The K’srillan—our “extraterrestrial immigrants”—made radio contact about a decade ago, and arrived on earth a year and three months ago. Juan periodically mutters about how no matter what they say, they might still be planning invasion and how would we even stop them? But they offered us suspended-animation technology in exchange for asylum (from who? was Juan’s immediate question, but we’ve been assured that they were fleeing the death of their sun, not some second wave of dangerous aliens), and a dozen U.S. cities wound up taking settlements. (They’re spread around. There are a bunch of others in other countries all over the world.) So far in the U.S. it was mostly okay, other than some anti-immigrant rioting in Kansas City. I hadn’t actually met any K’srillan—there was a settlement in Minneapolis but I live in St. Paul and don’t cross the river much—but from what I could tell they were all law-abiding and hard working and in general the sort of people you want to have come and settle in your city.
They also looked kind of like roadkilled giant squid. They don’t have faces, as such. I mean, they have eyes, seven of them, which are on stalks, and they have a mouth, which they use to eat and speak, but they’re not right next to each other the way you would expect in practically every earth species out there, from mammals to reptiles to fish. I mean, okay, we do have squids. But they don’t walk around the shopping mall. On tentacles.
K’srillan do talk, but they aren’t physically capable of making the same sounds as us, so they carry a voice synthesizer for communication.
The thought of sex with, or marriage to, a K’srillan was completely baffling to me.
Even, dare I say it, gross.
But we are pro-sex, pro-kink, and anti-shame, so I said, “Okay!” in as cheerful a voice as I could muster, and didn’t add, “Husband? You sure moved fast.” (I might not judge sex lives but I reserve the right to judge major life decisions.) “I don’t actually know that much about K’srillan sexual anatomy. So, um. He has a penis?”
“Yes, we don’t need a Firmie for him,” the woman said, dismissively. “Your products don’t interface with K’srillan neurology anyway or we’d consider buying him a Firmie and having him use that instead of his own penis. He has a penis, but it’s eighteen inches long, and bifurcated.”
“Bifurcated?”
“Branches into two, basically.”
“You’d need at least four Firmies,” I blurted out. “To make a vagina for eighteen inches of branched penis.”
“That is a lot of money.”
“Yeah, for that much you could practically get a custom order.”
“Oh! You do custom orders?”
“No. We don’t. But surely someone…”
“Do you think I haven’t checked?” the woman asked, exasperated. “There has been a lot of discussion of this in the Full Integration community. I am not the only woman looking.”
“You aren’t?”
“No!”
Well, that changed things, maybe. A custom order was one thing. A prototype was potentially a whole different matter.
“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 silicone 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 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?”