Ellen Datlow - Alien Sex

“I am coming back. As soon as I graduate.”

“It’s only two years,” Zibet said. Two years ago Zibet had the same sweet face as her sister. Two years from now, Henra too would look like death warmed over. What fun to grow up in Marylebone Weep, where you’re a wreck at seventeen.

“Come back with me, Zibet,” Henra said.

“I can’t.”

Toss-up time. I went back to the room, propped myself on my bunk with a stack of books, and started reading. The tessel had been asleep on the foot of the bunk, its gaping pink vaj sticking up. It crawled onto my lap and lay there. I picked it up. It didn’t resist. Even with it living in the room, I’d never really looked at it closely. I saw now that it couldn’t resist if it tried. It had tiny little paws with soft pink underpads and no claws. It had no teeth, either, just the soft little rosebud mouth, only a quarter of the size of the opening at the other end. If it had been enhanced with pheromones, I sure couldn’t tell it. Maybe its attraction was simply that it had no defenses, that it couldn’t fight even if it wanted to.

I laid it over my lap and stuck an exploratory finger a little way into the vaj. I’d done enough lezzing when I was a freshman to know what a good vaj should feel like. I eased the finger farther in.

It screamed.

I yanked the hand free, balled it into a fist, and crammed it against my mouth hard to keep from screaming myself. Horrible, awful, pitiful sound. Helpless. Hopeless. The sound a woman must make when she’s being raped. No. Worse. The sound a child must make. I thought, I have never heard a sound like that in my whole life, and at the same instant, this is the sound I have been hearing all semester. Pheromones. Oh, no, a far greater attraction than some chemical. Or is fear a chemical, too?

I put the poor little beast onto the bed, went into the bathroom, and washed my hands for about an hour. I thought Zibet hadn’t known what the tessels were for, that she hadn’t had more than the vaguest idea what the boys were doing to them. But she had known. Known and tried to keep it from me. Known and gone into the boys’ dorm all by herself to steal one. We should have stolen them all, all of them, gotten them away from those scutting godfucking… I had thought of a lot of names for my father over the years. None of them was bad enough for this. Scutting Jesus-jiggers. Fucking piles of scut.

Zibet was standing in the door of the bathroom.

“Oh, Zibet,” I said, and stopped.

“My sister’s going home this afternoon,” she said.

“No,” I said, “Oh, no,” and ran past her out of the room.

I guess I had kind of a little breakdown. Anyway, I can’t account very well for the time. Which is edge, because the thing I remember most vividly is the feeling that I needed to hurry, that something awful would happen if I didn’t hurry.

I know I broke restricks because I remember sitting out under the cottonwoods and thinking what a wonderful sense of humor Old Man Moulton had. He sent up Christmas lights for the bare cottonwoods, and the cotton and the brittle yellow leaves blew against them and caught fire. The smell of burning was everywhere. I remember thinking clearly, smokes and fires, how appropriate for Christmas in Hell.

But when I tried to think about the tessels, about what to do, the thoughts got all muddy and confused, like I’d taken too much float. Sometimes it was what Zibet Brown wanted and not Daughter Ann at all, and I would say, “You cut off her hair. I’ll never give her back to you. Never.” And she would struggle and struggle against him. But she had no claws, no teeth. Sometimes it was the admin, and he would say, “If it’s the trust thing you’re worried about, I can find out for you,” and I would say, “You only want the tessels for yourself.” And sometimes Zibet’s father said, “I am only trying to protect you. Come to Papa.” And I would climb up on the bunk to unscrew the intercom but I couldn’t shut him up. “I don’t need protecting,” I would say to him. Zibet would struggle and struggle.

A dangling bit of cotton had stuck to one of the Christmas lights. It caught fire and dropped into the brown broken leaves. The smell of smoke was everywhere. Somebody should report that. Hell could burn down, or was it burn up, with nobody here over Christmas break. I should tell somebody. That was it, I had to tell somebody. But there was nobody to tell. I wanted my father. And he wasn’t there. He had never been there. He had paid his money, spilled his juice, and thrown me to the wolves. But at least he wasn’t one of them. He wasn’t one of them.

There was nobody to tell. “What did you do to it?” Arabel said. “Did you give it something? Samurai? Float? Alcohol?”

“I didn’t…”

“Consider yourself on restricks.”

“It isn’t beasties,” I said. “They call them Baby Dear and Daughter Ann. And they’re the fathers. They’re the fathers. But the tessels don’t have any claws. They don’t have any teeth. They don’t even know what jig-jig is.”

“He has her best interests at heart,” Arabel said.

“What are you talking about? He cut off all her hair. You should have seen her, hanging on to the wallplate for dear life! She struggled and struggled, but it didn’t do any good. She doesn’t have any claws. She doesn’t have any teeth. She’s only fifteen. We have to hurry.”

“It’ll all be over by midterms,” Arabel said. “I can fix you up. Guaranteed no trusters.”

I was standing in the dorm mother’s Skinner box, pounding on her door. I did not know how I had gotten there. My face looked back at me from the dorm mother’s mirrors. Arabel’s face: strained and desperate. Flashing red and white and red again like an alert band: my roommate’s face. She would not believe me. She would put me on restricks. She would have me expelled. It didn’t matter. When she answered the door, I could not run. I had to tell somebody before the whole place caught on fire.

“Oh, my dear,” she said, and put her arms around me.

I knew before I opened the door that Zibet was sitting on my bunk in the dark. I pressed the wallplate and kept my bandaged hand on it, as if I might need it for support. “Zibet,” I said. “Everything’s going to be all right. The dorm mother’s going to confiscate the tessels. They’re going to outlaw animals on campus. Everything will be all right.”

She looked up at me. “I sent it home with her,” she said.

“What?” I said blankly.

“He won’t… leave us alone. He—I sent Daughter Ann home with her.”

No. Oh, no.

“Henra’s good like you. She won’t save herself. She’ll never last the two years.” She looked steadily at me. “I have two other sisters. The youngest is only ten.”

“You sent the tessel home?” I said. “To your father ?”

“Yes.”

“It can’t protect itself,” I said. “It doesn’t have any claws. It can’t protect itself.”

“I told you you didn’t know anything about sin,” she said, and turned away.

I never asked the dorm mother what they did with the tessels they took away from the boys. I hope, for their own sakes, that somebody put them out of their misery.

ARABEL: Is it necessary always to use the ugliest word?

HENRIETTA: Yes, Arabel—when you’re describing the ugliest thing.

Edward Moulton Barrett would have been shocked and outraged by this story. So, I suppose, would his poetic daughter, Elizabeth. They were, after all, Victorians, and members of that most staid and shockable Victorian society, the respectable middle class.

And Edward Barrett was certainly respectable. A widower and father of ten children, he was a model of parental devotion. He was especially protective of his invalided daughter, Elizabeth, who had not been out of her room for years. He knelt and prayed with her every night.