Chapter 15

“It is better to offer no excuse than a bad one.”
― George Washington

“Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions.”
― Albert Einstein

“If everybody minded their own business, the world would go around a great deal faster than it does.”
― Lewis Caroll, Alice in Wonderland

Three months later...
The Leland Residence
Lakewood Village, TX (near Dallas-Fort Worth)

“Do you, Dan, take these women, Freydís and Sía, to be your lawfully wedded wives, to have and to hold from this day forward, to love, cherish, and protect, for better or for worse, for rich or for poor, in sickness and in health, until death do you part?” Trudy, now an ordained minister with one of those interfaith organizations, asked Dan.

The Magistrate smiled as he exchanged vows with his chosen brides from Iceland. Freydís and Sía, of course, were very pleased to marry the even more desirable Dan Leland, now that he was the Magistrate. Not everyone knew this. The names of the Magistrates weren’t known to the general public as of yet, but who cared? He had the power, locally speaking, and he had a substantial salary, far more than he made selling weed. It was even more of a contrast to his old high school teacher’s salary, but sometimes it paid to have the right connections.

As for Dan, he was resolved to prove that he deserved to hold his new office, as he showed by making it much easier for ordained clergy from a variety of churches to perform weddings without too much scrutiny. It wasn’t the State’s business what dogmas a sect taught or didn’t teach, after all. He wore at least semi-formal clothing for once, as this was a combination wedding. David, Sasha, Trudy, Jeremy, Alycen, Les, Joanna, and Brandy would all tie the knot later, no doubt of that. For that matter, Duane was set to marry his Icelandic brides and be a co-husband to him that same evening.

“I do,” he simply answered with a saucy grin on his face.

“Do you, Freydís and Sía, take this man, Dan, to be your lawfully wedded husband, to have and to hold from this day forward, to love, honor, and obey, for better or for worse, for rich or for poor, in sickness and in health, until death do you part?” Trudy turned to the cousins.

“I do!” they said in unison, even as they knew what would soon follow.

“Then, by the power vested in me by my church and by the Magistrate, I now pronounce you man and wives. You may kiss your brides,” Trudy announced the nuptials, beaming with pride at this particular rite.

Dan enthusiastically kissed both ladies, and signed the marriage license with them, after which they posed for photographs as the happy throuple. They also posed with Duane, as he was intimate with all of them by now. They knew that the ceremonies were far from done, especially Trudy, who functioned as mistress of ceremonies for now. He gladly and proudly had his hands on their buttocks, rubbing them through their clothes.

They were also quite pleased that they were pregnant, and both babies were likely to be Dan’s. That was as it should be. He was still fertile, unlike an unfortunately growing number of men who were sterile these days. They were luckier than others, of course, though perhaps this was Nature’s way of bleaching the genepool a bit.

“Now, time for my ladies to wed each other,” Dan told Truly, who beamed at such a prospect.

“Ready or not, cousin, here we come!” Freydís punned as she teased Sía, the Icelandic girls being both quite eager to marry each other.

“Do you, Freydís, take this woman, Sia, to be your lawfully wedded wife, to have and to hold from this day forward, to love, cherish, and protect, for better or for worse, for rich or for poor, in sickness and in health, until death do you part?” Trudy inquired of Freydis now.

“I do,” Freydis glowed as she swore to be with her cousin for life.

“Do you, Sia, take this woman, Freydis, to be your lawfully wedded wife, to have and to hold from this day forward, to love, cherish, and protect, for better or for worse, for rich or for poor, in sickness and in health, until death do you part?” Trudy probed Sia next.

“I do,” Sia beamed for her part, quite thrilled to be at last able to do this.

“Then, by the power vested in me by my church and by the Magistrate, I now pronounce you woman and wife. You may each kiss your bride,” Trudy adapted the pronouncement to fit a Sapphic union in this case.

There was the same kind of fanfare, both ladies making out in front of everyone and posing happily for the cameras. They insisted that Dan be present with them, of course, as well as Duane, not wishing to exclude him. He was nervous, if still exultant, at his inclusion in this new kind of marriage, the stuff of seriously graphic fantasies in his past. People liked to speak of the effects of porn, but like many young fellows, porn could often be too tame to keep up with his own raunchfest of an imagination. It was a veritable Sodom and Gomorrah inside his own head.

“Now time for Duane to take these ladies to wife,” Trudy presented the opportunity to the pimply adolescent, who admittedly was still a bit stunned at times at his good fortune.

His mother looked on with a wide mix of emotions, still unable to comprehend that her son was engaged to two newlywed women and intimate with a guy. He wasn’t just any guy, either. He was the local Magistrate, and he looked like a serious, manly motherfucker to boot. “Dan the Man” was an expression that came to mind as Lauren Campari sat there with her daughter, Carly, Duane’s fourteen-year old little sister. Duane was seventeen now himself, and he had to admit to himself that Carly was kinda cute these days. Then again, so was his mother.

“Wait, can we ... join them?” Lauren blurted without realizing what she just said for a second.

When Truly, Duane, Dan, Freydis, and Sia all looked at them, Lauren blushed as much as her fine, Mediterranean tan allowed. She was the granddaughter of immigrants from Treviso in Lombardy, after all. Carly blushed as well, but licked her lips at even the notion of sharing her elder brother’s bed, let alone big, beefy Dan. Both of them were also quite attracted to the Icelandic ladies, even if they envied them a bit. It would be great to keep the family unit together, well after Duane quite legally seceded from his mother’s house.

“You wish to ... marry Duane ... and who else?” Trudy asked for clarification, being a career trial lawyer and jurist.

“Yes ... I wish to marry Duane ... and Dan ... and the ladies ... and ... Carly,” Lauren confessed this part with considerable embarrassment about her physical attraction to her own daughter.

“The feeling is mutual, Mom. I’ve seen your pussy and ass more than once, not to mention your tits. I would love to kiss those sweet lips of yours, too,” Duane waxed a bit more eloquent now.

“What ... what Duane said,” Carly felt highly embarrassed, but she knew that it was true.

Her mother was a helluva cougar, after all. Carly knew it. Duane knew it. Dan knew it. The ladies clearly knew it, judging by the way that they appraised Lauren in a very candid fashion. Her dance card would be filled easily among both sexes. Dan reached out with his right hand extended and whispered, “don’t forget that it’s my place and your vows to me shall naturally include your obedience.”

Lauren damn near creamed her panties right then and there as the Magistrate of this part of Texas said those words to her. Duane took his vows to Freydis and Sia, after which Dan did the same to Duane, she knew what was next. Sure enough, she stood up and married Dan as well as her own son ... and so did her daughter. She knew that her fate was sealed ... and she was weak in the knees as she swore to “love, honor, and obey” Dan as well as Duane. When Carly swore to obey everyone else, including her, she was even wetter, especially as she thought of parting her daughter’s cheeks to lick her booty.

“So, that part is done now. Dan, Freydis, Sia, Duane, Lauren, and Carly, you are now a six-way marriage. Now, of course, it’s time to unite me, Sasha, David, Alycen, Jeremy, Joanna, Les, and Brandy in matrimony as we move in with Dan and company. This is going to be a very crowded house, particularly once all of these pregnant ladies give birth,” Trudy alluded to the fact that Freydis, Sia, Sasha, Alycen, Joanna, and Brandy had conceived.

Of course, Alycen and Brandy were a bit further along, especially the former, and it was pretty obvious by now. There was a major surprise as to paternity by this point, particularly when it turned out that Jeremy was sterile. Who else could have put that bun in Alycen’s oven, anyway? An amnio check had confirmed that David Leland was, in fact, the father, due mainly to the one instance that Alycen had the flu and he had ... comforted her in spite of his frustration with her.

One thing led to another, and David got an increasingly rare dose of loving from his wife. He also got the flu himself, but that was hardly a shock. The flu had also made the Pill quite useless and led to her being pregnant sooner than they thought. Les was fertile enough, though, and his seed did the trick. They hadn’t checked Duane’s fertility, and at this early stage, that was hardly a shock. Even so, statistically speaking, with the climbing numbers of infertile men out there, even impotent ones, it was likely that quite a few of their partners had slow or dead swimmers.

“They are starting to call it the ‘Seed Slayer,’ in case you wondered. Whatever it is, it’s literally killing previously viable sperm. We don’t have any answers as to its cause. In the more extreme, advanced cases, it’s causing impotence, of course. It’s another nail in the coffin lid for the whole monogamy trap. More and more couples are swapping with other couples, just in case, plenty of husbands are letting their wives be bred by other men, and a variety of other arrangements are being made, including more than a few like this. Throuples, quads, quids, etc. Couples are so passe now, at least in the exclusive sense of the word,” Dan observed during their reception as he drank a bit of the rum and Coke to celebrate his union with these ladies.

“It’s probably a natural, Darwinian process, just a guess in my book, anyway. It’s just how it is. Evolution works the way that it does for a reason. It might be a necessary phase in order to achieve a punctuated equilibrium and shift rapidly out of the slower phases of the cycle or process or whatever. Many modern biologists believe that not only are there slower periods, but faster ones where massive evolutionary leaps forward occur. They are generally prompted by crises or calamities of some kind and they radically transform some species for the better,” Duane contemplated, making the Icelandic ladies very proud that he was one of their two husbands, even if he wasn’t of Dan Leland’s caliber.

“Or in my case, it could have been the mumps. I had those when I was a kid,” Jeremy freely confessed, “though I didn’t put two and two together about that issue. I hadn’t really thought much about it until now.”

“Well, for the record, I was prepared to accept the baby once Alycen and I reconciled, as you know. It just wasn’t meant to be. I do feel some grief on your behalf for your ... situation,” David reassured Jeremy, who shrugged and poured himself a shot of whiskey sour.

“It is what it is, man. I’m good. I’m Uncle Jeremy,” the butcher chuckled while enjoying the way that Trudy’s bottom felt on his lap.

The guests were carefully chosen for the same reason that Sasha had ultimately decided upon a secular or interfaith wedding. Indeed, so did the rest of them. The last thing that any of them wanted was a bunch of preachy, sanctimonious folks. They needed that kind of thing like a hole in the head. Of course, a lot of the megachurch pastors had been jailed of late, which they had painted as “religious persecution,” but such was their reputation that most people weren’t fooled. Then again, there was plenty to anger the puritanical left as well as the right, and a lot of folks were still steamed that polygamy and incest had been legalized.

It was just that the State no longer gave a crap what the self-righteous whiners and zealots said. In this particular area, the State was largely embodied in the Magistrate, namely Dan Leland, and he certainly didn’t care what people thought. It was handy that the Magistrate’s name and face weren’t recognizable yet, and he could hear what people said about the laws and policies of the regime. There were still plenty of complaints, but since most of the major officers of the civil government were anonymous, they had difficulty putting a face to their rage.

Of course, not surprisingly, there were plenty of other folks who welcomed the changes, as witnessed by the baristas the other day who accepted his offer of a sip from his flask. It was just a little bit of his personal favorite mix, Evan Williams with Canada Dry Ginger Ale, though he was careful not to drive after drinking any of it. He was at a cafe in easy walking distance of his new place, that was all, and the Icelandic cuties were off doing something. He didn’t bother tracking them. If there was any kind of issue, he had the entire State apparatus in his area at his fingertips, after all. He was the Magistrate, the Boss. He wasn’t the jealous type, anyway. He just didn’t like hypocrisy.

He still remembered how much they enjoyed the changes in HR rules, especially as they welcomed the slaps to their buttocks through their short shorts. They grinned and laughed as they even yanked each other’s shorts down to show him their panties. They didn’t have any clue that this was the Magistrate as they served him his iced coffees, two of them, in fact, using their cleavage as cup holders, too. It hadn’t stopped them from serving the obviously rich and powerful client in such a brazenly suggestive manner. It was a frank admission of the reality of such issues: women and girls only selectively apply certain boundaries or demand “respect.” Dan thought of that word in air quotes, because it was used so thoughtlessly by most ladies as to be nothing but a euphemism or platitude.

Yeah, Dan thought as he allowed Sasha to climb on his lap and began fucking his new sister-in-law like that, it was liberating to be done with feminist propaganda. Thankfully, the new regime was completely unimpressed by any of the idiotic and inane feminist arguments and all of their ludicrous buzzwords or rhetoric. Given the axe that by now fell on the various women’s studies and other such courses at various universities, streamlining higher education at last, the remaining feminist stronghold of academia would have to tread very carefully. It was on the very thinnest of ice.

It was also evident that David hated the feminists even more than Dan, but then he had good cause. That was one political movement that had a remarkable talent for losing friends and alienating people. They had done that in spades prior to the Mayhem, and while many of them were still delusional enough to expect others to listen to their claptrap, most people were just over it. Like the soft on crime tendencies of the recent past, feminism had been so totally discredited that it likely wouldn’t recover, at least not in his lifetime. It was as toxic as Fascism, Nazism, or Communism these days.

Dan chuckled as he fucked Sasha right next to David, who was now inside Lauren. It was indeed a great breakthrough and a sign of the right kind of inner circle that they had a wedding reception where they could fuck each other’s brides and no one batted an eye. It wasn’t cheating, after all. It was swinging and swapping instead. David had tried monogamy and found it lacking. Dan wasn’t so easily fooled. He even made mincemeat recently of a Catholic lady who promoted “old-fashioned marriage” and “family values” in a casual chat at the same cafe days before that very first incident. No, she didn’t know that he was the Magistrate, either.

That reminded him to check up on Marlena ... who knew how she fared these days. He wasn’t cold toward her, but she was toward both Dave and he, mostly because they didn’t share her views. If only she could get over it. Others certainly did. She should grow up and learn from their example. It was indeed a brave new world, after all.