Harem Scare 'Em Read online

  And when Mother Troyer's girl child died at birth, it was I who pointed out the tiny blood-flecks in the baby's eyes, which I recognized from something Old-Father had mentioned years ago to be evidence of death by smothering. It was I, also, who reminded everyone that the young Mother, whom I had grown up calling Dori Miller, had been heard to say that if her child wasn't a boy, she would "send it back." Everyone thought she was joking. But in this harsh world where there were too many women, boy-children were prayed for too fervently by some.

  Maybe most people were willing to turn a blind eye when a girl child died at birth, but I was blinded by outrage, and I spoke up. When presented with the truth, Dori admitted tearfully that she had smothered the baby with a pillow. Her husband renounced her, and the elders had no choice but to exile her. I was a Truth Teller, I was male, and women were, after all, at a surplus; and she was an admitted child-murderer to boot.

  After a while, people began watching their words and actions around me.

  Rebound:

  Slinky and Jenny watched over me as I bathed in the river, scrubbing my skin with sand until I was shiny and pink. I touched my stubbly chin and wondered if I should start growing in my married-man's beard. If so, my nascent mustache would have to go. I called out to Slinky, "So, would you say we're married now?"

  She laughed. "Ohmigod, Toby, you're so funny! And soooo old-fashioned. Just because we boinked a few times doesn't mean we're married. It's just sex. Besides, I need the enzymes to survive."

  "So I'm just a good meal to you?" I joshed.

  "That, and I feel the need to breed." She grinned. "You'll have a daughter soon."

  "Two daughters," Jenny said shyly.

  Nope, two sons, a small voice said in my head, sounding a bit smug. I perked up. Now I was truly a man! "Really? Why not sons?"

  Slinky looked at me sourly. "Ugh. And just like that, you've pinpointed the crux of all our problems. You're a smart kid, but there's so much you don't know."

  "Then enlighten me."

  "The men of this Earth can't actually make us pregnant, Tobe. Sorry. As far as the Goddess can tell, you just stimulate parthenogenesis."

  "Slinky, my name is Tobias," I reminded her, "and 'parthenogenesis' is not a word I know."

  "Toby, my name is S'linkitha. Suh-click Leen Kih Thuh. Not that hard. And parthenogenesis means you cause our eggs to develop, but because there's no male DNA involved, our babies are basically clones of ourselves."

  It felt like a candle lit in my head. "Oh! So my manly fluid is just an intermediary compound! Like what Old-Father calls a caddalithk?"

  She looked at me with a new measure of respect. "Catalyst. Yes, that's pretty much right. And does your Old-Father have a lisp or something? Because you seem to mishear a lot of interesting terms."

  "Well, he is missing some tee-"

  And that's all I had time for, because right then a hand grabbed my ankle and yanked me deeper into the river, under the surface, and down to the muddy bottom. Suddenly a mouth was on top of mine, breathing air into my lungs, and a hand was between my legs, guiding my sudden stiffness into the kind of warm, wet orifice that was rapidly becoming familiar.

  Goddess help me, it felt wonderful, and as long as whatever it was kept breathing for me, I didn't mind continuing.

  Rewind:

  Being a Truth Teller made people uncomfortable around me, but that wasn't the last of my oddities. Oddest of all was the fact that I was the boy who wouldn't grow up. The elders joked that they should change my name to Peter Pan. Puberty eluded me. That wasn't an insurmountable problem, luckily. All men were rare and precious now, because the demons kept stealing them away. We were highly protected, because how else could we carry on the human race?

  Unfortunately, many of the men who hadn't been stolen were unable to father children. For reasons that escape me, those men had themselves "snipped" well before the Day of Ruin. They regretted it now, but it was irreversible in our current world, so they found other ways to contribute to society. For example: Young-Father Trent, Old-Father Trent's son, had become my stepfather along with his father a few years after my birth father was stolen away, shortly after Young-Father Davin suffered the same fate. He served as my mentor and protector, and as one of my mother's comforters, and worked as a miner. I had been with him at the landfill, in case I needed to learn the trade, when I found the magazine cache.

  Back then, I had been more fascinated by the plastic bag the magazines were stored in, and I came right out and admitted it, which couldn't have helped my standing in town. Old-Father Trent said it had been made from petroleum, which was the concentrated, rotted remains of giant lizards and plants that had owned the Earth millions of years ago, before what he called the "KT extinction event." Before the Ruin, most people thought those lizards were killed off by a giant burning rock hitting the world. Now I wonder if maybe somebody like Slinky's people might have caused it accidentally, the way they had reset the Earth this time. Anyway, plastic was useful and could be made into dishes and stuff if you melted it down and cast it.

  None of the women shown in the magazines, not even the images Old-Father preserved for the village men to inspire themselves with, had been one-tenth as erotic as Slinky or the other demons I had met since I was exiled—with the glaring exception of the troll and her loathsome brood. No wonder some men just up and disappeared on their own. I had heard that Alfas were blindingly beautiful, capable of making men fall in love at first sight, though I had yet to see any of those "pointy-eared Alfa bitches," as Slinky called them.

  Now, the troll that ate my horse was pretty ugly, but Slinky said they hadn't started out as humans in the first place, but as something called "uplifted gorillas." Apparently, they had been herding a group of mounts called "raptors," kind of like giant, featherless eagles, when they had Stepped Through. According to the Goddess, Slinky said, they "had merged with the raptors on a genetic level."

  I hoped none of the trolls ever took a fancy to me. It was bad enough that there was already a lovesick young harpy following us.

  Rebound:

  Wide violet eyes were staring into my hazel ones. I couldn't see much more, since her lips were plastered to mine, keeping me aerated as we mated, but I knew I was in love. I let my hands wander, brushing my fingers across the delicate gill slits along the sides of her chest, then down along the sleek torso until I found the moons of her buttocks. I grasped them hard and pulled her down onto my manhood, again and again, until I came to orgasm. Adulthood was a fine thing.

  A second later there was a bubbling scream and a strangled squawk as several hands grabbed the water-lady and ripped her away from me, leaving me half-drowning as I struggled toward the riverbank. I panted heavily after my head broke the surface, and soon crawled out of the mud onto the shore.

  Well. That had been fun while it lasted.

  There was a lot of feminine screeching as four superbly feminine forms thrashed in the shallows, and I watched in fascination as Slinky, Jenna, and a bedraggled feathered form with small but nice "tracts of land," as Old-Father jokingly called them, dragged a fourth, sleek form onto the bank, where she coughed and gasped like a beached fish. She was mostly blue-violet, though mottled here and there with a pale green. She wore the ragged remnants of what looked like a woman's small clothes, though they hid nothing of her exquisite form. Curious but not frightened, I squatted beside her as Slinky and the bird girl held her down, and asked, "What type of demon are you?"

  "I'm not a demon, you stupid little prick!" she snapped.

  "It's not that little," the bird girl said in a breathy voice. "I think it's nice."

  The fish-lady and the succubus exchanged glances. "Second-gens are so naïve," Slinky said.

  "Whatever," the bird girl said, hands on her hips. As she looked Slinky and Jenny over, I noted that like Jenny, she wore long pants, but unlike Jenny, no top. I guess the wings got in the way. They were large, gray, and glorious.

  "You gonna fight anymore?" Slinky a
sked the fish-lady.

  "No," she said sullenly. "But only because you let him finish."

  "She's what you'd call a kappa," Slinky said as I opened my mouth to ask.

  "Oh! A water demon!" I clapped my hands. "She's so beautiful."

  "I told you, I'm not a demon!" the kappa shouted, as she bolted upright, then said, softly, twirling her finger in her cap of green hair, "You really think I'm beautiful?"

  "Mercy, yes. All you de—" all four looked hard at me— "mensional travelers are incredibly beautiful!"

  "Nice save, kid," Slinky murmured, then barked, "Report!"

  Automatically, the kappa's hand snapped up and she said, "Lieutenant Undine Parish, U.S. Navy SEAL, 23rd-" she stopped abruptly, then said wonderingly, "I can't believe I did that. It's been so long… were you with leadership?"

  "I was. I had the rank of Lieutenant Colonel in the Army, but I was a physicist by trade. First Planetary Engineers." She gestured at her body. "Now? The people who live here call me a succubus. For good reason."

  Undine blinked slowly at her. "You were the guys with the nano-bombs. When whatever happened, they went off, didn't they." It wasn't a question.

  "One of them did. One lousy nano-bomb did all this." She gestured bitterly at our surroundings. "Back to the Stone Age in less than a week."

  Rewind:

  When I was a kid, It was funny to think that the shiny rocks I found sometimes while digging in the ground, and the pretty gold and copper nuggets from the river that a careful smith could make into tools, and even the rusty red iron ore that outcropped as boulders and gravels over in the next county—that most of those had once been parts of buildings, and coins, and jewelry, and self-propelled carriages, and ball bearings, and food cans, and hand-tools, and a million other metal things before the bitty-swarms pulled them apart and put the metal back in the ground where it came from.

  Nowadays most tools were made of stone, and money was specially-engraved ceramic disks with luminium flakes baked in. Some of the luminium hadn't been eaten by the bitty-swarms. No one knew why. When I asked Slinky, she grew thoughtful and told me that it was probably a programming error such that the bitties in the nano-bomb didn't recognize that particular alloy as a refined metal. It had happened before, she said.

  At Hamiltown, we were lucky in a way, I guess. For a long time, most of our luminium came from a mine to the southwest, a big hole in the ground surrounded by a scatter of twisted luminium, cloth, plastic, and a lot of fragmented human bone. Old-Father Trent said it was the remains of an arrowplane that had fallen out of the sky on the Day of Ruin, when all the electros failed, and the bitty-swarms started eating critical components of the flying machine.

  Once, I had found a jawbone there with a gold filling that the bitties had missed. Old-Father had taken it to be worked into something useful. Maybe it would last a few weeks before dissolving. He said that in the old days, pure gold was worth so much that people would kill for it.

  Now people killed for luminium. We had to fight for the mine more than once, and until it finally played out, Hamiltown had posted a guard there. I had spent a couple of nights at the mine, holding onto a spear and staring out in the darkness. But that was years ago. Now we had to trade grain to the Tejarkanye for luminium, which we needed for knives or carving gopherwood. It was lousy for cutting because it was soft and wouldn't keep an edge, but it was better than stone. You couldn't make spearpoints or axes out of it, because it bent too easily, but for that we had re-learnt the ancient art of flintknapping. Young-Father said that the Edwards Plateau, which we lived near, was the source of some of the best tool stones on the continent, so it was easy to find good rocks to make into tools.

  Having heard Slinky say it, for the first time I realized we really were back in the Stone Age. But it was a Stone Age filled with well-educated 21st century minds, not to mention Misha and Mennonish plain ways to fall back on. We were fortunate. Given time, I suspected, we would make our way back to the top of the heap, and it wouldn't take as long as most people thought—if we would just stop fighting and fearing each other.

  Rebound:

  The bird-girl's name was Ava. Like all demons, she was what Young-Father Trent would have called "smokin' hot," as my privy member reminded me whenever I looked at her. Those deep black eyes of hers really got to me.

  As she ruffled her feathers in the sun to help them dry, making her look twice her real size, she told us that her mother had been a flight engineer who had Stepped Through into a place called Indiahoma with the rest of her Corps, tasked with guarding the dismantled arrowplanes that they would reconstruct after they'd settled in. Her father had been a full-blooded Cherokee, she said, whatever that was. Anyway, the bitty-swarms had eaten their arrowplane parts because they were made of something called titanium.

  "Mom said if only they'd been aluminum instead of titanium, they might have survived," Ava said, as her soft beak dipped to the preening gland on her side, and she started pulling her feathers through her claws and beak, oiling them up as they dried.

  "Aluminum? Is that like luminium?" I asked.

  "One and the same, handsome," she said flirtatiously. Slinky and Jenny growled a little.

  I liked Ava, and watched her, fascinated, while she preened. She was very attractive and had beautiful breasts, apple-sized and perfect for her lean body type. Another one of Young-Father Trent's crude but funny sayings came to my mind: More than a mouthful's wasted. He and Old-Father used to laugh about things like that, because they had so much experience with the ladies. Women outnumbered men in our village at least three to one, so the Young-Father was obliged to comfort other women when they asked. Mother made them make appointments. She would have made them pay her if Young-Father hadn't objected, saying he wasn't some man-whore to be traded around for money.

  At the moment, I didn't see anything wrong with being a man-whore, but then, comforting women was new to me. I mean, it wasn't like I was in love or anything. Young-Father Trent was, though. I didn't think Mother loved him back. She still mourned Father and Young-Father Davin.

  While I had disappointed my elders by not growing up properly, being 25 years old and hairless yet, I was not unloved. I had my friends, including Clem and my kindergarten girlfriend Kiera Wood, who still liked me. We had pretended we were married when we were little. But I stayed smooth and childish as she started to grow curvy and hairy and became interested in things other than nature and mining. No one had given up hope of my bollocks dropping, though they were getting impatient, and even if it never happened, there were still things I could do to contribute to society. I could become a courier between villages; if I was not yet mature, the demons would probably leave me alone. And even if I were never to completely mature, I could still comfort women with hands and mouth, and toys made of clay and polished wood. I had some training in it, and Kiera and I had practiced a little.

  But then came Bundling Day, 24 AR. I had tried to avoid it, but the elder women figured that, if nothing else, being surrounded by an acre of naked girl-flesh might "kick-start" my libido and push me through puberty. After all, even boys as young as 16 were able to comfort women and father children, though no one had practiced that perversity since the dark Days of Dread, when men first became scarce.

  Well, I failed to perform. Spectacularly. The girls all made fun of me except Kiera and Becky Runnels, and when all the other boys had bundled, I was the leftover. There were never any leftover boys, but if I couldn't perform, then I wasn't a boy. More a eunuch. I left before Becky decided to give up Clem to another girl out of pity, leaving her without a true man to bundle with for the day. I still had a little pride left.

  ❖

  Ava imprinted on me that night when she gave me her body. We were camped near Undine's underwater lair, because it was clear of dangerous creatures; no demon would allow competitors in her territory.

  I had wondered why Slinky and Jenny had held back from approaching me for comforting, except for their normal requ
irements. I was rather addicted to their attentions by then, and felt a little sorry for myself. But as it turned out, Ava had arranged it with Slinky, whom she called my First, and had exchanged some sort of favor to be named in the future. I was a little surprised when the bird-girl, who was now completely dry, her feathers sleek and shiny with health, slid into my bedroll in the middle of the night, wearing only a smile.