The Penisbirthers

Ethertravel report #71, received May 12, 2465.

I was Carlos Velasquez, among the first class of ethertravelers to be sent out at the start of 2413. My target was Epsilon Eridani. We knew there were giant planets here, and it was suspected there were inner, Earth-like planets but Earth didn’t have technology to detect them directly. Seeing the presence of ethertravel targets made that a whole like more likely, and I was one of several sent here to check it out.

Epsilon Eridani is a smaller, cooler, and less radiant star than Earth’s sun, but still within the range thought capable of supporting life. And now that I am here I can confirm there is a planet with abundant life!

Summary: I’m a purple bipedal creature, vaguely humanoid, under a pretty broad definition of that term, somewhat stouter and shorter than humans. I have two five-fingered hands and two five-toed feet. The planet is significantly colder than Earth, but livable in the tropics. The technology level is roughly early 21st century by Earth standards.

Infancy

When I first figured out what was going on, I realized I was in my mother’s pouch. There is sexual reproduction and pregnancy here, but it’s not quite the same as on Earth. The early stages happen in the womb, but when there’s a body that is starting to look the slightest bit like a miniature person, birth occurs. The new person doesn’t completely leave the mother’s body; she stays connected via the umbilical cord and lives inside a pouch, like a kangaroo has. Whether the cord bit is true for a kangaroo’s joey or not I have no idea; I studied a bunch of stuff before ethertraveling, but I couldn’t learn every detail about every animal. Eventually the child develops enough so she no longer fits entirely inside the pouch, and that is the point I was at in my earliest memories. I use “she” here, and female default in general, because it seems most appropriate.

The child in the pouch still receives nutrition and eliminates wastes via the umbilical cord, but as the child develops, her mother feeds her more and more externally and less through the cord. This continues for a while until the child grows so large that the pouch can no longer hold her. The cord keeps her from falling all the way to the ground, but this event triggers the placental separation that happens in humans shortly after birth. They don’t cut the cord; most of the cord withers and dies within a day, but a short piece which looks like a tail remains, and becomes the sole organ for excreting wastes.

When I first came loose from my mother, I was clothed in disposable diapers like ones which were a relic in stories of times past on Earth, before it was deemed impractical to continue generating huge amounts of plastic waste that way. By the time I was 7 of the short years here old, but no bigger than a human 2-year-old in relation to my parents, I was toilet trained. I needed a step-stool, but no booster seat, because there is only a small hole in the seat. We place the tail-like organ all our wastes come out of into the hole to use it. All toilets here are made that way. It’s cleaner than humans, certainly; that organ is the only thing that needs any cleaning, and then barely so. They have invented toilet paper here, but you actually only need one or two of those little sheets, and they come folded out of a little box like tissues on Earth.

And during this period, as I grew, I was fed food that did not need chewing until I developed teeth that could chew, and then gradually food more and more like my parents ate.

Also, I began to learn what this world is like. It has blue water and brown soil and green plants and various colors of animals, at least as I perceive them with the eyes I have here. I think the range of vision is slightly shifted toward the infrared compared to humans, but you’ll have to make do with my perception of the colors. The sun is orange, and as I mentioned, the people are purple. While the people here look clearly nonhuman, they have aspects in common with humans. Arms, legs, head, the basic body parts. There aren’t breasts; breast feeding is not a concept among the people nor animals of this world. And people have houses and vehicles of a sort and schools and well-developed technology.

In warm times, people usually do not wear clothes over the upper torso. A knee-length skirt is the only typical garment, and as with humans, it covers the excretory and sexual organs. Women with a baby in the pouch wear skirts with a slit that allows them to access the baby or lets the baby poke out, depending on how developed she is. There are various kinds of full-body coverings worn in cold weather.

Eventually I began to learn about the calendar, in part by my birthdays. The custom here is only to have birthday parties at ages which are multiples of 5 or 10; the individual year birthdays may be recognized, but that’s it. That’s because the year is only 91 days long (though it was not until after I started school that I could confirm that those units are really the years defined by this planet’s orbit around its star), so they come pretty quickly. Calendars here are 10 pages long, for 10 of the short years, starting in a year ending in 0, each year presented on a long page as thirteen weeks of seven days each. There aren’t divisions equivalent to months; there is not a large moon here with major influence on this planet. (There is a small one but its effects on tides and weather are minimal.) For some purposes, the years are used like months or quarters on Earth, and 5 or 10 year cycles (starting with a multiple-of-5 year) are used like years.

The language is, unsurprisingly, unrelated to any Earth language I am familiar with, and the names are likewise very odd to Earth ears. To make things easier, I am translating each name into something phonetically close to names people use on Earth. My name here is Becca. As it’s spoken here, the final vowel is very weak, weaker than in that name on Earth, and the rest is quite close. However, the language structure is typical, with features such as nouns, verbs, adjectives, plurals, tenses, and such. My own experience with language helped only a little; I had to learn it and learn to speak the same as any other child here.

As I learned more of the language, I came to understand my parents discussing certain periodic changes they were going through at the same time. I took note of this and saw that it happened on about 40-day intervals. But at this age I didn’t understand what the change meant; I thought it meant periods like with menstruation.

I also learned the time system and numbers here. It was pretty much all digital clocks, using a base-10 system, just with different digits than I had used before. You could find analog clocks on the sides of old buildings sometimes. There is a word that essentially means “clockwise” but it means the opposite way from on Earth. Of course they use different words for all these things, but the day is divided into what I think of as 10 hours, each divided into 100 minutes, each divided into 100 seconds. 100,000 seconds is a bit more than in an Earth day, but the seconds are shorter and even before I started school I was sure the overall day was a bit shorter than an Earth day.

Pretty soon I learned to write in their language, and in addition to my practice notebooks, I started a notebook of important things to send back to Earth when I was able. Parts of it were written in their language, and parts in English disguised among doodles when I wanted to write anything that might leak information about Earth if it was found.

School

I was age 22 (remember, in the short years of this world) when I started school. It runs on 5-year blocks which I’ll call terms, starting on the multiple-of-5 years, and we started in the first term after turning 20. And this was good, because I got to start learning more things about the world.

As I was preparing to start school, my parents explained more about not just time but also schedules, what it means to be a particular time. Just like on Earth, the day flips over in the middle of the night. The sun rises around 2.30 to 2.70 and the sun sets around 7.30 to 7.70, with a pretty small variation because we live close to the equator. They divide the world into 20 time zones to allow something close to that to be true everywhere, though half of them are not populated, and they don’t bend the zones around political boundaries, instead drawing many political boundaries along the time zones. School consistently starts at 3.10 and runs until 6.00 each day. Well, five days a week, because we have the same weekday/weekend setup which is common on Earth, and I translate their names of days of the week based on that. We go to school for the first 11 weeks of each year, and are off the last two weeks, which coincides with a number of religious and civil holidays. Each year is a separate lesson block within the system, and may have a different class schedule from other years in the same term.

I learned what the world looks like. They rarely use globes here because the world is colder than Earth, and everyone lives in the tropics, but you might see globes in a class that is teaching about the whole world. What would have been the temperate region on Earth is mostly iced over all the time, in addition to the poles, so a world map is usually a long narrow folded strip of the equatorial part of the world. If printed in a book, they usually only print the side of the planet within that region where everybody lives, across two pages. This along with the short year explains why there aren’t really seasons here. There is weather; we have warm and cold times, but not on set cycles.

The first two terms of my schooling took place in a school that was clearly designed to get kids used to the idea of being away from their parents for a time. I thought it was a bit like preschool and kindergarten, with some real learning but no changing classrooms during the day, except for a play period when we could go outside and play on nice days, and stay in and play games when the weather didn’t allow. There was a bathroom in a closet within each classroom, with lower toilets that we didn’t need step-stools to get onto.

So I was 32 when I started the 3rd term, what I thought of as first grade, in a regular school where we had clearly distinct classes, actual grades, homework, and the like. We could visit the non-gendered restrooms between classes, which looked like any women’s restroom on Earth, as the only kind of toilet they ever use here is just like the one at my home, with a small hole to put your tail organ into.

I was at this school for five terms. Those terms were incredibly useful to me to learn about the strange world I found myself living in. The math was easy and mostly unenlightening. The language classes helped me fill in lots of stuff I had missed trying to learn the language on my own and the limited amount my parents had taught me. There were some filler bits like art and music, which, while different from the art and music of Earth, I am not sure helped me a lot. I did do one thing with the art. Whenever I made a painting, a sculpture, or one of the other forms of art, I designed the shapes of letters spelling TERRA in it somewhere. Except the T (which made an M sound here), these didn’t look like the letters or numbers of this world. It wouldn’t mean anything to anybody here, but if another Earthling saw it, they’d know one of their fellow ethertravelers was here. It might be easier to build the communicator if I could find others; we were not in competition with one another. Of course, I had no direct way to contact the others or even know if they had made it here successfully. This didn’t get any response, but I vowed to myself to keep doing it.

Other classes taught me about the history and geography of the world, and of the people, and there were lots of nuggets in there. Somewhere along the way, the phrase I’d heard my parents use and had wrongly interpreted as referring to menstruation came up in conversation at school, and I learned it properly meant “changing sex”. One of the other kids explained it to me. They do have sexual reproduction here, as I thought, but the part I didn’t understand was that the adults alternate between being male and female. At the first opportunity, I asked my parents about it.

Lisa, my mother, answered (the dialogue is all translated very liberally, but capturing the essence of what was said), “Hmm. You’re only 40, and probably still too young to understand it all, but yes. When you become an adult, a little over twice a year you will change, becoming male if you were female or female if you were male. Joan and I alternate, so one of us becomes male when the other becomes female, within a day or so.”

That was the end of the answer, and further explanation was deferred “until I was older.” The word for female here is a derivative of the word for baby, literally “baby-bearing”, and the word for male is exactly the same word with a negative prefix attached. The language has gender for all nouns, as you might find in Spanish, but literally all the words for people are female except those specifically describing males. Because I have come to think in this way, you’ll see me generically use female pronouns, Queen, etc. throughout the report. The Queen is always referred to as a Queen and never with male descriptors except in a statement such as “our previous Queen was the father of the current Queen” (which is true), and even then, only in “father” and not either instance of “Queen.” Male pronouns are pretty rare, and only used together with one of those male-specific words, or certain animals. You could say “The Queen fathered her first child 40 years ago” and “he is the father of Princess Rona” with both pronouns referring to the same person, regardless of what sex that Queen is now.

Both the schools I’d attended to this point were a few blocks from my house, and I usually walked to school when weather allowed. The first term, one of my parents pushed me to and from school in a stroller because they thought it was still too far for me to walk. The next few terms we walked together, and starting in 5th term (3rd grade in my mind) I walked alone to school. I was also allowed to, with permission, visit the houses of my other school friends in the neighborhood on my own. They were pretty open with what we did, like a more innocent era that is sometimes told about in old Earth stories but was centuries gone on my Earth due to crime. And during these visits, we did kid things. The ways we played were not much different from the way kids played on Earth, and where things were different, it was often like ways kids used to play on Earth before parents got scared of one problem or another.

By seventh term, having failed to find another ethertraveler, I concluded there wasn’t one in my school, and I allowed myself to become best friends with a student in my class named Sarah. That really just meant that we visited each other more often. It wasn’t exclusive, and she wasn’t a “girlfriend.” They had a term comparable to that but it didn’t apply until we reached sexual maturity.

Big Kids’ School

For eighth term, which is sixth grade by Earth standards, I started at a new school, and like in the usual system back on Earth starting in 6th or 7th grade most places, at this school we followed individual class schedules and switched rooms by ourselves. We had the same schedule of 2 hours and 90 minutes for the whole school day, with 5 classes of 45 minutes each and a lunch period after either the second or third, and four minutes between classes.

And I still walked to school, though it was farther, with one of my parents walking with me both ways the first couple weeks. This was a larger school, but not like the mega-schools with over ten thousand kids that some big cities on Earth have. There were about a thousand kids in the whole school, and they all walked except on bad-weather days. They didn’t have the concept of school buses here. If the weather was too bad for walking, a parent took us to school and picked us up in a vehicle. Sometimes there were car pools on those days and I’d go with another parent and some other kids from my block, but by this point we knew all the neighbors involved. It was still innocent; nobody worried that one of the neighbors was going to kidnap us.

While we had the same classes for a full term in earlier terms, now we could have different class schedules each year within the term. But we had physical education as a class all five years of each term, for eighth through eleventh terms. Changing was simpler. We pulled on tight shorts under our skirts and then took the skirts off. There were lockers to store our clothes in, but no showers. The people here do not sweat like humans do. Instead, each such class includes “panting breaks” to rest and recover energy after athletic activity, usually in the middle and at the end of class. And there were no gendered locker rooms, because there was only one gender; everyone at this age was the same.

In addition to that, most people took math, language (a common world language), and history as classes that ran for the first four years of each term, and two different sciences as two-year classes in the first two and next two years. Fifth year allowed us to take minor sciences we didn’t need as broad a coverage over, like geology (this world’s version, which was actually quite similar to Earth’s because the conditions were similar and created the same kinds of rocks). There were a lot of elective classes in fifth year as well, like art. And in eighth term specifically, everybody was required to take the health class in fifth year.

Foreign language was notably absent, but my history classes explained why. There used to be many other languages, but there was a great war that happened about 400 years ago. One nation tried to conquer the whole world, and nearly did. Some terrible weapon, which they said made the area where it was used unlivable (which suggests to me nuclear weapons) was employed to stop them, and it succeeded. However, the enemy also deployed the weapon, not as successfully, but it killed many people. In all, over 90% of the population of this world perished, including for all practical purposes the entire populations of the aggressor and several other nations. Other nations lost significant population as well, and none of the remaining nations was able to survive on its own. They came together, resettling in unaffected parts of the world, and merging their languages into a common new one.

They wanted to avoid the kind of conflict that had allowed the war to start by bringing everybody together under a common culture. Part of that was a common language, an artificially constructed one based on elements of the other languages, but meant to be as easy to learn as possible. That’s why the language was completely regular and spelled strictly phonetically. The generation who started school during or after the war almost exclusively spoke the new language; they were not taught the old languages, though they still picked up bits of the old languages in the street from older people. The generation after that basically only knew the new language, and I was somewhat at the start of the following generation, when for almost everybody this is the only language even remembered. It is still permitted only for advanced history scholars to learn the old languages in later schooling similar to college, but it was only meant to be used to understand old records.

Religion had undergone similar treatment. The attacking country had taken advantage of religious differences between their people and others to bolster support for the war, and had assigned troops who held one or another tenet more strongly to fight against countries where that tenet was largely contradicted. Religious differences had also hindered the other countries from banding together, at first. And some of the religious differences seem trivial to me, including (this is an actual example) whether a certain sacrament should be performed with the left or right hand. The new religion took permissive attitudes, such as that it didn’t matter which hand was used to perform the sacrament, while reinforcing the basic religious laws against murder and theft which had been disregarded by the attackers.

Checking Time

By this time I was starting to think about time, and the school calendar, and all those units I was guessing at the sizes of. I looked up in the library the necessary figures to do the unit conversions in detail:

• I knew the speed of light was (to 3 significant figures) 300 million m/s. They had computed the speed of light here in their units, and this let me convert velocities.
• I knew it took 6.022 x 10²³ atoms to have a mass equal to that atom’s atomic weight in grams. I found the corresponding constant here, which let me convert masses.
• Some of the other constants I knew were based on the gravity or atmospheric pressure on Earth. While it seemed similar here, it’d be only guessing, which I had done before. To compute them more precisely, I remembered that the density of water was close to 1 gram per cubic centimeter, and this varied a little but was pretty constant to 2 significant figures over the range of conditions suitable for life in which water was liquid. This meant I could get within 1% estimates of the volume units, which let me figure out the distance units, which combined with the velocity let me figure out the time units.

So for the first time I could say that the adult people here are about 4 to just under 5 feet tall, but stouter. They have about the same mass as humans, but with a bit less weight because of the lighter gravity.

And I could quantify the “faster seconds” I commented on at the beginning of my report. I found that one of what I was calling the second here is about 0.71 of an Earth second, which means that 10000 of them, or one of this world’s hours, is 7100 Earth seconds or just a little short of two Earth hours. That means that the ten hour day here is just under 20 Earth hours. People here are adapted to sleeping on this schedule, so less gets done in a day than on Earth. This is why we only have 5 classes in a school day instead of 6 or 7 which is common on Earth.

With 1/4 as many days in a year, each 5/6 as long, the 5-year intervals they use for some things are almost exactly the same length as Earth’s years. More precisely, the 5-year cycle has 5 x 91 = 455 days, each of 100,000 seconds, or 71,000 earth seconds, which is 32,305,000 Earth seconds. A mean solar year on Earth is 365.24 days, each of 24 hours, each of 60 minutes, each of 60 seconds, which is 31,556,736 seconds. So it actually makes a lot of sense to use 5-year cycles here the way Earth uses years. They are almost the same length.

As far as schooling, a 4500 second class is 3195 Earth seconds, or about 53 and a half minutes, while on Earth schools often have 55 minute classes allowing 5 minutes between classes for an hourly cycle. But we have only 55 of them per year while, through grade 12, the Earth standard is 90 class days per semester, so it means they could fit only about half as much learning into one class. As a result, classes that run two or four years are pretty close to one and two semester classes on Earth.

Taken overall, a 5-year school term here consists of 25 courses each meeting for 55 days of 3195 seconds each, or 4,391,125 seconds of class time. A 180-day school year on Earth with 6 classes each 55 minutes long is only 3,564,000 seconds! We get 23% more class time! However, we also go to school for one year less, starting from the beginning of what I feel is regular school in third term; thirteenth term, which I equate to eleventh grade, is the end of it. Taken that way, we get only 13% more class time.

Health Class

Knowing that I had the fifth-year health class during eighth term, which includes full details about how reproduction works for people here, during the class break before that year, my parents tried to explain everything to me. Coming from the otherworldly background I did, it sounded crazy to me, but considered another way, it is amazing how similar they are. So I accepted the story, knowing I was going to get confirmation at school soon. The classes confirmed their story 100%.

Women on this world do not menstruate. The part of this course that on Earth would have involved periods, pads, and tampons, instead described penis-birth. Women here ovulate basically like human women do. But the egg always develops, fertilized or not. If it is fertilized, it grows into a new person. If not, then it grows into a penis. Technically, it is the complete male reproductive system, but the penis is so much larger and more visible than the rest that people commonly apply the word for penis to the whole thing. Even the technical word they use for the process here is literally a compound of the words for penis and birth.

In either case, at the end of the 40-day female period (so, about 32 days after the egg started growing), the woman gives partial birth to whatever was growing inside her, baby or penis. Partial, in that it stays attached via the cord, and is only birthed into her pouch.

They described the pouch next. It starts like what I had always had up to this point, what they call the cap, which is a tiny bulge that can’t be opened at all and is only big enough to conceal a fingernail. They told me I was going to start notice this growing, so that by the end of tenth term it would have just reached the size to contain a fingertip from the last joint, and by some point in twelfth term, twice that big in diameter and thickness. That is the adult size when there was nothing inside it.

Usually during thirteenth term, the last term of regular school here, around age 83 to 85, people experience their first ovulation, which can never be fertilized because the pouch hasn’t opened yet, so it always forms a penis. When it is born, the cap opens at the top/front, forming the pouch, and along with the penis, the cap grows upward along the body to about twice its original length. The tip of the penis just barely emerges from the slit of the pouch, and it sometimes slides back inside.

Then they explained how sex works. Sex is something people here do only when they want to get pregnant. Sex almost always results in pregnancy!

It’s also only possible when you are with someone you really love. The reason for this is that a person’s pouch retracts only in such a circumstance; without retracting, the organs are too covered by it for sex. In males, the retraction allows the full length of the penis to be exposed. In females, it exposes the vagina. There’s not enough room to force a penis into a vagina of a person whose pouch has not retracted, and the penis isn’t long enough if the male’s pouch has not retracted. Furthermore, the pouch only retracts during a person’s fertile period. The male is fertile from about a day after penisbirth until about a day before the penis withers and detaches, preparing the person for her next period as a female. But the female is only fertile during a period of about 5 or 6 days, which starts about 2 or 3 days after the penis separates.

A female can literally only have sex when she can get pregnant, and we’re super-fertile and practically always get pregnant if we do. That’s why sex almost always results in pregnancy.

In the health class they showed us some videos, one of an actual penisbirth, sped up by a factor of 10 until near the end, because it takes an hour and there isn’t much to see until it is almost over. There were also animations of what it looks like inside the body. There was also a sped-up video of the penis withering and separating. The pouch retracts only partially at that point, back to the size it was before the penisbirth, which is the normal female size. They didn’t show us a video of actual sex, but they showed us still pictures of exposed penises and vaginas, and of the male pouch retracted far enough to reveal the scrotum, which you wouldn’t recognize because the temporary 40-day testes are tiny. It’s rare for the male pouch to retract that far. Another picture showed the female pouch retracted to nearly nothing so the entire round opening of the vagina is accessible. There were also animations of how far into the vagina a penis goes during sex, which seemed about human standard, though to a kid just learning this, it seems shocking, and there were more than a few gasps among my classmates during this.

The time spent as male can vary. Normally it’s the same 40 days. But when a compatible couple lives together, one for which both partners’ pouches retract, if the penisbirth occurs in one partner while the other is male, the partner’s male period ends sooner. This tends to align them so they end up as opposite genders almost all the time.

So, I wondered, why isn’t the world completely overpopulated with people?

Well, there’s the thing we learned about where 400 years ago (in this world’s short years, so some children from that time still live) 90% of the population was wiped out in a war. But also some people never really find their true love, and that means they don’t even get the opportunity to have sex. This is so common that there’s literally a government program to help loveless people find partners. Some of the people who do find partners are happy with 2 or 3 kids and don’t want to have a massive family. My parents only had one other kid, 20 years after me.

And it turns out that sex isn’t the pleasurable part. It’s the opening of the pouch which sparks pleasure in people, so they get a lot just by being with their love, and it really encourages couples to stay together. It tends to be a life bond, and in the rare cases where people find they can no longer love each other and their pouches no longer retract, it’s generally considered grounds for separation, for each to look for another partner. My parents confirmed that their pouches are indeed open that far every day they are home together during their fertile periods, and it is a big incentive to be together.

The government encourages people to have more kids. The program to help loveless people find partners comes with a commitment of having two kids if you are matched up through the program. Of course, they advised us not to have any kids until after we finished school, if we were so lucky as to find a compatible partner before we did finish, not that we can even do that until the last term.

Whether through that program or otherwise, potential couples have something like an engagement, followed by a period of living together. Usually, if they do not both experience the pouch opening within 2 years, it is deemed a failure and the engagement is canceled, but in some cases, especially if one partner achieves pouch opening, they may continue up to 10 years before giving up.