When he woke, there was indeed pain. He felt as though a curling iron had been rammed into his gut and left at low heat. For the first time in his life he regretted being male. Surely this was a hell of a lot of trouble for a little tube of erectile tissue.
Then Oubliette entered the recovery room, still garbed in her working clothes, and he decided that it was after all worth it. Oh to have a member to penetrate that tantalizing cleft! The sooner the better. The bigger the better.
"I have a heavy schedule," she announced. "Two emergency cases just got in—a harem Sultan had his organ stepped on by an irate camel, and a homosexual just discovered that his natural penis is allergic to both saliva and fecal matter. So—"
"How could a camel step on—"
"Some are more sensitive about bestiality than others," she said. "I warned him about that last year. Stick to horses, Sulty, I told him, and female ones, because they're less ornery. But he wouldn't listen. Had to find out the hard way. Now I'm sending you off to visit the Egglayers for a few days. When you come back, you'll have healed over and I'll have matched the tissue cultures and we'll be ready for the next stage."
"Uh, sure," he agreed dubiously.
Chapter Twelve
So it was that Prior Gross, bearing a plaster cast at his crotch with an embarrassing spigot for urination, departed for a land he had never known existed. Behind Oubliette's spacious modern house was a pathway leading into a tangle of virgin scrub. Along this anemic scenic highway were unusual objects of art—statues of people, animals, and things. At the end of it, she had assured him hurriedly as she swabbed a local anesthetic on the Sultan's mangled meat, were the Egglayers.
"What do I want with a bunch of chickens?" he demanded, disgruntled. But she only smiled enigmatically and eased a plastic catheter up the Sultan's urethra. The bloody urine was just beginning to squirt as Prior got out of there.
He rode on an adapted golf-cart. The trail was too narrow for his car, and his cast prevented him from walking any distance without severe chafing, so this awkward compromise was best. He puttered along at ten miles an hour. It was an electric cart, but still it puttered.
The first statue was a nude woman. She was, of course, statuesque in outline. Oubliette herself could have been the modeclass="underline" the breasts were round and full and bursting with the milk of human sex-appeal; the waist was tiny, and the hips swelled with exactly the right planes and rondures. The breasts had realistic nipples, the tummy had a navel, and between the legs there was even a cleft complete with clitoris and vagina, the last as deep as his finger could probe. He had verified this purely as a matter of scientific curiosity, of course.
Why should such a finely-wrought piece of art be erected at this deserted outpost? The trail was virtually unused; grass grew tall between the weathered concrete sections and flowers peeped from chinks. Yet this nude was good enough to take to bed, stone though her hole might be.
Prior shook his head and drove on. The world was full of pieces of art that should have been pieces of ass.
A mile along he discovered a similar edifice, this one supporting a male. Handsome, muscular—very much in the classic Greek discus-thrower mode, except that this one's hand cupped not a discus but his ponderous turgid penis and full scrotum. Though the member was enviably large, it was also well-shaped and not disproportionate to the physique of the statue. It was an embodiment of the ideal in just the fashion the rest of the man was. And, Prior noted with satisfaction, it was uncircumcised.
All penises were beautiful, he thought, before the knife practiced its mutilation and left ugly scar tissue choking an obscenely naked glans bereft of the body's most sensitive nerve endings. Tantamount had been right about that. No wonder the penis was now the most concealed part of the human body! Women's breasts were beautiful, their genitals inviting, because they represented completely natural secondary and primary sexual characteristics. But the average person, male or female, averted his/her eyes in unvoiced disgust at the sight of penis and bag of testicles. Was this merely a natural aversion to overt disfigurement?
And what about the emotional disfigurement that seemed to follow in the wake of the physical? How much more readily a man with an ugly penis projected that ugliness to sex itself! Was it not true that beauty was in the penis of the beholder?
The next statue was of a sheep—a fine curly specimen good for at least three bags of wool for master, dame and boy down the lane. The fourth one was a dog, a tremendous Great Dane sitting on his haunches and reaching around to lick off his partially-extruded penis. Dogs, Prior remembered, really did have a bone in their members. How many human beings wished for the same! Then on along to spy a horse, and an eagle, and then a griffin. Followed by a combination: man and sheep.
Prior stopped to inspect that one more closely. He had been right the first time: a male man and a female sheep, and the connection was more intimate than one normally observed on the farm. The ewe stood upon a platform so that her woolly posterior came up level with the man's crotch. He stood behind her, his hardened member half-buried in her ovine pudendum and still thrusting. She looked tolerant and contented. Prior remembered that there was a story about interfertility of man and sheep, a crossbreed between the two.... but he doubted the validity of that. "Ba-a-a-a!" he commented.
Next was a male dog and a female human in much the same situation. She was on hands and knees, he mounted behind, tongue hanging out in his enthusiasm. Her breasts drooped toward the ground, almost tubular in this position. It was so realistic that it was hard to believe that it was all stone.
Stone it was, though. Those swinging mammaries were cold and hard to his touch; the furry flank quite stiff. Even the projecting tongue was dry and inflexible, and there was absolutely no warmth or give to the plunging prick.
Then there was a male pony having at a female eagle. At first glance this seemed a mismatch—but Prior soon saw that the pony had no real leverage, so that his member could penetrate only as far as the bird desired. There seemed to be plenty of desire amid the feathers, however.
And a trio: man, woman, griffin. The griffin was in the center, spreading its huge wings, beak open as if to caw exuberantly. It appeared to be hermaphroditic, for its leonine penis was entering the woman who clasped it in front, while the man drove at its womb from behind. Its long tiger tail curled around the man's buttocks, holding them steady.
It occurred to Prior that he had not seen a single portrayal of a really unnatural activity along this trail. Always a normal male conjugated with a normal female in the normal manner. No homosexual efforts, no perversions. Of course the species were shuffled—but the acts depicted by the statues were so obviously right and pleasurable that he could hardly fault them on a technicality like that. Sex between consenting adults was perfectly legitimate. Wasn't it?