Nobilis Erotica

The Patreon funded story for February is "The Chemical Trace of Amour in The Solar Winds, Like Lilacs on a Desert Breeze" by Roger Leatherwood. It's read by Nobilis Reed. We thought the aliens would come to visit us one day. That we wouldn't be the ones to go out into space and find them. Because we never had the resources to do true, extensive interplanetary travel. The government was forever stuck in domestic policies and snafus, by which I mean earth-bound. Politics and international tensions prevented all but a few face-saving and performative probes from leaving our atmosphere to orbit, possibly land on foreign objects and other planets as some grand statement of man's supposed legacy to conquer the universe. Or at least, the closest parsec of it. But even then, our satellites and probes would dig in the dust of Saturn's moons and find rhodium. Or gold. Or liquified krypton. Which would stop all attempts at further exploration and turn the exercise into how to best mine, transport and exploit the new mo