Ellen Datlow - Alien Sex

“And you know, I’m sure,” he is saying now, “how they’ve managed to survive on their hostile world for two hundred million years. I’m sure you know.”

Perhaps I do. Perhaps I do not. I have heard the stories—and chosen to believe them—about those miracles of symbiosis, the Climagos. How their world is a litany of would-be predators, of knife-blade mandibles, deadly integuments, extruded stomachs that should have consumed every Climago on the planet a million times over—and would have were it not for the one trait that makes them not unlike us: a talent for adaptation, for cooperation, for helping and being helped.

It isn’t simply cortical convolutions, though Climagos are certainly as intelligent as Terran cetaceans and pachyderms and Homo erectus, whatever “intelligence” may mean. It is the myriad ways in which they have learned to cooperate—to co-opt and thereby to best every other species on their home planet. The apelike things (so the stories go) who for aeons lent them their prehensile hands. The great saurians who provided them with locomotion and “gross environmental-manipulation capability.” The mindless coelenterates who shared their nutrient flesh with them during drought and famine. And the endless others. The helpers, and the helped.

In return, the Climagos—telepathic, patient—provided the sensory information needed to lead the day-blind lizards to new species of prey, to keep the feathery simians one step ahead of their growing enemies, to help the eternal jellyfish foresee the impending changes in the great tidal inlets of the world.

“You can understand why it happened. She was a greeter, too—one of theirs—and I was a lone human. As a devout student of humanity, she understood what my solitude meant; she understood that in their social needs humans are not at all like Climagos, who do not fear loneliness, but are instead like the bottle-nosed dolphins of Earth, who suffer horribly when removed from their own kind.”

He pauses now, averts his eyes and sighs. I smell half-digested food. I smell my own bile. The world swims.

“There was an aeon of need within her,” he is saying, “the need to help, the need to cooperate, the need to court a creature who, under other circumstances, might have been a predator. And within me, there was an aeon of need as well—the need to find kin, a creature I would recognize by the most primitive of means.”

I am still on my hands and knees, unable to move, the sickness darkening with a dread. Above me, Jory’s eyes are the true purple of space, and the metallic breath of nausea moves through me like a toxic tide. It is the pheromas, yes, and the sweat, the androstenol, and all the others, but it is what I see too. Whether he knows it or not, I can indeed see his Climago greeter clearly. It is the version most often described. The horrible consensus.

I see a man so lonely, so crazy from his years of inhuman sleep, so twisted in his pent-up libidinal soul, that he can bring himself to touch it—a worm, a slug, its rolls of fat accordioned on a cartilaginous spine, its face (do I dare call it that?) a lamprey’s, the abrasive bony plates, the hundreds of tiny sucking holes pulling the blood gently—like honey—from his chest, from the in-sides of his arms and thighs and—

Somehow I get up. I stumble. I rush from the room.

The footsteps behind me are heartbeats.

When I reach the bathroom, the sickness comes out. The pheromas make it the odor of death.

Behind me, a voice, disembodied:

“It wasn’t like that at all,” he whines. “Why can’t you try to understand?”

I have started to cry.

“It was beautiful ,” he says, faithful that words can change it. “She made it beautiful. They are an incredibly beautiful people, Dorothea.”

A moment ago, it was tears. Now, it is laughter. Here I am, kneeling in my own ambergris, as though worshiping a sunken bathtub, as though believing his most outrageous lie yet. The teeth marks, the rapture. Perhaps that, yes. But not the other.

Not a child.

I turn to him savagely. “And who carried the fetus for her? Some obliging surrogate, some Otean bound by diplomatic duty? If that strikes your fancy, Jory, just nod once and we’ll tape it. But I’m puzzled, Jory. How will he reach us? The locks are far too slow. Is he coming in a taterchip can with tiny retrorockets? Or an FTL attaché case? Climagos are small, you know.”

He looks at me in amazement, his eyes like a child’s. I could kill him and he doesn’t even know it. And I would kill him, I’m sure, were there anything near me sharper than a dryer or a toothcan. This man—this man who for five years has shown so little interest in the woman he lives with, who has heard none of my pleas—now offers me lies for a moment’s absolution.

He steps toward me, takes my arm. I twist my head in a snarl, but I do not pull away.

The look is still there. He shakes his head, horribly hurt. “There’s a son, yes, Dorothea, and, yes, he’s very small—as you surmised. He’s more Climago than human—an alien, yes—but he’s intelligent and caring and he has the capacity to love us. Can’t you at least—”

“Stop it!” I scream, hands over my ears, the smell of my own body like dung.

He goes dreamy now. He turns slowly, stares at the closed windows. I will scream again; I cannot bear what he will say.

“There’s a son, yes,” he begins anew. “He isn’t small at all. He’s a mutant, Dorothea, barely alive, and he may not make it through the starlocks. He’s a pitiful thing, and he deserves our compassion. He has a human head, a nudibranch’s body; he whimpers like a human child, but chokes on his own excrement if held the wrong way. Climago scientists have been studying him for years, but I want him with me now, and his mother—decent soul that she is—agrees. The child is allergic to so many things there; perhaps he will fare better here. If he survives the trip. If we can love hi—”

I hit him. I hit him on the temple, over the scar, feeling the metallic edge of the thing the corporation put there. The thing that has helped make him what he is.

The skin splits at the metal. He flinches, grabs my wrist. The blood begins to ooze.

I’m screaming something now that neither of us understands.

He says calmly, “Accept it, Dorothea. He’ll be arriving soon.”

He leaves me in the bathroom, where I continue to cry.

I do not see him for days.

I was a pale girl and still haven’t lost it. No amount of UV—no matter how graduated—can change that, with all the Irish and English I have in my genes. I’ve got big bones, too—big country-girl hands, pronounced veins and tendons, and hipbones that bruise loves. “Daughter of a meatless tribe,” as my father used to put it.

I wonder how I first looked to Jory.

He was the darkest man I’d ever met, as dark as an “olive” complexion can get—the curse (as he put it later) of some rather thoughtless BlackAm, Amerind, and Hmong-refugee ancestors.

His face, when he turned it to profile, was a hatchet from an ancient dream, and he frightened me at first.

I was raised on one of the last megafarms of the American Midwest. No, that’s wrong. I was raised as the daughter of the senior administrator of one of the last megafarms of the American Midwest. There is a difference. Our house was a big plasticoated three-story Victorian in Cedar Falls, an hour’s helirun from The Farm. No one ever really grew up on a farm like that.

Jory, though, was a son of the Detroit Glory Ghettos—those Recessional projects begun by a cornered liberal administration two decades before his birth. Every minute of his life had been subsidized by citizens who, at their noblest, were full of self-congratulating “concern”; at their worst, rationalized bigotry; and for 1,439 minutes of every day, apathy and indifference. He knew this. He’d grown up knowing it—1,440 minutes of every day.