Ellen Datlow - Alien Sex

“Maybe—”

“Don’t say it! You mean that we’ve been blind for thirty-four years and now our children can see?”

I felt such longing, and such hope. I wished I were younger. I wanted another chance; I had always wanted another chance. I didn’t understand the despair on Rufinella’s face unless it was because she, too, knew she wouldn’t be a part of the coming age. I said, “Maybe they’ll get it right this time.”

“It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils.”

Yes, I have been successful! I have dared to try, and managed to bring life to what to others has ever been only a dream: another race of beings, a partner-species, to end our long loneliness by being our planetary companions. Enough like us that we can communicate; yet different, so that each will have something worth communicating, bringing different visions, different experiences, to enrich the relationship of true equals.

Perhaps I shall have cause to regret my deed, but I do not think so. I think my name will go down in history as a positive example of how science can make the world a better place. I have not acted out of pride or ignorance, not for personal gain or ambition. Nor do I believe that anything that can be done should be; that scientific achievement is a valuable end in itself. No, I have thought long and hard about what I meant to do. I have considered the dangers carefully and established certain limits. And all along I have felt myself to be not an individual pursuing personal goals, but rather the representative of all womankind, acting for the greater good.

Not, of course, that everyone agrees with what I have done. Many do not see the necessity. Why create a new species? Why bring another life-form into existence? Isn’t that playing god? Yes, I say, and why not? Don’t we do that already, every day, as we struggle to change the world for the better? Why should we suffer the lack of something we can create? But, of course, some do not believe there was any such lack. Some do not even believe in the yearning that has driven me to this. Because they have never felt it, they say it is imaginary. Solid materialists, they refuse to accept the possibility that one might desire something that does not exist. Something—I hasten to qualify—that does not yet exist. For I believe that these unnamed longings are expressions of memory—a racial memory, if you will, whether of past or future hardly matters. Desire is timeless, but it does not deal in the imaginary. If it seems that what we want does not exist, that is true only of this time. You may be certain that you had what you desire in the past, or you may have it in the future.

I have been driven by the desire to know someone else, another being, who is not like me. Not my lover, not my child, not my mother, not any friend or stranger on this earth. And so I have created it.

What is this new creation? I thought of calling it “man” for the obvious, mythohistorical reasons. But the emotions connected to that word are mixed; and there are aspects of history better buried… not forgotten, but certainly not re-created. I have been careful to ensure that my “man” should not be like any man who lived before, not like any previous companion women have known. To signal this, I have given him a name that represents what many women want; I have named this, our hearts’ desire, “husband.”

So, now, on this not-so-dreary November night, I look through the glass side of the tank at my creation. He looks back at me, interested, intelligent, and kind, his body sleek and beautiful, his mind and spirit equal to my own. Equal, but different. I’m sure I’ve got it right. There will be no misunderstandings, no doomed attempts at domestication, and no struggles for power, for although we are enough alike to love each other, we will always live apart: women on dry land, husbands in the sea. Their beautiful faces and their complicated minds are like ours, but their bodies are very different. We will always live in different worlds. They must swim, having no legs to walk with, and although they breathe the same air we do, their skin needs the constant, enveloping caress of the water. We each will have our own domain, each be happy among our own kind, and yet they will find us as attractive as we find them, and so we shall seek each other out from time to time, and come together not for gain or of necessity, but from pure desire.

I look at him, the first of the new race, and when I smile, so does he. He waves a flipper; I wave a hand. I feel love bubbling up inside me, washing away the pain of the past, and I know, as he does a backflip for my admiration, that my husband feels the same. This time, it will work out for the best.

When I wrote “Husbands” I was thirty-five, had been divorced for a couple of years, and was suffering the pain of unrequited love. It was an experience I thought belonged to adolescence; I’d thought I was past it. I knew it was ridiculous. But it was also overwhelming, and quite out of my control. I thought of Fate, and of Greek myths; of the Minotaur, born because a god took vengeance on King Minos by making his wife fall in love with a mad, white bull (at least I’d had the good fortune to fall in love with another human being!); of the mystery, and the absurdity, of desire.

At the same time, I wanted to write something based on the radical concept of Monique Wittig’s “One Is Not Born a Woman” (1979), a short paper in which she declared that far from being natural categories, the division of human beings into two distinct classes of “men” and “women” is “a sophisticated and mythic construction.” If our belief that human beings must be divided into two categories is a matter not of immutable fact but of learned perception, what happens if we learn to perceive differently? Particularly since there must have been a powerful reason to make us all accept that old man/woman, yin/yang way of looking at things for so long.

Two stories—one contemporary, impressionistic, set in the real world, about recognizable emotions; the other an idea, another world, another way of being, explored science fictionally. Yet I kept thinking of them as being the same story, with the same title. Then I had another idea, for a third story also dealing with the theme of desire and sexual difference, and there it was, my story: three stories, three parts of one story. That old, old story.

Bruce McAllister’s short fiction has appeared in the science fiction and fantasy field’s major magazines, annual anthologies of outstanding fiction (such as Best American Short Stories ), and theme anthologies over the past three decades. His novels include Humanity Prime , Dream Baby , and the forthcoming The Village Sang to the Sea: A Memoir of Magic. He has been a finalist for the Hugo and Nebula awards and is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts writing fellowship. He has also has served on jury committees for the Philip K. Dick, James Tiptree, Jr., and Nebula awards.

WHEN HE TOLD ME he had fathered a child Out There, I felt sure he was lying. I thought of the five years I’d been awake, the five years since his return, the five years I’d been pleading with him for a child, and I thought of all his lies. (They all come back lying.)

I was sure he was lying.

It was night in the skyroom. We were naked and wet from another warm programmed rain, and were again pawing at each other in good-natured frustration, laughing because the paper-thin energy field between us wouldn’t let us touch.

The frustration was important.

Soon one of us would tell the room’s computer to activate a stencil, a brand-new pattern for our hands to explore blindly, seeking the holes through which we might reach each other.