(And now, a momentary detour from writing about the state of the world, and enjoy the diversion of humor. Imagine you meet a curious alien who asks you to explain the phenomenon of human reproduction...)
Dr. Marjorie Henshaw had trained for sixteen years to be humanity’s First Contact ambassador. She had memorized the periodic table in three languages. She had prepared a speech about peace so moving that a focus group in The Hague had wept. She had a lecture ready on Bach, on democracy, and on the haunting song of the humpback whale drifting through black water.
Humanity, she would explain, was a species of poets and dreamers reaching toward the stars.
She had not prepared for Question 47.
“And this,” said the Ambassador from Vellux-9, rotating one translucent appendage toward a diagram on its tablet, “is what your literature so frequently refers to as ‘making love.'”
Marjorie squinted. The diagram had been sourced, somehow, from a water-damaged 1987 sex-education pamphlet abandoned in a school library in Duluth. The Vellux probes were nothing if not thorough. They had crossed forty light-years and chosen that.
“Yes,” she said. “In a sense. That’s one schematic.”
“We have a great many questions.”
“I imagined you might.”
“Our civilization reproduces by mathematical consensus,” the Ambassador offered helpfully. “When conditions are favorable, a new being is calculated into existence. The process is silent, dignified, and complete in nine of your seconds.”
“That’s lovely,” said Marjorie, who suddenly hated them.
“We had assumed your species, given your achievements, employed something comparable.” It tapped the pamphlet. “This appears to be a diagram of two people who have become confused near a bed.”
“It’s not confusion. It’s intentional.”
The membrane across the Ambassador’s face rippled. A gesture Marjorie had learned meant either delight or the early stages of nausea. With this species, the two were apparently adjacent.
“Walk me through it,” it said.
Marjorie reached for her water glass. Empty. It had been empty for forty minutes, the way a person at a funeral keeps checking a phone that hasn’t buzzed.
“So. Two humans meet. And if a certain… feeling occurs…”
“Generated by what mechanism? A pheromone? An electrical field?”
“More of a glance, usually. Sometimes across a room. Sometimes over a basket of complimentary bread.”
The Ambassador made a note. Marjorie could see, upside down, that it had written the word BREAD and underlined it twice.
“This glance,” she continued, “may lead to a ritual called dating, in which the two humans repeatedly eat meals together, watch flickering images on a screen, and each pretends to find the other’s anecdotes interesting.”
“To assess genetic fitness?”
“To assess whether the other person chews loudly.”
“And then the procedure?”
“Then, frequently, a four-month negotiation about whether they are ‘a thing,’ followed by a serious argument over the temperature of the apartment, after which the procedure may or may not occur.”
“You delay reproduction over the temperature of a room?”
“We delay reproduction over almost anything. It’s one of our most consistent traits.”
The Ambassador’s membrane cycled through several colors Marjorie had no words for, one of which she privately filed as concerned mauve.
“Describe the procedure itself.”
She closed her eyes. She thought of her doctorate. She thought of the eleven nations watching the live feed. She thought of the whales.
“The two humans,” she said, in the calm voice of a woman reading a hostage statement, “remove their outer coverings.”
“For thermal efficiency?”
“For access.”
“You did not already have access to each other? You were in the same room.”
“Proximity isn’t access. It’s complicated.”
“It is becoming so.” Another note. “Continue.”
“There follows a preliminary phase. This may include compliments, the lighting of small fragrant fires…”
“You set fires?”
“Candles. Decorative. And music chosen specifically to be too quiet to actually listen to.”
“For what purpose?”
“Ambiance.”
“Define ambiance.”
“A feeling that something more sophisticated is happening than what is actually happening.”
The Ambassador stilled completely, which Marjorie had been warned was the equivalent of a held breath.
“Then,” she went on, “the two humans press their face-openings together.”
“Your eating apertures?”
“Yes.”
“The same apertures used for soup?”
“The very same.”
“And this is considered romantic, or is this a tragic misunderstanding of anatomy that your species has been unable to correct?”
“It’s romantic. We’ve checked. Repeatedly.”
She described the remaining mechanics with as much clinical dignity as the human body permits, which is to say none. The Ambassador listened with the grave focus of an auditor who has begun to suspect fraud.
When she finished, the silence lasted long enough that Marjorie could hear the building’s air conditioning, set, ironically, to a temperature no two humans had ever agreed upon.
“Let me confirm my comprehension,” the Ambassador said.
“Please.”
“Your species, which split the atom, which painted the ceiling of a chapel from the wrong side, which flung a small golden record into the void in the hope that a stranger forty light-years away might one day hear your music and think well of you…”
“That’s us, yes.” Marjorie sat a little taller. Here it came. The recognition. The respect. The moment.
“…propagates itself,” the Ambassador continued, “by means of a humid, strenuous, hours-long muddle of soup-holes and decorative fire, undertaken to a soundtrack too faint to enjoy, frequently producing emotional injury, legal proceedings, and a category of music your archives label ‘country.'”
The moment did not come.
“…When you put it that way,” said Marjorie.
“How does your civilization function at all?”
She considered the question with the full seriousness it deserved. The whales. The chapel. The golden record, tumbling through the dark, carrying greetings in fifty-five languages and, she now recalled with a small internal scream, the sound of two humans kissing.
“Mostly,” she admitted, “we don’t. We just take a lot of breaks to attempt the procedure and build civilizations in the gaps.”
The Ambassador absorbed this. Its membrane settled, at last, into a steady, contemplative gold. The closest thing, she would later testify, to alien tenderness.
“It is the most inefficient system I have ever encountered,” it said softly. “I have observed nine thousand worlds and never anything so ill-advised.”
“I know.”
“I find I cannot stop thinking about it.”
“That happens to us, too.”
The Ambassador picked up its stylus, hesitated, and then, with the air of a being against its own better judgment, leaned forward.
“This… country music,” it said, “where would a curious party obtain some?”
Two Earth days and several rom-com movies later, after the ambassador had finally stopped laughing, he composed his report to the Galactic Council. It began with the line,
“You’ll never believe this one…” In the background, the sounds of “Beer Never Broke My Heart” by Luke Combs echo throughout the craft.
Leave a Reply