Subtle Redundancy

"Scrotal baselines?" He blinked. "The fuck? You guys already have more data about my scrotum than you know what to do with." He looked away, licking his lips, while Rielle just waited quietly. "I don't like being fussed over," he muttered.

"Hey." She swept her feet from the desk and leaned toward him, her eyes intent on his. Maximum gravity. Work on her bedside manner? No thanks. "Erno, stop worrying. This is different. It's prophylaxis for morliosis; it has nothing to do with your motility." She laid a hand on his knee. "Trust me. I'm not the one who's worried about your sperm, Erno."

He swallowed and tried to smile. "It's just... five years, no kids. I've given Chonn enough samples to fill a bathtub."

"Ah. That explains why she doesn't use skin moisturizer." Rielle waited until she saw the meager joke land, a faint smile growing on Erno's lips. "Calm down, Erno. It's just a little testicular exam, a sample or two. For my bathtub, not Chonn's." She let herself giggle again." Seriously. I won't even count the sperm. It might be what Elon's looking for from you, but I'm not. You're my patient here for this." She leaned back again. "Trust me?"

He shrugged. "Whatever." She saw the tension in the set of his jaw and shoulders, and sighed; his inability to knock up any one of several females, and the scrutiny that came along with that, had really done a number on his confidence.

Not hers, though. She was excited to get started. "Good. Then stand up and drop your pants." She turned away to calibrate the scanner, working the calipers while she listened to his trousers fall. She'd seen his penis before, obviously, many times, but never had she evaluated it with the intention of taking it inside her. She'd found that being sexually active made her think about men differently. All the men in the Wad had been a claustrophobic presence in her life since she was thirteen, hauling stone through the mud of their new planet; now that they were eligible sexual partners, she found it made her think of them as objects rather than people. "I apologize in advance if my hands are cold," she observed absently.

"It's fine." He stood there with his shirt tugged up underneath his armpits, and Rielle studied him as she swiveled her chair around. He had the typical Wad build, caused by too much walking and not enough rich foods; the muscles stood out on his torso, his hipbones prominent. The penis in between was normal and healthy, totally ordinary, and his balls when she reached out for them gave off a pleasant heat.

She felt him tense slightly at her touch. "Try to relax," she murmured, and then she leaned in with her gentle fingers filled with his hairy scrotum. Subtlety, she reminded herself; she was planting seeds today, and she made certain to keep her back arched deeply as she bent toward his body. He'd look down, and what cleavage she had would stare right back up at him along with her unblinking grey eyes. She kept her fingers still, just the occasional gentle squeeze against his flesh. His balls were abnormally large, a meaty handful. "I'll just be a moment, Erno."

She knew his eyes were on her as she leaned in and concentrated on nothing, on where the root of his dick emerged from its brushy coils of thick brown pubic hair, and she watched that hair stir slightly in the warm breath from her nose. "Relax." One minute became two, and all Rielle did was breathe on his genitals, watching the hair move. She saw goosebumps rise on his belly. She treated him to occasional glances through short lashes, meeting his gaze before looking coolly away.

He'd remember what that looked like, her looking up at him with his balls nestled in her hand.

And, just like that, her work was done. She was pulling back, the sweat from his genitals thick on her fingers, leaving the last of her breath on his penis. "You can get dressed now, Erno," she purred. "That's what I needed."

"Okay." She swiveled sideways and pretended to make some notes while he tied himself up.

"Now then." She turned back to look at him then, her ponytail flicking over her shoulder. "Here's the hard part. You ready?" He raised his eyebrows. "I read a lot about this, and Dr Bexler is in agreement. No masturbation for two days, okay?"

He blinked. "What?"

"Just until you can come back and give a sample." She shrugged, launching without difficulty into the lie. "There's a minimum level of spermal richness the morliosis test requires. Forty-eight hours, Erno; that's it, then if my test comes up nominal, you can get right back to whacking it." She smiled to make sure he knew she was serious, but not too serious. "Okay?"

"Okay." He stood there awkwardly, leaving Rielle to set the agenda. She waved merrily.

"Now go, and sin no more. Send in the next man." She watched through narrowed eyes as Erno departed, only to be replaced at her door by a tall gangly shape. "Ah. Merner. Hi there." She sighed and launched back into the charade. "So. You've heard by now that Dr Bexler and I have caught morliosis in Mikhail McWong's testicles again."

* * *

Both moons had gone down, and the night was close and dark as Rielle strolled along the pondshore with Bexler. "Rough one."

"Mm-hmm." Bexler sighed, her usual ebullience flushed by her exhaustion. "They're like that, sometimes." She kicked a rock into the water. "No matter how far we progress as a species, no matter how many clones we produce nor how many advances we make? Gestational diabetes still sucks."

"Tikva's so strong." Rielle glanced at the lights of the Creche as they went by. "You just never know, huh?"

"No. You don't."

"She'll be fine, though. The course is well-known, the prognosis fine. It's just that we caught it late."

"Mm-hmm." Bexler shook her head as if to change the channel in her brain. "Oh! Speaking of which, I got Elon's permission to start implantation studies for your embryo." She glanced down at Rielle's bony belly. "Well, your eventual embryo."

"No shit!" Good news. "What animal?"

Bexler frowned. "The obvious choice is a bisch. They're big and strong, but I'll need to do the comparative anatomy from scratch, just about, to figure out if they've got a viable womb. And depending on how fast you work..."

Rielle smiled. "Go on."

"So the other option is a slork from that herd over on the other side of the hill. They're small, but promising, and I think four legs will give better stability than six. Plus I've already got womb studies from the terraformers. Should work." She shrugged. "It'll be pretty straightforward, once I start."

"And you'll use the vacavalls as the control?" They'd brought a herd from Terra. "That is, if Elon will let you kill one."

"I don't think they'll die, actually." Bexler pondered. "Well, I mean obviously a couple of the bisches will. But April 78-F says her studies indicate abundant populations all over the place, and they're taking to the terraforming. So." She shrugged.

"Meat sucks, though," Rielle observed lightly.

"Yes. But the milk gives such good clabber." Bexler licked her lips. "It's the best indigenous food we've got, I think."

"That's your opinion," Rielle scoffed. "Give me a plate of smoked purgeon, and I'm in heaven." She turned up the path to the sickhouse. "Instant orgasm."

Bexler laughed as they stepped out of the rain. "If a meal of smoked fish is making you cum, Rielle, you're doing it wrong."

* * *

She was sitting at her desk next day with the latest edition of the Antares Journal of Medicine (Special Podiatry Edition!), blinking back her drowsiness and waiting to put the next part of her plan into action.

Subtlety.

But it was proving difficult to stay subtle with the new fire, barely banked in her pussy. She'd never expected, during that first awkward half-hour or so with Roni, that she'd grow to like sex so much, so quickly. It had been a week already since she'd last gotten laid, and she was tossing restlessly in her bunk each night wondering which of the colony's men were thinking about her pussy.

The loose schedule she had in her mind said Erno was still a week away, at least. She planned to tease him enough that he'd be sending maximal sperm as deeply as his penis could throw it. But that meant six more days without a dick, and that prospect was proving increasingly frightful.

She'd tried two nights before, melting tremblingly into Jitsuko's narrow bunk just past local midnight. It was their second liaison, and they'd picked up right where they'd left off the first time. "Rielle!" Jitsuko had been pathetically pleased to see her, her slender dusky body not yet too ravaged by Roni's fetus in her womb. She'd propped herself on one elbow and smiled. "What brings you to my door?"

"Oh, you know." She'd kicked the flimsy door closed behind her. Sex in the Dorm was discouraged, but nobody ever ratted anyone out either. "Just looking to pass the time." She'd smiled and walked calmly across the airy room toward the bed. "Thought you might be interested in passing it with me."

The older woman had a textbook open at her pillow; she did most of the colony's teaching. She smiled through her long, blue-black lashes. "Maybe." She was naked, the room smelling pleasantly of plants and books and the faintest whiff of body odor, which Rielle found vaguely arousing. She backed her body against the wall. "Looking for a place to stay tonight, Rielle?"

Truthfully, yes; she was already 90% moved out of the old room in the Domestic section here at the Dorm, but back at the sickhouse Bexler was letting Mikka fuck her again, and in her present state of horniness Rielle was having difficulty with that. "Not like you'd mind, Jit."

"Not like I would," Jitsuko purred, pushing her book to the floor with a dusty thump. "I slept really well last time you visited."

"As a medical professional," Rielle admitted loftily, "I'm happy that I was able to help." Her dress whispered to the floor and her body slid into the sheets with its customary fluid grace, Jitsuko's wet mouth finding hers even before she had a chance to settle. The schoolteacher had proven an unexpectedly excellent kisser last time, and she didn't disappoint this time either; her lips were warm and full, the perfect mix of soft and firm, and not nearly as demanding as most of the men were.

Not that demanding men weren't also thrilling, of course.

But this was different, the women knowing instinctively where and how to touch each other, Rielle's leg sliding up onto Jitsuko's hip in a dry slither of flesh. Jitsuko's tongue found its way into her mouth just as Rielle plunged her arm in between their bodies, the fingers curling, seeking upward toward her slit. She felt the moist skin of Jitsuko's thighs, the comforting heat of the crease at the superior end of the adductor.

And then the older woman sighed, warm and welcoming, into Rielle's mouth as her nimble surgeon's fingers met the edges of Jitsuko's labia, stroking gently off the midline, spreading the fluid she already felt there among her sparse dark hair. Saliva fell to the pillow as Jitsuko leaned comfortably back. "Yes," she whispered simply, her eyes beginning to widen, and Rielle let the hormones rage in her bloodstream as her partner surrendered.

A blurred wave of flesh found Jitsuko on her back, strained and panting, while Rielle attacked her hard, sucking at the tangy flesh with her own back arched in the air and her hands gripping hard at her partner's ass. It had surprised her, that first time, just how much she enjoyed eating Jitsuko out, feeling the other woman responding in real time while her tongue and lips explored.

"Fuck." Jitsuko was licking her lips and pawing at her own nipples, her eyelids fluttering, as Rielle subdued her. "You're murdering me, Rielle."

And Rielle backed off, Jitsuko's juices staining half her face, staring evenly up at the other woman, past the slightly rounded belly and between the pregnancy-engorged tits, and she waited until Jitsuko's dark eyes found hers. "I know that, Jit," she half-smiled, waiting until the woman's mouth fell open, until the realization struck her fevered brain: no way should a capable woman with a PhD and nearly thirty years of life, with a trail of accomplishments and two healthy babies, plus another coming: no way should she allow a mere eighteen-year-old apprentice to play her so effortlessly.

But of course she couldn't help it, and her whole body shuddered when Rielle dipped her head back down, her teeth bared for Jitsuko's clit, and coaxed a jagged, screechy orgasm out of her body, the sheets and pillows flung aside as Rielle steadfastly ignored her achy jaw, a price she was willing to pay to make Jitsuko yowl.

And, eventually, return the favor; the late night found both of them tingling and jittery, drifting off to sleep at last in each other's arms, and Rielle's last fuzzy thought was how grateful she was to have asked Jitsuko, so hesitantly, to take her to bed.

But Jitsuko didn't have a penis. And a penis was exactly what Rielle Fourbee was thinking about, quite uncontrollably, as she propped her feet on her desk and struggled to focus on the podiatric article. The little chess knight she kept by the window trembled as footsteps jarred the floor. A throat cleared behind her; she dulled the music in her aural implants and twisted her head around. "Yes?"

"I'm done, Ms Fourbee."

Ah. The sham. "Thanks, Niall," she sighed casually, her eyes flickering back to her article as she flapped her hand out. "I'll take it." The sterisack of semen was warm and strangely heavy. "We'll test it and let you know about any potential morliosis risk." She said it loudly, not knowing who was listening in the waiting area. "Sorry for the inconvenience."

"No problem." The cook waited a moment more, fidgeting, but Rielle was in surgeon mode and had no time to reminisce about old times. Like a couple weeks ago, in the kitchen.

"You can send in the next man, Dr Bexler!" she called out toward the front of the sickhouse, her voice pitched to that caring neutrality Bexler was always talking about. "Thank you again." The big man shuffled out, and she waited until the curtain swished closed again before looking curiously into the sack. His cum was smooth and viscous, like all of them, and she marveled for a moment that this had been inside her. The morliosis screening took forty minutes in a radio spectrograph, but since this was all being done for Erno Taconic's benefit she just tossed the cumbag into the wastebasket under her desk. With all the others.

"Next man?" She could hear the irony in Bexler's voice. At some point today, Erno would make his appearance at Bexler's station in the front room, ostensibly to generate his sperm sample for the morlio test. Bar-Shaughnessy was one of just two guys who'd shown up so far. The sample was voluntary, but of course Erno was a geek; he'd come. In more ways than one. Meanwhile, there was reading for the two surgeons to catch up on. "Yeah. There's nobody here. Just go ahead and take a nap back there, Rielle. That's what I'm about to do."

Chuckling, Rielle leaned far back in the chair, the starchy smell of the semen rising from the wastebasket. The sun filtering in through the bullglass window cast its rare light across her workspace like a blade, tickling her bare feet once it fell off the edge of the desk; Rielle flexed her toes in the bold yellow beam, studying the tendons. What a marvelous machine the human body was; she'd been intrigued from the time she was little, poking at the vessels on the back of her hand, or moving her kneecap around, wondering what all the parts were meant to do.

She'd jumped at the chance, early in the voyage, when Dr Bexler had suggested she become a surgeon. The Domestics had all been whiling away their days taking Jitsuko Swope's classes, wondering which of the citizens would take them on and offer them apprenticeships, or whether they'd just go on unchosen.

The training had begun at once: gross anatomy, microscopy, and the endless lessons on chemistry. Prosthetics. Orthodonture. Microsutures. By the time they'd landed, little Rielle Fourbee was already a qualified corpsman at fifteen, doing better incisions than Dr Bexler. And now here she was, reading foot studies with a cum-filled wastebasket next to her knee.

"Hi!" Chonn, loud from the waiting room. "We've been expecting you! Have a seat." It was the gush in her voice, the swooping vowels, that put Rielle on alert: this was Erno. "Just give me a moment to make sure the room is clear." She heard the doctor's choppy footsteps, the swish of the curtain in the supply room, and then her grinning face was peering in at her apprentice. "He's here, Rielle!" she whispered.

"Yeah, I figured that." Rielle did not need to force the calm, even languid affect, the nonchalant rise to one eyebrow. "Once he starts, I'd suggest you send Janicka or Sergey around to the rest of the men, canceling their exams. I don't particularly need more sacks of sperm."

Bexler nodded. "This is going to end badly," she predicted, but she was smiling, her eyes aglow with excitement. "But not today. Good luck, Rielle."

"Thanks." Soon Rielle heard the bustling of Bexler and Erno filling the little supply area, Bexler's confident tones: We don't think this is anything serious. We just need you to do a good job aiming, Ern, straight into the sterisack. No, the odds of testicular morliosis are extremely low. What? No, there shouldn't be any further testing needed. Punctuated all the while by the rustle of the disposable sheet, the squirt of the sanitizer, the soft flapping of Erno's bare feet. Oh, hell. Just get naked; it's not like I haven't seen it before.

Rielle sighed and put down her publication. Podiatry wasn't all that interesting, anyhow, though on a planet where almost everyone walked almost everywhere, she knew she needed to brush up. But the itch between her legs and the nearness of her target were too much of a distraction. She closed her eyes against the yellow sunlight, feeling the fatigue from the restless night before as it melted away.

He'd be all set now, she knew. Three guys had come in that week to do their bogus frictive duty, and from watching the tapes afterward she knew they tended to get down to business quickly. Three minutes, fourteen seconds was the average time by which they'd gotten hard, and nobody had found any reason to figure Erno was an outlier, though in the past he'd evinced a longer plateau period. Three minutes... it didn't bear thinking about, once they finally did it.

But in any case, another few minutes and he'd be just about there. Rielle did the math and set her timer, debating about whether she should strip to her tanktop; the outer robe was fine, but she knew it obscured her ass. Not that he hadn't seen her naked, obviously, but still. She knew she looked best with the tight leggings covering her, so when the timer went off she left the robe pooled on the floor at her feet. He'd wonder, later, why she'd taken it off, but let him.

It wouldn't matter in a few days, anyway. He'd be impregnating her by then.

Quickly she composed herself, back straight, shoulders high, the air of quiet calm she'd been taught all through her apprenticeship. Grace, poise, competence: she strode confidently toward the curtain that separated her from Erno, emptying her mind, preparing in the surgeon's way to be surprised by what she encountered. She lifted her arm to sweep the curtain aside, resolutely ignoring the wet-flesh sound inside, the fast rhythmic snick-snick noise she knew she'd hear as she stepped through.

"Excuse me! Coming through!" The subterfuge called for her to come in and pick up a handful of clotters from the high shelves against the outside wall, stretching high to pull out the bin. The curtain whooshed aside and she walked straight in on a naked Erno Taconic, masturbating furiously, his teeth clenched and his eyes dull on the tabslate he'd hooked onto the armrest, where presumably there was some porn flickering on the screen. "Oh! I beg your pardon." She nodded politely, pretending not to notice the size of his cock. "I'll just be a sec. Don't mind me."