Nova Terra Gen2 Ch. 03

Disclaimer: All sexual activity is between fictional adults, which on the world of Nova Terra is the age of 20. A small warning that some of the relationships consummated in this chapter are the equivalent of step-siblings, but if you read Chapter 2 already, you'd know that was coming. I hope you enjoy.

~~~~~

Friday, 11 November, CY 26

Mario & Sukie, with their parents, Hannah & Yuri Spinski and Chanika & Kichiro Oyama

"You're doing what?!?" Chanika said.

"You heard me, Mom," Sukie said. "Mario, Tina, Blake and I are going to start dating with the Chess poly, to see if we might want to join them in an octet, if our genetic assessment says we can."

"But, Cooper and Spinz are your blood-brothers, Mario," Kichiro needlessly pointed out. "And Mario's Sukie's poly-brother, too."

"I know that, Dad," Mario answered. "But the women are not my blood-sisters, which is what the Charter forbids. There's no genetic issue here, beyond the fact that we'll have half-cousins among our kids as well as blood-siblings and poly-siblings. In fact, if we strictly have one child by each wife, to produce a total of 16 kids, each of my kids would wind up with six blood-siblings, six half-cousins and only three poly-siblings, all with Blake as the blood-father."

"But you're going to have sex with Cooper and Spinz? That's incest!" Hannah cried.

"Depends on what you mean by 'with', Mom." Mario responded, putting a hand on her shoulder. "Am I often going to be in the same bed with them, naked, while we make love to our wives? Sure. Am I going to be engaging in oral or anal sex with my brothers or with Blake for that matter? No, just no. Doesn't appeal to me at all. From what Spinz has told me, he hasn't had anything but occasional contact with Cooper since they married."

"I still don't like it." Hannah sighed.

"Noted, Mom. But this is our decision, not yours. And I'm okay with it." Mario said. "We're telling you so that you're aware of it, can adapt to it, and if this is the route we wind up taking, you might be able to give us your blessing."

"You have mine already, son," said Yuri. "Whatever makes you happiest. And I'll work on your Mom. She needs to stop trying to interfere in other people's love lives."

"Watch it, Yuri." Hannah snapped.

"No, Hannah, Chanika, you need to hear me this time," Yuri said. "The whole Colony is in an uproar, because you decided that interfering in Mario & Sukie's decision to date and marry was the most important thing, instead of just accepting that they love each other and what they wanted to do was legal. We debated the poly-family structure on Nova Terra more than a decade ago in developing Amendment 8, and decided, as a society, that the only barriers to marriage would be age, genetics and compatibility. We had the chance to forbid poly-siblings from marrying then, debated it, you were two of the voices for forbidding it then, but the Colony as a whole decided against it. It only had about 35% support then, and I bet it has half that now. Do you remember that?"

"Yes," said Hannah, softly.

Mario and Sukie had never heard about this debate process from their parents, but kept silent.

Yuri continued. "You saw an opportunity in allying with Cooper to impose what you know is a minority view onto our children and every other such pairing that might happen. Even then, Cooper out maneuvered you. Face it, if it came up for a vote tomorrow, your Amendment 11 would get revoked. It was only pooling your proxies with his that got it passed."

"But..." Hannah said, weakly.

Yuri raised his voice. "No buts, Hannah. You're still trying to apply Old Terran prohibitions against step-brother and step-sister pairings that even there were only illegal in some places. We all decided to make a clean break with Old Terra's traditions even before we left it, remember? That's the reason why we decided to call our families polys and the genetically unrelated kids in them poly-siblings instead of step-siblings, to make clear that this was a different kind of family, and a different kind of relationship. Mario and Sukie didn't become siblings after being born into separate monogamous marriages that ended, they were born into this poly, with a blood-mother each, a poly-mother each, and two poly-dads, since neither of us is their sperm-father. We want that to mean something different, not the same as the Old Terran family. Let go of the past, of your Mom's morality, pushing you away from your step-brother Curt. They're not here. You are. Decide right now to be a Nova Terran, 100%, and embrace Nova Terra's morality."

Hannah sighed, then said, "Y'know, I hate being outmaneuvered. First Cooper, now you? But I know you're right, damn it. I'm sorry, kids. Your Dad is right, I was hearing my Mom's voice in my head whenever I thought about you two being married. You... you have my blessing, for marrying each other, for your brothers, all of it. I do just want you to be happy."

"My blessing, too," said Chanika. "I never quite heard it expressed the way Yuri just did, maybe I just wasn't listening for it. This is a new world, with its own traditions being built and its own moral choices. My mom would have killed me if I'd ever told her I wanted to live in a polyamorous family, yet here I am, not only doing it, but ecstatic about it."

Yuri said, "As for Mario being with his brothers, you should remember that we debated incest and same-sex intimacy, too. The colony made the decision to only outlaw incest which could produce children, but to take no steps against having same-gender siblings in the same poly. It was deliberately allowed, if not explicitly stated, because we felt it could increase their chances of being compatible socially, where there was no genetic issue. As for same-sex intimacy, the only restriction against it is that the poly must produce its required number of children to grow the colony. What the spouses do when the wives are pregnant, not in the fertile part of their cycle or have met their minimum number of children is up to them. We identified that another benefit to the poly structure is that it allows two lesbians and two gay men to partner in a way that allows for enough hetero contact to produce children without forcing them into two monogamous marriages where they'd be unhappy. So long as they can be intimate with the opposite sex those few days per month when they're trying to get pregnant, we don't care about the rest. Some very good crew members were washed out on Old Terra because they were gay or lesbian, even though they were prepared to marry someone of the opposite gender and have kids with them. We weren't about to perpetuate that mistake here."

Mario spoke up, then. "Why aren't any of the debates you had captured in the colony history? It would have helped my generation a lot to have heard about the process by which the charter developed, particularly the things you were allowing by default and why."

Yuri answered, "In order to get people to speak their minds, we had to promise them that the debates would be off the record. We couldn't just guarantee them that things would be anonymous, when we're talking about having just 256 people involved, who all knew each other after the crew rotations on the Avalon. It took us years of ship-board life to arrive at the first amendments to deal with the infertility problem, and that was with it being a crisis that would affect us most once we landed so we had time to make those decisions. Debating the poly structure was a bit more acrimonious because the opinions varied more widely. As you can tell, some of those opinions didn't go away just because they wound up losing, although I like to think time has shown that the winning sides were right."

~~~~~

Cooper Chess' Journal

Tuesday, November 15, CY 26

It really has been kind of weird going back into a dating scene, while being married. The fact that Mario is my half-brother doesn't really register with me, since I wasn't raised with him. He's just one of dozens of half-siblings I have that have Chad as sperm-father, given how prolific Chad was, and I think of him more as a neighborhood friend than brother. However, Spinz grew up in the same poly with both Mario and Sukie as their brother. Emotionally, he does think of them as siblings, more than I do. But since Mario has shown that the two kinds of love are not incompatible, Spinz has spent a lot of time with Mario talking about how he and Sukie converted familial love into romantic.

This is part of the reason why we want to date before making a decision on marriage. If Spinz can't overcome thinking of Mario and Sukie as siblings, and start thinking of them as spouses, it might prevent us all from getting married, and the compatibility testing we'll have to go through will catch it. So far, he's done okay, even finding himself surprised by having a physical reaction when Sukie kissed him good night after our first date. I personally think he'll be fine. He just needs some more time to adjust.

Chinah and Mel both seem to be feeling strongly attracted to Mario, perhaps because he shares some traits with Spinz and I. It's taking them longer to warm up to Blake, but we can all see a spark. There doesn't seem to be as much of an attraction between my wives and Sukie and Tina, as neither of them seems to be bisexual, which we've agreed is okay. Both women are more petite than Mel and Chinah, with Sukie having the slight advantage in curves.

The fact that we all play poly-chess has helped a lot, as it has given us a shared activity to use as a basis for several dates, that have turned into intense discussions about our future, followed by make-out sessions between the guys and girls, that have left us so turned on that Mel and Chinah attacked Spinz and me afterward.

~~~~~

Thursday, November 16, CY 26

Doc Fowler notified us that the genetic screening for the eight of us had passed. He had identified that the two recessive genes that caused the risk between Mario and Sukie had come from Mario's and my sperm-father Chad and Sukie's sperm-father Dave Purcell, but that I had not inherited either gene from Chad. As there were no other conflicts introduced, the risk level was considered acceptable, and we could be an octet. Assuming we passed the social compatibility testing, that is.

We decided to date for at least two more weeks, pretty much every night, before making a decision about applying for that testing, in order to expand our poly. We would actually be the first Gen2 poly to expand, and only the second octet.

~~~~~

Thursday, November 28, CY 26

Our planned two weeks of dating are over, and we are convinced that our feelings for each other have grown into love, even faster than we expected, so the eight of us submitted to the social compatibility testing.

Debate about changing or repealing the Charter amendments was coming to an end, with a vote to repeal Amendments 9 and 11 scheduled on Sunday. The sperm-fathers who had caused so much upset publicly expressed their regrets for their competition, and promised the whole colony that they would stop. I still had my doubts that they knew how, but left that unsaid.

~~~~~

Sunday, December 1, CY 26

Both amendments were repealed, by 90-10 margins. I voted for repealing both by proxy, as farmwork needed to be done. Mostly, I was avoiding those who were still angry with me. Chinah and Melany voted in person, then returned to help me, while Spinz needed to stay to count the vote.

As soon as the votes were counted and the repeals were finalized, the Council was hit with a slew of additional petitions rearranging the Generation 1 poly families, mostly to their original states. Several of the pre-coup polys chose to swap members, rather than reform as they had been before. A special Council meeting was called, delaying Spinz further. Mario, Sukie, Tina and Blake stopped by before Spinz got home. With their help, we got the farm work done and were back in the house when Spinz arrived.

Spinz announced, "Doc told me after the meeting that we passed the compatibility test. Except for Sukie not being 20 for a couple more weeks, there's no barrier to them joining us. Since an octet would be responsible for a bigger farm, I requested that the farmland to our west be added to ours, since there isn't a house on it yet and the rest of the council approved it. It should be no problem to have it ready for a planting in three months. We might be a bit cramped until we can expand this house, but there's no reason we can't have another wedding on Sukie's birthday."

Sukie laughed. "Our moms would kill us, if we only gave them two weeks to plan a wedding. I vote for Old Year's Day for the ceremony. That will give them the whole month to plan."

We all agreed, and added our wedding announcement to the community scheduler.

Spinz said, "That's not the only news. We officially have our first cross-generational poly-marriage, among the petitions we approved today. The Windsmith quad requested to split in half, to join two of their neighboring quads, which are both Gen1 polys, to form new sextets, dividing their farm land between them. They were the only petitions we had to debate today."

"Why was there a debate, at all?" Melany asked. "They're not related to each other, are they?"

Spinz shook his head. "No, no connection in those terms. The issue Doc Fowler had with Josh and Mary is similar to the one Tina and Mario have, except instead of limiting Tina to one baby by Mario, Mary would be limited to two kids by Josh, and so far she only had one baby by Steve. By recombining the polys, Josh would be Mary's only fertile husband, and would be father to her next two babies, bringing the total to three out of her required four."

"Obviously, they must have gotten approved," Mel responded. "You said they were official."

"They argued that the three quads had already been intimate with each other quite a lot, and the four Gen1 women are all pregnant by Josh or Steve, rather than involving any of the sperm-fathers. More importantly, the two sextets plan to continue being intimate with each other, just not joining into a single poly. They had thought about making this switch months ago, but it wasn't until the debates over the amendments that they felt they would get supported for doing it. They did both want to adopt the Windsmith name, but ultimately settled on Eastwind and Westwind. I suggested they might as well be one poly, just operating on two farms, and they said they would think about it. Once Steve and Josh promised that they would get Mary and Katrina pregnant at least once more each, Doc Fowler relented."

"So, four Gen1 moms with Gen2 blood-fathers," I said. "Would that make their kids Gen2, or Gen3?"

"I'd say Gen3," Mario said. "They'll be half-siblings to Josh or Steve's existing and future kids by Mary and Katrina, so they ought to be considered part of the same generation, don't you think? I suppose Doc might care about the difference, but I doubt anyone else will."

"Well, it's going to matter less and less as the years go by," I said. "As the youngest members of Gen2 overlap the oldest members of Gen3, they're going to be dating prospects for each other. Old Terra measured generations by birth years, not genetic generations, so we'll go back to that at some point. It's only because we were a colony founded by childless settlers that there's such a hard dividing line between Gen1 and Gen2 in the first place."

Spinz added, "I doubt this will be the last grouping to cross the generation line, either. I've heard rumors that the Primus quad is involved with one of their older neighbors, too, where the moms there haven't reached menopause, either."

In the pause that followed, Blake asked, "I wonder, if we had arranged for impregnating Tina by other men, would my Dad have approved our original quad?"

I answered, "At the time, it wouldn't have been legal, because of Amendment 9. Now that it's been repealed, are you saying you want to back out of marrying us, and try to get your quad approved again, with that provision that Tina would seek out other blood fathers for her kids?"

Blake said, "No, I was just curious. We want to be part of this octet. But I bet it's a scenario that comes up again for some other quad."

~~~~~

Saturday, December 5, CY 26

Blake's prediction proved prescient, as one of my Romson blood-sisters from the other side of the colony ran into the exact same genetic issue in her quad's genetic screen a few days later, with one of Tina's Purcell blood-brothers. However, that quad also failed their social compatibility test, and split apart to start over. After Mario and Tina, Doc Powell had rescanned genetic data on all of the Romson and Purcell children from their post-birth paternity tests and identified a list of children who had inherited both of the problem genes, about a quarter of their children, each. The problem had not been identified during the creation of the original sperm-father breeding lists, since none of the Gen1 women carried the genes, and we needed Chad and Dave to breed anyway.

Also, several of the Gen3 kids born so far had acquired the genes as well, but they were still recessive and were being tracked. He originally didn't release the lists publicly out of privacy concerns, but changed his mind now that the conflict had happened again and the quad expressed that they wished they had been warned ahead of time. With the two lists made public, the news split apart two younger dating quads before they would have reached the stage of genetic testing, because members were on each list. They had the same option to form sextets or octets, but chose finding new partners as an easier solution.

~~~~~

Tuesday, December 8, CY 26

Chinah's pregnant! We're all excited by the news, although I can tell Mel's disappointed that her period came again. They had been hoping to get pregnant at the same time. Hopefully, Mel will catch soon. Privately, Chinah gave Spinz and me permission to give Melany the extra attention - and sperm - to ensure she got pregnant as soon as possible. Her next fertile period was expected in 9 days. And if she still didn't catch then, she was about to gain two more husbands at Year's End.

~~~~~

December 13, CY 26

The eight of us had dinner together to celebrate Sukie's 20th birthday.

Melany asked her, "How does it feel, to be an adult now?"

"No different, not physically, anyway," Sukie answered. "I don't think I'm really going to feel different until I make love."

"You still want to wait for our wedding night?" Chinah asked. "We could exchange our vows privately, right now."

"You waited until you were 22, right? I can wait another 3 weeks."

~~~~~

December 17, CY 26

Mel was nearing the most fertile part of her cycle, so Spinz and I were reserving all of our orgasms for her, to give her the maximum amount of our sperm, morning, noon and night. Chinah mainly assisted in getting us hard again, although if Spinz and I were both hard at the same time, she'd 'keep the extra cock warm' in her pussy, then once Melanie was filled up, the other husband would switch and let loose inside Mel. This particular night, Spinz and I both managed to come into her three times, filling her to the brim. She simply pulled a pillow under her butt to tilt her pelvis, so it would all flow towards her uterus.

~~~~~

Old Year's Day, CY 26

My second wedding day had similarities to the first, but a lot of differences. We still needed a member of the Colony Council to officiate, but since Chad wasn't on the Council anymore, he couldn't repeat in that role. Mario's mother Hannah volunteered, to show her kids that she supported them, now.

Chad attended as a guest, however, and came to me before the ceremony began to say, "Cooper, I was out of line with my suggestion that I participate in your wedding night. My wives got me to see that I was being the kind of boor that I used to detest. I swear to you that if I could go back to that night, I'd change it. Hell, I'd probably have to go back a few years, to get rid of the competitiveness I wound up indulging because I thought it was for the good of the colony. I'm sorry."