Chapter 3

“So, do you want to co-sponsor with me?” Megan approached me now that she had her two, Zhang Yishan and Liza Burbage.

“Absolutely! I can see some real ... perks in that, can’t you, ladies?” I asked my sisters especially, given their friendship with Megan.

“Probably no need for other co-sponsors, of course, though swaps and friendships might still arise,” Megan winked at me as she admired my conks in the nude.

“Well, looks like more have finished their selections. What are the odds, by the way, that we’d have a nine and two eights among us? A nine, two eights, six sevens, including me, and another half a dozen six pluses. The nine being Balwinder Singh, I believe,” I pointed to Dr. Balwinder Singh, quite conspicuous in his beard and turban, a famous brain surgeon who lived in Arizona for decades now.

The dude must be pushing seventy, in fact. Now he would start over, probably with a high post in Confederacy Medical, certainly the most prominent Sikh I ever knew. Alas for him, his wife couldn’t tag along due to her age, but at least she would get to retire with the severance package that the Confederacy gave her. She would also likely be long dead when the Swarm finally arrived. By all appearances, the man took mostly couples, but he made an exception for two nerdy, demure female college interns. Med school all the way, that was clear enough.

The two eights proved to be Peter Jordan and Duncan Macmillan, of which the former guy just happened to be the Canadian vice-consul in Phoenix and the latter an old Army buddy of Dad’s. Yeah, it was a given that Mr. Jordan would get a desk job, but not so much with Mr. Macmillan. Duncan Macmillan had been a Sergeant Major, after all, one who served with distinction in Yemen, Afghanistan, Bosnia, Kosovo, Panama, Somalia, Iraq, and Kuwait. Jordan would probably get to be a colonial governor or something.

Jordan seemed to focus on Native Americans, taking two White Mountain Apache women, one San Carlos Apache man, one Pima lady, one Hopi fellow, and one Navajo cutie. Whatever his reasons, I couldn’t argue with them. I kinda dug the idea of them getting the last laugh at the white man’s expense by carrying on their ways to other worlds. Frankly, if one wanted to collect a lot of American Indians, Arizona wasn’t a bad place to find them.

Macmillan singled out certain families, making fathers, daughters, mothers, sons, and siblings sixty-nine each other as a preliminary test. Any who showed too little enthusiasm for incest were rejected out of hand in spite of protests. He ended up with three different pairs, one of them mother-son, one father-daughter, and one mother-daughter. It was a very solid, practical way to weed out the chaff, that was for sure. Like Jordan, though he also scanned the reader to know what he would get and be forewarned.

I wasn’t the only seven not to take a male conk, however. The lower down the scale one got, the less motivation there was to pick a male concubine, unless one was a lady sponsor, of course. Half of the sevens went all-female like me, and of the other half, two out of three were female sponsors. Only one male seven, Andrew Kemp, took a male conk with him, and by all accounts, he had co-sponsored with his twin sister Andrea, anyway. She was also a seven, at 7.4 one decimal higher than him (7.3).

The other female sponsor who reached seven, Emily Blackwell, claimed two men and two women, both of them couples, in fact. Andrea had one lucky male and three lovely females, but that was likely part of her deal with Andrew. If he took on a guy, she would limit her own males to just one. That was a sensible compromise, after all, if your co-sponsor was so agreeable.

As for the other two male sevens, Allan Peterson and Terrence Richards both shared my own reluctance to put another cock in the chicken coop. The hens would just have to make do with sharing us ... and maybe hoping that we’d lend them out now and then. I was particularly loath to subject my Nina to another man’s touch so soon when she was obviously lukewarm at best about the idea. Terrence chose four of his children’s teachers that he liked best from PTA meetings. Two grade school teachers, one junior high, and one high school, in fact.