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From: "Elf M. Sternberg" <elf@pendorwright.com>
Subject: {ASSM} Journal Entry 097 / 01030  Ritacha on Terra (0)
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Date: Sat, 01 May 2010 21:10:05 -0400
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Ritacha on Terra
Erwer, Lothess 23, 1030
The sky overhead was a brilliant, beautiful blue, the color of ancient
television tuned to a quiet channel. The beach lay out ahead of us,
equally spectacular in diamond white purity, stretching toward a bend
where it disappeared. "Lovely, yes?" I asked.

"Magnificent," K'Novarra agreed. The bright sunlight of the island of
Kekira' agreed with the dark-brown of her long fur. She had a stripe of
lighter-brown fur that ran down her chin and merged with a triangle that
pointed between her breasts; a classic seal-point fur pattern. She wore
all white, bell-bottomed long pants of some light cotton and a bikini
top, and that was about it. I decided not to ask where she kept her gun;
it was in all likelihood halfway around the planet and available at a
moment's notice, just as mine might be.

"So you're getting to see them up close and personal. What do you think
of them?"

"They aren't what I expected," she said. I reached out and offered my
hand. She accepted it. "The two you said were the survivors seem to
still be in shock from the whole experience. I probably would be like
that if I were them. But the tliel, though, they're weird. They seem
so... serene. Curious about everything but not frantic at all. Maybe
it's just this group."

"Maybe," I chuckled. "There are a few who are energetic and 'frantic,'
but you're right. I don't know; maybe it's just that at Rocchodain we've
gotten so good at welcoming new species into our midst that they come
out of the first stage of incorporation shock feeling like the world is
as ready for them as they are for the world."

She nodded. "Has it always been like that?"

"How old are you?"

"Ken! Asking a girl a question like that!" She covered her laugh with
her hand. "I'm 124, if you must know."

"So you've never been through a decant before?" She shook her head.
"Then no, it hasn't always been like that. The first time was confusing,
the next were both parties and battles. We were both so grateful to have
new friends and so confused as to what to do with them since they were
so new and differently shaped. By the time we'd done the Dolphins,
Dragons, Mephits, and Ssphynxes we thought we knew what we were doing,
but I really screwed up planning with the Pamthreats. That's why
development was so slow after that. Sure, I got the Mustel out soon
afterward but they were already well through development when the
Pamthreats happened. I'm not sure why the Vulpins happened at all." I
took a deep breath. "But in many cases, when I think about a new
species, I think, remember what happened to Kei and Yuri, and I lose all
my nerve."

"Kei and Yuri?"

"The first two Pamthreats. The ones I really fucked up on." I kicked
idly at a shell that had washed up on the sand.

"Oh." She recognized that I didn't want to talk about it, and I was
grateful for that.

"You make a great bodyguard, you know?"

"Just because I took a bullet for you?"

"You took half-a-dozen, as I recall. No, because you want to talk to
your clients. Or do you?"

"It depends," Nova said. "Some want to talk, some don't. You're
obviously one of those that does, and I don't object to getting close to
a client. Especially not you."

"We got very close last time."

I looked down the beach, where the five Ritans who had come with us,
including Darch and Nori, were frolicking playfully in the surf. Nori
was frolicking. Darch was being pensive, as Darch was inclined to be. I
shook my head. How could we have screwed up his programming so badly
when we had gotten Lindsay so right? Maybe the original Darch had been
as morose and introspective. Maybe not.

"Yeah, we did, didn't we?" She grinned at me. "I don't imagine that it
takes getting shot at to make you care for someone, though."

"No," I said, with a grin, "it doesn't."

"So, does that mean you'll let a girl buy you dinner?"

I looked up at her, amused. "You can't buy me dinner, remember? You need
to look after your charges through an interminable, small, well-secured
state dinner tonight in Geneva."

She sighed. "Don't remind me. Okay, can I buy you breakfast then?"

"That you certainly can," I said with a grin.

            *            *            *

It was an interminable state dinner, of course. President Zapata made a
long and impassioned speech about how she welcomed these newcomers to
our universe and hoped that their future would be happier than their
progenitor's past. There wasn't that much humor in her speech, which
surprised me, but things were going so well that there was little
material to play off of. Humor is a response to stress. An unstressed
human doesn't have much to laugh off.

Nova made a comfortable enough dinner companion, and Nori peppered me
with more questions than I was prepared to answer if I was going to get
a bite into my mouth. Darch only picked at his food. I worried that he
was going to starve if he didn't start to eat more. I made a note in
Hera to make sure that Brieanna and Ember reviewed his files to make
sure that he was actually healthy mentally and physically.

I finally had my own turn to ask questions. "So, Sandahl, what do you
think of Earth?"

He grinned. "It's amazing. It's like Ritacha was before the war, with
all the bombed-out buildings I used to see as a child, but intact."

"Earth always seems crowded to me," offered Kashkah.

"That is something," Nori said. "How do they stand it, being so tightly
packed like this?"

"It's something they're used to," I said. "Humans, like all of us, are
social animals, and we're adapted to settings like this one, if need be.
Just think; there used to be three times as many people on Terra."

"What happened to them?" Nori asked.

I smiled my best evil smile, not that I have one. "They were made
wealthy."

"Would you care to expand upon that, Ken?" Ebele' Zapata asked. "After
all, you were there. That gives you an advantage over, I believe,
everyone else in this room."

"Sure," I said. "It's simple. It was even seen in NorAmerica in the late
20th Century before I arrived. Rich people don't have children. They
have one, maybe two, but not enough. The United States, even before
Landing Day, was only growing in population because of immigration.
Immigrants by themselves didn't even reproduce enough. There's something
about 3800 calories a day in food that satiates the human animal so well
that the need to reproduce, combined with birth control, is almost
completely quashed. The Feed The Stars program did that for all of
Terra, giving everyone tons of food. There was no reason to fight
anymore."

A dignified man of Indian decent protested. "But... but, the dignity and
pleasure of generating such wealth for yourself..."

"Is a myth," I said. "Or rather, it exists in such a small segment of
the population, and it is not an impetus by itself to reproduce.

"It's long been known that the instinct to 'have sex' and the instinct
to 'love your children' are separate. They worked so well before the
invention of birth control that an impulse to 'have children' barely
exists and arguably doesn't exist at all in men. Give people control of
their reproductive futures and give them the food they need and there
will be much fewer children. Instead of a reproduction rate of 150 per
100, which is what we had, after FTS started flowing the Terran birth
rate as a whole dropped to 65 per 100. It was a seriously powerful
balancing act on the part of the Terran government to prevent only those
who were inclined to reproduce like rabbits actually reproduce; hence
the Lottery systems of the 21st and 22nd centuries. They weren't really
necessary from a resource point of view; they were there to make sure
that the 'let's not breed' genes survived, given that you guys were
going to crack immortality eventually.

"Given enough food, Homo sapiens was like any primate species. They
sleep 10 and a half hours a day and spend the rest of the day looking
for sex-- not reproduction, mind you-- and other forms of recreation.

"Feed the Stars was a genuine humanitarian effort with a known and
expected side-effect. Governments terrified by the spectre of a
population threat because their citizens were no longer starving to
death or dying young of malnutrition-related disease made reproducing an
nontransferable, licensed activity that, much to their surprise, fewer
people than licensed actually exercised. Within a few generations, Terra
was back down to two billion people, with the hundred million most
courageous living off-world."

The room was dead silent for a minute. And then Ebele' Zapata spoke.
"You know, there are historians who have been arguing about that for
centuries. And now you have cleared up the mystery for us. You knew it
would happen."

"Do you disagree with the results?"

"The geriatric dead..." someone began.

"Are not feeling any pain today, and lived life no differently, indeed
better than, their ancestors. Retrofitting the stock human being to
immortality was not within the capability of Pendorian medicine until
you had it anyway. The politics of a generation built the Pendorian way
did not sell, then, to Humanity."

I seemed to have cast a pall over the room, but it soon picked up again
as the subject changed to something much more innocuous, like the
ongoing attempt by one of the Terran colonies to claim that it was an
'Empire of Humanity' and was not going to go in for all the silly
uplifting and modification of human beings.

"It'll never last. They'll have a hard time defining human," Ebele said.

"It's fascism. Like the German state in the 1940s, or the Israeli state
at the turn of the second millenium, trying to define who was a citizen
by heritage claims that couldn't be proved anyway," a petite young
Katckin across the table said. "I don't believe it will last either."

"They're going insular in a big way," I said as I cut at my too-dry
chicken.

"But the circumstances of interdependence..."

"Don't matter," Kashkah, a soldier and historian, offered. "It is the
ego of the Rangsey family that fuels that endeavor. He simply wants to
be Ruler of The World, any world. As Shardik might say, it is the last
gasp of atavism."

"Hardly the last gasp," I growled. "Merely the latest. Unfortunately,
the Rangsey Empire qualifies as a fully sovereign state, so we here in
the Corridor are not legally permitted to intervene." I shook my head.
"It's maddening to me that we allow the Rangseys to create a state of
insufficiency and mortality just to give them a backdrop against which
they can appear heroic."

The Ritans watched all this with quiet amusement, as if somewhere
between not believing we could all care so much and not sure why we put
so much energy into showing how little we really did care. In fact,
there was jockeying going on at the table for whom would get to advise
Zapata and the Congress on the matter of this 'Empire.'

And it was an atavistic endeavor that I thought deserved to die the slow
and horrible death all atavism deserves. But that's just me. I worried
more about the people who lived on the "Imperial Homeworld," who would
have to live with the consequences.

I sighed. Heavy thoughts.

When it was finally over, we herded the Ritans back to their hotel, and
then I went to the hallway and sighed. Nova leaned against the wall,
looking sexy in a long, red dress with a slit skirt that showed off her
lovely legs and her red, mid-heeled shoes that glittered, screaming,
"There's no place like home." I smiled at her. "Back to the Embassy?" I
asked.

"If that's where you want to go."

"I'm following you," I said.

She grinned and led me out to the front of the hotel. Her private car
was there, reserved for just her and myself. On the back she had a
bumper sticker. It read: "[]human []centaur []felinzi []uncia []tindal
[]dolphin []mephit []dragon []markal []vulpin []katckin []llerki
[]ssphynx []sendar []silicon []neorat" and hastily added with marker
"[]han []ritan" They were all scratched out and in the lower corner was
scrawled "{}conscious."

"Nice," I said, obviously looking at it.

"Thanks," she replied. "It's one of my favorites."

"I like the Ritan, especially. It's timely."

We took her car to the embassy, which looked much like it had a millenia
ago. The Geneva embassy building was even smaller than the one in
Washington, if that were possible, and it felt like it; cramped and
silent. But the silent part was the nice part. It was one of the
quietest buildings I had ever been in, and I enjoyed the sensation.

She led me up the whispering elevator to the fifth floor, and into her
room with the cartoon cat and the pink monitor adorned with glossy
stickers of daisies and marigolds. Once inside, we fell hungrily upon
one another, mouth to muzzle, tongue to tongue, arms bend and entangled
around one another. She felt warm through my tux. "I think you're a
beautiful fem, Nova."

"Good. Take advantage of me?" she said, her voice surprisingly coy.

"If that's what you want." I slipped one hand up her back and found the
tiny indentation that passed for a clasp on her dress. The invisible
seam that ran down her back parted and soft fur puffed through the
opening made. I scratched at her fur gently at first, but her purring
led me on and I applied more vigor to my blunt fingernails. She shivered
against me, whispering, "Fah, that feels good."

I brushed off her dress with the back of my hand, first one shoulder
than the other. The only thing holding it up then was my own body
pressed against her. I stepped back briefly and let it fall to the
floor, taking a look at my sweet bodyguard. "How can I ever thank you
for saving my life?" I whispered as I led her to the bed.

"You already are. I like making my own history."

I laughed gently as she tugged on the bow of my tie and pulled out the
knot. It fluttered to the ground and then her hands were working their
way down the buttons of my shirt. I surreptitiously dropped the
cufflinks as well. "No strip tease?" I asked.

She grinned. "Neither one of us is built like that kind of performer,"
she said gently.

I touched her chin briefly. "I disagree, Nova. You have the body for it,
you just hide it behind that bluff exterior that says 'I'm gonna take a
bullet for you.'" She unzipped my pants and I felt her hand on my
erection.

"No, I just like touch more than looking."

"I... um,... I feel."

She laughed as I pushed her onto the bed and fell on top of her. We were
soon in a tight clench of lust and desire, hungry for one another,
kissing, loving one another. Nova had saved my life, and I had comforted
her after the incident. She wasn't just a professional lifesaver. She
was something else. She was the woman who had stood between myself and
an armed gunman and then become a vulnerable, beautiful fem afterward.
Her hands were inside my shirt, my mouth was on her chin.

I kissed my way down past her small breasts, nipping at her through her
soft, brown fur, finding her navel hidden through the fur until I
reached her mound. She was breathing fast with the anticipation. The
last time we had been together she had told me that she didn't get
kissed down there often enough; I resolved to give her a year's worth of
attention in one night.

She moaned as I kissed her mound and worked my way down to her sweetly
parted lips. I find her smallish clit hiding in its close-fitting hood
and licked around it. She groaned as I kissed my way around it,
spiraling inward to my destination, my overly broad and indelicate
tongue doing its best to be gentle with her. I found her clit precisely.
"Yes-- Oh-- Ken-- fuck!" We had barely begun and already she was into
obscenities.

Nova is one of those women who smell like heaven and who taste even
better. Her juices were sweet-- not just tolerable or musky, but
honestly sweet. I kept dipping my tongue down to her opening,
frustrating her own wants and needs as I satisfied my own between her
thighs. I love cunnilingus like almost no other activity because of its
intimacy and its promise of closeness. She groaned as I backed off, then
hissed when I turned the speed back up. Her body bucked as she came with
a tiny "oh!" of pleasure.

I kissed her full vulval lips, enjoying the feel of her softest fur
against my freshly shaven face. I licked at her perineum briefly,
lapping up the little drips that oozed from her aroused sex. She moaned
as I refused to get up and kiss her mouth, instead staying where I was
until I felt she had recovered enough for another round.

Her hands held my head this time, making me stay where I was, her claws
just a touch threatening against my scalp as I licked her mound. She
came again, this time just a bit louder than the last.

I rubbed my erection between her lips, not quite entering her. "Please,"
she whispered.

"Why?" I asked, with a grin.

"Because I want to see you come," she whispered.

I slid my cock inside her. There was little resistance but for the
rapturous grip of her sex to mine. We slid together until hips met hips,
legs raised in the air, legs splayed to the side, two bodies locked
together in a union made romantic by our wishes, passionate by our
traditions, and needful by our pasts. Last time we had fucked so hard
and fast I barely had time to register it; this time, I slowed down to
watch her, to touch her face with a free hand, to caress her breasts as
I steadily pumped in and out of her. She was beautiful in this moment,
and she whispered tender lies of "I love you."

"I love you, too," I whispered back, and for that one moment we agreed
that we did love one another. I could feel her around my cock, and she
responded to the motion of my body against hers with small whimpers of
pleasure. She didn't ask anything more of me. We were here to connect.

When I came it was a calm and wonderful thing, a pleasure than rolled
through me like a bright moment of sun sweeping past an otherwise cloudy
day. It was a too-brief second we both basked in, wordless, passioned.

Over.

We lay side-by-side on the bed after that for long minutes, my eyes
closed, trying to hold onto the moment, trying not to let it go and
knowing that it was already a memory and would soon be a faded one. I
felt her move against me and turned my head toward her. "Are you all
right?" she asked with the concern of a lover.

"Yeah," I said. "Just... a lot on my mind. You made it all go away for
the time we were here, but..."

"But you're Shardik," she said.

"No," I said. "It's not that. It's not about me. It's about... that
conversation at the dinner table. Something is happening, Nova,
something wonderful. Something frightening."

"What?" she asked.

I smiled. "If I say, 'The universe is about to end,' does it have more
authority because it comes from me?"

She propped herself up on one elbow. "Of course it does."

"Then I won't say it. But a lot of the things you and I regard as
important are... I don't know. They're going to get swept aside. The
people of the twentieth century might have understood us. Not all of it,
mind you, but a good bit of what we have today would have made sense to
them. The people would be a bit bewildering... we're all walking
libraries, our minds capable of accessing raw data without any
noticeable delay at all, compared to them. But now we're starting to
store not just data but knowledge, even personal knowledge." I grinned.
"I guess it's that Empire business. The more we become as a people, the
more petty that sort of thing seems to be."

She turned over and held me close. "But those twentieth-century people?"

"Oh, in two centuries they'll have as much of a chance of understanding
our impulses and motives as mice have a chance of understanding us."

She sighed. "You're a heavy thinker sometimes."

"No, just an assembler. I know what I like and I put it together. This
is just the unintended consequences of creating beautiful, creative
people. See, if you make creative people, you've multiplied your
creativity. If you make them so that they want to make more creative
people, you've increased your creativity by exponents." I suddenly
grabbed her by the shoulders and kissed her hard. "I'm so glad I made
you!"

She giggled. "You didn't make me. The closest you get is my great,
great, great, great grandmother. And there was tinkering in between."

"See?" I said. "Multiplied creativity."

She laughed, then sighed. "It's late."

"Fucking dinner party," I growled.

"And good fucking afterward!" she agreed. "You're welcome to spend the
night here, but if you'd like to head home..."

"I'd be honored to spend the night in your bed."

"My gallant knight."

"You're the one who saved my life," I pointed out. I took a deep breath
and then relaxed. "Thank you, Nova. For being you."

"And thank you, Ken, for being, well, wonderful." We rolled over and
kissed each other goodnight.

----------------------
The Journal Entries of Kennet R'yal Shardik 
and Related Tales.

The entire archive of stories can be found at:
http://www.pendorwright.com/journals

Copyright 2003 Elf Mathieu Sternberg.
Distributed under the Creative Commons License BY-ND-NC/1.0
Some Rights Reserved. 

Elf's latest stories are available in paperback!  Buy 
the genderbending novel _Sterlings_, available
now from http://stores.lulu.com/elfsternberg

--

-- 
Pursuant to the Berne Convention, this work is copyright with all rights
reserved by its author unless explicitly indicated.
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