Joran felt the buzz of the comm unit on his wrist as he strode through the human train station; for the moment, he ignored it. His superiors on the ship could wait for his progress report—he had more interesting things directly in front of him.
He had spent the months of transit to this planet in preparation for the assignment he and twenty other scientists had been given; Joran smiled slightly to himself in memory of the research. The planet they had come to was densely populated—much more so than his home planet, Khatanar (called Tau Ceti e by Earthlings)—with lower gravity and a refreshingly lower normal temperature everywhere. The dominant life forms on the planet, the humans, were more diverse genetically than the Khateen, Joran’s own species. That genetic diversity was both the reason for the mission and the biggest hurdle to the goal of the mission.
Joran watched as a human woman paused at a ticket kiosk, glancing around furtively. She had been the focus of his attention from the moment she stepped onto the train; while Joran had not quite become accustomed to the various shapes, sizes, and traits of human females—and he had not yet come around to find them precisely attractive in a sexual sense—it was difficult for him not to stare from behind the dark-tinted glasses that he had adopted as part of his costume.
She was of medium height for human norms, and would have only reached Joran’s chest, standing in front of him. Somehow, however, when she stepped onto the train, looking around quickly to find a free seat, she seemed taller—an anomaly that Joran couldn’t quite understand. Her clothing subtly emphasized her full, heavy-looking breasts, the narrowing at her waist, and the flare of hips that suggested that she was sexually mature—and that she would be a very viable option for reproduction.
Joran had felt a hot jolt of something he couldn’t initially identify; keener than objective interest, more potent than scientific curiosity. He had carefully avoided her notice even as he stared at her, and even as he followed her off the train and into the station. It had been impossible not to see the sway of her hips as she walked in front of him; he wondered why every male in the crowded train station wasn’t responding to it. Joran had watched a great deal of educational material, excerpts taken by his superiors and compiled in order to understand the vagaries of human sexuality.
His comm unit buzzed at his wrist again. Joran tapped the screen, sending an acknowledgement. He may have found the subject he was sent to locate; the thought filled him with a mixture of heady scientific interest and something much more intensely personal.
The mission Joran had signed on for was to locate specimens of the human race—female, for the purposes of the current mission, though there were some among the scientific community who thought that a future mission should include males of the species—in order to determine whether a hybrid race could be created. From what little understanding the Khateen had of the human genetic code, it was more complex than their own, far less stable, and prone to mutations. The humans themselves did not seem to recognize the wealth that this trait had—their efforts at genetic engineering were still in infancy, and information gleaned about common opinions on the subject suggested that most were against the idea of tampering.
The question at hand was whether scientists could somehow cross the inter-species barrier between the two races, to either incorporate human genetics into their own code, or to create a new race that combined the benefits of both. Joran and his colleagues were each assigned the task of recruiting human females for experimentation; and Joran thought to himself, watching the woman walking away from the kiosk, looking around the station for the signs, that he may have found an excellent subject indeed. Everything about her boasted reproductive viability; her general shape, the look of good health, and something like vigor in the way she moved told him that she was likely fertile. Joran felt another hot jolt work through him as he surreptitiously moved closer to her, the better to take in details.
The more he watched her, the more Joran began to think of how he could persuade this woman to come with him. He knew from his research that human females were highly alert to improper advances; there was something he had read, a human essay, about a phenomenon called “cat-calling,” which suggested that if he tried to make an overt move—especially a loud or vocal one—she would reject him outright, feeling threatened by his aggressiveness.
Joran tried to decide how best to approach this female. On Khatanar, it would be so much simpler; mating was decided by genetic index, with mates chosen from a pool of candidates based on the need to unite and mingle families rather than individuals. From what Joran had seen in his attentive watching of human film art, this was not generally the case among their people. There was a complex, often paradoxical dance that seemed to result in failure much more frequently than success. And yet there were so many humans on the planet that Joran’s superiors had thought for certain that none of the women they took for the purposes of their testing would be missed. They would be less than a drop in a barrel, as far as the population of the planet’s humans were concerned.
He contemplated how he would perform the maneuver that he had seen called “breaking the ice” with this female as he followed her towards the newly-arrived train, and Joran thought that he would soon see just how well the various safeguards he had been told to implement worked to disguise him as a human male. If nothing else, he thought wryly, it would be a good test; but he knew that if he were not able to recruit this woman, he would be very disappointed in himself.