Adam’s Atoms

Although there are four trillion of them (yes, that is trillion, not billion) and they are humanoid, they all share certain physiological characteristics that may make them appear less diverse than the humans of the Earth. Indeed, if a human somehow managed to visit Planet Kumára, he would have a difficult time distinguishing among the various Kumárans at first. But as he grew accustomed to them, he would clearly see them as different and unique individuals. After that, he could tell them apart, just as he can with his fellow humans.

Actually, the Kumárans are so humanoid that if you happened to see one here on the Earth without purposefully analyzing him, you would most likely assume he was a male human teen. That said, chances are good that you would notice him in the crowd. He would be tall and slim. He would have red hair and his skin would be covered with freckles head to toe. His eyes would probably be of a deep blue color, like two blueberries. At least, that is the most common eye color on Planet Kumára, though some Kumárans have light blue or even emerald green eyes. Whatever their color, his eyes would be big and look pensive. He would have thick lips.

But it would not be just his looks that would make you notice him. He would be fairly athletic, with well formed muscles. His moves would be elegant and graceful, like those of a tiger. He would not be trying to stand out of the crowd. He would just be minding his business. But you would notice him anyway. If you looked at him and he would look back, you would notice a gentle smile on his face. His own smile would most likely put a smile on your own face, without him even trying.

The Kumárans are happy people and it shows. They tend to smile without even realizing that they are smiling. That is why he might even be surprised that you are smiling at him, even though it was his own smile that made you smile to start with. In response, his own smile would widen. You would have just made each other’s day.

That said, you will not happen to run into a Kumáran here on the Earth because Planet Kumára is 200 light years away and no matter how many aliens may have been coming to the Earth in the UFO’s lately, not a single one of them was a Kumáran. The Kumárans do have the technology that would allow them to cross the 200 light years fairly quickly, but they have a strict rule about not interfering in other planets’ development by just dropping in. As the Earth is slowly opening up to the idea of space travel, we may finally see some Kumárans visiting the Earth. But it has not happened yet.

If you took a closer look, you would start noticing certain differences between the Kumárans and the humans. You might notice their skin first. Its color is warm, essentially a combination of pink and golden. That is nothing unusual, many human redheads or even many other humans have pretty much the same skin color.

But you would notice the freckles. They are all over their skin. Again, many human redheads have freckles galore. Take a closer look at a Kumáran and you will notice the difference, however. While in a human you can generally tell his freckles apart, you will notice that a Kumáran’s freckles tend to touch each other so much so that you really cannot tell where one freckle ends and another starts. Rather than forming individual freckles, the Kumáran’s freckles seem to be forming a random pattern, sort of like the Army fatigues, but with a much finer detail.

The next thing you might notice is the Kumáran’s hair. He will certainly have a full head of hair. If you are used to human redheads generally having thinner hair and somewhat less of it than other humans, the Kumáran’s hair will surprise you with its full body. Definitely no receding hairline either. The only exception would be if he were trying to disguise himself, as will become clear later.

Chances are that the Kumáran will have neither a beard nor a mustache. Yet he will have a perfectly smooth skin on his face. So you might think him very young, before the age of shaving. In reality, Kumárans are perfectly capable of growing a beard, they just generally do not. We will see shortly why their skin still looks unshaven.

Like humans, the Kumárans have eyebrows and eyelashes, all of the same red color as the hair on their scalp. Their eyelashes are somewhat longer than human eyelashes, all that without any mascara, let alone fake lashes.

They have no hair on the rest of their bodies, with the exception of their armpits and pubes. But there is no hair on the chest, tummy, back, arms, legs.

The pubic hair is quite long, strong, and always curly. Because it is curly, you may not notice how long it is at first. But if you ran through it with a comb and straightened it, you would find it longer than any human pubic hair.

The armpit hair would probably surprise you the most. It is the same type of hair as that on the Kumáran’s scalp. There is plenty of it and it grows long. If left uncut, it would grow very long. The Kumárans normally trim it to a “teaser” length. That is, if a Kumáran is wearing a T-shirt or a short-sleeve shirt and keeps his arms down, the armpit hair is completely hidden inside the sleeve. But if he raises his arms or stretches out, so his sleeve pulls up a bit, his armpit hair sticks out and becomes visible. And because Kumárans love to run their fingers through their partner’s armpit hair, seeing the hair like that is a way of teasing their partners.

There are additional differences between the humans and the Kumárans, differences that you would not notice by simply taking a good look at a Kumáran.

Talking of Kumáran hair, we can point out that the Kumárans can control the growth rate of some of their hair. They have no control over the hair in their eyebrows and eyelashes, or over their pubic hair (other than the ability to trim it if they wanted to). It simply grows the way it grows. However, they exert much control over their scalp hair, their facial hair, and their armpit hair. Specifically, they can decide its growth rate, that is whether it grows fast or slow or not at all. By the way, they do have a default rate. If a Kumáran did not decide on the growth rate of his hair, or if he lost control, it would grow fast. They can control this growth rate over different sections of their hair. If they really wanted to, they could even control individual hairs. But normally they just control their scalp hair as a group, their facial hair as another group and their armpit hair as a third group.

A Kumáran can decide to completely stop the growth of his hair. Now, it would be nice if one could grow one’s hair to a desired length, then stop it from growing further and never need a haircut. But that is not how it works. If a Kumáran stops his hair from growing, the hair will fall out. This is not permanent. He can restart the growth any time he wants to. This is how the Kumárans can decide not to have a beard or mustache, yet need not shave. That is also what I meant that if a Kumáran wanted to disguise himself as a human, he could make some of his scalp hair fall out, get a receding hair line or a bald spot, thin hair, and such. He could easily regrow it later.

There is one additional thing they can do with their scalp hair and only their scalp hair. Like with humans, every Kumáran’s hair is naturally either straight, curly, or wavy. However, a Kumáran has a way of changing that. If he lets his hair fall out, when he starts growing it again, he can make it curly, straight, or wavy, any way he wants. He could even make some of his hair curly and some straight. But the only way he can change it is by letting it fall out and then regrowing it. Naturally, he does not have to go bald to change the way his hair grows. He can change it gradually. Just let a small section (or many small sections in different parts of his scalp) fall out, change its type, then set it at the fast rate. Once it is grown (days usually), he can do the same to other sections of his hair. Depending how long he likes his hair, he can change his hair type fairly fast.

Now, all of this applies only to the scalp hair. The facial hair grows whatever way the genes have determined, straight or curly, everyone is different. That is, of course, if the Kumáran decides to grow it at all. The armpit hair, on the other hand, is always straight. By the way, no Kumáran would ever dream about shaving his armpits (or letting them not grow). As I said, they love running their fingers through their partner’s armpit hair.

What the Kumárans normally do is, they stop their facial hair from growing (so it falls out) and set the growth rate to both their scalp hair and their armpit hair to slow. That way they only need to cut their hair about once a year, and trim their armpits maybe once a month. If they decide to grow longer hair, they set the rate to fast until they achieve the desired length (usually in days), then they switch to slow. And, of course, if they want to shorten their hair, they just cut it to the desired length.

By the way, please, do not get the impression that the Kumárans are in any way obsessed with their hair. While many humans would kill to have these special abilities, most Kumárans do not pay much attention to their hair other than the annual haircut. I am only mentioning all this in such a detail because this is one of the things in which the Kumárans happen to be physically different from the humans.

Ironically, none of the languages spoken on Planet Kumára has a word for red hair or redhead. They have a word for hair, naturally. By why call it red? After all, as far as they are concerned hair is always red. And in a world where everybody is a redhead, there is no need to refer to themselves as redheads. They are just... people.

But there is an even more important difference between the Kumárans and the humans which, strangely, is not obvious: The Kumárans are androgynous. That is, each and every Kumáran can function both as a male and a female. However, externally, they have a male appearance, so to the humans they look like teenage boys.

And guess what... The Kumárans live much longer lives than the humans. Their childhood alone lasts for several hundred years. So, by the time they mature and start looking like teenage boys to the humans, they are actually centuries old. And they continue to live for hundreds more years and still look like teenage boys to the humans.

So bear in mind, looks can be deceiving.