Chapter Four: Arriving

For the first few days, life on the ship was a lot like life in the moonbase. The biggest difference was Lupe. She went next door to see Miguel two more nights in the first week. Dee only came over once, and she slept with Kim that time. I could live with that, especially since I was with Carlita and Maria that night. It showed how far we'd come in a short time. A threesome with me, my sort-of-ex wife and my teen daughter's best friend! Sure I enjoyed it. We'd all been through medical so I was looking, and feeling, good and Maria was back to what she'd looked like when we'd gotten married. Her pussy was back the way it had been as well. It was a lot tighter now than it had been after three kids.

We could see Carlita changing by then. She was eating three big meals every day, but didn't get fat; all her new weight was bone and muscle. She hadn't reached her full height yet, but she was getting there. It must have been weird for her, changing shape like that. Like a fast-forward teenage growth-spurt. She got clumsy as well. She was bigger than she thought she was, so she sometimes banged into things. We had to clean up a couple of spilled glasses of OJ over breakfast. The other Marines told her that things would get easier once she stopped growing and got used to how long her new arms were.

I was able to talk to Carlita about Rosamaria's possible new friend, Shelley-Ann, and she agreed it sounded like a good idea. I left it with her since there wasn't any more I could do.

One evening in that first week Carlita called a family meeting. No kids, they were in bed. Just her and us four concubines. "I've got two things to talk about," she told us. "First, Miguel and I have agreed that if the worst happens and either of us gets killed, we'll each leave our concubines to the other. That means if anything happens to me, then the four of you will stay together and join Miguel's family."

I was happy with that. We all knew Miguel; even Kim knew him some. This way if the worst happened, we could stay together with a sponsor we all knew. The others were nodding as well. It was good of Carlita to think ahead. OK, so we were being handed around like property, but at least she was trying to do her best for us within what was allowed. It would be a helluva lot better than being dumped in with the Civil Service pool. We'd learned enough about that to know it was the last place we wanted to end up. Apart from anything else, me and Maria would probably be split apart if that happened. This way we'd stay together as part of Miguel's family.

"Second, babies," Carlita announced, interrupting my thoughts. "We need to get started soon. I know you've all been practicing," she smiled and we grinned back. "Now we get to do it for real. I'll be last because I have to wait until my training finishes. I'll want two of you to start now and one later, closer to me. They've asked us to spread the pregnancies out a bit so the maternity wards on Waller don't get completely overwhelmed in nine months time. Any of you want to volunteer for a slot?"

"I'm happy to go first," Maria said. "I've done it before."

"Can I wait please, Carlita?" Kim asked.

Carlita looked at Lupe.

"I'll go early with Mama if Kim wants to wait 'til later."

Carlita smiled. "Good, everybody gets what they want. Maria and Lupe will arrive on Waller pregnant. Kim follows a few months later, so the bathroom is clear for her in the mornings. I'll be last, so you can all tell me just how much my back is going to ache."

"It does, but it's worth it," Maria advised her, following up with a smile to Lupe.

"OK, that's half of the equation. We also need some fathers." She turned to Lupe, "We've agreed on Miguel to father your first." Lupe smiled at the thought. I'd known that was coming and I was OK with it. So was Lupe; we'd talked about it. I knew that Maria was happy with Miguel for Lupe as well. He was a good man, a good father and he'd treat our girl right. She'd sure enough enjoyed her times with him over the last few days.

Then Carlita looked at me, "Carlos, you already have three children with Maria, so you'll father Kim's baby. For the moment I'll leave you turned off so you can help with practice. I'll turn you and Kim back on when the time comes for her to start her baby."

Kim? Yeah, I could father a baby with Kim. That wouldn't be difficult. Like Carlita said, we'd been practicing. The difficult part was what was coming next. If I wasn't going to father Maria's next kid then someone else was.

Us humans are strange. Even if we know something is coming, we can ignore it and pretend it isn't going to happen, right up until it hits us in the face. That's probably what's keeping the Earth going now, when everyone knows the Swarm are on their way. People ignore them and carry on as if they don't exist. Me and Maria had done the same thing. She was going to go with another man and have his baby. We'd both been ignoring it, but it hadn't gone away. Up to now I'd been having my fun with Kim and Carlita. Maria had been with the girls as well, but never with another man. We'd tried to ignore it –- both of us -– and now here it was, sitting in the middle of the sidewalk. Right in front of us where we couldn't avoid it.

I could see that Maria was thinking the same as I was. As the realization hit, her face began to break up. I don't remember crossing the room to her; one second I was in my chair, the next I knew I was holding her in my arms as she cried on my chest. Carlita silently pointed to my room, so I took Maria there. With the door closed behind us she pulled down my shorts, threw me on the bed, jerked me to get me stiff and sat herself on my pole. She didn't even bother to pull off my T-shirt, just flipped it up to get it out of her way. All the time tears were streaming down her face. I lay there and let her use me. I could reach her thighs and tetas so I kept my hands moving. She wasn't talking, just crying and panting as she bounced up and down on my pito.

Once she came, she collapsed on top of me, my dick still hard in her. She didn't talk, just cried. I let her. Soon she started again. Still not talking, but moving on top of me; urgently thrusting herself at me. She collapsed on me again after her second climax, still crying, still not talking. I didn't know whether to talk or not, but I decided to stay quiet and let her rest. Would she want another one?

She did. When she started moving for the third time, I slowed her down with a hand on her ass. "Talk to me, mi querida."

She slowed a bit, but didn't stop. "You won't want me after," she gasped between her tears. "I'm getting as much of you as I can now. Before you leave me."

Leave her! Where the hell did she get that idea? Had she gone nuts? I didn't say that of course, "I'd never leave you. You're the woman I married and you're the woman I want to stay with."

She was still moving on top of me, her tetas swinging under her blouse, distracting me. "I'll have been with another man. I'll be used, dirty, a puta. You didn't marry a puta. You won't want me." Her tears came on stronger.

I held her while she cried. She'd stopped moving and we were just holding each other for comfort. We'd talked about this before, back on Earth. I knew she'd come around in the end -- she always did -- but it was gonna be more difficult for her than either of us had expected. Knowing Carlita, she'd give Maria the time she needed to get ready for what she had to do. In the end that was what would swing it. Maria had to do this and she knew she had to do it. She'd find a way to level with herself and do what she had to. She might not like what the world threw at her, but she always handled things she couldn't avoid. She'd do the same with this. She just needed me to hold her while she took the time to get used to it.

Later I could tell that Maria had fallen asleep, a good sign. As she slept, I saw some words appear on the wall. The AI was silently relaying a message, "Carlos, Carlita wants to talk as soon as convenient." I managed to slide out from under Maria without waking her up; she sort of half woke but went straight back to sleep. Quietly closing the bathroom door behind me, I sat on the throne and whispered, "Carlita? I can talk."

The wall in front of me showed Carlita's head. "How is she?" The AI was keeping the volume down so as not to disturb Maria.

"She's sleeping."

"Good. Will she be all right?" Carlita looked and sounded worried.

"She ain't happy, but she'll be OK. She'll do what she has to. She thought I was going to dump her if she went with another man."

Carlita gasped, "You'd never do that, Carlos."

"No I wouldn't, and she knows it deep down. She just needed me to tell her I'd stay with her whatever happened."

"Right." She gave a faint smile, "I wouldn't let you dump her anyway. I'll talk to you both in the morning. For now get some sleep. Goodnight, Carlos."

"Buenas noches, Carlita."

In the morning, Maria woke me with her mouth on my dick. As soon as I was awake she climbed on board. She wasn't as desperate as she'd been last night, which was good, and a lot less worried than she'd been the night before, which was definitely good. I probably wasn't going to come 'cause I was still a bit sore from her efforts last night. Happy? No, she wasn't happy. She didn't come either, probably she was as sore as I was. She just rode me for a time and then stopped. I think it was more for comfort than anything else. She needed to feel secure with me.

"Will you be OK, mi querida?" I asked her.

"Si, mi amor. I know you won't leave me. I just needed to have you. This will be more difficult than playing with the girls. That doesn't really count. This will be the real thing. I'll have that other man's child, whoever he is."

I thought about that. "He'll only be the sperm donor. You'll be the mother, and I get stuck with helping bring up baby. That gives us the better deal. He gets twenty seconds; we get the kid."

She managed a faint smile at my poor joke, "Twenty seconds? You think he'll last that long?"

"You're so beautiful now, maybe he won't even last ten." I dragged her down for a kiss. We had to cut it short, otherwise we'd have started again and I needed to take my morning leak.

Over breakfast I could see that Carlita and the others were watching Maria. She was trying to act calm and normal. She wasn't as calm or normal as she pretended, but she was for sure a helluva lot better than she'd been the evening before.

After breakfast, Carlita called me into her office. She looked worried, "Will Maria be OK?"

"She won't be happy about it, but she'll do what she has to. Yesterday she was upset about what might happen, but she's calmed down a lot after a night's sleep. We've always known this was coming. She'll deal with it."

"Good. She's always struck me as sensible underneath." I nodded; Carlita was right.

She paused. "Do you think Maria understands why I want a sponsor to father her next child, and not you?"

"I'm sure she does," I told her. "We've talked about it. Before we knew you would sponsor us, we'd assumed our sponsor would be a man and he would do the job himself. Lupe is a concubine and Rosamaria looks like she's headed the same way. It's too early to tell about Alvaro, but both Maria and me are concubines, so he's likely to be one as well. If her next kid has a sponsor for a dad, then there's a better chance it'll be a sponsor as well. That's what we thought, anyway."

"I thought the same way," Carlita agreed. "The child has a better chance if its father is a sponsor. Sorry, Carlos, but that's the way things are."

Yeah, they were, and I knew it. "I know, Carlita. There's nothing any of us can do about it." I shrugged. No point in getting worked up over stuff I couldn't change. I knew I could retest, but I was way too far below 6.5 to have any chance to make sponsor. Not like Miguel; he'd started from 6.4, so it was a lot easier for him to get over the line.

"One more question, Carlos," Carlita asked. "Do you think I should let Maria have a choice about who the father will be?"

I had to think about that one. "Best not to," I told her. "If she has a choice, then she might think that she picked him. If you decide on one guy and tell her, then she's only following orders. That should make it less personal for her." Carlita nodded at that. "Don't choose someone she knows either," I advised, "not like Miguel. A stranger will let her put it in a box and forget about it 'cause she'll never see him again. If it were Miguel, she'll be seeing him regularly."

"I wouldn't have picked Miguel anyway," Carlita told me. "He's getting Lupe and that's enough for him this time around. That's a good point about picking a stranger. I'll get the AI to suggest someone not in my unit, or maybe even Navy or ship's crew. That way when we get to Waller she won't see him around."

"Yeah, that should help her get over it."

Carlita looked at me, thinking. "I know you're sensible, Carlos, but I want to make sure you don't do anything foolish. I'll tell Maria not to let you know who he was. He'll be a sponsor, so if you forget and do something stupid...."

She was right. If I thought about it first I wouldn't do anything. The problem would be if I didn't think about it and laid straight into the guy. Not a big risk, but since it was easy to avoid... "I wouldn't have asked Maria anyway, but she might have told me. I can live with not knowing."

Later that day Lupe and Maria went to medical to have whatever was stopping them getting pregnant switched off. Carlita wanted to get things started quickly.

Our evening routine changed as well. First Lupe would leave to go next door to see Miguel and then Carlita would send me to either her room or Kim's room to get me out of the way. While I was having fun with my partner for the night, Maria would slip out to visit the guy Carlita had picked for her. By the time I got up in the morning, Maria would already be back and having her breakfast. I never saw her leave and I never saw her come back. That was good thinking by Carlita; doing it that way made it easier for both me and Maria. After breakfast we took a shower together. Maria never talked about what she was doing, and even I knew enough not to bring up the subject. I may be dumb, but I ain't that dumb. We just showered together and washed each other.

The first morning, Maria was a bit down. Nobody said anything of course. She got better as the days passed. She still wasn't happy, but the world hadn't fallen in on her either. I made sure to hug and kiss her a bit more than usual –- not too much more, but enough that she would notice. I saw Lupe was doing the same. Maria didn't say anything, not to me anyway, but I'm sure she was glad of it. At least there was no more talk of me leaving her.

One night Dee came to visit right after Lupe left. This time she looked a whole lot happier than that first time, and after a quick word with Carlita she was with me for the night.

As soon as we got into my room, she pulled off her shift and gave me a big smile. "Thanks for last time, Carlos. I wasn't really ready for anything then. Miguel's busy with Lupe these days, so I'm here to make up for lost time."

She told me Miguel liked to have her cowgirl, so we did it that way. I could understand why he liked having her on top, 'cause it let him get to her tetas easily. I'm a man, so I took advantage as well.

She seemed to like being on top. After we'd finished our first time she stayed up there. I didn't mind; the view was very nice. They looked different from underneath, even more unreal the way they stuck almost straight out. At that size they should have sagged more.

She put her hands under her tits, bouncing them up and down. "You like them?"

"Miguel likes them big, doesn't he," I said, being polite. I didn't want to criticize her new boobs straight off, in case she liked them more than I did.

"Yeah, he's definitely a tit man. Mind you, looking like I do, all my boyfriends have been tit men."

I laughed, "I can believe that." Even before Miguel had put her through medical, her tits had been big.

"It saved a fortune on makeup," she giggled, which did interesting things to her tetas. "None of the boys ever looked above my chest."

Oops! I pulled my eyes off her nipples and back up to her face. "Sorry, Dee. They're very distracting." They were pink, which I wasn't used to. All the women in Carlita's family had brown nipples, while Dee's were pink. Because she's blonde I suppose.

"I know. I think they're too distracting really, since Miguel enlarged them. I'd prefer them back to their old size."

Interesting. Maybe she agreed with me about them being too big now? "Have you talked to him? He could always change them back."

"I don't think it would do any good," she complained. "He's the one who wanted them this big in the first place."

"Try talking to Pilar instead," I advised her. "Get her to suggest the change for you. She can make up some bullshit excuse about them being too big and awkward for breastfeeding or something. He's a man so he won't know the difference."

"That's a good idea, Carlos. That would fit in because I'm soon going to need to breastfeed for real."

"You're pregnant?" I asked her. She smiled and nodded.

"Congratulations, Dee. Miguel was quick off the mark then?"

"Very quick. I was already pregnant when we got on your bus."

Obviously my suspicions that Miguel had been test driving his prospects had been right, at least in Dee's case. "The dirty dog. At least he did the right thing and took you."

"That's why I let him," she agreed. "I knew he wouldn't leave me behind if I was carrying his child. I trusted him to keep his word anyway, but the extra insurance helped."

All this time she'd been sitting with my pito in her coochie. Like Lupe, she'd taken off her pussy hair, so I could see everything -- her pussy-lips stretched around my dick. I was half hard, and she started twitching her pussy muscles around me. "Are you ready for another round, Carlos? I owe you at least two after I didn't do anything for you last time."

"Who am I to say no to such a pretty lady?"

She smiled down at me as she began to move. "If you do well I might give you a titty-fuck as well. Would you like that?"

I didn't answer, but stroked her tetas, gently playing with her pink nipples. Her tits might be too big, but her nipples were very very squeezable. Miguel had done good there.

"I'll take that as a 'yes' then," she grinned. She was right.

Dee stayed for breakfast the next morning. She was right about her tetas being too big a distraction. Even hidden under her shift, Alvaro was spending half his time looking at them and not his plate. It took a lot to distract Alvaro from his food.

After five days, Carlita sent Maria and Lupe off to medical again. Maria looked worried when she left, but came back looking a whole lot happier. Even I could guess what that meant. I couldn't read Lupe's expression, but she came up pregnant as well. Carlita didn't bother to wait for the evening, but sent me and Maria straight off to 'reconnect' as she put it. As we were walking to Maria's room she whispered in my ear, "Fifteen seconds."

I managed to remember the joke I'd made earlier about how long her temporary man would last. I smiled back at her, "I think I can do better than that."

One difference between the ship and Earth was the free time we all got, including the kids. Carlita had to spend a lot of time on her Marine training, but our concubine training tailed off quickly. It didn't take very long for the four of us to learn, "Do what you're told, or else." The kids still had school, but that didn't take as much time out of their day as it did back on Earth. They only got half a day in classes every other day. There was homework and sleep training for them as well, but they were in the apartment for that. There were some sports too -- the school had a half-size basketball court as well as some volleyball courts. There wasn't enough room on board for anything like a soccer field. The ship was big, but it wasn't that big. We'd have to wait until we arrived at the colony for full-size soccer. Alvaro was looking forward to that.

With no jobs and not much training, we got to spend more time with the kids. I'm not sure they were too happy about it -- too many Mamas around, but I enjoyed it. Kim was definitely practicing to be a mother. Lupe didn't find it so easy, she was still more their big sister instead of another Mama. I figured that would change in nine months when her baby arrived. She'd be a Mama for real then.

When Alvaro wanted to escape from too much mothering he went over to Miguel's to see Tomas. The AIs had them both on the same timetable so they were together in school as well. They'd done the same thing with Rosamaria and her friend Shelley-Ann, so Carlita must have passed on my suggestion.

We all got to meet Shelley-Ann when she came to the apartment for a sleep-over with Rosamaria. A black girl from Chicago, a few months older than Rosamaria, here with her parents. A nice kid, she smiled a lot. Chatty and well-behaved, at least when us grown-ups were around. Her father was the sponsor with her mother as his first concubine. His second concubine, Cammy, was a checkout girl from the store where they'd all been picked up. Shelley-Ann's family used the place regularly so Cammy already knew them a little -- two-minute chats while she scanned and bagged their stuff. Not a lot, but better than going with some stranger she'd never even seen before. Cammy had been working a second job in a nail parlor, so she'd done some spectacular nails for Shelley-Ann –- lots of stars and spangles. When they saw them, Lupe and Kim both wanted to have theirs done as well. I wondered how they'd pay Cammy. What did the Confederacy use for money?

One thing we didn't need money for was the Jacuzzis. There wasn't one in our apartment, but there were some down the corridor for all the nearby apartments to share. Carlita had to book our slots -- they were very popular so we couldn't just turn up when we wanted. Yes, there was a lot of sex going on in the tubs, and a lot of good-looking naked women wandering around. I'd got some new teenage hormones to go with my younger body. Anything female and alive could get my interest, just like back when I’d been a teenager the first time around. Add in all those hot new bodies, thanks to Confederacy medicine, and I was in horn-dog paradise. Maybe that was why Carlita took us there so often, she got the benefit when we got back to our apartment.

Mostly the journey was boring. There was only one real piece of excitement, and that was something we could have done without. The kids had gone off to bed and we were all relaxing. Carlita was sitting with Kim on her lap, cuddling and kissing. Maria was reading, I was watching El Mariachi on a tablet and Lupe was in her room. Just another quiet evening in our apartment.

Suddenly we heard Rosamaria screaming. I jumped up. By the time I was on my feet Carlita had dumped Kim on the floor and was running down the corridor. They'd told us that Marines got quicker reactions, but this was the first time I'd seen it from Carlita. She was just like Mike on the bus, a lot faster than me and getting further away every second.

Carlita ran straight past Rosamaria's room, though I stopped to check it. Empty. When I got to Alvaro's room Rosamaria was huddled in a corner screaming, "They'll kill me! They'll kill me!" Carlita and Maria were trying to talk to her while Alvaro was sitting on his bed looking puzzled and worried. Seeing that the others were seeing to Rosamaria I talked to Alvaro.

"We were playing and she started screaming. I didn't do anything," he explained.

"What were you playing?"

"We were tickling each other. She was sitting on top of me and my thing got stiff. When she saw it she started screaming. I didn't do anything to her, Papa."

"She saw it?" I asked.

"It stuck out of my PJs." He picked just this time to ask the wrong question, "It does that sometimes in the mornings, so I can't go pee. Why does it do that, Papa?"

"It means you're growing up, Alvaro."

"Oh. But it's stupid 'cos I can't pee when it's like that."

"You just have to wait for it to go down first, mi hijo. Then you can pee."

"Yeah, that's what I do, Papa. But it's still stupid."

By this time, Lupe and Kim had arrived. Kim was hobbling a bit from when Carlita had dumped her on her ass. Rosamaria was crying more quietly now, so Maria hugged her and picked her up. Carlita sent them both to Maria's room. Obviously Rosamaria would need a lot of comforting and cuddling tonight and Maria was the best person to do that.

Carlita explained what had happened. "She got all those lessons about no sex with under thirteens and all the penalties. When she saw Alvaro's stiffie she thought they were going to execute her."

"They wouldn't, would they?" I asked, worried. I could feel my heart thumping.

"No, definitely not. The AI confirmed it was an accident. She was sitting on top of Alvaro, tickling him as part of their game, and he got excited. No harm, no foul."

I felt a wave of relief at that. I don't mind a bit of excitement, but that one nearly gave me a heart attack. Rosamaria executed! Not something I wanted to think about.

That night I was on my own. Carlita let the AI show me what was going on in Maria's room, so I could keep an eye on Rosamaria. I was still worried about her. She looked a bit restless, though she didn't wake up while I was watching. She cuddled up tight to her Mama, so that must have helped her even though she was asleep.

I'd almost forgotten how the AIs see everything, but that brought it back to me. They're always there so you forget about them being there because you don't notice anything. They don't forget though.

Rosamaria was quieter than usual for a couple of days, but soon recovered after that. Kids seem to recover pretty quickly; all forgotten after a few days.

We'd arrived! There was an announcement from the captain late one night, we were in the Wallerat system and would be landing sometime tomorrow. They weren't landing the ship of course, it was much too big for that. They were just going to transport us passengers -- or were we colonists? -- down to the surface while the ship stayed up in orbit. They couldn't put all two hundred fifty thousand of us down in the same place, so they were dropping us in smaller groups all over the planet. Not too many in any one town that way. We'd have to wait for the ship to reach the right place in its orbit so we were above our destination.

When the time came for us to go, Carlita was leading as usual, and we followed. This time it wasn't straight through the transporter like before, the crewman had us waiting in two groups. We were with this red-headed guy I recognized from the canteen; another Marine, the same size as Carlita. He had four concubines with him and five young kids: four grade school age and one toddler. Looking around the room, all the sponsors were Marines. So we'd be going to a Marine base to live while the Navy people would go someplace else. They'd need different training, so I could see why they did it like that.

Miguel was in the second group, which had families with a sponsor and two concubines. Again, all the sponsors were Marine sized. I could see Shelley-Ann with her parents and Cammy in that group as well. It looked like they were sorting us by number of concubines. Carlita didn't seem worried about being separated from her father, so I didn't worry either.

The crewman waved us forward and we all followed the red-headed guy's family. I'd gone through enough transporters that this was all routine now: pick up your bag and follow on through.

¡Madre de Dios! A window! A wall of glass. A huge wall of glass. Wall to wall and floor to ceiling. A window with a view. We were high up in some building, looking out over a town and the country beyond. None of us had seen anything except walls since leaving Nevada. We knew for sure that we weren't on the ship any more.

I was the last one through, so the others were already at the window with their noses pressed to the glass. I joined them. What a view! It took my head a bit of time to adjust to seeing things so far away. Nothing that far away in the moon or on the ship. There wasn't anything unexpected; we'd all seen pictures of Waller during our training. It was the differences between the pictures and the real thing that grabbed me. Like pictures of the Grand Canyon ain't nothing like when you see it for real. No, the view wasn't that spectacular, but it sure looked good after nothing but the inside of the ship.

All the land was brown of course, ain't no plants on Waller. Just lotsa sand and rocks, like around Reno. There's water: rain, rivers and lakes, but no plants or animals. The only local life was in the sea, and you needed a microscope to see it. There were small patches of green in the town 'cause they'd brung in some grass from Earth, but that was all. We could see some parks and people's gardens looking green against the brown. The sun was in view, so we were looking south. Yeah, I knew it wasn't really the sun, but what else were we gonna call it? Off to our right I could see a tall apartment block, about twelve floors. We looked to be around nine or ten floors up, probably in a block like that other one. Looking south over the rest of the place, there was a low-rise town center with a spread of pods beyond, sorta like the suburbs.

The red-headed guy's family, the ones who'd gone through in front of us, started moving. Carlita called us together, "We're in apartment 1008."

I hadn't noticed it, but behind us there was a long corridor with a big "10" on the wall by where it started. So, the tenth floor then. It looked like there was another window, looking north, at the far end of the corridor, beyond where the other family was walking ahead of us. Four doors down on the right was 1008 so we turned off.

This apartment was different from the one on the ship. The outside wall, opposite the door, was all glass -- wall to wall and floor to ceiling again. Another long view, looking east this time. There was the kitchen/dining room on the right, the main room in the middle and Carlita's office/study on the left, all sharing the window wall. There was even a good-sized balcony off the main room! First time we'd ever lived in an apartment with a real balcony. It was bigger than our place on the ship; seven bedrooms, plus a big empty room that the AI said would be a nursery. Figured. We were here to make babies so the apartment was gonna need space for them. Two sleep learning tubes again, so Rosamaria and Alvaro wouldn't have to share. We'd probably need more than two once we had more school-age kids, but that was a few years off yet.

We were just about settled in when the AI announced a welcome meeting downstairs for all us new arrivals. This was a different AI again, not the same voice as the one on the ship, or the one in the moon. We'd changed out of our shifts, so we started for our rooms to get back into them. We'd barely started moving when the AI told us, "Shifts are no longer required outside your apartment. What you are currently wearing is sufficient provided your sponsor allows it." Carlita allowed, so we all headed out for the lobby. I was so glad to be rid of that damned shift. Never again.

The meeting was boring. Some woman took twenty minutes to tell us, "Welcome to Waller. All you concubines still have to do what you're told." For me the most interesting thing was who she was, not what she said. She was a concubine -- she had a collar -- wearing a gray uniform. Not a regular Civil Service uniform, we'd seen enough videos to recognize that, but in the same Civil Service gray color. She said she was working for the Civil Service here, helping run the welcoming committee. That meant there were jobs for us concubines to do outside our apartments. We'd seen stuff about that on the ship, but it was good to see it for real. You never know how much of what you're told is right and how much is just salesman's bullshit.

Cammy, Shelley-Ann's second mother, got in on the act as well. During the question-and-answer part at the end, she asked if she could set up a nail parlor.

"Sure," the woman answered. "You'll need your sponsor's permission of course. Did you do nails back on Earth?"

"Yeah," Cammy replied.

"That's good. We like to use people doing stuff they already know. If there's something you're good at, then make sure the AI knows. That way you'll get assigned to something you can do instead of something you can't." That sounded good to me, maybe there were some buses I could drive? From what I'd seen of the town so far there wasn't a lot of traffic, but I'd not been here long enough to tell for sure.

After the meeting we had a meet-and-greet so we could get to know some of the other people in this building. That was much more useful than the meeting. A lot of us were new off the ship, with a few families who'd been here for longer. I learned why we were on one of the higher floors. The further up the building you were, the bigger your apartment was. Guys with six or eight concubines were on the top, with the two concubine families in smaller apartments on the lower floors. We were between them on the tenth. Miguel was three floors below us, on the same floor as the Harrises. I'd thought we'd be put in one of those living pods we'd heard about, but they were bigger than the apartments and were for families with lots of children. Once we were stacking babies three-deep in our nursery, we'd be assigned to a pod and some new arrivals would have our old apartment.

That evening we were sitting in the main room looking out at the sun getting lower in the sky. Nobody was saying much, just enjoying the view, the clouds and the sky. I hadn't realized how much I'd missed them. Maybe this was what a submarine's crew felt like when they got off their boat after a long cruise?

It was Kim that noticed something, "AI, why is the sun setting in the east?"

She was right! This window was looking east, and the sun was going down.

"The local primary is setting in the west," the AI told her. "West and east are defined in terms of planetary rotation so the local primary rises in the east and sets in the west."

"So if this is west, then why could we see the sun when we arrived?" Kim asked. "We were looking south then, weren't we?"

That's what I'd thought too; we'd arrived looking south, facing the sun.

"No, you were not," the AI corrected. "You were facing north when you arrived. The town of Lansdowne is in the southern hemisphere of Waller, so the equator and the sun are to the north."

I almost laughed. Carlita did. Kim just went, "Oh." We'd all assumed, and we'd all been wrong. Something else new to get used to.