Author : Michael Varian Daly

The musky odor hit Tanith the moment she stepped through the portal; man smell. It always got her queasy and excited, made her yoni tingle and moisten.

She marched with purpose down the wide debris strewn avenues, lined with derelict warehouses converted into rat warrens of cubicles called ‘apartment’ or ‘club’ depending upon their usage, the huge facades covered with brightly colored artwork, its techniques crude to sublime, and often violent and sexual in nature.

This was Semefour, a sector of the abandoned dirtside space facility of Bessport and original ghetto of The Men.

The Men were not actual males. True Men were extinct, outlawed for centuries, their heritage diffused and divided into the myriad Mandroids; Y-chromosome cyborgs, a vast genetically engineered servitor class that ranged from the ubiquitous simple minded AgroDroids, patiently tilling fields on a thousand worlds, through the slim graceful Harlequins, serving the personal needs of Sisters everywhere, to the brilliant star spanning Sliders, The Sisterhood’s living spaceships who merged with their pilots, Mind, Body and Soul.

No, The Men were really Sisters. They wore Bitch Rods all the time – detachable bioform phallus’s…big, thick ones, too. They took hormones to shrink breasts and grow hair, lots of hair. They lived The Man’s Way, a throwback cult of ‘masculinity’. They steeped themselves in intoxicants, wrote nihilistic poetry, had bare knuckle brawls, and sodomized each other. They were The Men.

For most, it was a phase. They would Live The Life for a while, then put their Bitch Rod back in its Fake Box and go live as a Solitary in the woods or the hills or the desert on some world for a Solannum or two until their minds and bodies settled.

But some Lived The Life as their Life with total commitment. Like Frank, who had been one of The Men for well over a century now. That is who Tanith had come to see.

Tanith was a Jane, a Sister who sought out The Men for pleasure. She couldn’t call Frank a ‘lover’. Sex among The Men was ritualized consensual rape.

She turned, went into a shadowed door, up narrow stairs. Frank was waiting for her, ‘his’ wiry black hair, beard, chest, legs, making her body vibrate with an atavistic thrill. Frank took her straight away, brutally, with a cruel smile that no Harlequin pleasure server would ever match.

Time passed too quickly.

They smoked and drank, coupled with fury and languor. Frank sang her songs. Two friends came over, got drunk, had a fist fight, then all three of them ‘raped’ her for hours.

On the afternoon of the third day, Tanith stumbled down the stairs, bruised, sore, and wholly sated. On her way out the door, Frank had smacked her on the ass. “Say hello to your husband,” ‘he’ laughed.

“My husband,” she thought smiling. Her darling Maddox, thirty six thousand tons of Slider floating serenely in orbit. She knew he would relish every single detail.