Ellen Datlow - Alien Sex

They didn’t have to live this way. They could choose freedom. He did. He had a vocation, a vocation to love. To have a vocation, it is necessary to give up ambition and normality. He went to live in another place where love was allowed because life there worked differently, and disease, and procreation. Those who went there could love without risk and come back clean. He did not want to come back. He gave up his desk and the smells of cabbage. He was called a whore.

This is not a story of other planets. It is a story of being driven from within. He was driven to a different place and a different time. Visitors came there to be loved and he loved them. It was a paradise of politesse. There were the approaches, elegant, or shy; and the jokes; and the fond farewells; and the mild embarrassment of separation when it did not work, and the kindly stroking of the hair that meant—this has been nice and now it is at an end. Some of them never believed he was not doing it for money. They left, believing that.

The man began to see that he had set himself an unending task. You could not touch all human beauty, not unless you flung yourself in threads across the space between the worlds and stitched all the people and planets together in one sparkling cobweb. You could not do it, give or receive enough, unless you ceased to be human. A paradise of politesse was not quite enough.

His tastes began to change. He wanted to go in and not out, to stay with one person. He met the woman who was not real. He realized that this world had given her birth. Why she had chosen him, he did not know. Could she read his mind from his semen? First his tastes, and then his body had changed, from love and viruses.

And now he was bored with that, too.

He left the woman who was not real and walked across the austere tundra. His body had gone crazy. A steady stream of new life poured out of him, small and wet and sluglike, vomiting out of his mouth or dropping from the tip of his penis. He grew a pouch on his belly, to keep them warm. They would crawl up his stomach on batwings or hooks that looked like a scorpion’s sting. Others darted about him like hummingbirds. His nipples became hard and swollen, and they exuded a thick, salty, sweaty paste. His humming children bit them to force out food. The others hung on to the hair of his chest or on to each other, mouthing him.

Berries grew on bleak and blasted shrubbery. He ate them and the fleshy protuberances that popped, like mushrooms, out of the earth. As he ate them, he knew that genetic information was being passed on to him, and through his breasts, on to his strange children. His body grew crazier.

Then autumn came and all his children dropped from him like leaves.

After the first snow, he built himself a hollow in the snow drifts. He licked the walls and his spittle froze. He lived in the hollow, naked, warming it with his body heat. He would crawl up the warm and glassy tunnel and reach out of the entrance to gather the snow. It was alive. It tasted of muesli and semen. He was reminded then of people, real and unreal.

Why had he come here at all, if it were only to huddle alone in a room made of spit? He began to yearn for company. He began to yearn for the forest, but a forest untouched by fantasy. He was a contradiction. Without simplicity, it is difficult to move. He stayed where he was.

Until he began to see things moving on the other side of the spittle wall and tried to call to them. He could see them moving, within the ice. Then he realized that they were only reflections of himself. He threw on his clothes and left the burrow in the middle of winter.

The snow was alive and it loved him. It settled over his shoulders and merged into a solid blanket of living matter that kept him warm. As he walked he turned his mouth up open to feed. Again the taste of semen.

The world was ripe with pheromones. It was the world that drew him, with constant subliminal promises of sex or something like it, of circumstance, of change. What use was an instinct when its end had no distinct form or shape? It was form or shape that he was seeking.

The snow fertilized his tongue. It grew plump and heavy. It ruptured as he was walking, spilling blood over his chin and down his throat. He knelt over the ice to see his reflection, holding out his tongue. It was covered with frantically wiggling, burrowing white tails. He sat down and wept, covering his face. It seemed that there was no way forward, no way back.

He broke off a piece of the ice and used it like a blade to scrape his tongue. The white things squealed and came free with peeling, suction-cup sounds. He wiped them onto the snow. The snow melted, absorbing them, pulling them down into itself.

He ate the ice. The ice was made of sugar. It was neutral, not alive, secreted by life, like the nuggets of sugar that had gathered along the stems of his houseplants back home. He still thought of the other world as home. He spurned the snow and survived the winter on ice.

He trudged south. Even the rays of light were sexual. They came at him a solid yellow. They shot through him, piercing him, making his flesh ache. They sent a dull yearning along the bones of forearm and thighs. His bones shifted in place with independent desire. They began to work their way loose, like teeth.

His left thigh broke free first. It tore its way out of his leg, pulling the perfect, cartilage-coated ball out of its socket with a sound like a kiss. The bone fell and was accepted by the snow, escaping. As he tried to find it, the bone above his right elbow ripped through his shoulder and followed, slipping out into the living snow. It too was lost. He was lame.

He drank his own blood, to save his strength. He walked and slept and grew new children. They were new arms, new legs, many of them, but they would not do what he wanted. They had a will of their own. They pulled back the flesh of his face while he dozed, peeling back his lips so that he gave birth to his own naked skull. His bones wanted to become a coral reef. They did not let him move. The plates of his skull blossomed out in thin calcium petals, like a flower made of salt. He waited, wistful, patient, resting, hopeless.

The spring came. The snow grew into a fleshy forest, pink and veined. There were fat, leathery flowers, and wattle-trees that lowed like cattle. Pink asparagus ran on myriad roots, chattering. His bones grew into dungeons and turrets, brain-shaped swellings, spreading fans, encrusted shrubberies. His body lurked in hidden chambers and became carnivorous again. It would lunge out of its hiding like moray eels, to seize capering scraps of flesh, dragging them in, enfolding them in shells of bone with razor edges.

Finally he became bored. Bored and disgusted and able to move.

The coral reef stirred. With its first shifting, delicate towers crumbled and fell. They smashed the fantastic calcium spirals and bridges. They broke open the translucent domes of bone. The whole mass began to articulate, bend. He pulled himself free, slithering out of its many rooms.

He no longer resembled a human being. He lay on his back, unable to right himself. It was the first night of summer, warm and still. Lying on his back, he could see the stars. He tried to sing to himself, and his many mouths sang for him. The forest swayed slightly, asleep, in the wind.

He loved the world. He finally, finally came to it. Semen prised its way out from under his thousand eyelids, scorching his eyes. It flowed from his moray mouths, from his many anuses, and from his host of genitals, a leaping chorus the color of moonlight. The scrota burst, one after another, like poppy pods. He was no longer male. He slept in a pool of his own blood and sweat and semen.

By morning it had seeped away, given to this living world. The soil around him rippled, radiating outward. Everything was alive. Rain began to fall, washing him clean. Where he had touched the coral, he was stung and erupted in large red weals.