The Mutant World (44 page)

“Just like that, you’re married!” laughed an Arab ambassador.

“Not exactly,” said Manuel. “That was just the test to see what I was made of. If I sucked in the sack or wasn’t strong and durable enough to take the riding, they would have sent me back to where the other newcomers were being processed to be given to some common girl. And that would have been that. I guess I passed the test though, because not only was I not sent back, they wouldn’t let me out of their sight for an instant. Every night they made sure I fell asleep exhausted too! Mind you, I had
NO
intention of running away now, but they weren’t taking any chances!” There was much laughter at this.

“So how are your wives now?” asked a man.

“Well, only one actually bonded with me. In the centuries that followed, the other two bonded with other men and you know what that meant. It’s a good thing too! I’m not as strong has Cato and his folks!” There was laughter at this. “But we were all still close, and I have children with them and many, many descendants. Sadly, one of my former wives died a few centuries ago. We all don’t age the same I’m afraid.”

“And what happened to the big blond girl that caught you in the first place,” said a man.

Manuel chuckled and said, “She and her sisters wasted no time in making babies with Chieftess Zanae’s son, Rayden, and thus cemented their ties to the Zani Clan. Actually, her direct descendant is here today.”

“Really?” asked a man.

“Yes,” said Manuel. “As a matter of fact, you were even talking to her earlier.”

“I was?” said the man.

“Yes,” said Manuel. “She was the big oriental woman with reddish brown hair you were drooling over at dinner. Lady Yu, administrator of Zani City and hereditary vassal of the Zani Clan.”

The diplomat, who was Chinese, gawked. Lady Yu looked in almost every way Asian. Her name was even Chinese. Her skin was very white, the color of fine porcelain. Her hair might have been a clue to Caucasian ancestry, but not really. Many people in the orient had hair this color, but he never would have seen anything black in that woman’s bloodline. She seemed quite Asian. Thinking on it now, her figure was anything BUT Asian…at least not the Asian norm.

Cato chuckled as he saw the expression on Ambassador Zang’s face. “Mutants pay no regards to color or ethnic background here, Ambassador,” he said. “The only
truly
nonnegotiable matter in choosing a mate is someone bringing home a human. And quite frankly, even that is increasingly becoming less and less of an issue with our common folk. Obviously, someone from a clan with your cultural background recently married into the Van Riebeeck clan. That clan, despite what they may have
looked
like, had been …well, by an Earthman’s mentality, much mixed already. Of course, new mutant blood from other backgrounds has continued over the generations resulting in the Lady Yu not having any obvious African traits…aside from that ass.” The men laughed. “But her daughter, and heir, just married a mutant that is the same color and background as Lord Shabba over there, so I think the next generation might not look so Chinese.”

The American First Man noticed an incredibly beautiful woman entering the room. She was tall, stacked (of course) and carried herself like a queen. She came before Lord Cato and bowed. The two exchanged some pleasantries and then the woman and her attendants took their place among the others. None of the men protested.

“Um, excuse me,” said Barry to one of the Bellasarians. “I thought this was a men’s only gathering. Who the hell is that hottie? Is she a lesbian? Is that why no one seems to care that she just crashed the party?” As he said this he noticed the woman wink at a couple of servant girls. One looked suitably uncomfortable at this, while the other giggled and whispered in the other’s ear, who then also giggled, but nonetheless hurried away. To Barry this confirmed his suspicion that the woman was a lesbian. The amused Bellasarian would teach him.

“That is King Regeus of Futaria. He is a Futa man. He is androgynous, like many of the Futanari high nobility, and has all the usual female traits…but also a yard and stones. He is a man.”

“Jesus!” said Barry. “I…I…”

“Liked what you saw,” said the Bellasarian, amused by the human’s shock. “If you like, he might oblige you. You’re not a mutant, but you are a man of high rank. Mutant men are not as picky about a harmless little tumble with humans as mutant females are. And he can function just as well as a woman, albeit without the ability to get pregnant. Still, his
queen
would not approve. You are human and fragile. And he and his queen are very close friends of the empress’s eldest son and his wife. One way or the other, you might not survive your stay here if you sleep with him.”

“I have no interest in that…
man,”
said Barry Chambers. “I thought he was a woman and only wondered why she (sigh)
he
was among us. I now know my mistake! Thank you for your help!”

The Bellasarian man laughed.

As the evening grew late, King Roc approached Elder Manuel as he sat casually drinking. Many of the other men in the room were asleep. Others had been fetched by servants at the behest of their wives or other females leaving the women’s gathering. A man or two even left in the company of another man. It was explained to the Earthmen that gay men had little to complain about in regards to discrimination so long as they behaved like men and took proper mates to continue the bloodlines of their clans. A human homosexual didn’t even have to worry about that. However, many of the men stayed and interacted with one another telling stories about themselves and their families and learning as much as they could from men like Lord Cato and Elder Manuel. King Roc was one of these.

“Excuse me, elder,” said Roc with great respect.

“Ahhh,” said Manuel, “you’re the king of the mountain warriors that has all of these women scared shitless.” Then he chuckled and said, “Sit down, Your Highness. What can I do for you?”

Roc sat down next to Manuel and said, “Elder, I would never have pegged you as one who was once held by women, or indeed, one originally from the homeworld. The name ‘Manuel Zani’ is known even in Barrat. You won great fame in the Akkadian War and your sons have fought for my people against the Mavie. Yet you…I…”

Manuel chuckled. “I understand, Your Highness. But you have to understand that the women of the empire, not most of them anyway, are
nothing
like the women of Mavieland. Actually, even the women of Mavieland are not like the women of Mavieland anymore. I wasn’t kept as a slave by my mother-in-law, I was her honored son. Once I realized how things were…I just accepted it. Well, I wasn’t going anywhere anyway, now was I? I was on another world in another dimension and I was now married to, not one, but
three
of the hottest girls any man could want. Hah! Besides…life for a mutant on Earth was one of fear, hiding your gifts and being ashamed…a freak! I got used to not hiding and walking tall real quick!”

“You fought the Akkadians,” said Roc. “They were Earth mutants like you.”

Manuel nodded. “The Akkadians were trying to use outdated and dangerously irresponsible means to develop their nation because they were convenient. You’d think that after seeing what such practices had done to their old home they would avoid such damaging industrial methods at all cost on their new home. After all, better alternatives had been perfected and were in use here already.” Manuel snorted in disgust. “The effects of their industry were already being seen on the land and local wildlife. Our scientist also began to notice a slight but perceptible difference in the air quality of their region and how it was affecting ever so slightly everyone else’s. They were also trying to infect the Bellasarian people with their notions of decency, materialism and organized religion. I trust you have seen and heard many things in Akkadia already that you have
never
seen anywhere in the empire, Barratia…or even Mavieland.” King Roc nodded grimly. “How would you have liked their love of money, materialism, selfishness and what all this breeds being adopted into our peoples? Or perhaps the slums and crime had an appeal to you? Would you like their notions of morality, sin and guilt spreading like a plague everywhere until we were just as prudish, judgmental and hypocritical as them?”

“No,” said Roc.

“Mutants or not, they had to be corrected for the good of all! I, and many other Earthborn mutants, fought even harder than the Bellasarian mutants to do this.” Manuel scowled. “The Akkadians didn’t hesitate to try and use forbidden high level destructive weapons of war either! That was the first and LAST time we had to use our advanced weaponry on this world and actually target mutant cities and civilian populations. I’m not proud of fighting in that part of the war…if you can call that shit fighting at all! The fools had allowed themselves to believe that we could only fight with spears and swords. We showed them that we were quite equipped with weapons far superior to anything they had and we had people well-train to use them. We blasted the hell out of them and one by one destroyed their factories and processing plants. Finally, outnumbered and outclassed in military technology, there were some who at the end decided to forgo guns, aircraft and artillery and fight like men. Naturally, once they stopped using guns and other such killing tools, we did too. These people actually proved very skilled in man-to-man combat. It was then at this point in the war that I truly proved myself as a warrior and gained some fame against the Akkadians. Well, to make a long story short, the Akkadians put up such determined resistance that a truce was called before the death toll rose any higher. They agreed to cease their dirty industrial methods and policies in favor of the clean ones everyone else used. And we agreed to withdraw our warriors from their lands and allow them to keep their independence and way of life so long as they minded their own damned business and kept their values and missionaries in their own country.”

King Roc nodded and smiled. Elder Manuel was being too humble and had deliberately down-played
his
deeds during that part of the war by not going into details. The truth was that the Akkadian mutants that came against the Bellasarians towards the end of the war had fought so ferociously and savagely that many didn’t believe that they were descended from Earth mutants at all…and they were powerful by anyone’s standards. This man had taken on five of them singlehandedly in close physical combat and killed them all. And what he did later…Well, aside from Lord Cato and his progeny, there were only a handful of men here that were shown such respect as Elder Manuel. The Zani Clan had chosen well.

“I have heard that all the people on Earth are just like the Akkadians,” said Roc. “Money obsessed, selfish, prudish and hypocritical. I hear their women are all mercenaries. They take mates for material gain rather than real desire or love. Then they take the poor bastards for everything they own when they become dissatisfied…even their children. Worse, they still demand support financially afterwards rather than just take their spoils and leave. I have heard the Akkadian and Earthmen speaking of this. Even I must admit that the women here are
nothing
like that! Yet they dare to judge us?!”

Manuel had to shake his head and chuckle. It had been a very, VERY long time since he had been on Earth, but he did remember the issues there…and their root causes.

“Your Highness,” said Manuel, “people do marry for love and it is not always the woman who is the villain in these instances, and often such support is warranted. But there is much truth in what you say. The reasons for this mentality in women on Earth and their counterparts/descendants in Akkadia are very old and were ingrained in many Earth cultures many, many centuries ago, longer than even I have been alive. Aside from the fact that women look for good providers for themselves and their children, women were once little more than chattel historically in many societies on Earth.”

“I do not understand,” said Roc. “They seem to have everything in their favor today…at least that is the impression I get from the drunken human man from Earth there. Booze has loosened his tongue. When asked what women were like on his world he spilled all. And many of his fellow Earthmen agreed with him.”

Manuel laughed at this, but nonetheless explained. “That…is not entirely true, but…Well, let’s start at the beginning. Bloodlines were, and in most places still are, traced through the father’s line. Children carry the name of the father’s clan. So females once owned little or nothing as far as inheritance went. Aside from breeders and objects of pleasure, daughters were deemed at best inferior, at worst, valueless to some peoples because they married and left home to become part of someone else’s family. Even women valued a son more than a daughter. Boys stayed home, carried on the name and looked after their parents in old age. Daughters married, left home and often were never seen again. Even if they were around, their first loyalty was now to their husband’s family. Anything a daughter might inherit would belong to her husband’s family upon marriage, thus going out of her original clan. Only a fool would leave all of his land and money to his daughter when he had sons or even nephews of his name.”

Nearby, Luther Jefferies was listening to all of this with great interest. All of this was rather astute for a man who came to Bellasaria as a fifteen year old boy two
thousand
years ago. But then again, he certainly had a lot of time on his hands to reflect on and research his homeworld’s social issues. With a feeling of some irony Luther realized that this was almost the exact same topic concerning the sexes as the women’s gathering in Illyria a while back. The president and female aides had told him all about it. But this time the topic was being discussed from the man’s point of view. Manuel was surprisingly fair and knowledgeable. His words seemed to reinforce what the women had told President Chambers and the other V.I.P ladies that night.