Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 85

by Julie Novakova

  “No.”

  “No? Just no?”

  “Would you rather I went with ‘no, that’s a repulsive idea?’ ”

  I stared at Julia. “I thought we were pro-kink and anti-shame?” To be fair, I’d had a similar reaction at first, but I was actively trying to get past my emotional reaction. Everyone involved was a consenting adult—okay, so the K’srillans had a different life span and developmental arc from humans, but I’d checked, and since the K’srillan males didn’t actually develop a penis until sexual maturity, clearly these were adults we were talking about. Anyway. “Did you know that there’s already a sector of the porn industry devoted to sex between human women and K’srillan males? Apparently an eighteen-inch bifurcated—”

  “Stop. I don’t want to hear about it.”

  “Did I ever say that about your ex-boyfriend’s fetish for massive boobs? No. Your kink is not my kink, and your kink is okay. Their kink is not our kink, but that doesn’t mean we can’t sell them stuff!”

  Julia threw down the silicon butt plug she’d been examining. (We’d been thinking about new ways to extend our line anyway. It’s not as if my suggestion had come completely out of the blue.) “Okay. Fine. You want to design something, we’ll test the market. But you are going to have to take the measurements, you are going to have to build the prototype, and you are certainly going to have to do the focus group and interviews because this is a repulsive idea.”

  “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 twelveth 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 mis-remembering 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.”

  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 silicon, 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.

  About the Author

  Naomi Kritzer’s short stories have appeared in Asimov’s, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Realms of Fantasy, and Strange Horizons; this is her first appearance in Clarkesworld. Her novels (Fires of the Faithful, Turning the Storm, Freedom’s Gate, Freedom’s Apprentice, and Freedom’s Sisters) are available from Bantam. Since her last novel came out, she has written an urban fantasy novel about a Minneapolis woman who unexpectedly inherits the Ark of the Covenant; a children’s science fictional shipwreck novel; a children’s portal fantasy; and a YA novel set on a dystopic seastead. She has two e-book short story collections out: Gift of the Winter King and Other Stories, and Comrade Grandmother and Other Stories.

  Naomi lives in St. Paul, Minnesota with her husband and two daughters.

  The Creature Recants

  Dale Bailey

  During breaks in shooting, the Creature from the Black Lagoon usually rests in a pond on the studio back lot and dreams of home. The pond isn’t much even as ponds go. It’s maybe four feet deep at its deepest point and a hundred yards or so around, an abandoned set carved out of the scorched southern California earth for some forgotten film or other: cattails and reeds and occasionally a little arrow of ripples when a dry breeze skates across the surface. Not even a fish if he’s feeling peckish. Which he often is. The catering is suspect at the best of times, and it’s even more so when you’re accustomed to a diet of raw fish and turtle flesh prized living from the shell.

  This is Hollywood.

  “Don’t expect too much,” Karloff had advised him over sushi not long after he’d arrived, full of ambition and optimism, and Lugosi, strung out on morphine and methadone by the time the Creature made the scene, had been even more blunt. “They vill fuck you every time,” he’d said in that thick Hungarian accent. The both of them typecast by their most famous roles. The Creature had assumed he could beat the odds, but on those blazing afternoons in the pond, now and again scooping up handfuls of water to moisten his gills, he’d begun to reconsider. The water was unkind, perpetually casting his reflection back at him: the bald, barnacle-encrusted skull, the eyes sunk beneath shelves of armored bone, the frills of tissue encasing the gills around his neck. Not what you would ca
ll leading-man material.

  To think, he’d once been the king of his little world—the vast, dark Lagoon, overhung with the boughs of enormous trees, and the mighty Amazon itself, where anacondas slithered through the algae-clotted water, caiman slid into the flood without a splash, their tails lashing, and catfish the size of Chevrolets trolled the mossy bottom. Not to mention the jungle, humid, rank, and festering, clamorous with the chitinous roar of millions of insects. And here he was in southern California instead, spending his days in waist-deep water and sleeping his nights in an oversized bathtub in a crummy apartment.

  Such are the Creature’s thoughts when a member of the crew—it’s Bill, a gopher who’s trying to break into the biz as a lighting tech—walks down to the pond to tell him that Jack’s finished setting up the next shot. It’s time for the Creature to come back up to the set and stagger around the deck of the Rita—not even a real boat, just a cheap mock-up in one of the soundstages on the Universal lot—and menace Julie Adams for another hour or so. She’s a real scream queen, Julie, the genuine article, but she’s nice enough in real life; she even walks down to the pond to chat once in a while between set-ups. They’re all nice enough. Even Jack’s okay, though he’s always badgering the Creature to focus on his motivation when the Creature has enough trouble just hitting his marks. To tell the truth, the Creature’s heart isn’t in it anymore, but he’s signed a deal with Universal, and his agent—who rarely returns his calls anyway—tells him there’s no way to break the contract.

  So the Creature hauls himself out of the pond, and tramps back up to the soundstage, trying not to think about the fact that he could decapitate Bill with a single stroke of his taloned hand. Trying not to think that at some level he wants to.

  It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way.

  You never know happiness until it’s gone, that’s the way the Creature figures it. The present always seems like a mess. It was only once he left the Lagoon that he realized how good he’d had it there. In Hollywood, he recalls its dark waters with longing. Sometimes at night, his head pillowed on the bottom of his brimming bathtub and his webbed feet slung over either side to brush the peeling vinyl floor, he even dreams of it. How perfect it seems now, the murky bottom where he’d nested for hours among the drifting fronds of plants he cannot name and the hidden channel that led to his rocky underground lair. Armored with scales and impervious to jaguar and piranha alike, the Creature had hunted both the overgrown shores and the black fathoms, snatching spider monkeys screaming from their roosts and feasting on the great fish that slipped through the Lagoon’s sulfurous depths. He recalls even his isolation with melancholy regret. What had seemed like loneliness—he’d never known another of his kind—now seemed like autonomy, and when the boat that spelled his expulsion from paradise had first steamed into the lagoon he had approached it with a curiosity that now seemed like folly.