Albrecht Smith is widely recognized as the pioneer of sexual genetic performance art when it came into its own in the 22nd Century. He set loose collections of genetically modified humans. The performance art installation was the society as it developed. Some today argue that these stories should not be shared because of the egregious ethical and moral violations they were based on. We feel each epoch has to be judged by its own standards, and we can appreciate artistry wherever it is found.

The modifications to the human form in this installation are more extreme than in any other he attempted.

Smith confided independently to two friends that the inspiration for "To Have And To Hold" was the conversations between the genders around the turn of the millennium.

Five-year-old Chrissy was nervous as her wedding day approached. There had been possibilities before but it had never quite worked out. Now it looked like it would really be happening. Her friend Stacy just got married a few months ago. She said it did hurt at first, but you got used to it, and then it was kind of nice. Now Stacy could use the urinals, like most of the big girls, while Chrissy still had to sit down to pee.

At last her mother Jane got the call saying that the mother of the groom Katie had started her labor. So Jane and Chrissy drove to the birthing center and waited as Katie's labor progressed. They were ushered into the birthing room as Katie was in her pushing phase. Katie was lying in one bed, and the other was for Chrissy. She lay on her back, naked, and her mother fastened the restraints on each foot and hand and one around her middle. Then she hugged her, kissed her, and told her it often wasn't so bad, and in any case it would be over soon. The baby's head started crowning, and with a final push the baby slid out, Katie's husband stroking him gently as he went by. He couldn't cry, because he didn't have lungs. His most striking features were his long floppy birth arms and the shorter inner arms. He had no real legs and quite a small body. The midwife cleaned him off quickly, then carefully held his arms so they did not touch anything. He was still getting nutrition from the umbilical cord, which seemed to be working well, so the midwife held him up for Katie to see, and then moved him over to Chrissy. She placed the baby boy low on Chrissy's abdomen, partly against her pubic bone. She then deftly slid one of his long birth arms around each of Chrissy's hips and fastened them together in back, each arm having a hook on the end. The baby reacted to that and tightened until he was hugging Chrissy firmly. The midwife told Chrissy to get ready, and Jane told her she loved her. After a few seconds of instinctive palpating a little with his inner arms to make sure he was in the right place, the sharp points on the inner arms on both sides stabbed into Chrissy's groin where her legs met her torso.

She jerked hard against her restraints. She cried a little, but as she had promised herself she didn't scream. She felt pain in her whole groin area, and now pressure and tugging inside where his inner arms were at work. The umbilical cord reaching out from Katie was gently stroked by her husband as it left her vagina. But it connected her still to Chrissy's new husband, sustaining him as his inner arms groped. One set of appendages found Chrissy's tendons to wrap around to physically hold them together. Another set found what he needed to find very soon: the vein leading to Chrissy's right leg, and the artery leading from her left. The husband's arms quickly grafted his vein to hers, her artery to his and the two became as one flesh. Chrissy's heart started pumping blood into her husband and absorbing the return flow. He had transferred from dependence on his mother to dependence on his wife.

Now supported by Chrissy's blood, his body cut off the circulation to the umbilical cord. Chrissy was still pretty uncomfortable, but the panic was gone, and now her mother unfastened the restraints that had held her arms. As custom required, Chrissy and Katie now joined hands, and Katie asked if she agreed to love and honor her son as long as they both should live, and Chrissy said the classic "I do". Chrissy thanked her. Katie's husband slapped against her body and Katie interpreted for him that he thanked her too. Chrissy could have cut the cord herself, as some of the "natural birth/natural marriage" books suggested, but she was a bit squeamish. Her mother did it instead, observing the more venerable tradition. The beds had wheels, and Katie rolled off in one direction, Chrissy and her mother in another.

There was no need to give a name to Chrissy's husband. He was forever bound to her and could never be confused with anyone else.

Having performed his vital tasks of attaching to Chrissy, her husband could rest. He was as helpless as any baby, but would quickly be far less disruptive. He had no lungs to breathe or cry with. He had no digestive tract, so there were no feedings, no spit-up, no burping, no diapers to change. He had no kidneys, relying on Chrissy to filter his blood for him. The urgent connections to Chrissy had been merging the circulatory systems, and holding the two of them together internally. Gradually over the next couple weeks they continued to join. Within a day his head was largely flattened against Chrissy's pelvis, and wherever the skin of the two of them touched it started fusing together, including his outer arms that were wrapped around Chrissy's rear just above her butt cheeks. Within three weeks the skin would be seamless.

He had no eyes or nose or taste buds. But he did have a sense of touch and he had hearing through two small ear holes out near Chrissy's hips. And he had a capable brain. It was smaller than a girl's brain, but largely because it was missing parts it didn't need. It needed no visual or olfactory cortex, no cerebellum and no brain areas for fine motor control of hands or tongue. This smallish brain was flattened against Chrissy so the two of them would present a sleek shape. As he got older he would come to learn and think and understand. He had only one working appendage. The part nearer her body was a single small muscular protrusion called his leg, its upper part was his penis. The leg would grow to at most eight inches long. Its main function was to move his penis back and forth -- well, to not beat around the bush here, in and out. At this point it was poorly developed and uncoordinated, but as he grew it would provide his only means of expression to the outside world. He had a private way of communicating to Chrissy, because he could tug on her tendons with the inner arms that held him in place. As he grew he could talk to Chrissy by tugging on the two sides more or less hard, in patterns, and also by moving his little leg. Completing his anatomy was a pair of testicles in a scrotum.

One other means of connection between Chrissy and her husband was a tube that grew out from his left inner arm towards the centerline of her body. It was a urethra, and it attached to Chrissy's urethra above her sphincter. Chrissy's sphincter and lower urinary tract soon atrophied and the "pee-hole" closed. The urine for both of them now flowed out of his penis, and his sphincter was the only valve that kept pee from leaking out. So for the first few months of her married life Chrissy herself had to wear a diaper, but her husband soon learned to keep the sphincter closed and open it when Chrissy signaled, typically by bearing down with her abdomen as any girl does to expel urine. So as Chrissy sidled up to a urinal and unzipped her fly, her husband felt his penis being handled and pointed in the right direction, felt the pressure of the urine as Chrissy bore down, and he knew to release his sphincter to let the urine pass. He felt it pass through the ureter and along the length of his penis and out the end. He was fundamentally oriented with his front against her, so the penis was fundamentally pointed towards her, but it could easily enough flip backward to pee.

The symbiosis of touch was important. Chrissy had no nerve endings on any of her husband's skin. If his skin got cut or irritated, his reaction was to tug on Chrissy's innards, which would get her to investigate and solve the problem. As he got older, he could indicate by the pattern where the discomfort was and its nature, as in "scratch the left side of my head, it itches". If he had a sudden major pain, he would yank hard, which would cause Chrissy major pain herself and motivate her to quickly figure out what was wrong.

The traditional marriage concept of "'til death do us part" was here an understatement. Both would die together when they went. Her husband was obviously dependent on Chrissy for the most basic metabolic functions. But Chrissy could not divorce him either. Faced with an attempt to pry him off of her, her husband's inner arms would by reflex rip her arteries apart and she would bleed to death. That sounds horrid, but of course he would only do that when in mortal danger. Any married man or woman in our society can take a knife and stab the other one, but they hardly ever do. The same applied in Chrissy's world. She could hurt him by slapping his skin, or whapping his testicles. He could hurt her by tugging hard on her innards. But they had to live with each other, so even in times of trouble they rarely did.

A girl might get married as young as three, or possibly as late as eight. In either case her brain was far more developed than her husband's, and she could easily cajole and manipulate him. But soon he would start catching up. As a baby and small child his wants were fairly simple. His skin could get irritated, or he could get too hot or too cold, though his desires in that regard were rarely far out of line with Chrissy's. His main source of knowledge about the world was his hearing, although she could teach him a few things about spatial relations by tracing patterns on his skin. He learned to understand the language. He could get bored, so he wanted her to talk to him, or play music, or read to him, or listen as she talked with the other girls and women in her life. He also slept a lot, which allowed her if she chose to live fair portions of her day in a purely visual world of working, reading or just admiring scenery. He also developed his own opinions in music and stories, or he might come to dislike certain of her friends or get fond of some others. They had to negotiate. His only real form of leverage at this age was to hurt her by tugging on her innards, but that was enough.

The entire world was populated solely by women and girls, unless you looked closely near a woman's pelvis. Women had to do all the work, all the daughtercare, all the laundry. But they were also the ones to see all the sights, taste all the food, and make all the decisions. Their husbands did not belch or fart, watch TV or leave dirty dishes around.

There were somewhat fewer boy than girl babies, which was a blessing. A boy at birth would die if he couldn't be married within a couple minutes. But girls could live without a husband. All the prime athletes were unmarried, as well as most of the women who did strenuous physical labor. Unmarried women achieved adult strength and size and wisdom, but they never went through the sexual aspects of puberty, and sex just wasn't part of their world view.

Around age twelve Chrissy's breasts started growing, her hips got a little wider, she grew pubic and underarm hair, and she got acne. Even though her husband was only seven, her hormones stirred him to puberty as well. His voice couldn't deepen and he couldn't start growing a beard. He did grow pubic hair, which was right next to hers, his reddish and hers brown. But the biggest changes in both were the sex organs themselves. Chrissy's vulva enlarged, and her vagina got deeper, the walls thicker and more elastic. Her husband's testicles enlarged and hung down in their scrotum, his penis got larger and erect more often, and the "leg" muscle that moved it got stronger. Before puberty the leg muscle didn't have much to do. All his penis was good for was peeing, and Chrissy would just aim it where she wanted the pee to go. As puberty began she found herself intrigued by other potential properties of this penis between her legs, and her husband was definitely intrigued by the two flaps between Chrissie's legs and what they contained. When they had been taught the facts of life as kids they had both thought the idea of his penis going into her vagina was gross, but now it was definitely an intriguing possibility.

We urge our children to delay sex for a number of reasons. It can engender too close of an emotional bond to an inappropriate person; Chrissy and her husband were already bound for all time. There are sexually transmitted diseases; Chrissy and her husband had been and would always necessarily be faithful to each other. It can lead to unwanted pregnancy, and this was a concern that Chrissy and her husband shared. Chrissy got an IUD implanted, though going on the pill was another option.