by Neil Clarke
“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.”
I spent 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.
(Sorry. Very few people in my life seem to embrace my no-overshares policy.)
Anyway. There was one K’srillan who shrank at the sight of the tape measure, but then he laughed (K’srillans actually have a physical response to humor, I found out, but the voice synthesizers are programmed to pick up on it and translate it into a ha-ha-ha sound) and said, “Give me just one moment” and swelled back up to full size within a few seconds. K’srillans all grew up in K’srillan society, which has its own set of gender roles and expectations that are absolutely nothing whatsoever like human gender stereotypes, and then they were plunged into human society and forced to adapt. One of the men noted, as I wrapped the tape measure around the trunk portion at the bottom, that in K’srillan society it is the woman who is expected to make the first move; a man who propositions a woman is shameless and forward, and he thinks human women like that, once we get used to the idea.
“Maybe,” I said, and measured his length on the left-hand side: 17.85. “How’d you meet your wife, anyway?”
“I thought they told you?” he said, a little mournfully. “I have not been so fortunate yet, but I volunteered for this exciting project because it will perhaps raise interest in our kind.”
“Wouldn’t you honestly prefer to marry someone of your own species?” I said.
“Among my own kind I am considered unattractive,” he said.
I stepped back and took a look at him. Over the two days, K’srillans had stopped looking like roadkilled squid to me, but I still wouldn’t call any individual attractive as such. I finished the last measurement, wrote it down, and tossed my gloves into his kitchen trash can. “Thanks for your help,” I said.
I was back in the office, finishing up my prototype design, when my phone rang.
“You do us an injustice,” said a synthesized voice on the other end of the line.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Who’s calling, please?”
“For days you come to our settlement and measure the male organs,” the voice said, distressed. “And now I find out it is so that you can make false female organs for human women.”
I scratched my head, wondering how I’d gotten myself into this. “Look. You do realize that we specialize in false organs of all varieties for humans—both women and men.”
“Yes!” the voice said, furious. “And I am a K’srillan female married to a human male. Why are you not going to make false K’srillan male organs? What is my husband supposed to do to please me?”
So in the end, I’m sure you’ll be shocked to hear, we made both. We made K’srillan vaginas: as I warned Liz, they’re not capable of the K’srillan pre-sex vaginal origami action, but they do simulate the muscle movements with the addition of an adjustable vibrator. We also made K’srillan penises, though due to limited market penetration at this point we have only one size and shape (pop-bottle girth at the bottom, 17.85 on the left-hand size, 18.1 on the right-hand side).
What I find the weirdest these days are not the human/K’srillan couples. It’s the human/human couples that buy one from each set and have sex with the detachable genitals instead of the compatible set they already had. Or maybe it’s the porn of humans having sex with the K’srillan artificial genitalia. Or possibly the gay porn of humans having sex with K’srillan artificial genitalia. Or possibly the absolute weirdest is the porn of K’srillans having sex with artificial human genitalia—they can’t do that with IntelliFlesh (years of research into their neurology remain to be done) but there’s always the good old-fashioned strap-on option on one side, and an artificial vagina on the other.
Because really, there are two immutable laws of nature at work here: number one, love will find a way; and number two, if a sexual act can be conceived of, someone will pay money to watch it.
I’ve been thinking a lot about that first rule, lately. Because I told my sister about the “unattractive” K’srillan and jokingly—I swear I was joking!—pointed out
that at least she’d never be bored in bed. She jokingly—she claims she was joking—asked me for his number. I told her she could have it if she promised to never tell me the details of their sex life, and she pointed out that I already knew this guy’s penis size down to the quarter-inch . . .
Yeah, they’re dating. They’re not rushing into anything, so this story doesn’t end with, “And the wedding’s next week!” But I have to say—you do get used to the seven eyes looking at you over the after-dinner drinks and I’ve learned to spot the physical cues of the laugh even before the synthesizer goes “ha ha ha.” And Gintika (that’s his name) definitely doesn’t make me think of roadkilled squid anymore. He makes me think about how sometimes we have more in common with people than we realize; he makes me think about all the ways to form a connection. He makes me think about the look on my sister’s face when she talks about him. He makes me think, love finds a way, and hey, sometimes finding a way, finds you love.
Keffy R. M. Kehrli is a science fiction and fantasy writer currently living on Long Island in New York. When not writing, he’s busy working on his PhD, editing GlitterShip (www.glittership.com), or petting dogs. His own fiction has previously appeared in publications such as Uncanny Magazine, Apex Magazine, Lightspeed Magazine, and Clockwork Phoenix 5, among others.
And Never Mind the Watching Ones
Keffy R. M. Kehrli
Aaron
He is lying on the splintered, faded-gray wood of the dock, the fingers of one hand dangling in the slough and glitter frogs in his hair. His breath catches and he cups the back of Christian’s head. An airplane is flying far, far overhead. It sounds like the purring exhale of the frogs. Aaron wonders where it’s going.
When he comes, his abdominal muscles tense, pulling his shoulders off the planking. The frogs in his hair go tumbling nubbly ass over nose, their creaking noises gone silent. The orgasm is an adrenaline rush that outlines his body in nervous fire before fading, leaving a ringing in his ears.
Aaron stares up at the broadening remains of the jet contrail, sucking air like he’s been running rather than getting head. He thinks, like every time, that he should have liked it more. He wonders if there’s something wrong with his dick. Christian crawls across the dock and flops beside him, one arm draped carelessly over the baseball logo on Aaron’s T-shirt.
One of the frogs has come back. It puts a clammy little hand on Aaron’s cheek before letting out a croak. The others are scattered across the dock and they answer in identical voices.
“God, they’re so creepy,” Christian says. He picks up the frog. It kicks out its back legs and inflates its neck. It doesn’t ribbit; it freezes as though holding its breath. The two boys can see the delicate iridescent shading on the frog’s belly, the flecks of “glitter”—sensors of some kind, probably alien nanotech. They can see circuitry, visible under thin layers of skin.
“I like them,” Aaron says, reaching out to touch the frog’s nose with a fingertip. It opens its mouth slightly.
Christian holds the frog closer to his face, eyes narrowed in mock anger. “If you’re going to watch, the least you could do is pay us, frogface.”
“We still don’t know if they’re individuals, or like a hive mind or something,” Aaron offers.
Christian drops the frog into the slough and it hits the muddy water with a disconsolate plunk. “Holy shit, I hope not.”
“Is there really a difference between one super smart alien frog brain or a thousand of them, if they’re always watching?”
“Is that like, if a tree falls in the forest?”
Aaron doesn’t answer. The contrail overhead is starting to dissipate. The clouds around it have turned pink at the edges.
Christian rolls onto his side, propping his head up on one elbow. “Well, I’ve got something to tell you,” he says.
“Yeah?”
Christian brushes hair out of Aaron’s face, and then tucks his own long, dark brown hair behind his left ear. It falls forward over his shoulder and across his neck. There’s a mole near where his clavicle peeks out from the collar of his yellow-and-green shirt. Aaron watches his lips as he says, “I got into Dartmouth.”
He says something else, but Aaron doesn’t hear it. And then Christian is looking at him expectantly. And Aaron knows that what he’s supposed to say is, “Congratulations,” or “Oh wow,” or “I knew you’d get in.”
But what comes out is, “I thought we were going to U of O!”
Christian puts his head down on his arm and sighs. “You’re going to U of O. I told you I was applying to better schools.”
Aaron only vaguely remembers those conversations, whispered to him in the back of the band room while waiting for the conductor to drill the flute section on a difficult part of the song. He does remember hiding in Christian’s attic room, with stolen bottles of hard lemonade, talking about how they could be roommates. Was that all bullshit then?
“I didn’t think you’d actually apply to them,” Aaron says. “We had plans.”
Aaron thinks he can sense Christian rolling his eyes. “You had plans.”
“But you can’t just . . . I mean, what about . . .”
Christian picks his head up to look at Aaron, and then all he says is, “Well, I guess either we’ll spend a lot of time on Skype or you’ll get over it.”
“Fine,” Aaron says, and he gets up. Once he’s standing, his head is above the shadow of the slough’s bank, and he has to shade his eyes to look down at Christian. But he doesn’t. His huffy attempt to stomp off is made less dramatic and more comical by his need to tuck his underwhelmed penis back into his pants and zip his fly. So he’s already less angry and more embarrassed, cheeks burning, as he hunts around the grass for his sneakers. But it would be worse to back down and face Christian now, so he musters what anger he can and storms off.
“Whatever,” Christian shouts after him, as he struggles through the tall grass at the edge of the field, glitter frogs hopping up and away from his stomping feet, their bulging eyes watching him. “Text me when you feel like talking about this like an adult!”
Aaron rides home, stuffs his bike in the garage, heads for his room. There are frogs all up and down the stairs. Even though he likes the stupid aliens, he wants to kick them out of spite. He wonders if he drop-kicked one down the hall if it’d bounce off the back wall or splat horribly. The frogs hop away from him, as if they can tell what he’s thinking, and he feels awful. “Sorry,” he whispers, a roiling sickness in his guts. He can’t get the image of a splatted glitter frog dripping off the wall out of his head.
There are about a hundred of them in his bedroom when he gets the door open. Unlike the glitter frogs in the hall, these ones don’t scatter when they see him. He wonders how they get through closed doors and what they’ve been doing in here alone all day.
He swipes his tablet on and tries to distract himself with Facebook, which mostly works. Well, until Christian’s status changes to single.
Aaron stares at the notification. The thick feeling in his throat is the same one he gets right before he cries. “I didn’t mean that,” he says to nobody in particular, though of course the frogs are listening.
One of the glitter frogs jumps up onto Aaron’s shoulder. Its back is such a dark and stormy blue, speckled with metallic flecks, that it looks like the night sky. Aaron picks it up and holds it in his hands, feeling the cold fluttering of its heart and breath. It smells odd, like a spice barely remembered from childhood. He wonders if the frogs are alive, or if they’re robots, or if it’s just a grand, mass hallucination. “Well, you were there, some of you.” Aaron says, “Tell me why he did it.”
The frog doesn’t say anything, even after Aaron lifts its face to the screen, showing it his Twitter feed. The feed is full of tweets by Christian that are definitely about him, though they don’t mention him by name. The glitter frogs never say anything.
The night sky frog ribbits. It sounds disgruntled. Aaron sighs; the puff of his breath makes the frog blink. Here is the pain of his future collapsing on itself and the realization that no, he’s not that great. He’s not great at all. He’s completely, devastatingly average. Seventeen years of denial couldn’t change that.
“I wish for once I could be the one leaving, not the one being left behind,” he says.
The frog stares at him; its wet eyes reflect the cloud-studded sky out the window.
Tumblr gif set, eight images: Rescue Dog “Saves” Frog. Taken from a YouTube video of the same name, filmed on a smartphone in portrait mode.
One: A mottled green and purple glitter frog swimming in someone’s backyard pool.
Two: A golden retriever paces left on the pool deck. Barking.
Three: Glitter frog is still swimming, minding its own business.
Four: Retriever leaps into the pool, and the splash repeats incessantly in the browser window until you tap over to the next gif.
Five: Retriever paddling toward the pool stairs, glitter frog held in its soft jaws.
Six: Retriever puts down frog and backs two steps away. The frog blinks and its throat expands with a mighty, pissed-off croak.
Seven: Retriever lying next to the frog on the pool deck, wagging its wet tail.
Eight: Retriever licks frog. Frog retracts its eyes to escape the overeager tongue.
Christian
The last time he ever sees Aaron is when he watches the other boy walk away from their fight. He’ll come to think of it as the stupidest fight that he’s ever had. He’ll spend years wondering if Aaron would have still run away if they hadn’t broken up with each other on Facebook.
