I missed a bunch of talks yesterday -- talks I really should have attended. Bek mentioned that he missed me and I could only apologize without hopefully blushing too much. No matter how important cerebral matters might be, they can be easily trumped by the promise of an orgasm. Instinctive payoff schedules never seem to weigh in on the intellectual side.
As if to prove the point, even with everything else significant going on -- the presenter at the front of the room and my own technology talk looming this afternoon -- my mind kept fixating on Wald's hands. His hand on my waist; his hand on my thigh, his fingers gripping my buttocks; his hand on my neck, his fingers tangled in my hair; his hand on my back; his hand between my thighs, his fingers inside me; his hand cupping my breast, his fingers pinching my nipple; his hands on my wrists holding them down; his hands on my ankles holding them up. I probably missed half the damn conference losing myself in fantasies about Wald's damn beautiful hands.
When Doul called my own talk I felt like I wasn't even there. I went through it in a waking dream. Fortunately I had rehearsed enough that it went off pretty much without conscious intervention. Q & A, on the other hand, knocked me way off balance.
The questions had started taking a critical tone right off the top: my methods, my objectivity, and finally the very possibility of science at all. I think it was Guion who first posed the Mendo criteria.
"But seriously," he started, inauspiciously, "how can any species or a people of any kind, regardless of how complex their other behaviors, have the need for rights if they can't argue for their own rights?"
I screamed internally. I didn't want to be having this discussion, not at this point. I love arguing philosophy, but with people who are genuinely interested in the truth -- not people who want to find a flimsy excuse to colonize someone else's planet. "Good question," I began, "but there is not a single test that can give a simple yes/no answer like that -- especially not to such an anthropocentric question."
"Why not?" he spat. "Whether we can stay is a yes or no question. Ultimately that's the one that needs answering."
I continued, but my brain had curled into a fetal position. I don't think, in retrospect, that anything I said made sense to much of anybody. Least of all me. Remarkably, Evo chimed in.
"That's the whole point of semi-sentience," she explained. Her high bell-like tones made it all seem clear and obvious. "The boundary between sentient and non-sentient is less black and white when dealing with extraterrestrial life. It's more of a continuum. In the end we'll see which hypothesis has more evidence behind it, and we'll have to make a judgment call."
Controversy diffused, there were a few more easy questions and I was thankfully dismissed to a smattering of applause. I sat in a daze the rest of the day, and skipped dinner.
I did, however, knock on Wald's cabin door late at night. I needed to feel those hands in person again.
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