comfortable.
So the eight of us married. Started our own family compound: eight small domes ringed around a bigger central one. For a while, of course, it was sex, sex, sex—what do you expect from nineteen-year-olds? We had no other ideas about what marriage was. I took all seven of the others into my bed, individually, or in threesomes, foursomes, more-somes...
Faye being bad. Playing musical beds, not for any healthy reason like love or pure wet lust, but mostly just to be wicked. To get revenge on my mother for all the things she'd once imagined about me. To shock the rest of the community. To trivialize myself.
But the free-for-all burned itself out after a few months. Egerton and Darlene began pairing off together almost every night. Then Angie and Barrett. The other four of us stayed more loose and lubricious, occasionally showing up at each other's door on nights we wanted comfort, but sleeping more and more on our own as time went on.
When Lynn got pregnant, both Peter and Winston claimed to be the father. Not fighting over it; just both of them volunteering, eager to be dads. Which put Lynn, Peter, and Winston together, didn't it, even if Lynn occasionally planted me a fierce kiss as she padded past—the three of them cheerful parents-to-be, then overjoyed parents of Matthew and Eva. Naturally, the story went that Peter fathered one of the twins, while Winston fathered the other... but no one really knew who begat whom, and of course, they refused gene-testing to find out the truth. That would only spoil the solidarity.
So Darlene/Egerton, Angie/Barrett, Lynn/Peter/Winston—all of them sorted out. I was happy for them, truly. And I wasn't so cruelly cut off on my own. As the months and years trickled by, from time to time any one of the seven might show up at my dome near bedtime, saying, "Faye, you looked so lonely at dinner..."
Sometimes we talked, then I sent them away. Sometimes they stayed the warm-flesh night. My husbands, my wives, my lovers, my friends, my teammates, my safety lines to the world.
It wasn't so bad being the odd woman out. You can learn to live with anything when you've developed the notion you don't deserve more.
Meanwhile in those years after the plague, Demoth was going through a merry old flap-up of reshuffling. With only a sliver of its former population, the planet didn't have nearly the same mineral needs as before. All but one of the mines around Sallysweet River closed, but that was no hardship—so many Ooloms had died, there was work to be found all over Great St. Caspian. The government spent prodigious amounts on retraining; my spouses all got good educations, then good jobs.
For a while, it still looked like Demoth might need a splurge of immigration, just to keep things running. Add it up, and we only had six million inhabitants on the entire planet—blessed near empty, even by the sparse standards of Fringe Worlds and colonies. But the humans and Ooloms who'd come through the plague didn't want newcomers barging in: people who'd act sympathetic about the die-off but wouldn't know. So we buckled down hard and pulled things together on our own.
Our eight-in-hand family eventually moved from Sallysweet River to the poky urban sprawl of Bonaventure... still on Great St. Caspian Island, but out on the ocean coast. Less moss, more bare ice-scraped rock. By mainstream Technocracy standards, the city was a fiddly-dick clump-hole, population only 50,000. But with Demoth severely depeopled by the plague, Bonaventure was the twelfth largest metropolis on the planet. A major hub and port town: where supertankers dropped off raw organics harvested from the Pok Sea algae flats; where the spunky Island Bullet loaded and unloaded its railcars after running its circuit of the mining towns in-country. Bonaventure also had an up-sleeve to the North Orbital Terminus... mostly for distributing the metals mined inland, but also for business travelers and tourists who wanted fast
So the eight of us married. Started our own family compound: eight small domes ringed around a bigger central one. For a while, of course, it was sex, sex, sex—what do you expect from nineteen-year-olds? We had no other ideas about what marriage was. I took all seven of the others into my bed, individually, or in threesomes, foursomes, more-somes...
Faye being bad. Playing musical beds, not for any healthy reason like love or pure wet lust, but mostly just to be wicked. To get revenge on my mother for all the things she'd once imagined about me. To shock the rest of the community. To trivialize myself.
But the free-for-all burned itself out after a few months. Egerton and Darlene began pairing off together almost every night. Then Angie and Barrett. The other four of us stayed more loose and lubricious, occasionally showing up at each other's door on nights we wanted comfort, but sleeping more and more on our own as time went on.
When Lynn got pregnant, both Peter and Winston claimed to be the father. Not fighting over it; just both of them volunteering, eager to be dads. Which put Lynn, Peter, and Winston together, didn't it, even if Lynn occasionally planted me a fierce kiss as she padded past—the three of them cheerful parents-to-be, then overjoyed parents of Matthew and Eva. Naturally, the story went that Peter fathered one of the twins, while Winston fathered the other... but no one really knew who begat whom, and of course, they refused gene-testing to find out the truth. That would only spoil the solidarity.
So Darlene/Egerton, Angie/Barrett, Lynn/Peter/Winston—all of them sorted out. I was happy for them, truly. And I wasn't so cruelly cut off on my own. As the months and years trickled by, from time to time any one of the seven might show up at my dome near bedtime, saying, "Faye, you looked so lonely at dinner..."
Sometimes we talked, then I sent them away. Sometimes they stayed the warm-flesh night. My husbands, my wives, my lovers, my friends, my teammates, my safety lines to the world.
It wasn't so bad being the odd woman out. You can learn to live with anything when you've developed the notion you don't deserve more.
Meanwhile in those years after the plague, Demoth was going through a merry old flap-up of reshuffling. With only a sliver of its former population, the planet didn't have nearly the same mineral needs as before. All but one of the mines around Sallysweet River closed, but that was no hardship—so many Ooloms had died, there was work to be found all over Great St. Caspian. The government spent prodigious amounts on retraining; my spouses all got good educations, then good jobs.
For a while, it still looked like Demoth might need a splurge of immigration, just to keep things running. Add it up, and we only had six million inhabitants on the entire planet—blessed near empty, even by the sparse standards of Fringe Worlds and colonies. But the humans and Ooloms who'd come through the plague didn't want newcomers barging in: people who'd act sympathetic about the die-off but wouldn't know. So we buckled down hard and pulled things together on our own.
Our eight-in-hand family eventually moved from Sallysweet River to the poky urban sprawl of Bonaventure... still on Great St. Caspian Island, but out on the ocean coast. Less moss, more bare ice-scraped rock. By mainstream Technocracy standards, the city was a fiddly-dick clump-hole, population only 50,000. But with Demoth severely depeopled by the plague, Bonaventure was the twelfth largest metropolis on the planet. A major hub and port town: where supertankers dropped off raw organics harvested from the Pok Sea algae flats; where the spunky Island Bullet loaded and unloaded its railcars after running its circuit of the mining towns in-country. Bonaventure also had an up-sleeve to the North Orbital Terminus... mostly for distributing the metals mined inland, but also for business travelers and tourists who wanted fast
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