The Timswe people - for they were people in all but details of body, and though they occupied four worlds, not just that of Timswe - had known how to travel to other stars for many generations, yet had never done to.
The barrier of light-speed had discouraged them, and the fact that no one could survive such a journey except in hibernation kept them from spending the resources needed. They had sent probes which showed other inhabitable (and some inhabited) worlds and far more which could be made so, as they had made three others circling their own sun. But for colonies so far away they had never seen a need.
Until, that is, the discovery that their sun was going to explode in about six generations.
The population of their four worlds could not possible be sent out, but that remaining after a systematic reduction through birth control could be, six generations hence. In the meantime, large ships with small crews could be; each would have many livestock embryos and stocks of seeds, as well as the machinery needed to adapt the worlds to which they went.
The small crews would use only small amounts of unrecovered supplies, and the problems of inbreeding and genetic drift were avoided by seeing that the crew who arrived were the same as those who left - genetically. Parthenogenesis was simple and long-known, though more traditional reproduction was pretty near universal before the ships.
Each adult woman of the crew past a certain age had a daughter, identical in all but age, coming up. And many had a mother living in retirement, so that the original crew of thirty eventually became something like fifty-five in number.
The Polla, sixteenth of the colony ships, had been three generations out from Tinswe when the mechanical malfunction was discovered.
"That does not sound like so much of a problem. We have frozen semen and frozen ova just as backups for the embryos we have in storage. We probably won't need that semen at all, and if we do lose one species it will be more of a nuisance than a catastrophe," said Master Engineer Matoti.
"I would agree," replied the biologist Erria. "But it was of the one species we didn't bring embryos of. Us.
"They were unsure about doing that, since the experiments had never been done on how well we came through freezing. It may be that a lot of the semen is still good, but we can't find that out until we land."
"Surely we can," said Settema, the machinist. "It's supposed to be pretty simple to do."
Erria gave her a dark look. "That's the only simple part of it. The medical unit is not set up to handle birth, specifically to keep us from having them. I don't want to think about creating an embryo in the lab, since we can't store it now -- and destroying it is a mess ties in to things it took a century to settle.
"We can't really know the semen is good unless we bring the child to term and what if it is male? Once he reached adolescence we would start getting tempted, and contraceptives are not available until we land. It would be one problem after another."
"Well, they are problems I wish I had the chance to live with," said Sofoni the cook. "Being loved by a male and raising children sounds so wonderful in what I have read."
"Raising children is not all that great," said Willeti, who did that. "And I suspect the other is overrated."
"That's academic for now," said Erria, "though some of us may find out about the one, and our daughters about the other. But there is a possible solution to the problem."
Thirty heads turned to her.
"The ship tells me that there is an inhabited world that we will pass near, near enough that we will add only a few years to our trip. They are technological enough to have broadcast communication, and while medical information is much harder to find than an external view -- and even that is recent - they seem compatible to us. We can try to ask them to donate semen."
* * * * * * *
Some years later, a small mountain spat forth a rock and let it fall. The outer covering burnt away, then that below, until the reduced weight and increasing density of air combined to slow the descent. At close to sea level, the polyethelene capsule, originally a foot long, split open and gave birth to a finger-length flying machine.
That machine found a man dozing on a park bench in the summer heat, and bit him. The man swatted blindly - and might have been grateful for not seeing what he swatted at - and missed.
The machine rose straight up as fast as it could, and when its beating wings were almost useless began to beam a homing signal. A second probe quickly scooped it up and returned to the ship.
"This species is much closer to us than we expected," Erria announced when the analysis was finished. "while it appears from the video transmissions that just appearing and asking for donations would cause problems - these people are wary of the idea of contact with an alien species - we should have no trouble with gathering some informally.
"While monogamous mating is theoretically the norm, there is a lot of outside activity depicted among the younger ones. We can make use of that."
"That would mean we can carry the seed in us until we get back to the ship," said Sattema. "Won't we be in danger of, what's it called, pregnancy?"
"No," Erria said. "Fertility will require some modification of the germ plasm. We will be quite safe in that matter. In any case, we will not be carrying the semen."
Many eyebrows went up.
Matoti now spoke. "The ship will be within the practical limit for teleportation devices. Those sent will be implanted with nanodevices which will operate when triggered by the arrival of ejaculate - which we found the composition of on a medical broadcast. If we miss a little, it will dry up harmlessly. These males produce a lot!"
"But we are going to be able to attract them into a casual sex act?" asked Sofoni. "We don't exactly look like them."
"Two answers," said Erria. "There is a big difference between how these people look on their news broadcasts and how they look on the entertainment. We are still not sure what to make of that, but we are going to use the entertainment model, especially the ones represented there as young and engaged in informal mating.
"The second answer - I'm afraid that we will need extensive cosmetic changes. The skin tones do not match ours. No violet-"
There were groans.
"Or lime."
More groans.
"Or robin's egg."
Yet more.
"And while they have people that they call yellow-skinned, it is not a bright yellow at all.:
"These people use a number of different languages," said Willeta, "but they are segregated in such a way that you will only need to learn one each. We will only be using seven small ships, each to a different city, and three of the cities use the same language. It is a good thing that we have had a few years to study these people, since we have had to piece together information on reproductive matters, and I'm not sure we have it all yet; there is a cultural taboo in some places and of course some things are too obvious to them to be mentioned."
So twenty of the crew members were changed by nanites to almost duplicate some actress seen on television - the variation was intentional - with the genital area constructed to match medical drawings.
Wagira, Matoti, and Lugia were sent to Buenos Aires in the first of the three passenger ships.
Pargey, Farona, and Duki went to Peking.
Sared, Willeta, and Febra went to Moscow.
Imin, Valia, and Marran went to Paris.
Secu, Appar, and Rossi went to San Francisco.
Toewen, Jannua, and Settema went to Chicago.
And Erria and Sofoni landed near Washington.
The older Toewen and Febra (for the names were passed down along with the genetic patterns) were called from retirement to help handle emergencies and maintain contact with the ships expeditions.
Pargey walked up to a man at noon in Peking and asked if he were interested in sexual intercourse, and was immediately arrested for prostitution. On the other hand, she bought her freedom by offering herself to three guards in succession, one of whom was startled to see what a naked woman looked like, while for the other two it had been so long that they did not trust their memories. The one-child policy had affected their lives considerably. (Farona and Duki avoided arrest, but had trouble finding men who trusted them enough to negotiate the intended activity.)
Sared and Febra and Willeta all eventually reported back that the only men in Moscow with a private place to accomplish the mating were tourists and foreign businessmen with hotel rooms, who insisted on paying them. The pounds and dollars later rested in a museum on Polla.
The three sent to San Francisco reported great difficulty in finding anyone who was interested in them.
Valia was quickly and repeatedly successful in Paris, but Imin and Marran were puzzled by the men who did not seem to know the correct opening to use.
The three in Buenos Aires made contact of the right sort early and often but never left the city park they had landed in.
Those in Chicago only encountered one donor each, but repeated donations from them, and had to invent elaborate stories to be allowed to leave before dawn.
Erria and Sofoni landed their vehicle on the lawn of Montgomery Blair High School a little before nine in the evening on a Saturday night in June, turned on the visual projector so that the ship appeared to be a large rock, and walked obto the street together.
Erria wore a lime-green sheath (the color of her natural skin) on a body copied from that of Joan Severance. Sofoni wore a lacy violet dress (the color chosen for the same reason) on a body from Brigette Bardot's about 1959.
"How direct do you think we should be?" asked Erria.
"I'm not sure there is an answer," replied Sofoni. "The broadcasts that take a while to even hint at mating activity indicate that one falls into it after some time has passed. But the ones that show it clearly indicate that everyone is always read. Since we want to finish this tonight, I suggest the latter assumption."
"Yes. Those entertainment broadcasts indicate these bars as frequent rendezvous places for mating. Let's try this one." And they entered.
They saw two men sitting together. A quick glance showed that there were also women present talking to men, so this might not reflect the sort of problem relayed to them from San Francisco. But the crew members were unsure of the protocol with either or both of them spproaching the men together.
