Ellen Datlow - Alien Sex

And women whom Superman has never met find themselves in a delicate condition.

Consider: LL won’t get pregnant because there were too many of the blind mindless beasts. But whenever one sperm approaches an unfertilized human egg in its panic flight, it will attack.

How close is close enough? A few centimeters? Are sperm attracted by chemical cues? It seems likely. Metropolis had a population of millions; and a kryptonian sperm could travel a long and crooked path, billions of miles, before it gives up and dies.

Several thousand blessed events seem not unlikely.{If the pubescent Superboy plays with himself, we have the same problem over Smallville.}

Several thousand lawsuits would follow. Not that Superman can’t afford to pay. There’s a trick where you squeeze a lump of coal into its allotropic diamond form….

The above analysis gives us part of the answer. In our experiment in artificial insemination, we must use a single sperm. This presents no difficulty. Superman may use his microscopic vision and a pair of tiny tweezers to pluck a sperm from the swarm.

In its eagerness the single sperm may crash through LL’s abdomen at transsonic speeds, wreaking havoc. Is there any way to slow it down?

There is. We can expose it to gold kryptonite.

Gold kryptonite, we remember, robs a kryptonian of all of his supernormal powers, permanently. Were we to expose Superman himself to gold kryptonite, we would solve all his sex problems, but he would be Clark Kent forever. We may regard this solution as somewhat drastic.

But we can expose the test tube of seminal fluid to gold kryptonite, then use standard techniques for artificial insemination.

By any of these methods we can get LL pregnant, without killing her. Are we out of the woods yet?

Though exposed to gold kryptonite, the sperm still carries kryptonian genes. If these are recessive, then LL carries a developing human fetus. There will be no more Supermen; but at least we need not worry about the mother’s health.

But if some or all of the kryptonian genes are dominant…

Can the infant use his X-ray vision before birth? After all, with such a power he can probably see through his own closed eyelids. That would leave LL sterile. If the kid starts using heat vision, things get even worse.

But when he starts to kick, it’s all over. He will kick his way out into the open air, killing himself and his mother.

Is there a solution?

There are several. Each has drawbacks.

We can make LL wear a kryptonite{For our purposes, all forms of kryptonite are available in unlimited quantities. It has been estimated, from the startling tonnage of kryptonite fallen to Earth since the explosion of Krypton, that the planet must have outweighed our entire solar system. Doubtless the “planet” Krypton was a cooling black dwarf star, one of a binary pair, the other member being a red giant.} belt around her waist. But too little kryptonite may allow the child to damage her, while too much may damage or kill the child. Intermediate amounts may do both! And there is no safe way to experiment.

A better solution is to find a host-mother.

We have not yet considered the existence of Supergirl.{She can’t mate with Superman because she’s his first cousin. And only a cad would suggest differently.} She could carry the child without harm. But Supergirl has a secret identity, and her secret identity is no more married than Supergirl herself. If she turned up pregnant, she would probably be thrown out of school.

A better solution may be to implant the growing fetus in Superman himself. There are places in a man’s abdomen where a fetus could draw adequate nourishment, growing as a parasite, and where it would not cause undue harm to surrounding organs. Presumably Clark Kent can take a leave of absence more easily than Supergirl’s schoolgirl alter ego.

When the time comes, the child would be removed by Caesarian section. It would have to be removed early, but there would be no problem with incubators as long as it was fed. I leave the problem of cutting through Superman’s invulnerable skin as an exercise for the alert reader.

The mind boggles at the image of a pregnant Superman cruising the skies of Metropolis. Batman would refuse to be seen with him; strange new jokes would circulate the prisons… and the race of Krypton would be safe at last.

My article on xenofertility was only party conversation until Bjo Trimble made me type it up. The years since have brought considerable feedback.

There is an underground comic that begins as Superman drops and smashes the Kandor bottle… and ends as The Atom implants a fertilized egg in his abdomen.

People read the article to their friends over the phone.

When the Superman movie was due, a Brit reporter videotaped some interviews at the Griffith Park Planetarium. At his behest I described some of Superman’s expected problems. He held his straight face until he had what he wanted, then cracked up. A real pro.

In June 1988, Superman’s fiftieth birthday sparked a convention in Cleveland, his true birthplace. Very little went as planned. A panel on crossbreeding of humans and aliens turned out to be just me! I managed to hold the audience by reading “Man of Steel…,” then discussing Reed and Sue Richards (he’s prehensile in every appendage!), Mr. Spock, V-for-Visitors, rishathra…. Sex with aliens seems to fascinate people.

After living in Los Angeles, San Francisco, England, and Spain, K. W. Jeter and his wife, Geri, currently make their home in Ecuador. He still grieves for the now-vanished Los Angeles in which he was born. His latest publications include the novel The Kingdom of Shadows , a collaboration with Gareth Jefferson Jones titled Death’s Apprentice , and the first four books in the new Kim Oh thriller series— Kim Oh 1: Real Dangerous Girl , Kim Oh 2: Real Dangerous Job , Kim Oh 3: Real Dangerous People , and Kim Oh 4: Real Dangerous Place . Visit his author website www.kwjeter.comfor more details.

HIS FATHER AND HIS uncle decided it was about time. Time for him to come along. They went down there on a regular basis, with their buddies, all of them laughing and drinking beer right in the car, having a good time even before they got there. When they left the house, laying a patch of rubber out by the curb, he’d lie on his bed upstairs and think about them—at least for a little while, till he fell asleep—think about the car heading out on the long straight road, where there was nothing on either side except the bare rock and dirt and the dried-brown scrubby brush. With a cloud of dust rolling up behind them, his uncle Tommy could just floor it, one-handing the steering wheel, with nothing to do but keep it on the dotted line all the way down there. He lay with the side of his face pressed into the pillow, and thought of them driving, making good time, hour after hour, tossing the empties out the window, laughing and talking about mysterious things, things you only had to say the name of and everybody knew what you were talking about, without another word being said. Even with all the windows rolled down, the car would smell like beer and sweat, six guys together, one of them right off his shift at the place where they made the cinder blocks, the fine gray dust on his hands and matted in the dark black hair of his forearms. Driving and laughing all the way, until the bright lights came into view—he didn’t know what happened after that. He closed his eyes and didn’t see anything.

And when they got back—they always got back late at night, so even though they’d been, gone nearly the whole weekend, and he’d gotten up and watched television and listened to his mom talking to her friends on the phone, and had something to eat and stuff like that, when his father and his uncle and their buddies got back, the noise of the car pulling up, with them still talking and laughing, but different now, slower and lower-pitched and satisfied—it was like it woke him up from the same sleep he’d fallen into when they’d left. All the other stuff was just what he’d been dreaming.