Since most of the other crew is involved in hiring the specialized labor for their department or area of expertise, it falls to me to filter though the large quantity of custom applications. A pile of dreams that my common sense seems insistent on crushing. There seem to be a good number of people who want to risk their lives in space. Some of them thing they will just be helpful on the ship. Others think that they can buy their way onto the ship, despite what Zephyr wrote in my little speech. Some of them even have skills. All of them want to be on Zephyr. Denied, denied, denied.
Some of them are right, and I’ve added those positions as publicly listed. I hope that they get onto the ship, since it seems lousy to convincing argue the need for an expert in data management, and then have some other data management expert take the position.
Recently, I received a letter from Madam Elsie of the Dancing Dragon, which is, in fact, a house of pleasure. She thinks that, if we are to have an indefinitely long voyage with a relatively small population, we should have a number of prostitutes on the crew, along with, unsurprisingly, Madam Elsie to manage them.
To this end, she makes a surprisingly coherent argument. She notes that humans are human, and part of that is a craving for sexual activity. She does not disapprove of relationships between crew members in general, which she sees as normal, but warns of relationships built on lust, rather than love or even compatibility. She also warns about unhealthy rivalry and infighting caused by competition over partners. Similarly, she warns that, upon arriving on a colony, an unsatisfied crew might be more inclined to search for partners among the colony’s population, leading to diplomatic incidents, the spread of diseases, compromised security, or other complications.
Madam Elsie believes that a number of high-end professional prostitutes, with herself to guide them, is the ideal solution. She warns against common prostitutes, who lack the judgment and finesse to provide sexual release without leading to the same sort of complications hiring prostitutes is supposed to help avoid. Similarly, her command position is necessary to keep track of everything, understand who is in need of their services, to ward off anything that the prostitutes might not be able to deal with themselves.
She also notes that an elite cadre of professional seductresses and seducers could have other uses, including intelligence gathering and manipulation. Gestler’s domain, though I’m not sure what he would think of it, what with his native society being very puritanical with regards to sex, and backwards with regard to the roles of women. I probably should ask him for his input on how valuable this sort of intelligence gathering and manipulation would be, relative to his current methods. I think I know his answer, though, and it has less to do with relative value than combined value.
The other problem is that I can’t exactly make this position publicly listed. The houses of pleasure really only came to Tien Terra with the opening of trade with the Linked Systems, first on the spaceports to service crewmembers, but spreading from there. Things are calmer now, but back during the start of our prominence as a trade hub, there were riots decrying the dismissal of our culture in favor of the wealth of trade with outsiders. The foreign houses of pleasure were at the forefront of the rioters’ complains, and… well, that was not so long ago. Should I send quietly messages to other houses of pleasure? There are not so many that I expect others to have a sufficient quantity of workers and leaders who are interested in going into space, while Madam Elsie notes the enthusiasm of several of her workers.
And, if prostitution makes native Tien Terrans uncomfortable, I would not be surprised if we make contact with cultures that would be aghast at our acceptance of Madam Elsie and her boys and girls. I suppose we do not need to tell them, however…
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