“That question is a trifle difficult to answer,” I replied slowly. “We had the gravest communicative difficulties with the first explorers of your race over this question. They seemed to find it complicated.”
“A-ah,” he waved a contemptuous hand. “Those scientific bunnies are always looking for trouble. Takes a businessman, who’s also an artist, mind you—first and last an artist—to get to the roots of a problem. Let me put it this way, what do you call your two sexes?”
“That is the difficulty. We don’t have two sexes.”
“Oh. One of those a-something animals. Not too much conflict possible in that situation, I guess. No-o-o. Not in one sex.”
I was unhappy: he had evidently misunderstood me. “I meant we have more than two sexes.”
“More than two sexes? Like the bees, you mean? Workers, drones and queens? But that’s really only two. The workers are—”
“We Plookhh have seven sexes.”
“Seven sexes. Well, that makes it a little more complicated. We’ll have to work our story from a—SEVEN SEXES?” he shrieked.
He dropped back into the chair where he sat very loosely, regarding me with optical organs that seemed to quiver like tentacles.
“They are, to use the order stated in the Book of Sevens, srob, mlenb, tkan, guur—”
“Hold it, hold it,” he commanded. He conjugated with his bottle and called to a robot to bring him another. He sighed finally and said: “Why in the name of all the options that were ever dropped do you need seven sexes?”