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The builders of Treaty Station had done their best to make the interface zone look like a vast shoreline.
The ceiling (really the outer hull) had a clear blue sky projected on it. The floor was cushioned and warm, sand-colored if not real sand. The water was more green than blue, but it couldn’t be helped; the tarry-stars needed the water that way.
Aviva walked along the shoreline until she saw two skinny tendrils held above the water, twisted into a double helix: their signal. She untied her sarong, cast it on the sand-colored floor, and ran into the water. “Eighth Vow!” she cried.
A speaker embedded in the floor of the sea-tank spoke in a pleasant computer-generated voice, a little muffled and distorted by the water, which also couldn’t be helped. “I’m so glad you’re here, Great Sunrise.”
When Aviva and Eighth Vow had first met on this shore, the introductions had been a great muddle, as Aviva had been warned in her training before she shipped out to Treaty Station. The speaker in the water had said, “Greetings. My name is [BZZHT: ERROR].” Then the speaker had changed to its connotation murmur: “(Implied gender: female).”
Aviva didn’t understand how tarry-star gender worked. Her training had encouraged her to just roll with whatever the translation algorithm said. It felt rude to ask the alien why she was a woman; God knew Aviva had been asked that question more than enough times herself. Her training had also taught her what to do in the fairly common event of a translator error. So Aviva had cleared her throat and asked: “Do you mind explaining what your name means?”
“Oh! Well. Let me think. So, the various tarry-star cultures, we all have our vows we made to the water (connotation: mutual, permanent), right? My name refers to my Eighth Vow, which is, ah—it’s hard to explain. You don’t even know what a [BZZHT: ERROR] is!”
“That’s alright,” Aviva reassured her. “I’ll just call you Eighth Vow, then, if that’s okay.”
“That’s close enough… but I didn’t catch your name either,” admitted Eighth Vow.
“Huh. I would’ve thought… well, no matter. It’s the shift from the harshest season of the year to the most abundant.”
“Ah!” said Eighth Vow. “The Great Sunrise!”
It took Aviva a moment to put it together. The tarry-stars’ world was hotter than Earth, even with the climate change it had suffered. Tarry-stars only lived at the poles—Aviva could see that Eighth Vow was Southern by the way her star-shaped mantle faded from black at the center to medium brown at the edges. Their planet was less tilted than Earth, but the period of total darkness would still be a brutal experience for any diurnal being. The Great Sunrise would herald its end.
So it was that the new friends decided to call each other Great Sunrise and Eighth Vow.
“You can go ahead,” Aviva said fondly, and Eighth Vow flicked her thin sensory tendrils at Aviva’s pulse point and armpits—weird for humans, but full of sensory information for tarry-stars, whose vision and hearing were much poorer than human. For her part, Aviva watched Eighth Vow’s star billow and bob in the green water.
“Your pulse reminds me of the beach back home (tone: dreamy),” said Eighth Vow. “So calm, when most humans pound like rocky surf when I touch them like that. And the skin below your upper tentacles smells like [BZZHT: ERROR]—oh [EXPLETIVE], the translator won’t catch that… let’s say, it smells like shores where egg-thieves have never lived.”
Aviva laughed. “Eighth Vow, forgive me if this is a product of translation error, but… do you have a crush on me?”
“Please explain.”
“Are you sexually attracted to me?”
Eighth Vow’s star sleeked down like she was getting ready to flee. “How could you possibly tell?! Humans can’t even sense electrical impulses!”
“It was just from what you said, that’s all,” Aviva placated. “And it’s perfectly alright! I’m attracted to you, too.”
Eighth Vow pulled all her sensory tendrils inward. “We can’t! (tone: distressed) I’ve encountered electric transcriptions of human sexually explicit materials about tarry-stars, and I can’t do those things! The humans beg for the tarry-stars to rearrange their digestive systems! It’s too awful!”
Oh. Well. Aviva had never thought about it from that perspective. If she was being honest, she wouldn’t have minded a little rough treatment, but Aviva was nothing if not open-minded. “Alright. What would you prefer?”
“Are you sure? I am certain there are tarry-stars who would happily restrain you and create micro-tears in all your mucus membranes, if that’s what you want.”
“Eighth Vow, I want the reality of you more than I want a fantasy. Please tell me what you like out of sex.” Aviva reached out her hand, spreading her fingers wide. Eighth Vow weaved her sensory tendrils through the gaps the same way she might with another tarry-star.
“My tentacles aren’t just thrusting pistons in a machine, you know. They’re soft and sensitive. I’d just like to feel what it’s like when you touch them.”
Suddenly, Aviva understood. “I used to have a—a sexual appendage, I suppose. Sometimes when I was with other humans, they wanted me to use it on them the same way tarry-stars use their tentacles in human pornography. It never felt right to me. I didn’t like using it that way. I had the appendage replaced with new parts years ago, but—I remember what it was like. So really, it’s okay. I promise.” Sometimes, Aviva had a wild urge to look Eighth Vow in the eye, even though she didn’t have eyes. Instead, she closed her eyes and focused on the slippery tendrils in her hand. “Is there anything else you’d like?”
“I’d still like tendrils in your orifices. Sensory tendrils, though, for tasting. That would be much more fun than [BZZHT: ERROR].”
Aviva’s pulse kicked up at the thought of tendrils in her holes like eager tasting tongues. “Come again?”
“The things the tarry-stars do in the human sexually explicit materials. It reminds me of a hunting technique the Northerners use. They search for clusters of sea-worm burrows in the sand, and then they plunge their tentacles into all the burrow entrances but one, to flush the worms out (tone: disgusted).” She jabbed several of her tentacles suddenly downward to demonstrate.
“You shouldn’t make fun of other people’s hunting techniques,” Aviva scolded, before bursting into laughter.
“You’re right. I shouldn’t (tone: contrite).”
Aviva looked up at the artificial sky. The blue was shading darker. She flicked her hand out to trigger the holo-display from the implant in the meat of her thumb. Among the tarry-stars, public sex ranged from accepted to nearly required. As a compromise between social norms, public sex was allowed in the interface zone between certain hours of the station’s day cycle. “We could do it now, if you like,” Aviva offered.
“Oh!” said Eighth Vow. “I didn’t think—I would have secreted a new slime layer—oh, but you wouldn’t be able to smell the difference anyhow. I have no idea what makes me sexy to a human!”
“I think you look very sexy as you are right now,” Aviva reassured her.
“Looking sexy!” said Eighth Vow, whose vision could detect light levels but no defined shapes or colors. “How am I supposed to know how sexy I look?”
“How am I supposed to know how sexy I smell underwater?” Aviva waded in deeper, submerging to her shoulders. “No use worrying about it!”
“And what about you? Do you like anything besides… Northern sea-worm hunting?” said Eighth Vow with a suggestive thrust of her tentacles.
“I do,” said Aviva, “but I think it’d be easier to show you.”
“Okay. But lead me against the current (connotation: slowly and carefully).”
Aviva reached for one of Eighth Vow’s tentacles, about as thick as her wrist. It was dark brown with a sticky shine like fresh tar, but it felt slippery to the touch. She gently guided it between her legs, sucker-side up so that she gasped at the nubbly texture on her vulva.
“Ooh,” said Eighth Vow, and Aviva screamed a little as she started to move each sucker independently, plucking curiously at her labia. When one latched onto her clit, she fell backward in surprise, then resurfaced with a splutter.
Eighth Vow’s tentacle went slack between her thighs. “Are you alright, Great Sunrise?”
“Oh my God, do that again,” said Aviva.
A sensory tendril rose from the water, feeling up her neck and into her mouth, tucking ribbon-thin into her cheek. Another one, rolled up pencil-thin, slipped into her ass with little resistance. Finally, another in her cunt, too small to ease the burn of arousal no matter how desperately she clenched around it.
“Oh, your holes are strong!” Eighth Vow said.
“Thanks! I worked hard on it,” Aviva said, thinking of the year and a half she spent dilating. Working her new cunt around the dilators had given her pelvic floor muscles of steel. She gave the tendril in her mouth a hard suck for good measure, and laughed when Eighth Vow pulled it out to give her a smack on the cheek.
Eighth Vow slipped the tendril back in and applied her suckers once more, playing with her folds and clamping onto her clit. Waves of suction pulsed around her clit, and Aviva screamed and bucked in the water, churning the still surface. Eighth Vow’s suckers were so strong and smooth, more like sex toys than human mouths. Once the orgasms started, they would not stop. Aviva’s knees buckled, and a tentacle wrapped around her waist to support her. She panted and screamed until her mouth went dry. If she’d still had her factory settings, she was sure she’d be coming dry by now. Something inside her felt wrung out, at any rate. “Okay,” she gasped, “okay, Eighth Vow, let me—it’s your turn now.”
Eighth Vow withdrew her tentacles, though she kept the sensory tendrils tucked in Aviva’s holes. “I like the way your taste changes,” she said. She wiggled the tendril in Aviva’s cunt. “Here, you got so wet inside, and there were these bursts of acid. And those muscle spasms—are you okay? Were those a good thing?”
Aviva laughed. “It’s a very good thing.” She paused to take a deep breath and enjoy the aftershocks and twitches. Then she grabbed hold of two of Eighth Vow’s largest tentacles and used them to haul her friend to the water’s surface, star down. She parted Eighth Vow’s tentacles like curtains, exposing the underside of her star.
“This is fine, but why (tone: hesitant)?” said Eighth Vow.
“I wanted to get a good look at you. I can see and smell better out of the water.” Eighth Vow smelled briny and mineral. In the midst of her tentacles she had five holes of different shapes and sizes, most of them closed.
“Fluid production in your mouth is increasing (tone: anxious),” said Eighth Vow.
Aviva managed to stop herself from saying she was thinking about eating pussy—there was no way that would translate well. Instead she said, “Want me to touch any of those?”
Eighth Vow’s tentacles squirmed in Aviva’s grip. “I told you already to play with my tentacles!”
“Alright, alright. I’m sorry I’m such a hole fiend,” Aviva said.
“A hole what?”
Ah, right. A fiend was a demon, wasn’t it? Nothing a tarry-star would know about. “The basic point is, I swear I can think about things besides hole.” Aviva proved it by moving her grip on one of Eighth Vow’s tentacles closer to the base, where its suckers were spaced farther apart. She pressed the base slowly into Eighth Vow’s core, and watched the tarry flesh wrinkle in a ring around the tentacle’s root.
“Ooh, that’s interesting,” Eighth Vow said.
Aviva let go of the tentacle in her left hand and used those fingers to stroke at the flesh yielding around the tentacle’s base as she pushed it in. It reminded her of muffing on a human, the way you could push a testicle up and back inside the pelvis, the body welcoming the appendage back in. She found the point where the tentacle’s base would sink no deeper, then circled it around. Aviva felt a ripple as tentacles shivered in reaction all around her.
Some of those shivering tentacles were near Aviva’s face, and she couldn’t help but wonder. She let go of the tentacle she’d been holding and instead grasped one near her face. She stroked the suckers with a finger, and giggled when they sucked on her fingertip like sharp little kisses. The edges of them were so smooth and responsive; Aviva could scarcely believe how each one could react independently to her touch.
Aviva drew the tentacle up to her face. She held it to her cheek and nuzzled it. Little vacuum seals formed and broke between the suckers and the delicate skin of her face; she might have some fascinating hickeys after this. She squished the tentacle a little between her hand and her face, rolling it like a tube of dough. “(Tone: amusement.) (Tone: arousal),” said the translator from its speaker below the water.
“Huh,” said Aviva. She held the tentacle between two hands, rolled, and twisted, applying pressure. She grabbed another between her thighs and did the same.
Eighth Vow said, “Oh, that’s… weird! (tone: excited)”
Aviva decided to go for broke. She gathered up as many tentacles as she could, bunched them together like a bundle of hair, and wrapped her arms and legs around them. She squished them in a full-body embrace, writhing and squirming and rubbing them against each other and her own naked skin. The feeling of slippery slide and sucker-kisses all over her front made sparks go off under her skin, and the translator kept saying, “(Tone: surprise) (Tone: arousal) (Tone: ecstasy)” until Eighth Vow flapped her star-hood against the surface like a breaching whale. She cried, “Oh, Great Sunrise, show me!”
“Show you what?” said Aviva, more than a little breathless.
“Show me to them,” said Eighth Vow, waving her few free tentacles around herself. Aviva looked around and realized that there were other tarry-stars in attendance. She knew they were in public, but she hadn’t quite expected an audience to gather round.
Aviva didn’t really understand the dynamics of public sex among tarry-stars, but if Eighth Vow wanted to be shown off, and the other tarry-stars wanted a show, Aviva saw no reason to hold back. She crossed her ankles around her bundle of Eighth Vow’s tentacles and craned her neck so she could press an open-mouthed kiss to her star-hood, coating her mouth with cool slime. “Isn’t she cute?” Aviva said.
“(Tone: arousal),” the translator said. Aviva had no idea if it was speaking for Eighth Vow, her audience, or both.
Eighth Vow wriggled her way free of Aviva’s grasp, withdrawing her sensory tendrils from inside Aviva. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you, friend. I was scared to try something so new but—that’s the whole reason I signed up to work at Treaty Station. I wanted to push myself into being a braver person than I am.”
Aviva thought of all the work it had taken to communicate with the tarry-stars, to craft a treaty everyone could agree on, to build Treaty Station. It had taken all of that work to bring them together in this moment—but there was still so much left to learn and discover. Maybe the two of them could build some small part of it.
“Next time, you’ll be the one to show me something new,” Aviva said, gently grasping the tip of her tentacle, because she missed being close. “I promise to be as brave as you were.”