Chapter 1

"Seven point eight!" Chuck Oberndorfer yipped as he skipped toward his father's car, "Yippee!"

"Well, get in and stifle it at bit!" his father retorted, grinning. "You don't want to get shot at, and we have a limited amount of time for your family birthday celebration -- we're going to Maude's tonight!"

"Maude's! Mom will SHIT!" Chuck erupted -- then covered his mouth.

Gary Oberndorfer chuckled. "Earlier this week maybe, but not now -- she knows." He pulled away from the curb and turned the car for home and the family portion of his son's coming of age celebration.

Chuck's birthday was Thursday; Sherry Oberndorfer got HER surprise on the previous Monday. After a quiet dinner (without the children) Gary had driven Sherry to a huge old Victorian home on the edge of town. "Why are we here?" she asked.

"I thought we should do something educational as well as entertaining," Gary replied. "Just hold your questions -- they're better answered by the staff." After parking, he led Sherry to the house, where they were greeted by a fortyish woman and led to a table in a large ballroom -- one of several arranged in a semicircle around a large podium. After some drinks were served, the lights dimmed and a forty-something looking woman ascended the raised dais.

"Good evening, Ladies and Gentlemen, and welcome to Maude's. I'm your hostess, Maude Carlson."

Sherry gasped and turned to Gary, "What... ?"

"Wait," Gary shushed her.

"I see some looks of surprise as I look around the room," Maude declaimed. "No doubt that's for good reason. God knows what those of you who are surprised must think you're in for -- so I'll dispel your fears at the outset. This is an educational seminar -- a presentation, if you will. There will be none of the hijinks some of you appear to expect to occur in this place. In fact tonight's presentation is specifically designed to provide you with a clear understanding of what REALLY DOES go on here, rather than the rumors and disinformation that are epidemic surrounding it."

Maude looked around and smiled gently. "There has been a LOT of confusion - wild charges, disinformation, and public uproar - since I opened this establishment a few months back. I supposed that the most prevalent rumor is that this establishment is a house of prostitution. While I can understand how this misunderstanding may have occurred, let me be clear - this is an educational institution!"

This statement caused a bit of an uproar; Maude put her hands out to quiet the crowd. "Please, please! Allow me to continue and I will prove my case!" She waved her hand and a projection appeared behind her - charts and statistical data. "American youth is significantly unprepared for the responsibilities pressed upon them by the current emergency - by which I refer to the impending invasion of the Swarm. The Confederacy has decreed that for their purposes, children reach adulthood at age fourteen. Their criteria are simple - not to say simplistic - biologically, the vast majority of humans -- male or female - are prepared to function sexually by age fourteen. The vast majority of Western civilization's answer to this decree was 'Well, yes, but... ' - but the Darjee - and the Confederacy in general - turned a deaf ear. Maximizing the birth rate requires that we begin to procreate at the earliest feasible date - and fourteen works for some ninety-plus percent of the population. Since we really don't want our children to miss out on the diaspora, we've put up with this."

New charts went up - and a globe. "Not everyone complained," Maude continued. "You see, in many countries, the Confederacy's edict isn't a problem - children are treated as adults as early as thirteen in some countries in the Far East, for instance, and in Africa. Australian aborigines would also be a prime example. But here in the United States, we feel that the young are not really ready to accept responsibility for their actions until eighteen at the earliest - and therefore, because we have failed to prepare them properly, they aren't."

This brought a rumble from the floor. More charts appeared behind Maude and she flourished a laser pointer. "Children haven't changed. Our race hasn't altered significantly in several thousand years. Yet we choose to believe that our children are unable to carry the burdens of adulthood. We shield them and protect them - and stunt their growth. As late as the early part of the last century, the median age for MARRIAGE was fifteen IN THIS COUNTRY! A sixteen year old girl who was not being courted was considered an old maid incapable of attracting a male and likely to be a burden on her family for a serious length of time! Natural selection can be quick - but only on a geological scale, ladies and gentlemen. We're no different than our great-grandfathers from a purely biological standpoint. Why, therefore, are our children?"

Maude looked around, measuring the silence. "Thanks to the Pilgrims, America is one of the most sexually repressed countries on Earth. We're a testament to the fact that ignorance and superstition and bigotry take root in every person before enlightenment and education can open the windows of the soul and banish them. The British, who bequeathed us this extremist mindset, did it in the process of ejecting unwanted elements from their civilization, much as they did later by shipping convicts to Australia - and thereby purged themselves of the problem. But we inherited it and carried it from coast to coast. We've been doing a miserable job of raising our children, failing to teach them some of the most fundamental aspects of the human condition - largely due to the fact that we were never properly exposed to that curriculum at a young age, either. No, we were told that our process of procreation was 'dirty' and not to be discussed in public - and although we've many of us learned otherwise, those prejudices we were inculcated with at a young age continues to provoke the kind of knee-jerk reaction that causes us to propagate the cycle of ignorance without thinking about it ... Added to this was our natural desire to provide our children with what we never had and the false enlightenment of the last few decades of the past century, and we are saddled with a generation that has no concept of personal responsibility and is unable to even visualize the consequences of their actions. Our children are not adults at twenty-five, let alone fourteen!" She glared around the room, "Tell me that you don't already know this!" Around the room, people recoiled at the rebuke.

Maude continued, "In almost every continent of this world, children assume roles that include vital responsibility for the family unit before puberty - but Western civilization - here in the United States in particular - pretends that they are unable to assume the mantle of adulthood. This is largely in the name of protection, because the young make mistakes - but when did we forget that making mistakes is a learning process? We've been STEALING from our children by wrapping them in security blankets and only allowing the safest of experiences to trickle through the openings. Well, ladies and gentlemen, the world has changed - and we can do something about it or we can hide our heads in the sand and be ground into fertilizer when the aliens arrive!"

Maude gathered herself. "So we're saddled with a situation; our children - our best and brightest - aren't going to be staying with us any more for the period that we anticipated that they would. We need to prepare them for life faster - or we need to find a way to ensure that they have help making the right choices. How do we do that? Education, ladies and gentlemen, education. And what is the first choice we need to help them with? Their companions, should they be extracted!" Maude looked around. "Each of you has a son or a daughter approaching that critical age. What happens if almost immediately after they are tested, they stumble into a pickup? They'll be required - on the spur of the moment - to select mates - theoretically for the rest of their lives! How many of you are under the impression that selection is going to go well if it happens to your child tomorrow?" She glanced around. "The Confederacy extracts fourteen year olds - and they expect them to contribute to the gene pool - but they generally do not deploy them to the fighting forces until they are eighteen. Why is that, do you think? Because they know they're not ready for combat at fourteen, even though they CAN procreate. Instead, they send them back to school - an intensive course designed to make them technologically literate in ways no one else has time to be, while they work their way through the minefield of family and personal responsibility."

The slideshow changed again, to show a stylized outline of a boy and a girl. "Now that we've discussed nurture, let's look at the underlying nature. Young men and young women have different goals at the outset. While a fourteen year old girl has some interest in sex, she has longer term goals in mind as a rule; basically, she's looking for love and a mate. This is basic biology; she needs to secure a partner and support for her offspring, which is a long-term project. Young males, on the other hand, aren't looking for ANYTHING long-term, and their interest in sex occupies a considerable portion of their attention. In fact, a fourteen year old boy is a semen delivery system, and he spends hours each and every day trying to figure out how to be more successful at it. Since adults have chopped off most of his opportunities, he lives in a constant state of agitation. This is exacerbated by the things we allow young women to do and to wear. A fourteen year old girl is a newly-minted weapons platform in the war between the sexes - everything is bright and sleek and polished and has that new-car smell, if you will; they're not showing the wear and tear of older models who sat low in the water for nine months working on construction, then spent another several months providing fuel for others before the demand went away, leaving them with empty tanks. No, they're tight and sleek and nothing on them has had its elasticity tested. All of the equipment works, but no one has ever used it - and it is put on display as much as possible, in the hopes of attracting the interest of that elusive male..." Maude smiled. "The problem is a fourteen year old girl has everything she needs but very little idea how to use it. Their focus isn't on sex, but on romance - even though they're sending floods of sexual attractors. And make no mistake - if a male wanders in to her area of influence, it was NOT romance that attracted him - it was the lure of sex - and opportunity to discharge a load of those pent-up little wigglers that are driving him crazy trying to get out! Is this a match made in Heaven? Errr, not exactly..."

Maude smiled. "Historically - and again, we're talking about timeframes into the middle of the last century - the effort of everyday living put certain pressures on the home - its size, in particular. And that meant that children got a certain amount of sex education from watching their parents go at it." There was a collective gasp. "Now, think about it - how much privacy do you think your pioneer ancestors had in their one-room cabins while they were pumping out the large quantities of children required to ensure the survival of an adequate number of bodies to get the chores done? This is STILL the case in some countries on this planet of ours, but generations of wealth have skewed our viewpoint, so we don't think about it - it isn't a situation in our experience. When we think about this kind of thing, inbred hillbillies come to mind - and we neglect to remember that the conditions such people live under echo what our own great-grandparents dealt with. Even the inbreeding is a consequence of living in a confined space next to great temptation..."

Maude looked around at the host of scandalized expressions confronting her and grinned. "But I digress. What IS a match made in Heaven? If you deliver a fourteen year old boy and a couple of fourteen year old girls to a pickup, what is the likely result? Is that a recipe for perfection -- or a recipe for disaster? Given the lack of limitations imposed upon a male volunteer and the experience level of the trio, what are the chances that BOTH of those young girls won't irritate their sponsor and get shoved out an airlock because they have the wrong focus and none of the three of them knows what they're doing? They're good, I'm afraid. And that's EXACTLY why, despite the pressures of an uninformed public, the Confederacy INSISTS that this institution should continue to exist - because the human race is losing prime breeding stock to ignorance!"

The slides changed again. "This is the comparison of the male and female reproductive cycle - it's been around for decades and comes from sources we've all heard about - I didn't have to compile it from anywhere specious," Maude declared. "As you can see, the male's capabilities ramp up rapidly from puberty until about age twenty, after which they slowly taper off. The female, on the other hand, while capable from puberty, exhibits a different pattern of interest. We've all heard of women in their late twenties and early thirties whose biological clocks are ticking - this is why. Young girls spend more time interested in love than sex - and their response curve tends to cross that of the male over a decade after the male's peak. What does that suggest? Oddly, it suggests that, sexually, the optimum partner for a young male is a woman a decade his senior and the optimum partner for a young girl is a male as much as twice that!"

This comment produced another uproar; Maude put up her hands. "The thing about the truth is that even when they recognize it, people tend to deny it if it brings them discomfort. Obviously, this data has implications - one of which is that marriage tends to be unstable over time. Why? As time goes on, the male and the female have different needs. Early, a female seeks protection and comfort and safety - and in many cases looks for sexual partners who know what they are doing. Later, when they are more confident in themselves, nature ramps up the pleasurable component in order to ensure that they make the leap and procreate if they haven't earlier in the cycle. This urgency is felt more and more as menopause approaches, and then tapers off some after - but older women still enjoy sex within their capabilities. Still, there are long periods in a woman's life when sex isn't a top priority - and actual motherhood can readily displace it."

"Males," Maude continued, "are different, as has been previously described. Young males feel the urge to procreate keenly - basically all day every day. A willing female in their presence WILL be serviced - period. As the male matures, he begins to understand the needs of the female and assumes responsibility for her and certain of his offspring - but early in the process, getting his itch scratched regularly is top priority. Age brings a certain perspective on the implications and consequences of sexual activity - by the time he's twenty, most males understand that a female wants a long-term commitment, even if they're not prepared to deliver one. But earlier on, males are less selective - for instance, is there any male present this evening who can honestly say that as a teen he didn't fantasize about enjoying his mother sexually - or perhaps a sister, or both?" A couple of men raised their hands, but under Maude's challenging stare, lowered them. Sherry eyed Gary in surprise, as he never even showed an inclination to raise his hand.

"Girls aren't immune. Daddy provides the average teen girl comfort and protection and in some cases sexual stimulation. And climbing onto daddy's lap can lead Daddy's Girl into unfamiliar territory - especially if her curiosity and receptivity push his limits either over time or at an unguarded moment," Maude continued inexorably. "The female's allure continues to be effective in a limited way on the male throughout his life, and while an older male may regularly maintain control of his urges, if he is approached correctly in a weak moment - particularly by a girl who is persistent or who deploys her weapons properly - he may slip. As I've previously indicated, a young woman is at her peak of desirability, and the male - by design - has no defense. Add the fact that he already loves her and that she is inside his normal defenses for this reason, and you have the possibility of an explosive situation. Much is perception; if the father perceives his daughter as 'my little girl' she is generally safe - but if she begins to do things that cause him to evaluate her as an adult female, that layer of protection dissipates. Research indicates that the male has to be well into his forties or early fifties before a nubile teen female is considered 'too young' to have sex with."