Different strokes for different folks, it’s been said, in one way or another in seven million languages across the galaxy, and nowhere is that saying more appropriate than the Pangalactic Singles Mixer.
It’s an entire planet set aside for races to 'get to know each other'. It happens once every Universal Flarn which is ten and half of our earth years. That’s when the majority of the mating seasons in the universe coincide. The minority that don’t line up with the Flarn and wish to attend force themselves into hibernation, freeze themselves, put themselves on pause, hold themselves in stasis or simply meditate deeply until the time that they can join in.
There are over a billion species represented. Random mating is the order of the day. Finding out information and language about a species happens quickest during coitus, they say, and the more plentiful the better.
To preface each encounter, each race is given a ‘race card’ that they communicate to each other in pictograms on their datapads to find out if sex between a given being’s race and a proposed mate is at all physically feasible. If it is, they quickly ascertain what customs they can afford to do away with and what customs they will keep. The races that kill during or after mating, for instance, usually forgo that denouement at the Pangalactic Singles Mixer.
Janice and I were selected from over eighty thousand applicants. We are radiant and healthy by earth standards. We’re a bit of a rarity in the universe, us humans, seeing as we can engage in sexual intercourse whenever we feel like it. For most of the races, there is no sex until a mating season that is hard to avoid or resist.
The stink of this planet is incredible. Every single race’s raging pheromones waft heavily through the air. The aquatic races make the ocean reek of vanilla, the avian races pepper the air streams, and us land-lovers stumble through a thick fog of undiluted sex.
The planet, predictably, is pink with these gusts of love. It also a Wednesday by our human calendar this year, traditionally Hump Day. Janice and I giggle at the joke as our pupils dilate wide open in the miasma of attraction. Every breath is a new erotic spice.
We are approached immediately. With a quick squeeze, we let go of each other's hand and turn, naked and smiling, to the duty at hand.
A plantform from Karssis shows me his datapad and wiggles his stamen in query. I nod, and it rubs some pollen on my head that quickly burrows into my brain, grabs control of my motor control, and forces me to walk twenty feet west to another plantform from Allorway whose sweet smell of fennel coaxes it out of my brain through the pores on my face. It's painful and I laugh through the grimace on my face. The pollen jumps out of my face, wafts into the air and blooms dark red parachutes of dandelion ecstasy, steering themselves towards the Allorwayan pitcher bowl mouth.
The experience is harmless and I have insight into the cultures of the two species that cannot be described.
I look back to see Janice rubbing herself to climax on one of the horns of an iridescent beetle ten times the size of the shuttle that brought us here. The beetle’s many eyes track her tiny body with clinical interest as she shudders to the finish line.
In the course of the next fifteen days, I have sex the clinically accepted human male way of penetration with seventy-six partners and ejaculate over 46 times. Beings have sex with me and Janice, however, hundreds of times.
Our performance is nothing compared to the Sarvanians, the most prolific maters of the universe. It’s said that they get to nearly all of the species in their time on the planet. They barely have time to report their findings when they get home before dying, exhausted and happy to have attended.
I am scratched by love bugs that burrow deep and lay benign eggs in my liver. They will never reproduce and will dissolve in my bloodstream in weeks. I am tongue-painted with photo-sensitive, fertilized-egg paint over one half of my body. It dries in the sun and disappears. Cheek cells are taken from me for a races that hybrids itself with others. I trade minds with two of the races that reproduce mentally. My gene type is mimicked by those that mate by copying. Janice is lucky enough to find a race that can gestate inside of the flesh on the back of her arms in under an hour. The babies burrow out of her triceps, blinking and crying. She is crying and smiling as it happens, ecstatic.
I am rubbed against, massaged, pounded and washed in juices. I am touched briefly by some races, held for hours by others. Some scare me to drink in the pheromones of my fear in order to start estrus.
Janice and I are deadly to some and some are deadly to us. We smirk sadly to these ones and we walk past. We're too big or too small for others but if it's at all possible, we give it the old college try.
I have sex in the air with six of the flying races, one of whom drops me in orgasm but catches me over thirty seconds later before I hit the ground. It’s the most exhilarating experience of my time there.
That is, until I’m taken into the oxygen-breathable egg sac of an aquatic mammal and my body is dissolved completely and painfully by the breath of her needy eggs. I am dead and completely nonexistent for a full half hour before I am reassembled by her internal genetic generators and deposited laughing back on the shore. My eyes are now a different colour. Not an accident, an improvement by her standards. A flirtation.
Janice has hundreds of similar experiences to mine. Together, with our boundless enthusiasm, we cover 0.0003% of the races on the planet. Rich with experience that will take a lifetime to tell, we return to our docking bay for debriefing.
I will be smiling for years. Janice, too. We will not be eligible for the next run a decade and a half from now, but we’ll read the reports that come in from that future couple with jealousy and grins, taking in experiences completely different from ours as they explore as whole different set of races.
Janice and I have scars from our time on the love planet; beautiful memories. I have new eyes that will stare back at me for the rest of my life. Janice is missing a finger. It doesn't matter when I die now, I will die happy, as will Janice.
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