EDITOR’S NOTE: Sometimes stories come around that we just can’t help but like. And sometimes those stories don’t fit into any of the structures we have set in place to choose quality pieces that also have Romance and Speculative aspects. We call those: Stories We Simply Love.
This is one of those stories. It’s not even close to being a Romance in the genre sense we usually look for. And still. We hope you enjoy it as much as we do.
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Keisha Mbotu propped her right foot up on the small round table and arched her back. She grasped the center of her kilt with both hands, and raised it as high as it would go.
“And, that’s where they come out.”
Zoa, the Molloscoid envoy, was puddled over two of the three stools that circled the table. He hunched forward and extended an ocular for a closer look. His Tzeen counterpart contented itself with a slight tilt of its head for a better view, and clicked its mandibles together doubtfully.
“It’s a bit small isn’t it?” the arthropod chirped.
Zoa’s ocular was getting a bit intrusive. Keisha playfully swatted it away and stood back from the table.
“Well, our young are quite small when they’re born,” she answered, demurely smoothing the front of her kilt. “And we rarely give birth to more than one child at a time; at least that’s how we did it in the old days.”
She moved back around the table and sat carefully on the two fat tentacles that Zoa courteously left coiled on the otherwise too-narrow stool top. The seats just weren’t designed for human comfort, and Zoa’s coils provided extra height, width … and padding.
“Human newborns have disproportionately large heads,” she said. “And I understand that it was a painful process, even allowing for the elastic labia.”
Keisha dialed up another round of cocktails and confirmed the running tally. The three envoys had just concluded four weeks of difficult negotiations, and were celebrating.
Representatives of most of the known sentient species were scattered around the bar, but they were keeping their distance, out of respect for the Diplomatic Corps.
Tzee continued to click his mandibles, still unconvinced. “And that makes Humans the sexiest creatures in the Universe?”
Keisha set her glass down. “No, not at all. I was just explaining the biology,” she answered, fixing Tzee with a meaningful glance. “Besides, we’re not talking sheer quantity of offspring,”(this to Tzee, whose own arguments had focused on pheromones, and fertilizing thousands of eggs at a time).
She turned to Zoa. “Or numbers of mates.”
Zoa was widely known as the Molloscoid Don Juan. In his youth he had repopulated his almost extinct subspecies, which had risen to dominate Antares New Mars and the Molloscoid Empire.
“We bet on the Sexiest.”
All three were well into their cups and were indulging in some edgy banter. The bet offered a degree of “decompression” after weeks of high-stakes political maneuvering.
Keisha squirmed slightly as Zoa readjusted a tuberole, and continued. “Humans don’t just signal during mating season. There is no mating season. Human males are ALWAYS ready, and social customs notwithstanding, human females are ALWAYS receptive.”
Tzee stirred restlessly.
Zoa readjusted a pseudopod, and Keisha, stifling a little gasp, shot a cautionary glance his way.
“We signal every waking moment of every single day.” She touched her hands to her face. “Our ‘cheeks’ have evolved into double spheroids, strong visual stimulants for our species.” She moved her hands lower and cupped her breasts.
“These shapes are accentuated in the female upper torso, and to a lesser degree, in males.” She paused. “They are even echoed in the male scrotum.”
Tzee’s clicking nuanced to a puzzled chirp.
A pedantic lecturing tone crept into Keisha’s voice. “We evolved from vegetarian quadrupeds that signaled sexual stimuli with their horizontal buttocks.” When Keisha rose slightly in her seat to better display her own bottom, Zoa slid another coil onto her seat.
“As we evolved into bipedal carnivores…” she halted in mid-phrase and gasped as Zoa quivered suddenly. The staccato movement allowed one of his ridged appendages to slip underneath her derrière, until the tip wagged nervously out the front of her kilt.
Molloscoids were pretty much vegetarians, and Keisha apologized for the apparent faux pas. “Sorry Zoa – it’s just evolution. We may technically still be omnivores, but we’ve lived on synthetic proteins for centuries.”
Zoa was uncommonly uncommunicative. He seemed preoccupied.
Keisha traced her eyes, cheeks, and breasts with figure-eight motions and cupped her butt cheeks briefly, before running an index finger down the bridge of her nose and across her lips. “The vertical lines of our noses, both male and female, echo the erect male member, just as our lips, in shape and color, signal … female labia.”
Zoa playfully inflated his upper torso to form two cantaloupe-sized bulges, while Tzee continued on the offensive. “Oh come now,” he chirped. “What’s so sexy about a few swellings and lines … vertical or horizontal?”
Zoa’s drone pipes gradually began to vibrate and hum – barely audible to human ears, but quite obvious to the Tzeen. Keisha relaxed and leaned back towards the wall, only to nestle into another of Zoa’s coils.
Her voice was becoming husky. “Yes, but that’s just our physical appearance. When sexually aroused, our cheeks, necks, even chests and backs become flushed, further arousing males and females alike.”
Tzee stared fixedly at Keisha’s dusky face with his complex eyes, while Zoa adjusted his normally doughy complexion to more ruddy hues.
Keisha, startled a bit by Zoa’s transformation, answered Tzee’s unspoken question. “Well, I come from a naturally darker-skinned race of humans. To make up for the loss of color signals, our lips are more precisely defined, our breasts more distinctive and our buttocks more pronounced.”
Tzee bobbed his antennae in Zoa’s direction – the closest a Tzeen could get to winking, and Zoa responded with crimson mottling up and down his upper torso.
The Molloscoid’s thrumming grew a bit more insistent, and Keisha began to feel warm.
She fanned herself with her embassy credentials, and dialed up another round of cocktails. Zoa began a slight, almost imperceptible rocking motion, and Keisha unconsciously moved with the coils.
“We also respond to subtle olfactory stimuli.”
Tzee experimentally raised a back wing plate to expose one of three pheromone emitters.
Keisha didn’t notice a thing, but there was a sudden commotion from a group of Tzeen at the far end of the bar, expostulating their equivalents of “Hey!” and, “Watch it!”
Tzee adjusted his emitters and the Tzeen commotion subsided.
Keisha’s nostrils involuntarily dilated and she began to feel … damp.
“Ummmm,” she said, rocking rhythmically with Zoa’s coils. “And, and, we’re hairless,” she stuttered.
Tzee looked pointedly at her dark braids.
“Mmmmmfh,” she said, momentarily distracted. “Well, almost hairless. All of our closest ancestral species are hairy all over. There are small patches of hair under our arms and around our genitalia, but basically just scent patches. We sacrificed insulation for tactile stimulation.”
Zoa casually brushed a smooth pseudopod down Keisha’s cheek, neck and arm.
“Oh,” she murmured. “Our breathing becomes deeper and more rapid as arousal develops,” she panted. “Often accompanied by rhythmic moaning.”
Keisha absently pressed down on the soles of her feet and rocked backwards. “At climax, our faces might become contorted, our mouths open wider, and our nostrils dilate.” She spoke the words like an athlete in extremis, her eyes half-closed, her white teeth exposed as she gnawed at her lower lip.
“Mmmmmm,” she whispered, and continuing in a stronger voice: “There’s a general vaso-dilation as our arteries begin pumping more blood into distensible organs faster than our veins can carry it away.”
Keisha’s lips, nose and earlobes looked darker, thicker and swollen. Her breasts had increased at least 25 percent in size, and seemed to be straining under her Diplomatic Corps jumpsuit. Her now-erect nipples were clearly apparent.
Tzee took on a worried look and began anxiously signaling to Zoa to back off.
“Ogaw. Arah-ah-agh-ogawd.” Keisha’s eyes shut tight and her body convulsed. She arched her back, then stiffened, and then began to shudder all over.
“Ogah. Oh, yes!”
Tzee rose up from his seat in alarm.
Keisha, unaware of his sudden movement, had stopped shaking. Her tumescence rapidly subsided as she relaxed, and except for dark patches of moisture which seemed to be soaking her front, back and sides, she seemed to have returned to “normal.”
Tzee was sitting back down as she opened her eyes.
Zoa deliberately adjusted his own appearance to its customary pallor. The scarlet stripes and ruddy lozenges disappeared, and were replaced by the familiar grey mottling.
He retracted the extra tuberoles and psuedopods which had migrated towards Keisha, and collecting his own and Tzee’s cocktail napkins, he proffered them wordlessly to Keisha. She flashed a non-verbal “thank you” and dabbed at her palms, forehead, and upper lip. She still seemed a bit disoriented and confused.
“Well,” she said, in a small voice. She cleared her throat and tried again. “Well,” she repeated a little louder, still dabbing with the napkins. “That’s my two bits’ worth. How about you, Zoa?”
Tzee reached for the cash pouch that he kept suspended from the regulation harness that Tzeen wore in place of uniforms, and began stacking credits in front of Zoa.
Zoa nodded, scooped them up, and began feeding the cocktail meter in the center of the table. “It’s getting petty late, Keisha.” He smiled. “How about if I make my case tomorrow?”
Clearly disappointed, Keisha answered doubtfully. “Well, it’s not THAT late, but, whatever you say.” She looked suspiciously at Tzee, glanced at Zoa, and stared at the flattened tuberole that continued to settle accounts with Tzee’s credits.
“And what’s THAT all about?” she asked almost peevishly.
Zoa focused all of his oculars on Tzee, and then coiled three of them around to look back at Keisha.
“A side bet, Keisha. Just a friendly side bet.”
Tzee chirped back reassuringly. “Yes. Friendly.” And a bit ruefully, as he watched his credits disappear: “Side bet.”
© 2008 M. Howard
The author grew up in a small west coast Norwegian fishing community. Favorite childhood haunts included a working waterfront and wooded parks fronting the Pacific and a cavernous used book store where he became intimately familiar with the pulps of previous decades. Extensive travel and a sequence of active careers (he narrowly avoided jail-time in Mombasa, and was suitably impressed by mirror-sunglasses-sporting/Colt Python-toting Dominican Republic Police) provided the courage and leisure to explore writing as a means of keeping an adequate supply of lefse and aquavit.
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Tags: M. Howard
Pretty neat! Makes me wonder, though. Just what was in their cocktails?