Disclaimer: All sexual activity is between fictional adults, which on the world of Nova Terra is the age of 20. A small warning that some of the relationships consummated in this chapter are the equivalent of step-siblings, but if you read Chapter 2 already, you'd know that was coming. I hope you enjoy.
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Friday, 11 November, CY 26
Mario & Sukie, with their parents, Hannah & Yuri Spinski and Chanika & Kichiro Oyama
"You're doing
what?!?
" Chanika said.
"You heard me, Mom," Sukie said. "Mario, Tina, Blake and I are going to start dating with the Chess poly, to see if we might want to join them in an octet, if our genetic assessment says we can."
"But, Cooper and Spinz are your blood-brothers, Mario," Kichiro needlessly pointed out. "And Mario's Sukie's poly-brother, too."
"I know that, Dad," Mario answered. "But the women are not my blood-sisters, which is what the Charter forbids. There's no genetic issue here, beyond the fact that we'll have half-cousins among our kids as well as blood-siblings and poly-siblings. In fact, if we strictly have one child by each wife, to produce a total of 16 kids, each of my kids would wind up with six blood-siblings, six half-cousins and only three poly-siblings, all with Blake as the blood-father."
"But you're going to have sex with Cooper and Spinz? That's incest!" Hannah cried.
"Depends on what you mean by 'with', Mom." Mario responded, putting a hand on her shoulder. "Am I often going to be in the same bed with them, naked, while we make love to our wives? Sure. Am I going to be engaging in oral or anal sex with my brothers or with Blake for that matter? No, just no. Doesn't appeal to me at all. From what Spinz has told me, he hasn't had anything but occasional contact with Cooper since they married."
"I still don't like it." Hannah sighed.
"Noted, Mom. But this is our decision, not yours. And I'm okay with it." Mario said. "We're telling you so that you're aware of it, can adapt to it, and if this is the route we wind up taking, you might be able to give us your blessing."
"You have mine already, son," said Yuri. "Whatever makes you happiest. And I'll work on your Mom. She needs to stop trying to interfere in other people's love lives."
"Watch it, Yuri." Hannah snapped.
"No, Hannah, Chanika, you need to hear me this time," Yuri said. "The whole Colony is in an uproar, because you decided that interfering in Mario & Sukie's decision to date and marry was the most important thing, instead of just accepting that they love each other and what they wanted to do was legal. We debated the poly-family structure on Nova Terra more than a decade ago in developing Amendment 8, and decided, as a society, that the only barriers to marriage would be age, genetics and compatibility. We had the chance to forbid poly-siblings from marrying then, debated it, you were two of the voices for forbidding it then, but the Colony as a whole decided against it. It only had about 35% support then, and I bet it has half that now. Do you remember that?"
"Yes," said Hannah, softly.
Mario and Sukie had never heard about this debate process from their parents, but kept silent.
Yuri continued. "You saw an opportunity in allying with Cooper to impose what you know is a minority view onto our children and every other such pairing that might happen. Even then, Cooper out maneuvered you. Face it, if it came up for a vote tomorrow, your Amendment 11 would get revoked. It was only pooling your proxies with his that got it passed."
"But..." Hannah said, weakly.
Yuri raised his voice. "No buts, Hannah. You're still trying to apply Old Terran prohibitions against step-brother and step-sister pairings that even there were only illegal in some places. We all decided to make a clean break with Old Terra's traditions even before we left it, remember? That's the reason why we decided to call our families polys and the genetically unrelated kids in them poly-siblings instead of step-siblings, to make clear that this was a different kind of family, and a different kind of relationship. Mario and Sukie didn't become siblings after being born into separate monogamous marriages that ended, they were born into this poly, with a blood-mother each, a poly-mother each, and two poly-dads, since neither of us is their sperm-father. We want that to mean something different, not the same as the Old Terran family. Let go of the past, of your Mom's morality, pushing you away from your step-brother Curt. They're not here. You are. Decide right now to be a Nova Terran, 100%, and embrace Nova Terra's morality."
Hannah sighed, then said, "Y'know, I hate being outmaneuvered. First Cooper, now you? But I know you're right, damn it. I'm sorry, kids. Your Dad is right, I was hearing my Mom's voice in my head whenever I thought about you two being married. You... you have my blessing, for marrying each other, for your brothers, all of it. I do just want you to be happy."
"My blessing, too," said Chanika. "I never quite heard it expressed the way Yuri just did, maybe I just wasn't listening for it. This is a new world, with its own traditions being built and its own moral choices. My mom would have killed me if I'd ever told her I wanted to live in a polyamorous family, yet here I am, not only doing it, but ecstatic about it."
Yuri said, "As for Mario being with his brothers, you should remember that we debated incest and same-sex intimacy, too. The colony made the decision to only outlaw incest which could produce children, but to take no steps against having same-gender siblings in the same poly. It was deliberately allowed, if not explicitly stated, because we felt it could increase their chances of being compatible socially, where there was no genetic issue. As for same-sex intimacy, the only restriction against it is that the poly must produce its required number of children to grow the colony. What the spouses do when the wives are pregnant, not in the fertile part of their cycle or have met their minimum number of children is up to them. We identified that another benefit to the poly structure is that it allows two lesbians and two gay men to partner in a way that allows for enough hetero contact to produce children without forcing them into two monogamous marriages where they'd be unhappy. So long as they can be intimate with the opposite sex those few days per month when they're trying to get pregnant, we don't care about the rest. Some very good crew members were washed out on Old Terra because they were gay or lesbian, even though they were prepared to marry someone of the opposite gender and have kids with them. We weren't about to perpetuate that mistake here."
Mario spoke up, then. "Why aren't any of the debates you had captured in the colony history? It would have helped my generation a lot to have heard about the process by which the charter developed, particularly the things you were allowing by default and why."
Yuri answered, "In order to get people to speak their minds, we had to promise them that the debates would be off the record. We couldn't just guarantee them that things would be anonymous, when we're talking about having just 256 people involved, who all knew each other after the crew rotations on the Avalon. It took us years of ship-board life to arrive at the first amendments to deal with the infertility problem, and that was with it being a crisis that would affect us most once we landed so we had time to make those decisions. Debating the poly structure was a bit more acrimonious because the opinions varied more widely. As you can tell, some of those opinions didn't go away just because they wound up losing, although I like to think time has shown that the winning sides were right."
~~~~~
Cooper Chess' Journal
Tuesday, November 15, CY 26
It really has been kind of weird going back into a dating scene, while being married. The fact that Mario is my half-brother doesn't really register with me, since I wasn't raised with him. He's just one of dozens of half-siblings I have that have Chad as sperm-father, given how prolific Chad was, and I think of him more as a neighborhood friend than brother. However, Spinz grew up in the same poly with both Mario and Sukie as their brother. Emotionally, he does think of them as siblings, more than I do. But since Mario has shown that the two kinds of love are not incompatible, Spinz has spent a lot of time with Mario talking about how he and Sukie converted familial love into romantic.
This is part of the reason why we want to date before making a decision on marriage. If Spinz can't overcome thinking of Mario and Sukie as siblings, and start thinking of them as spouses, it might prevent us all from getting married, and the compatibility testing we'll have to go through will catch it. So far, he's done okay, even finding himself surprised by having a physical reaction when Sukie kissed him good night after our first date. I personally think he'll be fine. He just needs some more time to adjust.
Chinah and Mel both seem to be feeling strongly attracted to Mario, perhaps because he shares some traits with Spinz and I. It's taking them longer to warm up to Blake, but we can all see a spark. There doesn't seem to be as much of an attraction between my wives and Sukie and Tina, as neither of them seems to be bisexual, which we've agreed is okay. Both women are more petite than Mel and Chinah, with Sukie having the slight advantage in curves.
The fact that we all play poly-chess has helped a lot, as it has given us a shared activity to use as a basis for several dates, that have turned into intense discussions about our future, followed by make-out sessions between the guys and girls, that have left us so turned on that Mel and Chinah attacked Spinz and me afterward.
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Thursday, November 16, CY 26
Doc Fowler notified us that the genetic screening for the eight of us had passed. He had identified that the two recessive genes that caused the risk between Mario and Sukie had come from Mario's and my sperm-father Chad and Sukie's sperm-father Dave Purcell, but that I had not inherited either gene from Chad. As there were no other conflicts introduced, the risk level was considered acceptable, and we could be an octet. Assuming we passed the social compatibility testing, that is.
We decided to date for at least two more weeks, pretty much every night, before making a decision about applying for that testing, in order to expand our poly. We would actually be the first Gen2 poly to expand, and only the second octet.
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Thursday, November 28, CY 26
Our planned two weeks of dating are over, and we are convinced that our feelings for each other have grown into love, even faster than we expected, so the eight of us submitted to the social compatibility testing.