Root and Branch

by Tripp Greyson

  The Centis old enough to have breasts, of course, generated another type of appreciation, especially since, as I've pointed out before, their female hind-parts are not only exposed (what kind of pants could they even wear?), but also a bright, eye-catching pink. The teen Centis found the attention of the Dixies both amusing and gratifying. Not that the Dixies were ever going to be able to give them sons; they were willing to try (they were always willing to try anything… don't ask), but Apollo had passed the word when I told him, rather despairingly, to leave the larger races for us larger fathers.

  Later, that had led to some spirited negotiation regarding the Olbyts, Hob Pyskeen, and the Moggies — the smallest of the Pookas — since they were kind of in the middle size-wise, but we had finally worked it out to our satisfaction. That happened when I told them that if they didn't back off, I'd join Genewín the next time he visited the Memegwesi.

  (The other Elves tended to stick with the larger races, mostly because they still had some idiotic concerns about Onanism. Especially after they learned their Lord God was really their Lady Goddess. But that kept the peace, so I left it alone.)

  Nor were the teenage Terran boys immune to the charms of the Centi girls. Having known Coulter for so long, and having admired her from afar, the Centaurines drew them like magnets. Some of the interested boys were younger than my little brother Calvin, who had almost reached his majority at half past 21, which Dad insisted on calling 16 since he preferred the old-year calendar. In fact, I had to run Calvin off a few times when he visited, considering he already had three or four Terran girlfriends anyway.

  Thank goodness my Pooka sons were still too young to see the Centaurines as anything more than especially cool playmates! The oldest of my Sylvies were less than a year old, which made him younger than seven in Pooka years.

  Incidentally, while the Hero Dixies knew that they were supposed to leave the large race girls alone, the Newdies didn't at first, so we had to drill that into their thick little skulls. Literally: it was part of their military training after they caused more than a few fights with the bigger boys. Plus, I had to ride herd on and punish several of the older Terran boys, because they were not averse to either anterior or posterior romps with the Centaurines. Luckily, we never let them get away with both required matings, which would have ensured pregnancy.

  It goes without saying that those same boys were hound-dogging the Taura and Giant girls when they came around. I also had to ban them from visiting the Faunlets — and vice versa. An affection for mountain climbing seems to come naturally to teenage boys. The always-on Faunlets actually encouraged it, hence the ban on both sides, so I couldn't blame them for doing what I would have done, too, had I been their age. And which I did regularly anyway.

  The truth is, the teen Centaurines wouldn't have minded full-on affairs with the Terran boys — Centaurs are as lusty as any other human race — but those dalliances would have resulted in girl children. The Centaurs were going to need some females for their later generations, but right now they really needed boy babies, so they could build up their own populations without Terran help.

  The Elves were careful to keep their distance and never said a word, but I figured they would have the older Centis pregnant with boys the instant their father and I allowed it.

  Chapter 6

  I spent the next few weeks dealing with Pixies in one way or another. Not the Dixies and Imps, for once, but their female equivalents who lived in Clearwater Hive, a half-day down the Rio Serendip, and the Highglade and Soaringoak hives on the fringes of the Great Trinidad Forest to the north. My goal was to bring them into the Commonwealth; my bribe was, unsurprisingly, boy children for all, as well as a chance to go to war with someone besides each other. After some spirited wrangling between our ambassadors (a pair of Olbytla and a Cobber) and their leaders (three councils of fierce, ornery women), we finally met.

  I found myself seated on the ground under the deep shade of the Forest on the outskirts of Highglade, which was more or less equidistant to Icarus and the other Pixie communities. Nine cranky female Pixies sat on a dais before me, bringing us more or less eye to eye. Most were dressed in a way I would have once called scandalously, in little more than brief skirts; and three, the ladies from Clearwater, had papoose slings over their shoulders, carrying tiny, drowsy babies. Those were the crankiest ones.

  "Why didn't you tell us havin' babies this new way comes with so many friggin' strings!" cried Beryl, a little redhead who was the chief representative of Clearwater. "Mornin' sickness! Backaches for a year! Bein' the size of a friggin' whale! Hardly bein' able to fly! Then, after he's born, all this crapping and pissing and lettin' him suck my tits! By the time Icky grows out of it, they'll be hangin' to my waist!"

  She made an angry gesture at breasts that seemed just fine to me.

  "That's the way all the other races do it," I told her. "It's pretty much normal to them. In a few years, I suspect it'll be normal to you."

  "The old way's a lot easier," groused a girl with multicolored hair named Giselle, also from Clearwater. "And fun. Not as fun as boinking, but still pretty fun. And there wasn't all this damn paperwork, keepin' track of the baby daddies and such."

  "You just like the jizz, Gis," another Pixie named Gypsy joked. She was from Highglade, and her hair was redder than Beryl's.

  "You ain't had to carry a kid in your belly a full year yet, Gyp!" Giselle cried. "It ain't no friggin' picnic!"

  "But it's the only way to get the boy babies you need," I said reasonably. "You Pixies may not die out, with the old way of having babies and all, but you're not insects, and you deserve to have your own men instead of basically just cloning yourself every generation. You need some variation in your population. There must be a limit to the efficacy of the old way."

  "What the hell's 'Elf-fricassee' mean?" dark-skinned Jermaine of Soaringoak demanded loudly. "It sounds like how you'd cook one a them pointy-eared Alf bitches!" That was followed by a full round of raspberries from all the ladies.

  You might have noticed that I use the term "ladies" in the polite sense, because Pixies are about as far from true ladies as one can get. Each and every one of them was either a former military NCO transformed into Tinkerbell cuteness during the Step Through between their world and ours, or the descendent of one such, with all that ancestor's memories. NCOs are not known for their sweetness and light.

  I explained, "Sorry about that. I was raised in an old-fashioned household, and 'efficacy' is an old-fashioned word. It just means how well something works. We don't know how long the old way will keep producing functioning Pixies. One day it might stop working, or you may get an increasing number of defective babies or ones that can't make it to adulthood.

  "You've already got your girl babies acting like complete savages for about six months before they settle down and join a hive. You usually can't even be sure which girl-child is yours most of the time, correct?"

  They agreed, sounding aggrieved. Pixies put up a good front, but they have hard lives. Under the old way, few survived to full sentience, and then half of those didn't survive to adulthood. That's one of the downsides of "fire-and-forget" reproduction. That said, they tended to be one of the more numerous of the new races, because their old way of reproduction normally yields up to ten Pixies at a time. Whenever certain Goddesses don't interfere.

  If I haven't made it clear, before my Dixie sons came along, Pixies reproduced in the same way many wasps do. After fertilization by a Terran male, they injected their eggs into a large animal… whereupon the larvae hatched out and ate the host alive, from the inside out. It was a horrible, intensely painful process that only ended when the Pixies had run out of food inside the host and had polished off their younger sisters, before their eating fangs fell out and they escaped the host.

  As bad as all that was, some Pixies believed their grubs needed a sentient host to become sentient themselves, which meant they used large-race humans. That was one of the things I was trying to
end with this meeting. If I didn't end it soon, I was going to have to issue a proclamation banning it, and then I've probably have a war with the Pixies on my hands. Thank goodness for all the Newdies; with them around, I ought to be able to offer boy babies to all the Pixies who wanted them.

  They easily agreed to the sentient hosts ban, saying they didn't use them anyway.

  I sincerely hoped I didn't have to make more Newdies the old way, but I suspected I might have to in time. Besides the upcoming Wayko campaign, there was the war with the Tejarkán Empire, when it inevitably came… though perhaps instead of more Dixies, I could tap the Pixies instead, assuming they became members of the Commonwealth. I still had several hives to find and convert between here and Hamiltown, our outpost to the east.

  Between our negotiation sessions, the leaders of Highglade Hive took me and my scribes, Tripp Greyson and his assistant Valencia, on a tour of their community. It wasn't what I expected when I thought of the term "hive." It was, in fact, a tidy little self-policing community, a little town of 300 small women mostly composed of little log houses built on the ground and in the larger trees, few larger than five feet on a side. A few were carved out of tree-stumps, and to my surprise, there were neat ranks of multistory tenements similar to the structures in Cobbertown, but better built. Maybe we could negotiate with them to build homes for the other small races elsewhere in the Commonwealth, because there was always a need for new small-race homes, especially for the Cobbers, who reproduced and matured quickly.

  We'd started with 13 Cobber ladies less than a year before, and now there were close to two hundred cobbers, almost all of them their sons. I suspected we'd have a population explosion among all the small races soon, as those who lived in the Commonwealth (especially Icarus Township) no longer had to worry about predation from raptors, foxes, wolves, jaguar, puma, and chupacabra. Nor did they war among themselves; I didn't allow it.

  The Pixies of Highglade Hive were all adult, though no doubt some were just barely come into sentience. There were no babies, of course, because the Commonwealth had yet to hammer out an agreement with them, and they hadn't yet enjoyed the attention of my Hero Dixies. Until the first wave of male Pixies matured enough to impregnate the ladies the traditional way — and we suspected that would be at least 21 new-years, if not longer — their only babies would be boys provided by the Dixies.

  Given that those children took a full year of nine months to gestate, as with Terran women, it was reasonable to assume it would take the boys a similar amount of time to mature, and that from then on, Pixie reproduction would be standard. Hopefully the Cobbers, whose gestation period was six weeks and who matured fully within a year, wouldn't overrun the entire Commonwealth in the meantime. Though even if they did, they'd be too busy having meetings and organizing how they would organize things to take over.

  (Still immune from prosecution, ladies.)

  I was taking in the little Pixie town, wide-eyed with wonder and with a mindful of plans, when I heard the buzz of hydrostatic wings and felt a pair of tiny feet alight on my right shoulder. I was about to turn to look when a half-familiar voice in my ear made me freeze. "Hello, boymaker. Looks like my get have changed the world, eh?"

  I almost landed on a Pixie house when I jumped, and was turning to face my assailant, unconsciously rubbing an old scar on my hand, when Gypsy yelled, "Mad Kait! Whaddaya think yer doin'!"

  I managed to put my foot down on the mossy lawn of the Pixie house instead of the roof, thank goodness, when I whirled to see Kaityline, the Pixie who had basically raped me in my sleep just after my Succubi captured me. I'd infuriated by calling her a Fairy, not knowing better; and instead of working out a trade for my seed, she just took it several nights later.

  Shortly afterward, we'd found a trussed-up pig being eaten alive by the grubs that, in time, emerged to become the first nine Hero Dixies — my first sons and the men who had indeed changed the world.

  Kaityline, who had also stabbed me in the hand with a nail file when I called her a Fairy, was not my favorite Pixie. Currently, the nail file was in its scabbard as the devastatingly beautiful blonde winged woman buzzed about at head-height, grinning like she was insane. "You!" I huffed angrily.

  "Me!" she agreed cheerfully, and sang. "I gave you Hero Dixies, hurray, hurray!"

  "No! You just laid eggs in a pig! My wives and I did all the rest!"

  "Yeah, yeah, whatever. I made 'em and I gave 'em memories, and I hear they were born with actual manners and all. Especially that little ponce Apollo. If he didn't already have, like, 90 kids, I'd think he was a little light in the loafers, know what I mean?"

  "And what would be wrong with that?" I demanded, forgetting that the U.S.A. worldline that had merged with ours had been much less tolerant in terms of sexual orientation.

  Mad Kait — the name fit her — just gave me a bitter look.

  "Oh, I get it," I said slowly, mockingly. "You were one of the original NCOs, weren't you? One of those manly men before Step Through. A sexist, bigoted Neanderthal who thought women and gays were inferior. How ironic that you became a woman — and now you have to have sex with men to reproduce!" I laughed, delighted. "You like that? How's that working out for you?"

  "I do okay, ya fucker," she replied, scowling, and out came that nail file from its scabbard.

  Gypsy and her sister, Traveler, got between me and the mother of my children. "Oy, Kait! Back that ass up! No fightin' in town or we'll kick ya out again!"

  Knowing my rapist was a member of the Highglade Hive almost killed that deal dead in the water, but I restrained myself, knowing I needed these Pixies to become a part of the Commonwealth. I thought about making part of the deal that they had to kick Kaityline out permanently, but that would start us out on a sour note, and I figured it would be more than a little high-handed. After all, I wasn't completely innocent, even though I thought I was having a wet dream at the time, and she had gifted us with the original Hero Dixies, without whom there might be no Commonwealth. Hell, Icarus had died for it.

  After they'd hustled Mad Kait off, Gypsy turned to me and said, "Is it true that psycho's the mother of the original Hero Dixies?" she asked.

  "Yes, but it's not like I had any choice," I told her. "She kind of snuck up on me in the night. I thought it was a dream until the next day."

  The little redhead shook her head. "I've heard the First Clutch was a real handful," she says. "Maybe that explains it, her being the mother. Good thing they got your genes to temper her influence."

  I sighed deeply. "Oh, I don't know. So far we have over a thousand Dixies made the old way, and they all seem to be little hellions. And I say that when 166 are my own flesh and blood."

  She looked at me sidelong. "We pixies aren't known for our temperance and self-control," she said. "We'll see how the new babies will turn out."

  I perked up. "Does that mean you'll join the Commonwealth?"

  She smirked. "Loan us men our size to boink for the first time in 25 years, and we'd move the moon for ya!"

  "Good to know. You don't have a problem joining the army marching on Wayko?"

  "I've seen those Dawn blades the boys carry. I want some. And I want to fight. You'd be surprised at some of the tactics we've come up with the handle the biggies."

  "Knowing my boys, I'll bet. Wait until they introduce you to bricksies and kicksies." I bowed to her, as her friends of Highglade and Soaringoak joined us, eager to learn what was going on.

  We went back to our meeting spot and talked for quite a while that day, working out the details of their assimilation into the Commonwealth and all the things they wanted in return, especially Dixie babies. I discussed the wisdom of not having all the women pregnant at once, and we set up schedules for their visits by the Hero Dixies, the Newdies, and, yes, the Imps, because they were "so cute!" as Giselle squealed. We also added in provisions for them to help us make more Newdies — though Goddess knew I didn't want to invoke that clause unless I really had to.

 
; The only other provisions I added were that any sexual relations with our Dixies had to be consensual. And that Mad Kait wasn't allowed within a hundred feet of me when I visited Highglade.

  Chapter 7

  Ladies, ladies everywhere, and ever a drop to drink. The Elves and Dixies thought they were in paradise, especially the ones — and there are always a few — who found pregnant ladies especially attractive… or "hawt," to use the Dixie term.

  Frankly, I have never understood how sexual attractiveness equates with a particular temperature, as Undine and her sister kappas have low body temperatures but are still extremely sexy. As is the one Sad Girl in Snow who makes her home in Icarus. (Yes, that's an actual race — blame it on the Wold's sick sense of humor.)

  The pregnant ladies kept the boys busy when their pregnancy hormones kicked in. Hurray for youthful stamina! The boys went to bed (rarely alone) in utopia, and they woke up in utopia, as far as they were concerned. But I knew better. There's no such thing as paradise short of Heaven, and the Goddess tells me there's not one there, either. The Deities have their own society, surprisingly similar to ours — or perhaps not so surprisingly, since our Deities Ascended from billions of individuals very like us. At least, the many that she calls "humanish" do; it seems there are others. Even cockroach Deities.