Грегори Бенфорд - Not One of Us - Stories of Aliens on Earth

“Fine!” I said. “Fine. I will handle—” I cut myself off. “I will deal with all of it. And we’ll see if enough people want this to make it viable.”

The woman who’d called was named Liz, and her husband’s name was Zmivla, and it turned out that Zmivla was part of the group that had settled in Minneapolis, so they lived less than five miles from my office. I drove to the high-rise apartment where so many of the new arrivals had moved in, and took an elevator to their apartment on the twelfth floor.

“Come in,” Liz said when she answered the door. “I’ve made coffee.” She laughed nervously. “Do you drink coffee?”

Zmivla was lounging in the recliner, tentacles draped over both the arm rests and the foot rest. Two of his eye stalks swiveled to look at me when I came in and his speech synthesizer said, “Hello, Ms. Marshall.”

“Call me Renee,” I said.

Liz handed me a cup of coffee and I studied Zmivla, wondering if I should just whip out the tape measure and ask him to whip out his penis, or if we should have some more preliminaries first. When Julia started making the Firmies, I think rather than measuring actual penises she bought the dozen or so top-selling models of dildo and measured those . But there aren’t currently any K’srillan dildo models on the market, so we were going to have to go with some actual penises. I took a deep breath. “I should ask some sort of basic questions first, I think.”

“Would you like to know how we met?” Liz asked, brightly.

Actually, I mostly wanted to know how K’srillan sex normally worked with another K’srillan but if she wanted to start with something a little less explicit I supposed that was a reasonable lead-in, so I nodded and drank my coffee while they told me their how-we-met story. I think it involved a conversation that started at the Powderhorn Art Fair but it’s possible I’m misremembering and actually that’s how my sister met her ex-husband. If you want to know the truth, all the cutesy “how we met” stories blur together for me. If you met your sweetie because he was third in line for the organized gang bang at the local dungeon and you really liked the shape of his dick, that I’ll remember. If he offered to help you carry your pottery in his tentacles while you kept your dog from bolting, I just don’t care enough to keep it in my head for more than fifteen minutes.

Liz worked in a boring office and Zmivla had a boring job that was clearly beneath his talents and after they told me that Liz’s hobby was making still life paintings it was clear they were stalling, and I couldn’t entirely blame them, given that I was there to measure the guy’s penis.

“I know this is a somewhat uncomfortable situation for all of us,” I said. “But we really probably should get down to business, okay?”

“I just want you to…” Liz hesitated.

Zmivla stroked the back of her hand with the tip of one of his tentacles, delicately. With one of the others, he brushed a strand of hair out of her face. “Liz and I appreciate your open-mindedness,” he said. “But it’s important to her that you see us as people first. As a couple who has a right to be together, to share the love that we do.”

“You want me to think that you’re normal,” I said. I tried to keep the edge of sarcasm out of my voice, but I probably didn’t entirely succeed. “Just another Minneapolis family.”

“I know we’re not like everyone else,” Liz said. “But we love each other and take care of each other. And that’s what’s important .”

“Right,” I said. “But you didn’t call me to affirm your relationship. You called me to help you with your sex life. So let’s talk about that. ”

So, among actual K’srillans, the female folds herself around the male; she does have a short channel that’s there all the time, but a decent amount of her sexual passageway is constructed on-the-fly. I took notes. The actual sex involved friction, but some of it was accomplished by the same muscles that were used to fold the extended vagina into place; I wasn’t entirely sure whether the male K’srillan thrusted, or not.

“You realize,” I said, “there is no way we can build an IntelliFlesh vagina that will do the folding thing. Or the rippling, or whatever. Maybe we could add a vibrator…”

“Older K’srillan females sometimes lose a certain amount of strength,” Zmivla offered. “There is a procedure that allows the female to fasten her channel into place, and when having sex with a female who has had this procedure, the male thrusts. It should work.” The tips of his tentacles turned pink and I wasn’t sure whether he was embarrassed, sexually aroused, or something else entirely. “Though this vibration option you mention…”

I had brought the tape measure but I wound up having Liz do the measurements. I made a sketch and had her call out the measurements as I noted them down. Eighteen inches was a rough estimate, it turned out: one branch ran 18.25 inches stem to stern and the other branch was 17.8 inches. Girth of the trunk portion was comparable to a soda can; the branches were a lot more slender and tapered toward the tip, like extremely long carrots. The K’srillan penis is blue, I noticed, or at least it’s blue when he’s sexually aroused, sort of a dusky violet-blue that would indicate in a human that he’s oxygen-deprived or possibly freezing to death. There are visible veins in the sides.

“I don’t suppose you know how typical you are,” I said. “I mean, for a K’srillan male, are you on the large side or the small side, are you more or less asymmetrical than most, how does your girth compare…”

“I don’t know,” he said. “But I don’t think it would be too hard to find out. There are about a thousand K’srillans living in this apartment complex, after all, and I know two dozen others with human wives.”

Ispent two entire days measuring K’srillan penises.

The good news was that K’srillan penises turned out to be reasonably uniform. I mean, they ranged in length from sixteen inches all the way up to twenty, and they ranged in girth from pop can to coffee mug, and there were some penises where one branch was noticeably shorter, even by as much as six inches. But human penises also vary. I mean, the average length for an erect dick is about five inches, but the record holder was 13.5 inches long. (Not to overshare but that just sounds like it would be painful .)

The variety of sizing in human dicks has not prevented the successful marketing of any number of artificial vaginas (or “masturbation sleeves,” to use the technical industry term). I mean, just like with dildos you can provide a set of different sizes but they are not all THAT customized, and given that IntelliFlesh is a lot more adaptable than silicone, I was pretty sure we’d be able to come up with something that would work.

Anyway, that was the good news. The bad news was that I had to spend two entire days measuring K’srillan penises.

Fortunately, K’srillan men seem to be pretty secure in their masculinity. I mean, imagine the reaction if you came at the average human male with a tape measure. My former brother-in-law actually measured his own dick at some point and it was 4.5 inches long, so a whopping half-inch shorter than the average. My sister told absolutely everyone, after the divorce, but the problem wasn’t really his very-slightly-runty dick, it was the ways in which he compensated and the fact that he was a complete loser in the sack, one of those men who thinks that his penis is magic and if you can’t climax in two minutes just from him sticking it in you, you must be broken. One-half-inch-less than average length: not a problem. Complete boredom in the sack: definite problem.