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It was dark and quiet in the tent, once the light had been shut off. I lay a long time, staring into the darkness, thinking about what Estraven had said.
He was in kemmer.
He had asked me what a woman was, and what could I say? What had I ever known of women? I had been so long away from Terra that attitudes had changed; my female colleagues called me an “old chauvinist,” with a laugh. But I think perhaps even in my childhood, on the Terra of my own age, I had never understood women very much.
I was heterosexual enough, coming from a place and time where almost everyone was. I thought of love, of sex, only when I thought of women. But I knew little of what they were like except in that single context. I had never been friends with a woman. I suppose I did not think it possible.
But Estraven was asking. Why? Asking, perhaps, what I expected? Asking how to please me?
But if so, he had stopped short of anything clear. As always. Like a woman, he was obscure even when he did not mean to be.
Or perhaps, like a man, I was obtuse even when I did not mean to be.
We were aliens, both of us, in that tent. Subtext could carry nothing here without context. And I suppose that was why I had not spoken.
I had thought of us, all this long journey over the ice, as comrades. The old tales of friendship, of loyalty. And now, abruptly, I remembered that the tales the Gethenians tell are subtly different. They are love stories, somehow, at the same time. Was ours a love story? Had Estraven saved me from the Voluntary Farm because he loved me?
It seemed unlikely. After all he had not been in kemmer at the time. It was only now that he was susceptible to me in that way. If indeed he was.
Estraven had been quiet for a long time, and I thought he was asleep. But over the soft sighing of the wind and the ticking of the Chabe stove, I heard a faint rustle.
I held my breath. Listening. Wondering if he was still awake.
Another rustle. A broken breath. Then a rhythm established, soft, soft, barely audible, the sound of his elbow moving the sleeping bag, that was all. But I knew.
Well, of course. He did not have an outlet, he was in kemmer, there was nothing more natural. And it was my part to be respectful of it, to pretend to sleep, to let him think I had not heard.
Easier said than done. My own breath quickened, and I parted my lips so it would be soundless. Blood rushed to my loins and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it. In the dark, I could not help but imagine everything I could not see. Estraven’s lips, parted on that tiny gasp. Estraven’s fingers, touching his small, changeable organ. I had seen Gethenians naked in somer. I had never seen one aroused before.
My presence, my pheromones, would—if I understood correctly—make him pass this kemmer as female. So a clitoris, essentially. Perhaps a little larger.
My nose tickled, and I held my breath. If I sneezed, I would ruin it all. He deserved this. If he did not want to experience it with me—and I had no way to tell if he did—then he must be able to deal with it on his own, at least. In what simulacrum of privacy I could give him.
The tickle grew. I needed to breathe. Stealthily I reached my hand up, rubbed my nose.
It was enough to dissipate the sneeze, but it was too much for Estraven. He had heard me. His tiny movements stilled.
I drew a breath. What could I say? Please continue? There was nothing whatsoever I could say. Perhaps, on Gethen, there are customary words even for this. Sex is no threat to shifgrethor; they are practical about it.
I was silent for some time. So was he. He could not trust that I was sleeping. We were both too still for sleep. Impossible to sham the deep breathing of sleep, the aimless restlessness.
And meanwhile I was still hard, uncomfortably hard, and I was not even the one in kemmer.
I had not thought that I was attracted to Estraven. I had thought of him as a comrade. Those were not the thoughts to have about a comrade. But now, abruptly, she was not a comrade at all. She was a woman.
More or less.
An idea occurred to me. Surely a foolish one. A violation of the boundaries we’d so carefully kept all this time. But at this moment it seemed just as stupid not to. Clinging to my Terran customs and my un-Gethenian bashfulness.
Stealthily I lowered my waistband, and I took myself in hand.
At the first touch I involuntarily sucked in my breath. Then held it, afraid I had made a terrible mistake. But no. The point was that he should hear. The point was that he should know, and have no shame. He desired me, I thought—biologically must desire me, as the only soul around. And he might think I did not desire him, as I had been in perpetual kemmer all this time and made no overture. Let her see that I did.
I slid my hand down and up again—a soft sound, but loud in the stillness. He had to hear. Again. I panted softly. I did not want the touch of my own hand, but I needed some touch, whatever I could have. And I confess it aroused me further to know Estraven was listening.
Two strokes, three, and then he too began again. A soft rustle. A broken breath. Oh, god. Was he touching himself to me, as I touched myself to her? Or only to forestall a craving nothing in this tent could satisfy?
We went on like this for two or three minutes, falling unconsciously into a rhythm. There was a wet sound, sometimes, when he moved, and I shuddered slightly when I heard it. Fingers sliding in slickness. My guess had been correct; she was entering kemmer as female.
Perhaps her own pheromones had filled the tent, had made me desire things I normally would not. Or perhaps that was a comfortable lie I told myself as I lay there in my sleeping bag, sliding my dry hand over my cock, picturing her every imaginable way.
The Gethenian genitals do much to dispel the lie most other human races believe, that the male and female genitals are intrinsically different. It is only that some clits are larger, some scrotums empty, some passages seal or don’t seal along the course of development.
I imagined him male, enlarged, hard, in my mouth. Then I imagined her female, wet, clenching on my fingers.
Abruptly I had to stop, panting. I could have come right then, and I was not ready to be finished.
“This is very inefficient, Ai,” murmured Estraven’s voice in the darkness. “Is this really how you prefer it?”
It startled me. I had gotten carried away in imagining, not truly deciding. I didn’t know what this was, whether he was my comrade I was trying to politely help, or whether she was a beautiful woman I had been somehow left alone with in this tent.
Either way, it seemed, the answer was the same. I let out a shaky breath, half a laugh. “I just didn’t want to presume.”
“Your people, you can neither presume, nor can you be direct.” But the crossness that had been in his voice earlier in the evening was replaced with amusement.
“Can you do any better?” I demanded.
“I won’t presume,” he said. The rustle of him untangling himself from his sleeping bag, sitting up. I could almost see her shape, dark against the dark of the tent, unless my eyes were inventing it. “So I suppose I must be direct. Ai, do you want this, yes or no?”
“Yes,” I whispered. I could not say more than that. I did not know if I was offering him a favor or lusting after her. I only knew that the answer was yes.
That, it seemed, was all he needed. He crawled toward me over the groundcloth, parted my sleeping bag. Her hand touched my cheek first, trailed down my neck, found the edge of my shirt.
“Should I turn on the light?” I asked.
“No.” Her voice was low, soft. In the darkness, without my preconceptions, without the sight of him to confuse me, it was a woman’s voice. Almost. But not…not quite.
His hands on me guided me out of my thick clothing. He himself was naked already, our way of managing to handle the same temperature. But I was not cold, as he undressed me. The stove was turned toward me, and her hands on me were fever-hot.
He had me on my back, hands stroking down my flanks, till they found my cock. Her small hands measured it, one fist at the base, another along the shaft, and then her first hand had to shift to cover the head. “You are larger than a Gethenian. I hadn’t realized it got so much bigger. After all you are always in kemmer.”
“Not always in full kemmer,” I said. “Always, perhaps, in secher. But there is further yet to go.”
It was easier, like this, talking as we always did. As scientists, as envoys of our people.
Estraven’s fingers trailed through the slick dribbling from the head of my cock. “Further even than this?”
I hissed a little from the touch. “Not much further. Please—please, I want to touch you.”
“I had thought—well. I think you may be too large for me. We will have to be creative.”
My hands reached her hips. He was straddling my thighs as her hands studied me. I could only just reach him. Her hipbones were sharp, from the deprivation we’d had. I slid my hands inward, felt the softness of his belly, the crepelike pattern of marks—for he had borne a child. It was strange for me to think of, my comrade as a mother, and yet not strange at all, for her wet vulva was pressing down now against my thigh.
I moved my hand to touch her, till my thumb pressed over her clit—cock—no, clit, because it was shrunken, drawn up almost inside herself, as her vagina widened. But still, I found, as I slid my thumb against it, quite sensitive. He shuddered, thighs tightening around mine.
I asked, “This takes days for you, doesn’t it?”
“When we savor it, yes,” said Estraven. “This time, I think tonight will be sufficient. And I’m very nearly ready, after all day in secher.”
I pinched her labia to trap the clit between, so I could rub her easily with no friction. He gasped and bucked against me. “I don’t know if I’ll be able to keep up with you,” I confessed. “I doubt I will be able to come more than once. So I want to focus on you. What I can do for you.”
She was grinding against me in earnest now, against my hand, making a slick trail along my thigh. His breath came fast, with little low grunts.
I was caught up in him, the hard wetness of her clit on my fingers, the squeeze and relax of his thighs. My own cock bounced, almost forgotten. “Will you come for me, Harth?”
He bucked forward and obeyed, riding it out against me, a deep groan escaping his throat. Abruptly I was aware, again, that he was not a woman. I was not a homosexual, or I had never thought of myself as one. And yet the almost-a-man’s voice in the darkness, the thought of my comrade coming on me like this… it felt like more than I had ever experienced with a woman. Powerful in a way for which I had no comparison.
I sat up, wrapping my arms around him, bearing him down against the sleeping bag. “God, Therem,” I muttered. His name, which he had never proffered me to use. “Please. Let me get my mouth on you.”
“Whatever you want,” he said, his voice strange, almost drunk. He was in the thick of it now, full kemmer and half out of his head. “Touch me, Genry.”
So I touched him. I licked him, tasting the alien flavor of his slick. I sucked his large clit, his small cock. I drove my tongue into him as far as it would go, following it with my fingers. He clutched my hair, moaning and babbling. Gone, completely lost in the hormonal tide, and it was beautiful to me. A part of Gethen I had always been excluded from, and therefore never understood. This wildness, amid all their usual control.
A part of me was afraid. Estraven had always been so controlled, and I had never known why, nor what he feared. For him to lose it now seemed to presage some catastrophe. And yet none revealed itself. Only the flex of his thighs around my head; his large nipples between my fingers; the clench of his cunt around two of my fingers, as I curled them toward where his cock had drawn in and buried itself.
After his fourth orgasm he became aggressive, twisting out of my grip and pushing me over on my back again. “You can’t distract me this easily,” he gasped out. “I will have you, Genry. As I’ve wanted you.”
I clutched his hips, fearful that he’d forgotten what he’d said earlier, that he’d attempt intercourse even when it might be dangerous to him. But he only lay down on me, grinding himself against my cock, his wet vulva slicking me as he moved.
I gasped profanities in my native tongue, words he couldn’t understand. And then his mouth was on mine, swallowing them all, tongue questing into me. I wanted him, suddenly, in a way I had never wanted anyone. I did not want to be inside him. I wanted him inside me. I wanted to be fucked by him, roughly, urgently, with all the need he was showing me right now. I wanted to be a vessel for it.
We thrashed and vied for dominance, he and I. I think he was desperate to make me come, and forgetful of my warning that I could likely only manage it once, in my condition. And for my part I urgently needed to see him come as many times as he could. We ended sitting, facing each other all tangled up, him straddling my lap, his hand around my cock to grind it precisely against his. My mouth was at his neck, sucking, as my hips bucked up into his grasp.
I loved him. It was that perfectly simple. Only a thing I had not been able to comprehend, with my human vision, seeing us as two male comrades out on the snow. Yet if he were a woman, I do not think I could have loved him so well. I loved him as he was.
“Therem,” I panted out against his damp shoulder. He groaned deep in his throat, coming again, small cock pulsing against mine and dribbling out yet more slick. I gave myself up to it, to him, and came. Thick pulses against his belly, hidden by the darkness.
I sagged against him, panting. It had been more grueling than I had been aware of, while I was still wrapped up in kemmer madness—for that was what it was for me too, I think.
He gently disentangled himself, guiding me to lie down. Now, at last, he turned the light on low, so that he could root through the baggage and find us something to clean up with.
In a Terran his insistence on darkness might have been an insult, as implying I was not beautiful to him, or giving him the opportunity to imagine I was someone else. From him, I had assumed it was piety. Light was the left hand of darkness, and darkness might be more appropriate for kemmer.
But, as I took in once more his compact body, his smooth face, his small half-there breasts, I thought perhaps it had been for me. For fear that I would be unable to want him, unless I could imagine a woman.
And perhaps he had been right, when we began. It was not true now.
He cleaned off his belly and between his thighs, handing me a rag for my own needs. I was tacky in many places, from his slick. When I was clean he drew the top half of my sleeping bag over me and curled up outside of it, bare, to cool off.
“Thank you, Ai,” he said politely. “I do not know…precisely…what that meant to you. Or what it should mean.”
I breathed slowly, looking at the yellow circle of light on the ceiling of the tent. I could not express what I felt, not in any of the words of either of our languages.
“On Terra,” I said, “I would know the answer. I thought I did know the answer. I clung to it, perhaps, too tightly, and failed to see what you really are, what we really are to each other.”
He lifted his head to look at me. “And what are we to each other?”
“I love you,” I confessed. “I believe it is as simple as that. On Terra there are kinds and types of love, rules for what is done for one or another type.”
“The love for a man, and the love you have for a woman,” Estraven supplied.
“Yes. And these were separate in my mind. But now they are collapsed into one another. You are my [comrade] and my [lover].” I used the Terran words.
“I do not know if I can be these things to you.”
“You do not have to be. Perhaps it is most apt to say…you are my friend, Therem.”
“Yes, Genry,” he said softly. “You are that.”