Alien Sex: 19 Tales by the Masters of Science Fiction and Dark Fantasy

I. BUFFALOED

MY FIRST HUSBAND WAS a dog, all snuffling, clumsy, ardent devotion. At first (to be fair to him) we were a couple of puppies, gamboling and frisking in our love for each other and collapsing in a panting heap on the bed every night. But time and puppyhood passed, as it tends to do, and as he grew into a devoted, sad-eyed, rather smelly hound, I found myself becoming a cat. It is not the dog’s fault that cats and dogs fight like cats and dogs, and probably (to be fair to myself) it is not the cat’s fault, either. It is simply in their nature to find everything that is most typical in the other to be the most difficult to live with. I became more and more irritable, until everything he did displeased me. Finally, even the sound of his throat-clearing sigh when I had rebuffed him once again would make my fur stand on end. I couldn’t help what I was, any more than he could. It was in our nature, and there was nothing for it but to part.

My second husband was a horse. Well-bred, high-strung, with flaring nostrils and rolling eyes. He was a beauty. I watched him for a long time from a distance before I dared approach. When I touched him (open-palmed, gently but firmly on his flank, as I had been taught), a quiver rippled through the muscles beneath the smooth skin. I thought this response was fear, and I vowed I would teach him to trust and love me. We had a few years together—not all of them bad—before I understood that nervous ripple had been an involuntary expression not of fear but of distaste. Almost, before he left me, I learned to perceive myself as a slow, squat, fleshy creature he suffered to cling to his back. We both tried to change me, but it was a hopeless task. I could not become what he was; I did not even, deeply, want to be. It was not until we both realized that such a profound difference could not be resolved that he left me for one of his own kind.

I didn’t intend to have a third husband; I don’t believe the phrase “third time lucky” reflects a natural law. With two honorable, doomed tries behind me, and having observed the lives of my contemporaries, I concluded that the happy marriage was the oddity; in most cases, a fantasy. It was a fantasy I wanted to do without. I still liked men, but marrying one of them was not the best way to express that liking. Better to admit my allegiance to the tribe of single women: My women friends were more important to me than any man. They were my family and my emotional support. Most of them had not given up the dream of a husband, but I understood their reasons, and sympathized. Jennifer, bringing up her daughter alone, longed for a partner; Annie, single and childless and relentlessly aging, wanted a father for her child. Janice, who worked hard and lived with her invalid mother, dreamed of a handsome millionaire. Cathy was quite explicit about her sexual needs, and Doreen about her emotional ones. I had no child and didn’t want one, earned a good living, seldom felt lonely, had friends for emotional sustenance, and as for sex—well, sometimes there was a lover, and when there wasn’t, I tried not to think about it. Sex wasn’t really what I missed, although I could interpret it that way. I yearned for something else, something more; it was an old addiction I couldn’t quite conquer, a longing it seemed I had been born with.

There was a man. Now the story begins. It can’t have a happy ending, but still we keep hoping. At least it’s a story. There was a man where I worked. I didn’t know his name, and I didn’t want to ask, because to ask would reveal my interest. My interest was purely physical. How could it be anything else, when I’d never even spoken to him? What else did I know about him but how he looked? I watched how he moved through the corridors, head down, leading with his shoulders. He had broad shoulders, a short neck, a barrel chest. Such a powerful upper torso that I suspected he had built it by lifting weights. Curling black hair. An impassive face. On bad days, I thought it was noble. On good days, he looked irritatingly stupid. I did not seek him out. I tried to avoid him. But chance brought us together, even though we didn’t speak. I wondered if he had noticed me. I wondered how what I felt could not be mutual, could not be real, could be, simply, a one-sided fantasy; an obsession.

Pasiphaë fell in love, they say, with a snow-white bull.

One day I went to the zoo with Jennifer and her daughter. Little Lindsay was thrilled, running from one enclosure to another, demanding to know the animals’ names, herself naming the ones she recognized from her picture books.

“Tiger.”

“Tiger! Lion!”

“Ocelot.”

“Ocelot!”

“Leopard.”

“Leopard!”

“Panther.”

“Panther!”

I wondered what his name was. And what about his soul. What was his sign, his clan, his totem? What animal was he? The bull? The ox. The water buffalo. I considered the Chinese horoscope. A man born in the year of the ox was steady and trustworthy, a patient and tireless worker. Undemonstrative, traditional, dedicated. Boring, I reminded myself. And a determined materialist. He wouldn’t even know what I meant if I talked about the union of souls. He was certainly married already, a husband devoted to his wife and children, never dreaming of any alternatives.

I watched Jennifer watching her daughter. I looked at the fine lines that had begun to craze the delicate fair skin of her face, and at the springy black hair compressed into an untidy bun on top of her head. The red scarf (which I had given her) swathing her neck. The set of her shoulders. Her fragile wrists. She felt me watching, and caught my hand with her thin, strong fingers; squeezed. We knew each other so well. We felt the same about so many things; we understood and trusted each other. Sometimes I knew what she was going to say before she said it. We loved each other. The love of two equals, with nothing excessive, romantic, or inexplicable about it.

“Zebra.”

“Zebra!”

“Okapi.”

“Okapi!”

“Giraffe.”

“Giraffe!”

“Buffalo.”

Buffalo. The American Bison. Order: Artiodactyla; Family: Bovidae. A powerful, migratory, gregarious horned grazing animal of the North American plains.

Thick, curly, dark-brown hair grew luxuriously on head, neck, and shoulders; a shorter, lighter-brown growth covered the rest of the body. The bull stood there, solid and motionless as a mountainside, and yet it was a warm, living mountain; there was nothing cold or hard about it. I remembered how, as a child, traveling in the back of the car on family holidays, I had gazed out at the changing landscapes and dreamed that I could stroke the distant, furry hills. Something about this creature—wild, yet tame; strange, but familiar—stirred the same, childish response. If I could touch it, I thought, if only I could touch it, something would change. I would know something, and everything would be different.

The set of his shoulders. The curve of his horns. The springy curl of his luxuriant hair. A wild, musty, grassy smell hung on the air, filled my nostrils, and I could feel a sun that wasn’t there, beating down on my naked back.

“Buffalo.”

Pasiphaë fell in love, they say, with a snow-white bull.

To have her desire, Pasiphaë hid inside a hollow wooden cow, and so the fearsome Minotaur was conceived.

Was that her desire? To be impregnated by a bull? I understand her passion, but not the logic of her actions. It is not Pasiphaë’s story that we have been told. What we hear is the greed of Minos, the anger of Poseidon, the cunning of Daedalus. She was a tool, the conduit through which the Minotaur came to be. When her passion died did she understand what she had done, or why? Did she think, suddenly, too late, as the bull mounted her: But this isn’t what I meant! This isn’t what I wanted! Or was she triumphant, fulfilled? Afterward, was she satisfied? Did the desire she had felt vanish once Poseidon’s will had been served, or was it waiting, nameless, incapable of fulfillment, waiting to erupt again?

We are told that Pasiphaë’s love for the bull was an unnatural desire. But what is natural about any desire, for anything not necessary to sustain life? What does it mean to want a man? To want a husband?

Staring at the buffalo that cloudy day in the zoo, separated from it by distance, by time, by species, by everything that can distance one creature from another, I felt a wordless, naked desire. It was a desire that could not be named, and certainly could not be fulfilled. It was the purest lust I had ever known, unmuddied, for once, by any of the usual misinterpretations. If that had been a man staring back at me across emptiness with his round, brown, uncomprehending eye, I would have invited him home with me. I would have thought my feelings were sexual—sexual desire, at least, allows satisfaction—and if they persisted beyond that, I would have used the word love. I might have convinced myself that marriage was possible; I certainly would have tried to convince him. To have him. Forgetting that it was impossible; forgetting that desire, by its nature, can never be satisfied.

Remember, I told myself. And then, forgetting, I wondered what his name was.

“Buffalo?”

“Husband.”

II. THIS LONGING

“Sometimes I think we made them up,” I said to Rufinella. “Mythical creatures for the mythical time before Now.”

We had just been to see an old movie about the relations between men and women—husbands, single women, and wives—a horrible story that stirred up emotions unfelt for more than thirty years. At least in me. I don’t know what Rufinella felt: she had seemed to enjoy it. Although, given the number of times she had had to lean over and ask me, in a loud whisper, which ones were the men and which the women, I wondered what it was she had enjoyed, and just how much she had understood.

Rufinella gave me a disbelieving look. “What’s this? You’ve joined the revisionists? You’re about to confess you were a part of the conspiracy all along? That you’ve been lying to your students all these years, pretending that myth is history?”

“No conspiracy,” I said. “I’ve always taught the truth as I’ve understood it, but sometimes I wonder—what did I ever understand? How much of what I remember was true? Did they really exist, this other… gender? Like us, yet so unalike? Face it, the details are so unlikely!”

“But you said you had one.”

“You can’t say ‘had one’ like they were property—”

“People talk about them like that in the movies. And I’ve heard you say it—you’ve always said you had a husband. What are you telling me now—that it didn’t exist?”

“He,” I corrected automatically, teacher that I am. “Oh, yes, I had a husband… and a father and a brother and lovers and male colleagues…. At least, I think I did. When I remember them, they don’t seem so terribly different from the women I knew that long ago. They don’t seem like strange, extinct creatures… they were just individuals, whom I knew. Other people, you know? I was twenty-eight years old when the men went away. That’s—well, more than thirty years ago now. I’ve lived longer without men than I lived with them. What I remember might almost be a dream.”

“If it was a dream, everybody else had it, too,” said Rufinella. “And there’s the evidence: there they are—or at least their shadows—on film, on video, in the newspapers, in books, in the news…. They were real; if you’re going to judge by the evidence they left behind, they were more real than the women.”

“Then maybe they woke up to reality one day, and found that the women were gone.”

“Nobody dreamed me,” said the daughter of my best friend, very firmly. Rufinella was two months old when the men disappeared. Therefore, unlike her own daughter, she had a father, but she cannot possibly remember him, or any man. Although she has tried, through hypnotic regression. According to her, she succeeded in going back before her birth, to her time in the womb. She said she could remember her mother’s body. But she could not remember her father. She couldn’t remember a male presence, no more than imagine how creatures called men might have differed so dramatically from creatures called women, as all history, all art, tells us they did.

Art is metaphor, and history is an art. It was like this. It was not like that. We are language-using, storytelling creatures. Trying to explain reality, we transform it. We can’t travel in time and know the past that way, but only, endlessly, try to re-create it. As a teacher (I’m semiretired, now), I tried to make my students understand something they could never know for themselves. Imaginative reconstruction of a place that no longer exists. They can’t go there, but neither can I. My own memories are stories I tell myself.

Maybe women did make up men, invented them the way earlier civilizations created gods, to fill a need. A group of revisionist historians—psychohistorians they call themselves—would like us all to believe that there was never any “second sex,” never any “other” kind of human being except ourselves. According to them, men were a cultural invention. After all, if they were truly other than us, necessary in the same way as are male animals, how is it that we women have managed to continue to reproduce ourselves, managed to conceive and bear children, without any of the equipment or the contortions depicted in illustrated texts on human sexuality, and in a certain class of film?

I’ve heard many clever and convincing arguments for the revisionist view of human history, and there are times when I feel that only a native stubbornness keeps me clinging to what I “know.” Yet the argument they think is the clincher for their point of view does not convince me.

Like all sane and sensible people, they still, thirty-four years after the fact, cannot come to terms with, can hardly believe, the way that men disappeared. Overnight; all at once; in the twinkling of an eye. They simply were no longer. Reality doesn’t work like that; dreams do. So it makes a certain comforting sense to conclude that the whole class or gender of men was a dream. Nothing vanished except an illusion. There was no sudden, worldwide disappearance, but only an equally sudden change in perception. Men no longer existed because we no longer needed to pretend that they did.

Things that exist do not suddenly cease to be. They change, possibly out of all recognition, but something doesn’t become nothing except through a process of transformation. This is true not only of objects, but also of needs. What happened to that need which made women invent the story of men in such convincing detail, and cling to it for so many thousands of years? Why should it be any easier to erase such a need than half the human race? How could it vanish in the blink of an eye, between one breath and the next?

I said something of this sort to Rufinella. She looked tired and sad. “Oh, yes,” she said. “You’re right. The need is still there, and we still don’t understand it. That’s why I think men are coming back.”

“The same way they left?” I loved my husband very much, and grieved for him and other male friends and family when they disappeared; I had mourned for years, wanting them back. And yet, now, the thought that they might all return, be found back in place tomorrow morning, was strangely horrible.

“Oh, no. I don’t think so. I don’t think you’re going to roll over in bed one night and find you’re not alone. I think they’re coming back in a different way… more slowly, but more surely. We’ve had this time, all these years, to learn to understand ourselves and to change, and we haven’t done it. We’ve missed our chance. We’ve blown it, as your generation says. We still need them, and we don’t know why. So men are coming back. And I think it’s going to be worse for us this time; a lot worse.”

Rufinella is bright and observant and cautious, not given to making rash, unprovable statements.

“Why?”

“You don’t spend much time around children, do you?”

“Not much,” I said. “In fact, hardly any. I suppose your Leni’s birthday party was the last time.”

“I spend two afternoons a week in the community nursery,” Rufinella said. “And of course I live with Leni, and there’s her friends, and Alice has an eight-year-old… since I’ve noticed, I’ve been talking to more mothers and teachers and nursery workers and… it’s consistent. It’s not isolated incidents; there’s a pattern to it, and it’s—”

“What?”

“I didn’t mean to tell you yet—I didn’t mean to tell anyone, until I was certain. Until I had more evidence. I could be wrong, I could be overreacting, imagining things…. I thought it was just a fad, at first. Most people who’ve noticed it probably think that. Because you only see a part of it, you only see what the kids in your house or your school or your neighborhood are doing, and you don’t realize that they are all doing the same thing, all across the city, all across the country… all over the world, I suspect, although of course I don’t know… yet. At first I thought… you know how children are; I myself remember what it was like. Making up codes, secret languages, little rituals. It’s part of childhood. A children’s culture. And that’s what this is. They have their own culture.”

I felt the way I always feel before a medical examination. I wanted to leap ahead of her, tell her before she could tell me. “And you recognize it—this culture—from the old movies.”

“Not the details. The details are different. I guess they’d have to be. But, yes, I do recognize it… at least, I recognize one thing about it… you would, too, I think.”

“Tell me.”

“They have their own language, their own rituals. Those might differ from group to group, but the worst of it is, there are always two. Two separate classes, if you like. They’ve created certain differences… certain, consistent differences. Two types of language, two types of ritual. One group of children uses one, and one is for the other. No crossover allowed. You can’t change the group you belong to, once you’ve picked it… or once it’s picked you. I can’t quite work out how the division is determined, or how early it is established, but somehow they all seem to know. A two-year-old going to nursery for the first time—it’s settled before a word is spoken. They all know which group she belongs to, and there’s no mistake possible, no appeal allowed. Almost as if they can see signs we can’t—as if it were established at birth, the way sex used to be.” Rufinella looked at me steadily, yet somehow desperately. She was pleading, I realized; hoping that I would have some advice, some wisdom from the age before hers.

“You think they’re reinventing gender.”

She nodded.

“What do they say about it? Have you asked them?”

“They can’t explain it. They say that’s just how things are. They invent new languages, they create differences, but they talk about it as if they can’t help it. As if these are discoveries, not inventions.”

“Maybe—”

“Don’t say it! You mean that we’ve been blind for thirty-four years and now our children can see?”

I felt such longing, and such hope. I wished I were younger. I wanted another chance; I had always wanted another chance. I didn’t understand the despair on Rufinella’s face unless it was because she, too, knew she wouldn’t be a part of the coming age. I said, “Maybe they’ll get it right this time.”

III. THE MODERN PROMETHEUS

“It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils.”

Yes, I have been successful! I have dared to try, and managed to bring life to what to others has ever been only a dream: another race of beings, a partner-species, to end our long loneliness by being our planetary companions. Enough like us that we can communicate; yet different, so that each will have something worth communicating, bringing different visions, different experiences, to enrich the relationship of true equals.

Perhaps I shall have cause to regret my deed, but I do not think so. I think my name will go down in history as a positive example of how science can make the world a better place. I have not acted out of pride or ignorance, not for personal gain or ambition. Nor do I believe that anything that can be done should be; that scientific achievement is a valuable end in itself. No, I have thought long and hard about what I meant to do. I have considered the dangers carefully and established certain limits. And all along I have felt myself to be not an individual pursuing personal goals, but rather the representative of all womankind, acting for the greater good.

Not, of course, that everyone agrees with what I have done. Many do not see the necessity. Why create a new species? Why bring another life-form into existence? Isn’t that playing god? Yes, I say, and why not? Don’t we do that already, every day, as we struggle to change the world for the better? Why should we suffer the lack of something we can create? But, of course, some do not believe there was any such lack. Some do not even believe in the yearning that has driven me to this. Because they have never felt it, they say it is imaginary. Solid materialists, they refuse to accept the possibility that one might desire something that does not exist. Something—I hasten to qualify—that does not yet exist. For I believe that these unnamed longings are expressions of memory—a racial memory, if you will, whether of past or future hardly matters. Desire is timeless, but it does not deal in the imaginary. If it seems that what we want does not exist, that is true only of this time. You may be certain that you had what you desire in the past, or you may have it in the future.

I have been driven by the desire to know someone else, another being, who is not like me. Not my lover, not my child, not my mother, not any friend or stranger on this earth. And so I have created it.

What is this new creation? I thought of calling it “man” for the obvious, mythohistorical reasons. But the emotions connected to that word are mixed; and there are aspects of history better buried… not forgotten, but certainly not re-created. I have been careful to ensure that my “man” should not be like any man who lived before, not like any previous companion women have known. To signal this, I have given him a name that represents what many women want; I have named this, our hearts’ desire, “husband.”

So, now, on this not-so-dreary November night, I look through the glass side of the tank at my creation. He looks back at me, interested, intelligent, and kind, his body sleek and beautiful, his mind and spirit equal to my own. Equal, but different. I’m sure I’ve got it right. There will be no misunderstandings, no doomed attempts at domestication, and no struggles for power, for although we are enough alike to love each other, we will always live apart: women on dry land, husbands in the sea. Their beautiful faces and their complicated minds are like ours, but their bodies are very different. We will always live in different worlds. They must swim, having no legs to walk with, and although they breathe the same air we do, their skin needs the constant, enveloping caress of the water. We each will have our own domain, each be happy among our own kind, and yet they will find us as attractive as we find them, and so we shall seek each other out from time to time, and come together not for gain or of necessity, but from pure desire.

I look at him, the first of the new race, and when I smile, so does he. He waves a flipper; I wave a hand. I feel love bubbling up inside me, washing away the pain of the past, and I know, as he does a backflip for my admiration, that my husband feels the same. This time, it will work out for the best.