Earth-349: The Return of Brainiac
by Anton Psychopoulos, Ph.D.

	Disclaimer #1: This story is inspired by a story in Superman #349, but is not
limited by that story or any other.
	Disclaimer #2: This story makes use of copyrighted characters owned by DC
Comics, Inc., and other publishers.  It is written for amusement only and is not intended
to infringe or disparage those copyrights.
	Disclaimer #3: This story is not recommended for persons under 18 or the easily
offended, especially those who have difficulty with themes like involuntary pregnancy
and lactation.
	Acknowledgements:  Thanks to Femur of www.tgcomics.com for creating the
modified cover to Reality Flux #15, which in part inspired this story.  Thanks to Boglin,
who created "Spider-Goblin", inspiration for the Black Widows.  And big thanks to
Gangnet, creator of the monumental Bent Silver, who explained why the number 38 is
sacred to Supergirl.

	Linda had fallen asleep at the breast, Karen's nipple slipping from her mouth with
a stream of milky drool.  Karen was just laying her down when Clark began to wail.
Karen sighed and hurried over to his crib, wanting to silence him before he woke any of
the others.
	Too late.  In the gray bin beside Clark's, Edna was now wide-eyed with
pursed lips.  Edna was new, only a few feedings old, but Karen already knew that when
Edna's lips pursed like that, she was about to give forth with an explosive, owl-like
scream.  She snatched up Edna even before Clark, automatically pressing her to the breast
Linda hadn't been using, as much to muffle her cry as to offer her a nipple.  Sure enough,
Edna's scream vibrated joltingly into Karen's breast, but then she settled down and started
to suck.
	Unfortunately, that left her other breast for Clark.  The nipple was still wet and
sore from Linda's nursing, and Clark was a real vacuum-pump sucker.  Wincing, Karen
accepted the discomfort.  Just one more, among so many.  It had really been a bad year.
	She lowered herself carefully onto the bench that projected from one wall of the
nursery, wishing yet again that she had a rocking chair, and swayed slowly forward and
back, murmuring softly and rhythmically to Clark and Edna, trying to let her mind
wander.  There were only so many things for her to think about.  Inevitably, one of them
was to relive her last day of freedom.
	It had been a Saturday morning, blessedly free of anything to do.  Karen Zorelle
had a busy life, but she had carefully kept Saturdays free of obligations.
Tuesday through Friday there were classes in the morning, waiting tables in the
afternoon.  Monday, a full shift at the restaurant.  Sunday there was church, and usually a
full afternoon of parish work.  But on Saturday, she didn't have to do a thing.  Not even
get out of bed if she didn't want to, she thought as she stretched in bed.
	But she did want to, of course.  Actually, she wanted to do a lot of things she
wouldn't have time for the rest of the week.  Climbing out of bed, still in an oversized
blue T-shirt and red panties, she went into the kitchenette of her little apartment and
checked on her teletype.
	The machine had been busy through the night (she kept it in the kitchenette so its
clattering keys wouldn't wake her up when a message came through at 3 AM), curls of
yellow paper piled up on the floor.  Karen tore the end of the paper off the printer and
carefully rolled it into a scroll, with the first message at the top.  She poured a cup of
lukewarm tea from the pot on the stove and sat down to read.
	The teletype had been a blessing to so many people: shut-ins, the socially
awkward, people who worked in remote places.  Also to people with interests more
specialized than network television and major-league sports.  A teletype message, once it
was composed and recorded onto punched paper tape, could be sent to one person or
dozens, just by feeding it the right address-tapes.
Karen communicated daily with all sorts of people over the teletype: her
numerous and far-flung family, old classmates, and people who shared her interest in the
vaguely defined phenomenon of the "superhero".
	There'd been the occasional being with unusual abilities down through the
centuries, people like Hercules and Makeda of Sheba, but in the eight years or so since
Superwoman had first appeared, they'd seemed to be popping up everywhere.  Often, it
was rumored, they'd been ordinary people until something extraordinary happened to
them.  Karen collected fragmentary reports and rumors about the superhumans, the lawful
and the ill-behaved, exchanging news and speculation about them.
	Growing up in the little town of Argo City, Missouri, she'd never seen a real
superhero in action.  She'd seriously considered trying to get into Metropolis University,
or Empire State, in the hope of seeing them mor eoften, but had finally settled for
Stanhope, near Gateway City.
	She also nurtured fantasies of having an "origin incident" of her own, and
becoming a heroine called "Supergirl", or maybe "Power Girl".  She indulged herself to
the extent of using the name Power Girl as her teletype handle.
	Karen read through her messages, sorting out the ones from hero-fans so Power
Girl could reply to their comments.  From London, Cricket Babylon had sent "Through
the Red Lens" #43 (she alternated titles, reporting well-documented incidents through her
"Green Lens" and freewheeling speculations through her "Red Lens").  Hamlet, self-
appointed curator of an imaginary Flash Museum, had sent "Flash-Gram" #105 from hub
City.  Mister Action, who apparently had a major crush on Superwoman and probably
lived in Metropolis, had sent "Pen Pal" #18.
	Karen carefully cut the long scroll apart, setting aside messages from other people
in a pile and dropping the inevitable, paper-wasting unsolicited advertisements in the
kitchen wastebasket.  She took the small sheaf of fan newsletters back to her teletype and
began composing "Power Girl Press Release" #12.
	"The big news from New York, of course, is the capture of the Green Goblin.
Turns out Funky Flashman was right all along: he was Norman Osborn.  But what really
interests me is the unmasking of the Goblin's Black Widows.  Now, I never heard of Mary
Jane Watson, Gwen Stacy or Felicia Hardy before, but you'll kindly recall that back in '63
I suggested that April Parker was Spider-Woman, and when the wall-crawler disappeared
and the Goblin turned up with a hench-harem with the same powers as Spidey, I thought
it likely that one of them was the former Spider-Woman.  If Bellevue ever manages to get
the girls coherent again, now that they're off whatever it was the Goblin was feeding
them, it'll be interesting to hear Parker's own story.
	"Last year, both Batgirl and Robin disappeared from Gotham.  Batgirl later
showed up in Washington, D.C., of all places, sometimes seen teamed with the male
Captain America who appeared in the capital at the same time.  But Batwoman remained
a solo act until just recently, when she showed up with a new prot‚g‚e, the Huntress.
Apparently about ten years old, the girl in the tiger skin moves and fights as though she
had about twenty years' training.  Maybe Batwoman should give up the vigilante business
and open a school, if she's that good a teacher.
	"Cricket Babylon has some strong opinions about how people are depicted in
comics.  [This was a powerful understatement: Babylon's scorn for certain comics had
been both pungent and obscene]  I can't really comment on that, because I usually don't
read superhero comics.  I get impatient with the way the writers take liberties with the
facts; even the ones like Detective Comics, where the heroes act as consultants, tend to be
'based on actual case files' the way gingerbread is 'based on' stalks of wheat.  You learn
about as much about Superwoman's actual life by reading an issue of Action Funnies as
you learn about a wheat farmer by eating a gingerbread man.
	"When I read comics, it's for entertainment.  I'm fond of the science fiction
anthology titles like Reality Flux and Altered Fates."
	She worked on her newsletter until 11:00, when the I Ching Boutique would be
open.  She needed a new bra.  Even the one that had always fit best didn't fit very well
anymore.
	She tried on bras for half an hour before she finally accepted the owner's offer to
measure her for a custom fitting.  Dianna White worked quickly and efficiently, and she'd
made her own measuring tape out of soft flannel, which Karen especially appreciated.
The dark-haired woman took her measurements and gave Karen the bad news.
	"The reason none of the bras you tried on would fit is simple, Karen: you're no
longer a 38D."
	Karen sighed.
	"Great, so now I'm a 40?"
	"No.  Now you're a 38 double-D."
	Her eyes widened.
	"I'm only 19!  How big are they gonna get?  What'll happen when I have kids?"
	Dianna chuckled, not unkindly.
	"Don't worry; my rates for custom work are quite reasonable."
	A little window shopping, lunch at a curry restaurant downtown (an indulgence on
a student's budget, especially when she was going to have to pay for a custom-made bra,
but she liked indulging herself), then back to her apartment.  She did some more
teletyping, made herself some supper and teletyped some more.  She finally had the tape
punched and edited by nine that night, scotch-taped it to the end of the well-worn tape
that held the addresses on her mailing list, and fed the whole spool into her teletype.  She
watched it start feeding, imagining with satisfaction her words pouring out of several
dozen teletypes all over the world.  Once she was confident that it would keep on feeding
and not snarl, she turned from the teletype and finally gave a thought to her homework.
	Reluctantly, she picked up the stack of folders that held her various assignments,
opened the one on top (U.S. History 221: Civil War I to the Mexican War), and tried to
focus her eyes on the fuzzy purple print of a ditto-copied handout.  It seemed fuzzier than
usual.  And then fuzzier still.  And then the stack of folders slid from her lap.  And then
she was leaning over to pick them up, and somehow wound up on the floor.
	She never did see who or what it was picked her up.
	Karen awoke to the sight of a dull gray wall that was neither metal nor plastic.
She rolled over, noticing that she was naked and that her body ached in several places,
and saw more dull gray walls, and something that looked like a dime-store counter made
of the same stuff.  The ceiling above her was giving off a pallid white light, apparently
coming from the entire surface.
	Karen rose shakily to her feet, feeling the most acute ache in her breasts, which
felt very heavy.  It occurred to her that she might have been raped, but there was no
special soreness between her legs.  At about the same time that she rose high enough to
see inside the long gray trough that stood nearest her, and could see that it was divided
into four trays, each with a small body in it, she also heard one of them start to cry.
	Instantly, the ache in her breasts became more acute, and Karen had a nightmarish
insight into where she was and why she had been brought there.
	There were four babies in four little cribs in the nearest trough, and three more
gray troughs beyond that, taking up most of the gray chamber.  The first child she saw
was a boy, pale and totally hairless, with very large eyes.  The next was a dusky girl, with
a full head of black curls and oddly elongated ears.  The third was a ruddy girl with long
fingers.  The sixth baby had fine wispy maroon hair, and seemed to have no visible sex at
all.  The ninth was a boy covered from head to foot in coarse black hair, like a baby
gorilla, but with unmistakably human face, hands and feet.  There were twelve in all.
	And they were all green.
	Pale translucent jade green, dark olive-green that was almost brown, dappled
aquamarine like a body seen underwater, but always distinctly green.  As though they'd all
come from different mothers, but had the same father.
	It was the better part of a day before it occurred to her that she might have gotten
the correct answer on the first try.
	There was no mistaking what she was there for, however: the aching in her taut,
heavy breasts made that obvious.  Almost before the reality of the situation had sunk in,
Karen was cradling the baby who was crying the loudest -- a grass-green boy with thick
blond hair -- and holding him to her breast.  She'd seen her mother do it often enough, and
had no trouble cradling him in her arm, supporting his head, and pressing beside her
nipple so the bulk of her breast didn't force him away.
	She'd watched her mother nursing often enough over the years, so she knew how
it was done.  But somehow Mom had never mentioned that it could be painful.  It hurt,
more than she would have guessed, but the little guy was hungry, and her breasts were
aching with milk pressure, so she kept at it.
	Mom had dropped hints over the years that nursing could feel very, very good, and
Karen had guessed that the feeling could be sexually charged (she certainly enjoyed
playing with her own nipples, and could only imagine what it would feel like for a lover
to kiss them).  She did feel some sexual arousal, and also noticed that there was pleasure
in the relief of pressure, like taking a leak when you'd been denied for a long time.  The
pain she figured would lessen, in time
	While he nursed, she examined him more closely.  He was male, with a normal-
looking uncircumcised penis.  There was a tiny patch of white on the tip, under the
foreskin.  Gently she pushed, to peel it back, and saw that there was a tiny round swatch
of something white and fluffy, like toilet paper or flannel, stuck over the urinary meatus.
She was afraid to try to pick it off; she'd leave it be unless he showed signs of distress.
	Examining his penis reminded her that he had no diaper.  None of the babies did.
That was going to be a problem, and sooner rather than later, especially considering how
much the little green sprout was drinking.
	Cradling the boy, she walked around the room, looking over the children.  All
twelve had little white patches, always in the analogous place.  The seemingly-sexless
child had a patch surprisingly far back, almost to the anus, which she saw also had a little
patch.  That was the clue, quickly confirmed on all twelve: a little patch on the anus, that
stayed in place unless she pulled at it steadily for several seconds, and which smoothed
down again when she placed it back on the anus.
	So, apparently she didn't have to worry about diaper changes; some mysterious
arrangement, using alien technology (a disintegrator?  a teleporter?), had solved that
problem very elegantly.
	Walking around the space, she found her own sanitary arrangements, which were
just as elegant and outwardly simple: a shallow hole in the floor.  Wastes which fell in it
vanished without a fuss.  A small square of the same fluffy white stuff wiped her clean,
and stayed clean itself.
	At the opposite side of the chamber was a small recess in the wall, holding a bowl.
She pulled the bowl out, looked it over and set it back in, and it was instantly filled with a
mound of moist bluish stuff, somewhere between bread and pudding in texture and not
very flavorful.  She was a little hungry, and quite thirsty, so she ate most of what was in
the bowl and then set it aside.
	She continued around the room, and almost missed the door.  Fine cracks marked
a section of the wall which, if it were removed, would make a standard-sized doorway.
There was no sign of a handle or hinges, just the cracks.  And another set of even finer
cracks in the middle of the door, which she saw formed three circles joined into a "V" by
straight lines.
	Now at least she knew whose slave she was.
	Colu Dox had been born with powers and abilities far beyond those normal for the
inhabitants of the planet Yod: he was stronger, faster, vastly more intelligent, nearly
invulnerable.  On Earth, he might have become a superhero, or at worst a supervillain, but
Yod had a different culture, different rules, different expectations.  Dox became a tyrant.
	His reign had not been a popular one.  Coups and revolutions were more or less
constant, and each time his reprisals against the rebels were more terrible.  Finally, he
responded to a worldwide revolt by releasing a deadly microbe to which only Dox
himself was immune.  Left alone, Dox used computer-controlled machinery to keep Yod's
industrial plant running and began preparations to resettle the planet.
	He roamed the galaxy, abducting thousands of people from different worlds,
holding them in suspended animation until the day he would arrive home.
	The people of Earth first became aware of Dox as a mysterious voice speaking
from Metropolis University's BRAINIAC computer.  At first, even some of the engineers
on the project believed that the machine's thousands of relays and vacuum tubes had
somehow produced a conscious mind.  By the time it was revealed that the computer was
being manipulated from afar by a flesh-and-blood alien, the public couldn't stop calling
him "Brainiac".
	Superwoman had defeated Brainiac and returned him to Yod alone, leaving
Brainiac's spaceship in the hands of experienced space travellers among the abductees.
	Dox had returned two years later, this time as the leader of a legion of super-
powered beings from many planets, including one who claimed to be Captain Comet of
Earth (an identification made problematic by the fact that "Captain Comet" had been the
fictitious hero of an early television serial).  Superwoman had unmasked the group's
leader as the infamous Brainiac, and his dupes turned against him.
	So, now Dox apparently had a new scheme to provide himself with subjects:
abduction, but also mass breeding.  The babies were obviously half-Yodian, presumably
bred from Brainiac's own sperm.  A sick assembly line, with captives performing
separate tasks, in some ham-fisted notion of efficiency.  Karen thought the man really did
act as though he had a computer for a brain.
	She kept nursing the green boy until he fell asleep; by then, two more babies were
crying.  She'd seen Mom with an infant on one breast and a one-year-old at the other, but
didn't feel up to trying the trick just yet.  She nursed one while holding the other on her
lap, singing softly to it.
	She found herself singing a lot, in her new life.
	Boredom was her worst enemy.  There were no books, no newspapers, no TV, no
teletype, no adults or even children to talk with.  There was no cooking to do, not even
any mindless housekeeping to divert her.  There were just the babies, sleeping and waking
and crying, and all she had to do with her day was rock them and nurse them.
	Not that there were any days, or nights.  The lights were always on, and the
babies, of course, were always waking up hungry, so she could only sleep in irregular
snatches, between feedings.  None of them stayed satisfied for long, and there were
twelve of them.
	She sang to the babies.  Soothing sounds, to keep them from fussing; occasionally
a bouncy tune to make a cranky baby giggle.  And it was one of the few mental activities
that satisfied her, dredging up songs from her memory.
	She noticed she was singing "O Tannenbaum" a lot.  She sang the German words
		O Tannenbaum, O Tannenbaum,
		Dein Kleid will mich was lehren
she sang the English words
		Each bough doth hold its tiny light
		To make the gloomy winter bright
she sang the secessionist lyrics from Civil War II, which she'd learned in eighth grade
history class.
		Avenge the patriotic gore that flecked the streets of Baltimore
		And be the battle queen of yore, Maryland, my Maryland
she sang the lyrics she'd learned in the Girl Scouts, at Arctic Survival Camp in Minnesota
		O Lutefisk, O Lutefisk,
		Vhy do I eat you, Lutefisk?
		You smell like bleach, you look like glue
		You taste yoost like an overshoe
she sang the words her grandfather had used one night, when very drunk
		It waved above our infant might
		When all about seemed dark as night
		It witnessed many a deed and vow
		We will not change its color now
	The tune didn't really make her think of Christmas, which would only have made
her sad; instead, it gave her a feeling of quiet, calm endurance, the kind of patience
required of a prisoner waiting for parole, or a besieged city waiting for relief.
	Or, she supposed, a family gathered in the dead of winter to cheer themselves up
with rich food and bright lights.
	She named the babies.  They didn't answer to their names, and she had no-one
else to talk with about them, but it wouldn't have been right not to.
	She named them after her parents and grandparents: Fred, Edna, Jordan, Laura,
Eben, Sara.  She named them after her brothers and sisters: Lena, Linda, Jerry, Helen,
Joey, Margo.
	It wouldn't have been so bad if they'd just let the babies grow up a little.  Seeing
them learn to crawl, to walk, watching their heads fill up with words, long before words
began to spill out.  That would have been more fun than these wordless, squirming babes-
in-arms, even if they would have been more work as they grew more mobile.
	But when the babies got to be three or four months old, they would disappear
while she was sleeping, replaced by newborn infants, the stumps of their umbilical cords
sealed with white patches.  Clearly, Brainiac wanted her to nurse the newborns, not to
rear the toddlers.
	It hurt to wake up and find a baby gone, replaced by some newborn stranger.  But
after the first couple of times, Karen reconciled herself to it.  As time went by, her dreams
were filled more often with images of purple-skinned drudges carrying the babies away
through a haze of sleepy-gas, or of metal tentacles writhing from slots in the ceiling, but
she never had a clue to how it was really done, or what was done with the babies
afterwards.
	Although she had some dreams on that subject, too.
	Having used up her immediate family, she named the next batch of babies after
old boyfriends and schoolmates: Irma, Tina, Lorna, Carlos, Lillian, Byron, Dick.  After
that, she named them after people she knew over the teletype: Kurt, Jim, Morty, Jules,
even Cricket.
	Sometimes she would test her memory by dredging up teletype letters, movies she
had seen, books she had read, summarizing them for the babies as they nursed.  She was
surprised by how much she could remember of the Cherry Ames books she'd read when
she was ten: Cherry Ames, War Nurse.  Cherry Ames, Ski Lodge Nurse.  Cherry Ames,
Refugee Camp Nurse.
	One day it occurred to Karen that they'd left one title out of the series: Cherry
Ames, Wet Nurse.  She laughed hysterically over that, until it started to make the babies
cry.
	She remembered all of their names as they came and went: Jimmy, Clark, Lucy,
Steve, Oscar.  Some she gave names based on their appearance, like a pet's name: a girl
with a white streak through her orange hair became Streaky, a boy with milky-jade skin
the color of cleansing powder was called Comet.  A hairless monkey-faced boy was
called Beppo, like an organ grinder's assistant.
	Karen ate and nursed and rocked and comforted, and slept when she got the
chance.  She tested her memory, singing and talking.  She tallied up the babies' names,
and when she got to 48, realized that she had been through four complete cycles of
approximately three months, and had been a prisoner for about a year.  By coincidence, it
was only a few hours later that her captivity suddenly ended.
	A draft of air woke her.  Air moving as it never had before, and sounds echoing
from spaces that had never been there.  Karen sat up and saw that the doorway in the wall
was open, the door gone without a trace.
	Moving warily, acutely aware that she had no idea what was beyond her own little
chamber, aware that she had no weapons, no defenses (aware for the first time in months
that she was naked), Karen stepped through the doorway.
	A long corridor curved identically off in both directions.  Small sounds came form
the left, so she went that way.  She saw a blue person lying on the floor, draped with a red
blanket.
	No, it was a pink-skinned person in a Superwoman costume, she saw after a
moment.  A glittering gray tentacle, more lifelike than the machinery from her dreams,
held a stubby green lamp above the fallen body, even though the corridor was well-lit.
	Finally Karen understood that the person really was Superwoman, overcome by
Kryptonite.  Next, she saw a pair of larger tentacles hanging down from the ceiling,
reaching for the fallen heroine and then jerking back, apparently suffering some kind of
mechanical failure.
	Not expecting to succeed, Karen stepped up to the small tendril that held the
Kryptonite and yanked at the luminous ingot.  It came away easily, Karen almost fell
over, and then she ran back into the nursery and dropped it into the potty hole.  She gave
a cry of triumph as it vanished, and she hurried back to the fallen Superwoman.
	Pulling the crumpled cape away from her would-be rescuer's face, Karen was
stunned to find that the person in the blue suit was actually a blonde boy of about thirteen.
He looked up, blinking weakly, smiled nervously.
	"Um, thanks," he said in a soft, very pleasant alto voice.
	Karen smiled.  "Thanks for getting my door open, if I'm not mistaken."
	He nodded, sitting up, then getting shakily to his feet.
	"Yeah, I think I've shut down most of the main computer's control systems, but
some of the independent defense systems are pretty clever."
	He looked up at the impotently-writhing tentacles.
	"But fortunately, not perfect."
	He brushed himself off, seeming to grow larger as his power returned to him.  He
bit his lip and tried to look Karen confidently in the eye.
	"I'm Superwoman's Secret Emergency Weapon Number 38.  I was built in this
form in order to confuse and mislead criminals.  Um, my internal power source is based
on her own powers, that's why it's vulnerable to Kryptonite."
	Karen waved her hand, silencing the boy's clumsy explanations.
	"Look, I don't care what you are, or where you came from: whether you're
Superwoman's kid brother, or an immigrant from Earth-252, or if you actually are
Superwoman, transformed by Red Kryptonite.  Whatever you are and whatever you're
doing here, if you want me to keep quiet about you, I will."
	The boy bit his lip, nodded.
	"Um, thank you.  You and the other, um, women will be all right now.  The ship
is yours.  And yes, my existence is supposed to be a secret, so . . . ."
	Karen ended his discomfort by offering her his hand.
	"So this never happened.  I never saw you."
	He shook her hand, nodded again and punched buttons that opened a door in the
opposite side of the corridor from the nursery.  The door closed, and a small window
appeared in it.  Karen watched through the window as an opposite door opened onto
starry space.  It was an airlock.  The boy faced outward while it cycled, and flew away
without a backward glance as the outer door closed and the little window discreetly
vanished.  There were only faint cracks to show there had been a door in that spot.
	Karen looked left and right down the corridor, which seemed like a vista of
infinite freedom after a year in the little nursery chamber.  But Irene was crying, and she
herself was hungry, so she nursed the little beige girl and ate a bowl of blue pudding, and
after that she badly needed a nap.
	The small figure in red and blue flew down towards the ice-covered mountain too
rapidly for ordinary eyes to notice.  Once past the immense golden door, he went directly
to his bedroom and began to change.  He was in yellow shorts, pulling on a green tunic
with horizontal shoulder-wings when a platinum-haired girl of about nine entered without
knocking.
	"Somebody saw you this time, didn't they?"
	He stared at her for a moment, then went on dressing, saying nothing.
	"The Drygur Moliom is gonna have your hide if she finds out."
	"She won't.  I wasn't on Earth."
	"Du-uh!  Neither is she, half the time."
	"Well, anyway, she won't find out, so don't worry about it."
	"Who's worried?  Like I care if you get in trouble."
	They went out into the common room that connected the three small bedrooms.
He picked up a puzzle-sphere and poked at elements deep inside with tiny puffs of
controlled breath.
	"It's so dumb.  She's always on us about how the greatest thing anybody can do is
to help people, and then she won't let us do any helping."
	"Not until the time is right, yeah, I know."
	"I'm almost as old as she was when she started out, and she was self-taught."
	"I know, I know.  Heck, I agree with you.  But you didn't hear that from me."
	"Not a word," he sighed, nodding, "not a word."
	When Karen woke, the door was still open, and the corridor outside was full of
women.  Blue women, red women, impossibly tall and slender green women, immense
hulking women with rough orange skin and breasts like warheads.  Hairless grey-skinned
women who looked like they spent a lot of time in the water.  Black-furred women with
eight breasts.  A woman with three breasts in a row, in flagrant violation of bilateral
symmetry (Karen wondered if it were a cosmetic addition).
	Some of them carried babies or toddlers.  About half of them were visibly
pregnant.  All of them were visibly relieved.  Most of them were milling about with
nothing to do, but from time to time individuals and small groups bustled past, intent on
some task.
	Karen wandered the corridors like the others for awhile, feeling something build
up inside her.  Suddenly she felt a sigh escaping from her as though it had gathered from
all corners of her body, and a huge weight was lifted from her shoulders.
	She was free.  Whatever happened next, whether she saw Earth again one day or
not, she was no longer a prisoner of that diabolical nursery.  She felt the way she had
when the disarmament treaty had gone into effect, and the world had been freed from the
threat of nuclear war.  There might be all sorts of bad things in the offing, but the worst
was over, and she had survived.
	Shaking herself, Karen found the strength to go back to the nursery again.  Peri
and Morgan were both red-faced from crying, so she cradled both of them, giving them
each a breast.  When they fell asleep, she fed Freddie, who was not in so much distress,
then took advantage of the lull to go out again and find one of those purposeful types.
	She found an orange-skinned woman with what looked like purple tentacles
growing from her head, passing out green shifts to nude women.  Karen accepted one,
relishing the sensation of fabric against her skin for the first time in over a year.  She
made a note that she'd have to cut the front more deeply, to allow her to nurse with it on.
She also considered, for the first time in a long time, how much bigger her breasts were
after a year of very intensive nursing.  She could only guess what her bra size would be by
now.
Tugging the shift into place, she hurried after the woman.
	"You're one of the ones in charge here, aren't you?"
	"Well, I'm working, anyway."
	Karen took an armload of shifts and helped distribute them to those who desired
clothing.
	"There's somebody aboard here who knows how to pilot this thing, right?"
	"Sure.  Many of us were taken off ships in transit, and some were pilots.  We're in
control of the ship now, but since we're only a couple of months out of Yod, we're going
to make the landing.  Once we're settled there, anybody who wants can make
arrangements for flights back to their home planets.  Wherever you're from, someone's
bound to be heading in its general direction.
	"As for me, though, I'm planning to stay on Yod and help raise the kids.  I don't
think I could stand to be separated from the bunch of little crawlers in my compartment."
	Karen thought it over.  Staying on Yod would mean giving up on Earth, probably
for good.  Never seeing her family again, never continuing her education.  Yod had
advanced technology, much of it still in working order, but it was still a mostly-vacant
world, with dangers she could only guess at, not the least of them being the threat of
Brainiac's coming back.
	It might also mean living on a planet of women and children, seeing men rarely, if
ever.
	But going back to Earth meant never seeing any of the babies again, and she was
so sick of having her babies taken away.
	"So will it just be the three hundred of us, and the babies, when we get there?"
	"No.  There are nine other ships, all under the control of their former captives,
converging on Yod right now.
	"There's also a prison asteroid in Yod's solar system, where Dox confined various
enemies of his regime in the early days.  Supposedly it had been destroyed, but apparently
Dox was actually keeping them incommunicado in case he needed healthy Yodian males
after all.  Recently, they managed to get a ship to Yod, and now they're ferrying prisoners
home.  There are ten thousand in all, and between them and us we seem to have all the
necessary skills to keep a civilization running."
	Karen was a little dubious.
	"Enemies of the regime?  What kind of enemies?  Gangsters, disaffected youth?"
	"Some of them were from a rather disorderly subculture made up of the attendants
to herds of meat animals on the plains of the Eastern Continent, but most were members
of an emergency-services guild which conspired to overthrow Dox soon after he took
power."
	Karen began to smile.
	"So, let me see if I've got this straight.  We've got three thousand women on their
way to meet ten thousand firemen and cowboys. . . ?"

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