SWEET CHILD OF MINE

~

Getting to Know You

Judas wore an almost loose-fitting silk shirt, rising from his wrists and waist to a turtleneck collar in a lovely navy blue shining like the lazy swells of the Pacific at noon; encasing his torso was a fine three-button suede vest, in a shade of midnight blue so dark as to be indistinguishable from black to the old and those races of lesser eyesight. His belt was black leather with a high sheen; the buckle was of blue steel; the genuinely black pants, though lined with silk on the interior, were of a finely-treated black suede on the outside; on his feet were steel-toed iron-shod leather boots wrapped from round the arch to halfway to the knee. On his finger he wore a sapphire ring like a cobalt hole; in his hand he nursed a golden chalice, from which he sipped distilled water cold as ice.

His race was not human, nor half-human as one would mistake. Rather, that noble brow and Roman nose and chin strong enough to chew concrete owed their birth to another world. That uncanny white skin –or was it a very, very light shade of blue?—was soft as the silk it was dressed in, being made for a home with more ice and less air. It would be a mistake to say he was not indeed masculine: there were veins and strong sinews visible enough along those long, graceful hands; only, no stubble grew on that proud and sad face of his, nor could it grow there. Indeed, what graceful, straight, heavy, sholder-length hair he had, running straight back from a youthful line across his forehead, was not even a train of dead cells. They were rather living folicles, transparent and clear as that of a polar bear, giving him a gray-blue head of hair on a sunny day, or turn his head aflame at sunset. But not merely for decoration or absorption of excess solar radiation, the living trains of cells were sense-organs almost unique among sentient beings: a physical sixth sense, the ability to detect the heat of blood, the murmur of a pulse, the pounding of a heart, even a mile away. It's true, those big violet doe-eyes had learned to subdue the "volumne" of such sensations in a crowd, of sheer necessity.

All in all, his kind, for which few know the proper name (though the vulgar modern-Galactic ikcythian will suffice for us here), consider themselves nothing like humans, and rather consider us hairy pink apes: that less sanitary, horribly unsterile, quick-dying, un-beautiful race with which they were often mistaken. As a matter of fact, it was almost theoretically impossible for human and ikcythian blood to mix: their naturally antiseptic bodies lead to vaginal juices acting as a kind of super spermicide, while on the other hand, human bodies were so host to bacteria that the interiors of human females acted the same way, while almost nomatter how beautiful the woman, ikcythian males couldn't shake the very idea that what they were shagging had hair, of all things! The repulsion can only be compared to that felt by those humans whose women shave their legs to those women who do not, upped in intensity by an order of magnitude or so. Furthermore, in the laboratory it was found that ikcythian character traits were all vigorously dominant, and if forced, the resulting foetus would not survive beyond 15% of full development –leaving the very idea of a hybrid creature in the realm of impossibility. Despite the physical disparity in sheer size of genitalia, interbreeding would involve breaking down multiple barriers of sheer improbability.

So it was that, when the hotel managers sent up two of their human whores to his room, Judas' brows bunched in a tired way, as much as a boy would watching his beloved dog run into a wall for the hundredth time. But he did not even need to bother about explaining anything to the girls: he had them think it was the wrong room, then forget altogether in precedence of their next meal, leading nicely into what happened at the bar last night, and before long thoughts of invading his room were as far from their shriveled minds as the surface of the moon.

A thin, but genuine smile spread across Judas' face, as he sipped his distilled water and considered what would happened tomorrow.