Rax

I have remarked before on how strange it would be to live in a civilization where intelligent beings met in the course of everyday work or business could have any size or shape of body. People who got used to such a situation really would inhabit a world different from ours. In Poul Anderson's A Circus Of Hells, Djana, a prostitute, goes, as she thinks, to meet a client.

Instead, she faces Rax, the sole member of his species on Irumclaw: a lumpy, gray body on four thin legs, the head at its middle level with her waist, one tentacle holding a vocalizer converting buzzes and whistles from the lower beak into Anglic. Djana thinks that inter-species sex is wrong although Rax suspects that she could be bought. However, as it happens, sex between his species and human beings is impossible and he wants to conduct a different kind of business - although an extremely dangerous one, nevertheless.

Imagine going anywhere to meet a new business contact or make a new acquaintance and being faced with something like Rax. But this can happen all the time in the Terran Empire:

"...many autochthons were present and space travelers of numerous different breeds circulated among them."
-Poul Anderson, Young Flandry (New York, 2010), p. 205.