, on the grounds that I never even had a course in alien psych. They’re making me into a regular curse of labor, using my appointment and a bunch of others from show business as a means of attacking the present administration on grounds of corruption and incompetence. I never looked at this job as anything more than a stop-gap until Hollywood finds that it just can’t do without the authentic Shlestertrap Odor in its stereos—still, the good old bank account on Earth is growing nicely and right now I don’t have any better place to go. It would be kind of nice and appreciative of you to give me a testimonial in the form of a stereo record that I can beam back to Earth. Sort of show humanity that you’re grateful for what we’re doing.”