Ellen Datlow - Alien Sex

One of his children came to its father. It was no particular shape or gender. It had a huge mouth and was covered in lumps like acne. It was still an adolescent.

It found his real arms and legs, found the ones that were lame, and mumbled them, warming them. Deftly, with the tip of its tongue, it flicked bones out of itself, and pushed them through the old wounds back into place. Then it pruned him, biting, cutting him free from his accretion of form, into an approximation of his old shape.

“Ride me,” his child whispered. Exhausted, he managed to crawl onto its back. Hedgehog spines transfixed his hands and feet, holding him on to the back of his child. The thorns fed him, pumping sugar into his veins. As he rested, growing fat, he was carried.

His desires hauled him across the world. Staring up at the changing sky, he had opportunity to reflect. He could fly apart and pull himself together. His DNA could carry memory and desire into other bodies. DNA could combine with him, to make his living flesh behave in different ways. Was it only power that pushed him? To make the world like himself? Or was it that the world was so beautiful that the impulse was to devour it and be in turn devoured?

His child set him down in a cornfield. Great thick corn leaves bent broken-backed from their stalks like giant blades of grass and moved slightly in a comfortable breeze. He had never seen a cornfield, only read about them. He and this world together had fathered one.

“You have grown too heavy,” said his child. Its speech was labored, the phrases short and punctuated with gasps for air. “How long do I live?”

“I don’t know,” he said. It blinked at him with tiny blue eyes. He kissed it and stroked the tuft of coarse hair on the top of its head. “Maybe I will grow wings,” it said. Then it heaved its great bulk around and with sighs and shifting began its journey back.

The cornfield went on to the horizon. He reached up and broke off an ear of corn. When he bit into the cob, it bled. There was a scarecrow in the field. It waved to him. He looked away. He did not want to know if it were alive.

He walked along the ordered rows, deeper and deeper into the field. The air was warm, heavy, smelling of corn. Finally he came to a neatly cultivated border on top of the bank of a river. The bank was high and steep, the river muddy and slow moving.

He heard a whinnying. Rocking its way back and forth up the steep slope came a palomino pony. Its blond, ragged mane hung almost down to the ground.

It stopped and stared at him. They looked at each other. “Where are you from?” he asked it, gently. Wind stirred its mane. There was bracken in it, tangled. The bracken looked brown and rough and real. “Where did you get that?” he asked it.

It snorted and waved its head up and down in the air, indicating the direction of the river.

“Are you hungry?” he asked. It went still. He worked an ear of corn loose from its stalk, peeled back its outer leaves, and held it out. The pony took it with soft and feeling lips, breaking it up in its mouth like an apple. The man pulled the bracken out of its mane.

It let him walk with it along the river. It was hardly waist-high and its back legs were so deformed by rickets that the knee joints almost rubbed together when it walked. He called it Lear, for its wild white hair and crown of herbs.

They walked beside the cornfield. It ended suddenly, one last orderly row, and then there was a disorder of plants in a dry grassland: bay trees smelling of his youth, small pines decorated with lights and glass balls, feathery fennel, and mole hills with tiny smoking chimneys. Were they all his children?

They came to a plain of giant shells, empty and marble patterned. Something he had wished to become and abandoned. The air rustled in their empty sworls, the sound of wind; the sound of the sea; the sound of voices on foreign radio late at night, wavering and urgent.

All the unheard voices. The river became smaller and clearer, slapping over polished rocks on its way from the moors. The clouds were low and fast moving. The sun seemed always to be just peeking out over their edge, as if in a race with them.

They came to bracken and small twisted trees on spongy, moorland soil. There, Lear seemed to say, this is where I said I would take you. This is where you wanted to be. It waved its head up and down, and trotted away on deformed legs.

The man knelt and ate the grass. He tore up mouthfuls of it, flat inert and tasting only of chlorophyll and cellulose. It seemed to him to be as delicious as mint.

He walked into the water. It was stingingly cold, alien, clean. He gasped for breath—he always was such a coward about going into the water. He half ran, half swam across the pond and came up in the woodland on the opposite shore. Small, old oaks had moss instead of orchids. Rays of sunlight radiated from behind scurrying small clouds. The land was swept with light and shadow. Everything smelled of loam and leaf mold and whiplash hazel in shadow.

He sat down in a small clearing. There was a beech tree. Its trunk was smooth and sinuous, almost polished. The wind sighed up and down its length, and the tree moved with it. The soil moved, and out of it came his children, shapeless, formless, brushing his hand to be petted. “Home,” they mewed.

Everything moved. Everything was alive in a paradise of reciprocity. The man who was real had fathered the garden that had fathered him.

The woman came and sat next to him. She was smaller, flabbier, with the beginnings of a double chin. “I’m real now,” she said. They watched the trees dance until the four suns had set. All the stars began to sing.

A friend of mine nearly sold a story to Cosmopolitan. It was all about the usual Cosmopolitan subjects: sex and success. It took, however, an anti- Cosmopolitan line. You can’t, my friend was saying, have it all. The story got all the way to the final selection stage before the editors began to get a creeping, uncomfortable feeling about it.

A few years later, I tried to do the same thing with a glossy, men-only-style magazine. It was a story about an interplanetary brothel in which the whores were nonhuman androids. It was clearly pornographic by the strict definition of the word (fiction about whores), except that it made plain the existence of such a place in any form was a tragedy. The story almost sold.

I feel friendlier toward sex now. In a way this story is a return to that brothel, except that the sexual feelings embrace the universe, and in some way transform the artificial relations into lasting, human ones. It is probably the most optimistic story I’ve written, and, I hope, the sexiest.

Connie Willis is an internationally known science fiction author and the winner of an unprecedented total of seven Nebula awards and eleven Hugo awards. She is also the first author to have won both the Hugo and Nebula in all four fiction categories. In 2009, she was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame, and in 2012 she became a Nebula Grand Master of Science Fiction.

Willis is the author of Doomsday Book , winner of the Nebula and Hugo awards for Best Science Fiction Novel; Lincoln’s Dreams , winner of the John W. Campbell Award for Best Science Fiction Novel; and To Say Nothing of the Dog , winner of the Hugo Award for Best Science Fiction Novel. Her other fiction includes the novels Remake , Uncharted Territory , Bellwether , and Passage , as well as the short story collections Fire Watch , Impossible Things , Miracle and Other Christmas Stories , and The Winds of Marble Arch . Her most popular short stories include “Fire Watch,” “Even the Queen,” and “The Last of The Winnebagos.”