Martin Lourcy didn't think he would buy Gretchen, but he certainly didn't mind buying the right to spank her. As he pulled up her sweet little green dress to expose the pert ovals of her bottom cheeks, though, he wondered—perhaps, he would admit, in part because of how very prim they looked, and yet how invitingly round—whether the rebellious streak she had just shown them, in trying to avoid the taking, might actually make her a better "wife" for him than some other, more docile relict girl. She wore no underwear, of course; nor would she, if he bought her, except perhaps on special occasions.
The most important thing now, though, whether or not he decided to bid on Gretchen in the auction, lay in keeping his intentions veiled—above all from Heather and Diana, who almost certainly already suspected that Martin had forbidden notions about family-structure. Even with the inviting prospect of Gretchen's little bottom over his knee, he gave an inward sigh at the sheer idiocy of the attitudes held by so many of his fellow elites and the vicious tenacity with which they held onto those attitudes, seeking to punish not just anyone who questioned them but also anyone who appeared not to hold them himself.
It wouldn't bother Martin if every other elite on Athena kept his or her relict girls like slaves, whether for procreation or for pleasure. And Martin couldn't deny, either, that he hoped to buy a relict girl who could provide to him both those things, as he saw fit. But to declare any attempt to establish an ongoing partnership with a girl to care, with her, for one's own children illegal seemed to Martin the same kind of fascism the Athena colonists had tried so hard to abolish, three hundred years before, when there had been five thousand of them on Athena and the basic law had prohibited cohabitation because of the dual need to inculcate the new Athenian culture in their children and to give women the freedom they needed to work as full citizens.
Now, with fewer than a thousand Athenians aboard the station and the birth-rate finally growing again thanks to the drastic step of establishing the taking, it seemed to Martin that the ideas of the men who had been prosecuted two years before—the so-called Cohabitant Three—made a great deal more sense than any of his fellow Athenians wanted to admit. At the very least, Martin wanted to try, despite the fate of the Cohabitant Three, expelled back to Earth with their wives and children remaining on Athena, the children in school and the wives auctioned to others.
Martin supported the taking, of course. He had just come of age in time to vote in the referendum and, like everyone he knew, he had voted Yes. What choice did the Athenians have? The only way to continue civilization and the human race itself remained locked within the bodies of young women. By the time of the referendum, Athena had doomed itself to genetic non-viability through the impossibility of forcing elite women to bear children. The population at that point had already fallen so low that the number of genetically allowable mates for each Athenian was sometimes zero. Martin himself had grown up knowing that there were only two women on Athena with whom he might reproduce. Without new DNA—without girls who could be made to bear children—the space station whose citizens justifiably, Martin thought, viewed themselves as the only hope of the human race, would soon become a dying orbital hulk.
I'm guessing at a release-date in June.
No comments:
Post a Comment