Super Extra Grande (7 page)

I’ll never know if he was serious about it or just making a sarcastic joke.

But I rushed there straight away, and I’ve never regretted it.

I learned more about super-extra-grande veterinarian biology in those three weeks on Jurassia than I had in seven years of classroom study at Anima Mundi.

Before long, even the cocky team at the local bio theme park, whose members considered themselves the unrivaled experts on dinosaurs, starting listening to and respecting my opinions, even though I was just a novice.

I demonstrated a special intuition for the anatomy of those giant lizards. I seemed to know instinctively where to inject a stegosaurus with half a kilo of intravenous sedatives in order to knock out not only its tiny brain but also the medullar control center back by its rear hips, which controls, among other things, its highly dangerous tail spikes.

From just a glance at an eighty-ton seismosaur writhing on the ground in pain, I could tell its digestive system was incapable on its own of expelling the fecaloma obstructing it. By palpating bare-handed near the base of its tail, I determined where best to apply the ultrasound generator and break up the stone by extracorporeal lithotripsy, allowing the creature to evacuate the obstruction without further pointless suffering.

I was the only one whom the fierce tyrannosaurs and spinosaurs allowed to get close enough to administer the miraculous warm-oil enemas that calmed their howling pain.

By the end of my third week there, the epidemic was over. It had been caused by a local microorganism, its morphology a cross between coccus and spirillum. As so often happens, for years no one even suspected its existence—but from one day to the next it entered an especially virulent phase in its centuries-long life supercycle.

On Jurassia they were ready to erect a statue of me. Novice or not, I’d saved their world’s most important source of income, dedicated as they all were to biotourism. As for the dinosaurs I’d treated, I had them literally eating from my hand.

Speaking of tyrannosaurs and spinosaurs, well, it wasn’t so easy to keep them from eating my hand along with the food. They’re predators, after all, and not terribly bright, and the truth is, they weren’t too clear about where affection ends and abuse of friendship begins.

For my part, I deeply regretted not being able to deal with anything bigger than the seismosaur—which was extra grande, at most. Big, sure, but still not a genuine extra extra grande.

That was when I decided what my professional specialty would be: super-extra-grande animals, perfect for a guy with my body type and manual dexterity—or rather, my lack thereof.

With the not inconsiderable savings I had salted away from working in the mythological holovision series on Anima Mundi, plus a little extra help kicked in by my parents and my already established classmates João de Oliveira and the Amphorian Murgh-Jauk-Larh, I rented an office in the capital of Gea, the most populous Third Wave world, hired my first secretary-assistant, Enti Kmusa, and with an enthusiasm that my skeptical parents both thought I should have reserved for a better cause, I started treating the diseases and afflictions of the largest living creatures in the known universe.

THE BIGGER THE BETTER
VETERINARIAN TO THE GIANTS

That was my first slogan.

It’s been a few years since then, and I can say without fear of exaggeration that more tons of flesh or cytoplasm have passed through my hands than through anyone else’s.

I simply have no rivals in my specialty. I’ve worked on everything, so long as it’s really big—from threshers infected with a space virus that rotted their hydrogen collector traps to titan leeches on Swampia with gills contaminated by an oxygenated water leak from a nearby Kerkant refinery.

There’s only a handful of problematic giants I haven’t treated yet.

First off, concholants: a species of small (I know that isn’t the best word, but…) living Dyson spheres, which surround medium-sized asteroids with their shells and then devour them to the last molecule. These silicon-based space life forms are so rare and so little is known about them that we can’t even determine with any certainty whether one is alive or dead. Not to mention sick or healthy.

Second, the hissing dragons of Siddhartha. Not because they’re rare or problematic, but because nobody’s too interested in making a pet of a forty-meter-long cockroach that eats anything that falls into its mouth and excretes clouds of sulfurous vapor whenever it’s disturbed. I think there are only four or five specimens in all the zoos in the galaxy. But I’m patient; when one does fall ill, I’m sure they’ll call me to take care of it.

And third, last but not least, of course, my great dream: the laketons of Brobdingnag. The most enormous creatures in the galaxy…

Here, strictly speaking, if this were my autobiography, I’d have to start talking about them, but…

“Boss Sangan, mensaje importante.” Narbuk’s screech shakes me out of my pleasantly lethargic reminiscences, brought on by a combination of exhaustion, satisfaction with a job well done, and our gentle ride spaceward.

I half-open my eyes. Some thirty meters from me, which is as far away as you can get in the spacious orbital elevator, my Laggoru secretary-assistant unfurls his gill pleats in a rather unenthusiastic attempt at a greeting—which the gas mask he has on deforms in a way that doesn’t look nice at all.

Narbuk’s insistence on wearing this breathing gadget when he’s with me proves (as if the fact that we’re the only passengers going into orbit aboard this cable car designed for fifty weren’t proof enough) that even taking five decontamination showers wasn’t sufficient to completely rid my skin of the persistent fecal stench from a fish-fed tsunami with grave digestive ailments.

Good thing I can’t smell it anymore.

I just hope it’ll wear off over time—or else my professional practice is going to take a serious hit.

“If it’s esos ecologistas from Abyssalia otra vez, preguntando how soon we’ll get to their planeta, tell them que vayan a fry un eggplant,” I growl, stretching my limbs and radiating bad humor. “Ellos can wait. Grendels aren’t ni siquiera super extra grandes, really. Yo solamente agreed to look into their out-of-season spawning porque… well, let’s say, porque me sentí nostálgico. I have buenos recuerdos of vivisecting them en mis días de estudiante. That’s all. Ahora que lo pienso, didn’t you already tell a ellos que we were in a space elevator? Any idiota knows it takes horas, even días, to reach la órbita estandard de un planeta stationary in one of these cable cars. Though at least de esta forma I don’t have to go through la experiencia of getting squashed by eight
g
’s of acceleration otra vez. Algo bueno had to come out of Gobernador Tarkon’s penny-pinching, refuseando to book otro shuttle for our return trip y todo.”

“No ecologistas. Me already tell a ellos you late,” Narbuk disabuses me. Then, staring straight at me, he asks me point-blank, “Qué eggplant be, Boss Sangan?”

“Es, um, a vegetable, de la Earth. Since you’re un vegetariano, just para contradecir your people, yo creo que you’d like it.” I don’t even know why I said “vayan a fry un eggplant” instead of “vayan a fly un kite,” but thinking about eggplant, sliced thin, sautéed in a sofrito of onion and garlic with tomato, I lick my lips… and only then do I realize: “Wait un segundo, Laggoru, let me adivinar. There’s algo you aren’t telling me. If los ecologistas de Abyssalia already saben I’m going to be tarde, what’s with the llamada urgente? Y más importante, who…”

Narbuk peevishly interrupts me. “Me ahora pass you call, Boss Sangan. Never say be ecologistas. One día you invite a mí a eat eggplant. Prometido?”

A holoprojection suddenly appears in front of me, displaying the image of a person—no, scratch that—of a humanoid.

A person wouldn’t have lavender skin or yellow eyes or a spiny crest on top of her head, or those six beautiful breasts with perfect nipples, seductively arranged in three pairs, all so naturally exposed.

It’s a Cetian, of course. And the only clothing she wears, the wide skirt hiding her hips and legs, is silver, meaning she works for the Galactic Community Coordinating Committee.

What if it’s…? Like many Westerners who can’t tell Chinese or Africans apart, I’ve never been able to tell one Cetian from another, not even with a magnifying glass, so I ask her in confusion, “An-Mhaly?”

“No, Doctor Jan Amos Sangan Dongo. Yo no soy An. Mi nombre es Gardf-Mhaly.”

Her melodious contralto lends a delightful accent to her terrestrial Spanglish.

Our mouths, tongues, and palates are anatomically incapable of pronouncing most of the labial-nasal fricatives and three-toned palatalized vowels in the language of the goddess of the natives of Tau Ceti. We don’t have their versatile tri-forked tongues or their unique chewing structures formed with multiple layers of cartilage, which make them extraordinarily versatile. Just listen to the “simple” name they give themselves in their own language: Harh-Ljurg-Thalkfg-Brjady, which means, more or less, “the good people who do things as they ought to be done.”

Not at all chauvinistic, these Cetians, not the slightest bit.

Of course, they can pronounce the name and we can’t, so who knows, maybe they’re right…

The total inability of humans to twist their tongues and lips along a four-dimensional continuum has left the Harh-Ljurg-Thal… the Cetians with only one choice if they want to maintain regular contact with the culture of Earth and its colonial worlds: learn to communicate in our Spanglish.

And the truth is, they do a brilliant job of it.

It’s odd that, though few go so far as Narbuk, even the significantly clumsier Laggorus also prefer to torture and simplify our language than to suffer listening to us sweat over theirs, with its ridiculously convoluted syntax, its thirty-two conjugations, and worst of all, its impossible hissing pronunciation, which they’re so proud of.

It would appear that the only non-telepaths among the “lucky seven” who have no knack whatsoever for languages are us humans.

And if our Spanglish has become the virtual lingua franca of the Galactic Community, the only reason is that when Juhungans, Parimazos, Kerkants, and Amphorians have to pick a language for their telepathic translators to speak, they also consider it the easiest option.

Gardf-Mhaly unfurls the delicate purple membranes of her outer ear—meaning, if I’m not mistaken, that she’s giving me a friendly smile.

The only intelligent species in the Galactic Community that considers displaying the teeth to be an expression of friendly intentions is
Homo sapiens
. Must be because we don’t have sixty or seventy canines, like the Laggorus, or a series of flexible chewing plates that bear a distant resemblance to the coronal cilia of our rotifers or the cylindrical millstones of our ancient mills, like the Cetians.

In fact, all the members of both species scrupulously avoid displaying the inside of their mouths to each other if they can at all help it.

“Yo estoy a cargo of Human-Cetian Affairs para la Galactic Community, Doctor Sangan. Pero I understand if you me ha confundido for your former employee. An y yo somos milk cousins,” she went on, explaining my mistake with charming politeness.

*

The dominant species on the fourth planet from Tau Ceti has a unique life cycle. It’s so fascinating that students in veterinary biology are even required to take a course in it, though medical professionals protest what they see as our shameless encroachment on their practice.

The adult females deposit their fertilized eggs near the seashore only once in their lives, and they die in the process; they have no orifice for laying the eggs, so their abdominal cavities explode violently and irreversibly.

After a few hours the eggs hatch, releasing larvae that look remarkably like tiny eels: ophidiiform, carnivorous, and mindless. These creatures quickly slither into the sea and swim off, eating everything that’s not big enough to eat them first. By the end of their first year of life they measure a little more than a meter in length.

At that point, a few larvae that have been given… well, let’s call it “special nutritional treatment”… are overtaken by an irresistible compulsion. Driven to wriggle out of the sea, once they are on dry land they encase themselves in a mucous chrysalis, within which they undergo a complex yet rapid metamorphosis. The final result is an adult Cetian, a creature curiously similar to the human female—apart from the minor differences that everyone notices upon first look.

An extremely interesting case of evolutionary convergence, and so forth, and so on.

Other specimens, however, never leave the theoretically larval eel-like stage. Yet they continue to grow until they are several meters long. Then most of them grow those curious “nipples” and copulate furiously with the few that have none, which then lay eggs that hatch into more eels, in one of the most fascinating cases of neoteny to be found in the wildly varied fauna of the enormous Milky Way.

These neotenous eelish creatures play a very curious role in the life cycle of the species.

As it turns out, the large eels with six “nipples” are all male. And the few that swell with eggs to double their size, as well as the intelligent humanoid beings who build ships powered by the Arnrch-Morp-Gulch entailment (that is, the Tunnel Macroeffect or González drive) and who defend their space borders so aggressively, are all female.

The most striking feature of the humanoid Cetians, their six lovely and voluminous breasts, so like those of our women, which they always display so proudly and nakedly, are as non-functional and purely decorative as the nipples of human males. Obviously they can’t be used to breastfeed the Cetians’ aquatic eel-like spawn, and they secrete nothing like milk.

That function is left, paradoxically, to the many neotenous eel-like males. These “gentlemen” secrete a liquid from each of their six “nipples” that some of the larvae find irresistibly delicious (clearly not all larvae do, though it remains unclear why some do and others don’t).

The substance they secrete isn’t remotely similar in origin, consistency, or flavor to the milk of any terrestrial mammal, of course. It couldn’t be; the “nipples” are actually highly modified male reproductive organs, through which the male Cetians secrete huge amounts of semen—which contains, in addition to gametes, incredibly large doses of hormones and nutrients.