"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 model: 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?

Then he spied a representation of a man with his baby. The man's penis was flaccid; but even more remarkable, he had a well-developed bosom, and the baby was nursing.

Prior stood and stared at that for some time, his groin twinging nervously. Was this a sculptural joke? He had never heard of a man with full-blown breasts, except for the chosen castrates who claimed to have converted to women. Yet every man did have nipples, and before puberty the chests of boys and girls were pretty much alike, and in some cases boy-babies dribbled milk from those nipples. So the potential was there—and if man was not intended by nature to have it, why was he born with nipples? Only body chemistry in adolescence made the difference. Why not men with breasts and women with beards?

Could it, in fact, have been this way in the past? Less differentiation between the sexes? Perhaps at one time every adult human being had had beard and breasts, and penis and vagina. Maybe only in historic times, when prudery could be developed, perfected and spread like a vile disease, had the woman's member been reduced to the clitoris and the man's hole portioned between anus and urethra. Once man had fought his way to supremacy on Earth, he had no longer needed to have every part interchangeable, and so true sexuality had developed. A modern woman could be considered at least in part a castrated male; a modern man might be a debreasted female.