Ellen Datlow - Alien Sex

2. Jory was never on Otus.

One day not long after he returned and I awoke, Jory said to me: “What does a man gain by winning the universe, if by doing so he loses himself? He can never buy it back once it is bartered away.” He was quoting someone, I felt sure. But I didn’t ask and he didn’t explain.

He was quiet for a while, and then, voice hoarse with sorrow, he whispered, “They lied to me, Dorothea, just as they lie to us all,” and he began to weep. I took him in my arms and held him. I did not let go.

That was the man I knew. I have not seen him since.

I have located four species of rock shell, but it has taken nearly five hours. According to the wood-pulp book, fifty years ago I’d have found four times as many, and in half the time.

The factory has been here for thirty-five, yet it denies its pipes have ever dumped oxygen-depleting wastes into the delicate littoral zone.

The liars are so nearby, Jory.

I recall something else now, too.

Four years ago, not long after we had the addition built, Jory received a tape in the mail. He never offered an explanation; I never asked for one. That is our way. But one day I heard it, and saw it.

I was passing his new room, the one he’d built for privacy. I’d never stopped before, but this time I did because I heard a voice.

It sounded innocuous enough—mechanical and skewed to the treble like a cheap computer voice. But when I tried to understand it, I realized that it wasn’t a simvoice at all, that the language I was hearing was not of Earth.

When I reached the doorway, I stepped quietly inside and stopped.

Jory was seated at the screen, his back to me, and by the way he was staring I felt sure the screen held a face, a face belonging to the voice.

I took one step and saw the screen.

There was no face. Instead, an alien landscape filled the screen, violet crags and crimson gorges bathed by an unearthly light, the entire vision quivering like a bright, solarized rag.

The voice chattered on. Jory remained hypnotized. I left quickly, shivering.

That evening I pleaded with him again. All I could think of was the gorges, the eerie light, the quivering screen. I still believed that a child, however it came, would be able to banish such strangeness from the heart and soul of the man I loved, the man I thought I knew.

Despite the Climagos’ greatest gift, very few humans have traveled Out There. As our technocrats learned long ago, the exploration of space is handled best by machines, not by flesh-and-blood liabilities.

There is one matter, though, that cannot be handled by mechanical surrogates—not, that is, without risk of diplomatic insult. That matter is Business—the political and economic business between sentient races and their worlds.

The leaders of Business understand the risks, and in turn, the diplos of interstellar politics, the greeters and runners of interstellar trade, and the occasional scope of interstellar R&D are all common men and women. All contract for the money (so they claim); all are commissioned with instant diplomatic or corporate rank in the departments of state, MNCs, and global cartels that hire them; and all have little computers implanted in their skulls.

To make them what they are not.

To make them what those back on Earth so need them to be.

“She was a Debolite, Dorothea.” His agony is profound, his confession sincere, tortured. “Forgive me, please. I know few women would, but I ask it of you because you, more than most, should be able to understand.” The pause is a meaningful one. “I shared a meal—skinned rodentia of some kind and a fermented drink made from indigenous leaves—with a committee of seven provincial demipharaohs. She was their courier. Later that night, she visited me in my quarters with an urgent—and I might add, laudatory—message from the Pharaohess Herself. I was intoxicated from their infernal tulpai, Dorothea. Otherwise, I’d never have been able to do what I did—to touch a body like that, so small and fragile, the face a clown’s, the skin like taut parchment except where the slick algae grows.”

He puts his head in his hands. He slumps forward. The scar is no longer red.

He says: “I saw the boy two years later. I could barely stand the sight of him.”

He seems to collapse. “Dear God,” he whispers. Quietly he begins to sob.

I get up. He is probably sincere. He probably believes what he is describing. Nevertheless, I blame him and with blame comes the hate.

1. Procreation is no more likely between humans and Debolites than it is between humans and sheep.

2. Jory was never on Debole.

3. Jory does not believe in the God whose name he takes in vain.

Debole is a small planet, and does not spin. Its inhabitants—fauna and flora alike—hug the twilight zone between eternal sun and endless night, and the thermal sanity which that zone provides. The Debolites are much smaller than humans, no larger in fact than the prosimians who scampered on Earth’s riverbanks forty million years ago, grist for the gullets of larger reptiles. The black algae that feeds on the secretions and excretions of their skin helps insulate them from the cold, as do the arrangements of fatty deposits around their vital organs, deposits which give them a lumpy, tumorous look. And the natural violet pigment of their dermis protects them from ultraviolet agony.

The Debolites are five thousand years away from their own natural space age. Because they are, mankind couldn’t be less interested. But the Climagos are interested. This puzzles us. What do they see?

I’ve taken the pheroma capsules, and try not to complain.

To keep our skin’s bacterial succession intact, we have not bathed. Our exertions fill the air with a nightmarish brine, and I choke on it. The copulins are fiery ants behind my eyes, I am as nauseous as I’ve ever been in my life. (What was the dose this time? Which series did he use? Am I developing an allergy? Is there anyone who hates them as much as I do?)

We are squirming like blood-crazed chondrichthy. Jory’s breathing is stertorous from the olfactory enhancement, the steroid bombardments, and I am doing my best to emulate his passion despite the threat of peristalsis.

Suddenly, in the voice of a stranger, Jory says:

“You’ll choose not to believe me, as always. That is your right, Dorothea. But I must try to prepare you.”

I shudder, shudder again. The room is warm, sickeningly so, but Jory’s body has stopped moving. What will it be this time?

“She was a Climago, Dorothea. I use the term she to help you—to help us both—understand what happened. Don’t bother insisting that such a thing is impossible, because it is possible—it indeed happened. The Climagos are a compassionate race. They gave humanity the starlock secret; they gave humanity crystalline sleep and energy fields. And they gave one lone man—me, Jory Coryiner—another gift as well.”

He pauses, mouth open, his jaw struggling.

“I don’t need to tell you what they look like. You know.”

I say nothing, the nausea unending.

How could I possibly know? Those who come back with descriptions are liars, and there isn’t a government on Earth that appears interested in dispelling the mysteries. Even the commedia claim they can’t get stills or tapes—not even of those Climagos who visit Earth. (Are they so shy? Are they so archetypally terrible to behold that the teeming masses of Terra, were they to find out, would riot, destroy their own cities, demand an instant end to diplomatic relations?)

But like everyone else, I’ve collected the descriptions—dozens and dozens of them. Chambered nautili with radioactive tendrils? Arachnoids cobalt-blue or fuchsia, or striped like archaic barber poles? Bifurcated flying brains? Systolic muscles with “gyroscope” metabolisms? Silicon ghosts? Colonial pelecypods looking more like death’s-head skulls than clams? Which do you prefer, Jory?