The Fathering Land

by Tripp Greyson

  "Thanks for coming, son," I said, and asked without preamble, "Would you recognize your mother if you met her?"

  Wide-eyed, he said, "Kaityline? Of course."

  "Have you ever seen her at Clearwater while you were there?"

  "Well, no," he said, and had the grace to blush. "But Father, I have always been rather... busy while I was visiting."

  All of us around the table laughed. We knew what he'd been busy at.

  "Any indication she lives at Clearwater?" I pressed.

  "Oh! Oh no, Father, she doesn't. No, she is a rather... independent pixie."

  "Good. Now that that's out of the way, how are your boys?"

  He grinned. "I have..." he looked up in the air as he figured, "Going on fifty now! Mostly cobbers, but of course there's little Ferrin—so cute!—and Daydel the fairy's Cottontop is probably mine, as I had her before Dion did, and of course there's Cygnus's bunch, and Dueña's too. Ferrin took his first step yesterday!"

  I glared at him. "Cygnus is a sylvie. And isn't Dueña a moggie?" We'd gotten a few more of the feline pookas along with a group of sylvies shortly after the Battle of Scarborough Faire.

  "Yes!" Apollo said, clapping his hands delightedly. "I do love catgirls! She gave me three fine sons. She called them Ap, Pol, and Lo! Isn't that precious?"

  I sighed and put my head in my hands. "You know, you Dixies can't boink every grown woman in town."

  "We can't? Well, I do wish you had said something before I got those three olbytla ladies with child, Father," he said regretfully. "And of course, Dion and Chaos will soon be moggie fathers, too."

  "Of course they will. Oy," I said, something I'd picked up from Old-Father Trent, as I wiped my face with my hands and looked up at him. "You boys need to leave the big-race ladies to us. Please?"

  "Yes, Father," he said obediently. "Shall I go pass the word now?"

  "No, no, not yet. I actually brought you in about something else. You remember how you and your brothers were... um, gestated."

  "Yes..." Apollo said. "So disgusting!"

  "I agree. Unfortunately, it's fast, you boys were born nearly adult and completely civilized and intelligent, and I'm thinking the same process will work not just for me, but for all us big-race fathers."

  "I see. And why does this matter?" Apollo asked with great interest.

  "We'll soon be going to war with the Waykans, the monsters who murdered and cannibalized Queen Isengrid's herd. The ones who ate your minotaur brothers after ripping them from their mothers' wombs."

  Apollo's eyes went wide, and he stopped breathing. I'm sure he'd heard the scuttlebutt but hadn't known it was true.

  I looked at him grimly and said, "Son, the Goddess has ordered us to exterminate them, and I quote, 'root and branch.' For that we need an army. She has further instructed us that this army will include at least 500 new Dixies. Birthed the old way."

  "Oh, dear. I think I may be ill," Apollo said faintly.

  "Join the club, kid. You were still a grub while your Mamas and I had to listen to that damn pig's agony. I don't like it any more than you do. But I need you and a couple of your brothers to go to the Clearwater pixies and diplomatically ask if they could provide eighty ladies to, um," I sighed deeply, "help us make more Dixies the old way. Tell them they'll have first fathering rights from the boys who result. One thing, though."

  "Yes, Father?"

  "None of those women can be your mother! She's not welcome here."

  "I understand, Father."

  "It has to be consensual on both sides."

  "I see."

  "We'll provide the... um, birthing hosts," I said heavily.

  "Oh. Dear."

  "Yes, deer, if we can catch some. And greeps and sheep and pigs, I guess. And we'll have to have people to keep watch for when the Dixies are ready to emerge, so we can help them like your Mamas and I helped you and your brothers."

  "Not it!" Apollo said immediately in a high-pitched voice, horror on his handsome little face.

  "...Um, what?"

  "Oh. I guess your Earth didn't have that," Apollo said. "It means I reverse-volunteer."

  "Reverse-volunteer?"

  "In the strongest possible terms, Father. I... I never told anyone, but I can still remember being a grub. I still remember what I did. Those scars on Icky's legs were from me. I want nothing to do with the birthing hosts."

  "You do know that most leaders would volunteer you just for reverse-volunteering, right?"

  "You're not most leaders, Father. I have faith in you." Apollo smiled earnestly.

  "Give it some thought," I told him. "Think about who would be bothered least by the agonized screams of the birthing hosts. And then talk to one of the engineers about designing and manufacturing earplugs."

  "Yes sir!" my eldest son said cheerfully.

  "You gentlemen have any questions?" I asked, looking at my fellow Fathers.

  Andruíl said curiously, a half-smile on his face, "How can we possibly impregnate pixies? They're so tiny! How would you even put it in?"

  I stared at him. "You mean you haven't visited the memmies or one of the other small races...?"

  "No, we've just gotten quite a few new faunlets and giants in town, and I've been helping Father Dree with Queen Greta's herd to the northeast."

  "Another mountain-climber," I muttered. "Okay, Genewín, I know you've visited the memegwesi before. Tell your brother how it works."

  Genewín began, "Well, brother, first they rub..."

  "Whisper it in his ear!" I shouted.

  Genewín looked offended. "My goodness, Father Tobias, for a man who has bred hundreds of women, you are most startlingly prudish! Even Papi is more open about sex than you, and he was a Catholic monk!"

  "I can't help how I was raised, brat. Now see to it."

  It was funny to watch Andy's face as Gen explained the rather embarrassing process to him. "No!" He gasped at one point, and a moment later, "But isn't that a sin?" Near the end, he asked, "Does it feel good?" and finally, he just said, "Okay, then."

  "Anyone else?" I asked, and five other hands went up in the room. "Really, Toméz? You really don't know? The boys I understand, but you're a grown man."

  "Well... I think I know. But I'm not sure."

  "If you think you know, you know, I assure you."

  "Oh my," he said, and looked at Genewín. "Son! You have done that?"

  "Many times!" he said, and laughed at the expression on the face of Toméz. "Come now, Papi, when the woman is so tiny, there are only so many ways to do it! I assure you, it does not go to waste! The ladies, they are so beautiful, and so willing, and so grateful—and after all, we are on a mission from God!"

  "Goddess help us," I muttered.

  ❖

  Just before lunch, I visited the workshop near Cobberville. The ladies Ganglee and Axionyu were busy cobbling together the air compressor with the help of several sylvie engineers and other assistants. So far, it was a collection of gopherwood pulleys, gears, and cogs, as well as a series of belts made from tightly-sewn layers of tough chupacabra leather. There were several sets of bellows borrowed from the glassworks, and the central tank was made from a large, flat-bottomed Fiberglas ovoid that, according to the stickers on it, once held a flammable gas called propano.

  There was a fitting on the top that was made of the right kind of luminium, luckily, but they were having a devil of a time carving a gopherwood fitting to glue into the ends of the hoses they were also having a devil of a time making. They thought perhaps that chupa leather could be used for the hoses, too, or perhaps they could weave the hoses somehow from other tough materials.

  Then there would have to be another fitting made to fit the Fiberglas air tanks. The force to compress the air was easy to come by: they had already put together a bicycle-type arrangement to be powered by a big-race individual, perhaps a faunlet or terran, and they were already talking about adapting it for the giants.

  It looked hideously complex, but it also looked
like it would work.

  After inspecting the compressor prototype, I wondered over to the glassworks, where cobber, terran, and olbytla glassworkers were struggling to make the damned spheres. I still hadn't figured out what to put in them, but I suspected my Fathers Trent would know. I thought the work would be easiest for the cobbers, but they had problems getting close enough to the furnaces to blow the spheres. They were tiny and didn't have the reach bigger people did; and though they used long pintles to handle the molten glass and blow the spheres, it took a gang of them to do it. The terrans were better off in terms of reach, but it was hard for them to blow such tiny bubbles. The olbytla seemed a happy medium and I figured they'd end up doing the best work.

  As I was preparing to leave, I noticed a wooden bucket full of glass balls in swirling blue and red colors. There appeared to be hundreds, if not thousands of them. I picked up a couple and examined them; they were clearly solid glass, but were round and smooth, and only slightly smaller than paintballs. They seemed only a bit heavier, too. "What are these?" I asked the glassblowers.

  They just looked at me, like I'd said something stupid, before an olbytla named Khalo replied, "Those are marbles."

  "As in, 'you've lost yours'?"

  "Uh, yeah."

  "Huh. I've always wondered what marbles were. What are they for?" I asked, examining them closely. They were kind of like pebbles — perfectly spherical pebbles.

  "They're toys. We make them for the kids. Or we did, until the cobber boys started slingin' 'em at people with their little catapults," Khalo said.

  "Oh. What are you supposed to do with them?"

  "You've never played marbles?" a big terran named Jim asked, sounding surprised.

  "Misha aren't big on manufactured toys, though I had some wooden blocks and a little wooden train when I was young." I tossed a marble into the air and caught it, tossed it and caught it. "Suppose a paint gun could shoot it like a paintball?"

  "Don't see why not," Jim said. "It would hurt like hell to get hit with one, maybe even break a bone, or kill someone if ya hit 'em in the head."

  "Jim, you're a genius," I said, and stuck a dozen in my pockets. "Remind me to double your salary."

  That startled a laugh out of him. "Ha! Twice zero is still zero, I remember that much from grade school, boss!"

  Meanwhile, a group of terrans, faunlets, and pooka had been learning to use the paint guns. Since some of the air tanks were still full, they had been shooting the hardened paint pellets at makeshift wooden targets. Puck was confident they could cause a nasty injury if they struck someone, though it probably wouldn't kill them.

  I had her dump the solidified paintballs out of her gun's reservoir, and dropped in the dozen marbles. "Try those," I told her.

  Thunk Thunk Thunk. She triggered off a burst and we watched the marbles punch three neat holes through the half-inch plyboard she was using as a target. Admittedly, the wood was over 25 new-years old, but the results were, to say the least, impressive; and her little militia set up a rousing cheer when they saw them.

  I smiled and told Puck, "They've got lots of these at the glass factory. Get those, have the glassmakers make more, and then go around and confiscate every single kid's marble you can find. Especially the cobbers'. I don't care if you make all the little green brats cry. Until we can work out more lethal glass spheres, these'll be lethal enough." I looked at the holes in the wood, then back at Pucky, who looked a bit awestruck. "Oh, and set up some kind of earthen backstop to catch them, would you? Might as well recover as many as we can after practice."

  I strolled back toward the Castle, thinking about what kind of nastiness we could fill our glass pellets with once we figured them out. I needed something fast-acting and incapacitating. After meeting with Serafina and her sister, Angelica, we'd decided cyanide was too slow, and nitric acid was too hard to make, so we needed an alternative—or else, someone who knew how to make industrial quantities of the acid. For that, I would need a professional chemist. I hoped Old-Father Trent was well, because I'd soon be visiting him, and not just for a social call, either.

  It was about time to go home to Hamiltown. And conquer it.

  First, though, we had to arrange to make some Dixies. And to my supreme annoyance, most of the Elves, with the exception of course of Genewín, were balking. While they had received quite a bit of knowledge from their Alfa mothers (who interestingly enough had also been quartermaster bastards in the other Earth's army), they'd also absorbed a lot of knowledge from their father, including the entirety of the Christian Bible. Because of that, they were horrified by the possibility that what the pixie ladies would be doing to them might cause them to commit "the sin of Onanism."

  I actually had to ask my wives what that was. When they told me, I realized that most of the teenage boys and unmarried men in Hamiltown, and probably the rest of the world, were damned to Hell already according to the Catholic way of thinking. Even me, I guess, due to what Kait had done, and what I had done to myself before I met S'linkitha, when I had no one to comfort but myself. What kind of society would torture their boys and unmarried men like that, especially when closing off all access to nubile females?

  I found it ironic that the Elves, who had no problem with living in sin with as many women as they could get their hands on, found this to be an issue. But in fact, the Onanism rubbish got so bad that I had to call in Little Magic, who arrived in his Elven form to deal with the problem.

  When I had the Elves file into the same conference room where we'd talked about it all before, they were goggle-eyed to discover a heavenly messenger sitting at the head of the table who looked just like them, except older, right down to the loincloth this time. They recognized him from before, and were horrified to realize that he was not happy with them. At all.

  "What's all this nonsense I've been hearing about Onanism?" he thundered as soon as they all sat down, glowing so bright and hot that I was afraid we might melt. I swear the Elves shrank until they were about ten inches tall, even Gen, looking like schoolboys caught doing something naughty behind the barn.

  Andy, to all our surprise, was brave enough to say, "Well, in the Book of Genesis, the Lord, He tells us–"

  Eos shouted as if enraged, "Aye! And Judah said unto Onan, Go in unto thy brother's wife, and marry her, and raise up seed to thy brother. And Onan knew that the seed should not be his; and it came to pass, when he went in unto his brother's wife, that he spilled it on the ground, lest that he should give seed to his brother. And the thing which he did displeased the LORD: wherefore he slew him also!"

  Eos looked around and spat, "That was a man refusing to service his wife, despite the Lord's order! That was not masturbation! It was a waste of a Divine gift!" My demigod son glared at the Elves, meeting the eyes of each, and then bellowed as vast white wings unfurled from his shoulders, "And who do you think you are, to quote Holy Scripture to ME, the Divine messenger of the Lord thy God?"

  Andruíl just said "Eep!" and I think he passed out right about then. I wasn't sure. I was watching Little Magic, impressed by the show.

  "Mind you, that order was laid upon that idiot Onan four thousand years ago, in the Elder World well before the Ruin. Can't you not use the tiny brains the Lord gave you to realize that the world has changed beyond measure since then? Don't you have the sense to understand that all is not as once it was?"

  Oh boy, was Little Magic pissed. He went on: "And did I not tell you that the Lord thy God has ordered that you do this very thing? So why on EARTH would you even think that the Lord would punish you for following HIS orders? Oy gevalt!"

  That last part he got from me, second-hand from Old-Father Trent.

  "Know this!" Eos continued, waxing brighter and fanning us with his wings. "The Lord has ordered you to impregnate pixies in order to birth more Dixies via animal hosts! This you shall do! And yes, even though the process may spill your seed, there is no other way due to the smallness of your pixie allies, who cannot accept your privy members
into their tiny bodies. And know that it will ALL be put to good use, for each of you shall spill seed enough to impregnate five pixies at once! Thus, each of you shall only spill your seed twice! Do you all understand me?"

  "We understand and obey, O Great and Powerful Eoz!" I said quickly, and I knew he caught the reference from the sour look he shot me. "The Lord's Will be done! So it is!"

  "So Mote It Be!" Eos proclaimed in a voice audible throughout the township, and vanished in a blaze of Glory.