THE MILKING PENS
By Tommyhawk1@AOL.COM
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The barns were arranged in long lines of silver aluminum. There was none of the usual smells one associates with a barnyard, but then, there were no cows in the field, no sheep in the meadows, no horses in the corrals, no dogs in the yard. That was the enigma of this planet, Marnicia, that it had been colonized many years ago, and had endured during the long Interregnum between the fall of the Old Empire and the rise of the New Galactic Union. These colonists had landed on a barren world with only a small supply of seeds. They had been lacking in several of the essential elements to make a successful colony (they hadn't been colonists by choice, their ship had made a forced landing during the evacuation of Telvecia during the wars), they should have dwindled and died out.
Instead, they had a thriving culture. Somehow they had fought the battle for survival and won. Only...how?
The ship's eco-biologist had spelled it out. "They must have found a local source of proteins. The human body can absorb proteins from some unlikely sources, you don't have to be a meat-eater, though that's the easiest source for an omnivore such as ourselves. But there are nuts, legumes, some grasses, that manufacture proteins. I would have guessed that they had turned to cannibalism, but that wouldn't introduce new proteins into their eco-system, just recycled the ones that they already had. They might have survived, a few, after a fashion, like that, but this colony is not only larger than the source population, it is expanding over the main continental mass.
We had made aerial scans. No animals we could see. No plants that were cultivated beyond those brought by the original colonists. They had landed on a world with an oxygen-rich atmosphere and no life above the size of microbes and algae. All the life on Marnicia was of human origin.
It was a mystery. And given the possibility of cannibalism, we had to find out quietly, before we announced our presence.
The first thing I noticed was a rather casual dress code, many of the local inhabitants went naked and seemed to be of a servant or slave class. My few efforts to talk to these servants and find out their exact condition went for nothing, they would stare at me, dumb, and I wondered if they were mutes. I wasn't in a position to examine them close enough for that, another issue for the main landing party when we brought them down. I had an uncomfortable few weeks being a casual listener while I learned their dialect, Telvecian English which had further corrupted by their isolation. I lived as one of them, kept my conversation to a minimum, soaked in their culture (they had the most astonishing range of vegetarian dishes, usually served with a frothy mixture that was salty but flavorful; I quite enjoyed a glass of it with every meal after the local custom. After I solved Marnicia's main enigma, I intended to track down the source of this drink, called Nurita, and get the recipe so I could feed it into our ship's database.
After I got a grasp on the language, I left the city and headed toward the smaller towns. I needed to get friendly with a farmer.
Mikmal was my mentor as I walked toward the barns. I had overheard that he had one of the "largest herds in the county" and was looking for help on his ranch. Whatever the secret was of this planet's survival, Mikmal had the answer in his barns.
"Your job will be to milk them according to the schedule posted." Mikmal informed me. "Most of them produce at least a liter's worth three times a day. I have a couple who are about to get below that; when that happens, it's time to render them down into glue and fertilizer."
"How old are they when that happens?" I asked him. I couldn't admit I didn't know what animal they had somehow managed to bring with them despite the records, but the age might help me.
"Most of them manage well enough until they are about thirty years old." he informed me. "After that, the production drops and you get decreased intervals as well as decrease in product volume. Comes to below three times a day, they don't bring in enough to earn their feed and keep and it's time to render them down. A damned shame, they're affectionate things, and one can get attached to them if you aren't careful. Did you keep a herd back where you came from?"
"Oh, only a couple for family use." I said. "Not the big production line you have going here."
His chest puffed out. "Best source around. I have contracts with three of the biggest Nurita producers, they send their trucks around every day to collect. You won't have any hand in that part of it, though I'll show it to you if you work out."
"What will I be doing, exactly?" I asked him. "Do you have machines to milk it out of them?"
"Machines? Pah!" Mikmal said that like a word, not a grunt of disdain, though its meaning hadn't changed. "You have to give the herd the personal touch to get proper production, any farmer knows that. You sure you grew up on a farm?"
"Yes, sir." I said hastily. "But with a big place like this, I figured you might do it different."
"No machine can replace the personal touch." Mikmal informed me pompously. "The affection of the animal to the man milking him is what keeps productivity high. Simple-minded brutes, they stare at you with those long, pretty eyes of theirs and pucker their lips like they want to kiss you. Go ahead if you want to, it helps them produce."
"Yes, sir." I said and walked inside the barn, looked at the beasts inhabiting the stalls, gasped despite myself.
The stalls were filled with men, young men ranging in age from late teens on up to prime of life. They looked at us entering and made the first sounds I had heard from the unclothed segment of the population. Eager grunts and they thrust their erect cocks at Mikmal and myself with a lusty urgency unmistakable.
"Well, you can see it's time and then some for their milking." Mikmal said. "You take that side, I'll take this one and I'll see how you do."
With that, Mikmal walked over and pulled from a receptacle in the wall a sort of funnel, which he held in one hand as he walked up to the eager young man in the first stall. The youth capered as Mikmal got closer, and Mikmal smiled and embraced the young, nude form, and gave his body a couple of simple strokes. The youth shivered with pleasure at the touch, and Mikmal then grasped the hard young prick and began to pump on it. The young stud stood there, his hips thrust outwards, shivering, eyes closed in rapture.
"Well, get to it!" Mikmal ordered and I looked up from what he was doing to Mikmal's face. He wasn't mad, but he was giving me an order.
"Uh...yes, sir." I said. "Just wanted to see you with the first one, be sure I was doing it your way."
"What way is right?" Mikmal said. "You grab their pud, you give it a couple of good jerks, and if you're halfway decent about getting it right, they'll come every time. If they don't, it's the fertilizer pits for them!"
I looked at the young man Mikmal was jacking off to see how he took this threat, but the words hadn't fazed the youth. He was shuddering and it was apparent he was already close to climax. Mikmal put the funnel to the young man's cock and the youth grunted, moaning, as he came with a wrenching sound that went on and on. Far longer than any climax I'd ever had.
Mikmal was watching a gauge with satisfaction. "Half liter. Three quarters. Liter. Liter and a quarter. Oops, that's all of it. Good boy." he said as he slid the funnel back down into its receptacle, and then patted the young man on his unkempt shock of blond hair. "Damned good producer, but hell, he's been bred from a fine line of producing studs."
Mikmal looked at me, transfixed by what I saw, this one man in a clean set of clothes, a row of naked, grunting, horny studs, all staring at him like he was their sole source of salvation.
"Well?" Mikmal said.
"Uh? Oh!" I said and moved, suddenly bashful, to the first man on my side. I had to stay long enough to get Mikmal in a real conversation. And to speak privately to one of these men who apparently lived his life in a small stall, and spent his days being whacked off by this farmer.
So many men living like this! No wonder Mikmal needed help.
The first man was a bit older than the youth Mikmal had jerked, but I got the funnel in my left hand and moved over to the nude, muscular man. He seemed a bit shy of me.
"Hello." I said to him. "My name is Ettan-64."
My words sound soothed this man, if not the sense, for he didn't answer me, just walked over and nudge my free hand with his erect cock.
"You ready for your morning treatment?" I asked him.
"Guhhh!" was his only answer.
I got hold of his cock, and his reaction was immediate, he moaned from the first touch, and when I didn't start stroking him right away, he began to hunch at my hand, sliding his shaft back and forth.
"You are eager, aren't you?" I asked him. "Well, let's get this over with and when I'm done, I want to talk with you, all right?"
His only answer was to grunt and hunch at me harder, this time it wasn't so much self-stimulation as his telling me, "Shut up and pump my rod, damn you!"
I jerked his pud and he grunted with a surprisingly loud growl. His climax caught me off-guard, his spray hit me on my arm instead of the funnel. The amount of this shot was incredible, it wasn't like having a guy jizz on me, it was more like someone had thrown a cupful of hot liquid onto me.
"Catch that, Ettan!" came Mikmal's shout.
I got two more loads on me before I managed to fumble the funnel to where this stud's jism could land inside of it. I looked a moment before I could find the gauge, and forgot to pump the guy's prick while looking and he groaned with frustration and rage.
"Keep working it!" Mikmal ordered. "Forget the gauge, it'll be there when you're done!
I shamefacedly returned my attention to the cock and aiming that hot, white flood into the funnel. "Sorry." I said.
"That reading will be messed up anyhow." Mikmal griped. "You lost nearly half of it by not being ready. I thought you were raised on a farm and knew how to milk out a stud's load of cream."
"We didn't do it like this." I said. "But I'll do better next time."
"You'd better, and hurry." Mikmal said. He was on his fourth one already, three exhausted men behind him, lying on the cold floor. He was right, if I was going to pump half the cocks in this room, I was going to have to hurry."
My first man finished, and I shook the last drops of his come-load into the funnel, slid it back into its holder, and looked at the gauge. "Nearly a half liter." I said to Mikmal.
Mikmal shook his head. "Even with you screwing up, that's low." he said to me. "That one's getting old. Have to turn him in one day soon."
Turn him into what? I shuddered and moved to the next man in line. This time I was better prepared, I let this naked man hug me and even gave him a one-handed hug back, and ran my hand down his chest before grasping his prick. I pounded him with rapid fury and held the funnel ready and caught that entire huge load when he squirted it, gasping and grunting, feeding it all into the funnel.
I looked at the gauge when I was done. "A liter and a half." I said. "No danger of the glue factory for you, that's for sure."
"Come on, Ettan, move it." Mikmal said. "Two more barns after this one, and we have to come back for this group again before we break for lunch."
I did what I could. My attempts to speak with these slaves (I couldn't call them anything else, given their condition, despite my knowledge of the myriad ways humans got along...or didn't...with each other throughout history. Mikmal owned these men, all of them. And he made his living by selling their admittedly enormous come-loads to be turned into a protein drink!
"That must be it." I said to the guy I was jacking when I thought of that. "The Nurita is a daily drink because it's this people's source of protein. They survived by feeding off of this mutation which increases manyfold a man's sperm production. What do you think of that?"
His only answer was to grunt in a now-familiar sound and I hastily moved the funnel up to catch the load.
Mikmal had to take my last half-dozen men and he wasn't that satisfied when I was done. "Okay, come on, Barn Number Two was ready nearly a half hour ago. This time is coming out of your lunch! Mine, too!"
"I'm sorry, sir." I said as I trotted after him. "I just wasn't expecting this."
"What's to not expect?" Mikmal said scornfully. "What did you think we did with them. Works the same for the Cows as it does for us humans, after all."
"Cows?" I asked him, unsure if I understood him.
"Now come on, we have another hundred and twenty-five Cows to milk out, and then back to the seventy-five in Barn Number One before you and I get lunch. I keep my Cows on a strict schedule, and they love it. Their pricks bob up and get nice and hard just from it being the time for me to pump their puds and catch their milk."
Milk? I didn't dare ask him about that alteration of the word. "What about...female Cows?" I asked him.
He looked at me with a scorn I was beginning to tire of. "I don't have time to have a bunch of females around, with their brood of pre-producing offspring yelping around them. Only thing female Cows are good for is breeding. Most breeders I know will get rid of most of their female crop, so they can breed the mother again quicker."
I gulped hard at that and kept my mouth shut. After Mikmal finished his half of the second barn, he looked at me with eight to go and said, "Come on over to Barn Number Three when you're done with your row." and walked out.
I was alone with the slaves. I turned to them urgently. "All right, I'd better talk fast. I'm not from this world, I'm from another planet and we've come to rescue all of you. But I will need all of your help to do it. Be ready to break loose with me when I give the signal, and spread the word to the others if you can, okay?"
Silence, except for grunts from the men I hadn't milked out yet. The ones who had been milked were ignoring me entirely. I tried again, with increasing urgent and simple words, and it finally sank in.
These men didn't answer me because they couldn't! The same mutation that had rendered them such enormous producers of jism had also rendered them unable to speak. I also had some serious doubts about their intellect as well.
So I did the only thing I could, I went over and took care of the other eight men. My arm was aching by then as you can imagine, but I didn't plan to stay on this job any longer than I had to. I already had the primary answer to my question, how had this colony survived without any animals? The answer was, they used some of their own number, turned them into the animals that they needed. I wondered if they were cannibals after all. But I hadn't seen any signs of meat dishes while in the city, only the Nurita that was everywhere. By some miracle, I assumed, the people of Marnicia avoided the ultimate degradation of humanity, that of the consumption of human flesh to survive.
But their other practices weren't any better! My God, baby girls were killed so their mothers could bear more children, preferably male? Men were kept in these stalls, only to shoot their astounding huge loads into funnels at the behest of the men like Mikmal, like myself, producing hot come in huge quantities for us to drink at every meal. And when they couldn't keep up the horniness of their younger years of maturity? Fertilizer! These people may not be cannibals, but they were definitely guilty of slavery and genocide.
I resolved to talk to Mikmal at the end of the day, but by then, my own understanding had shifted.
First, I had seen too much to think that these "Cows" were intelligent as humans despite their physical similarities. Mankind traveled down many roads when left on other worlds, and this wasn't the first instance of man being animal once again...although it was the first case of a world turning some of its men into animals to serve the ones who had kept their intelligence!
Second, I was worried about one of the Cows under my care, the first one I had dealt with that now-eternally far-off morning. His seond load, he produced just under a liter. The third time, he was down to two-thirds of that.
Mikmal checked the gauge while waiting for me to finish. "This one is ready for the knackers." was his judgment. "When they run out, they run out."
That night, I went out to the barn again, my talk with Mikmal over. I had learned too much to sleep well, anyhow. The lives of these Cows was barren of any dignity or hope. They lived their lives in these stalls, a narrow box. At one end was a hole they could squat over to void their wastes, the other end had a trough that carted down loads of food to them twice a day, grain wastes such as corn husks and bean stalks, mostly, edible but not proper human food. They would gulp it down, the only food they had ever known. Once a day, Mikmal would come in with the hose and spray them with water as a means of bathing them and washing out their stalls at the same time. If they ever left their stalls (they could, nothing barred their way), they were beaten back into them again. A Cow that was anything but docile was killed out-of-hand. And even when they did everything their owners wanted of them, at about the age of thirty, when only the first diminishment of sexual capacity was involved, they were discarded as being useless. Not worth their care and feeding. Scraps and a stall, and they didn't produce enough to be worth even that to their owners.
Everyone knows that a researcher shouldn't get personally involved with his subjects, but let's all face the fact it happens all the time.
I was determined to save this one man, this one "Cow," from his fate at the hand of a cruel blow to the head.
So I went out to the barn with only one goal left, to free this one being under sentence of death and get back to the ship. The scientists would need a specimen to study.
The man looked up as I entered and when I approached him, he got to his feet gamely, his erection as potent as ever. There wasn't the exuberant eagerness of the other times, though, he had shot his three loads and he was wiped out. But ready to give me another load if I wanted it, if he could.
"How's it going?" I asked him.
"Gunh?" he said, his erection aiming itself at me.
"I wish I knew your name." I said. "A man ought to have a name, right?"
"Gunh?"
"I'll call you Gunn." I said. "That way, you can say your name all you want to."
"Gunh!" He slapped my hand with his cock.
"Gunn, you and I are getting out of here." I said to him.
"Gunh!" he said agreeably, but when I tried to get him out of the stall, he stopped. The training they had before they were brought to a place like this must be thorough.
"No, come on, it's okay." I said to him, trying to take his hand. He swiftly substituted his dick for his hand as I did, and I ended up with some precome on my palm.
"All right, then." I sighed as I wrapped my hand around his prick. "You want to come, I'll let you come one final time, but then we have some traveling to do."
I began to jerk his cock, but as I have said, he just wasn't up to it as he had been before, and my arms were dead-tired.
"I can't do it any longer." I said after a time. "I don't see how Mikmal does it all day long, every day. My arms are aching!"
"Gunh, gunh!" Gunn said to me, his cock throbbing in my hand, and he began to hunch at me again, like he had that morning.
"If you think you can do it, I have an idea." I said and I bent down to kiss his cock.
At first, he jerked back from me, and I smiled up at him. "It's okay, Gunn. Come on, Gunn. Let Ettan suck your dick like a nice little Cow, okay?"
Gunn didn't understand me, but obedience was drummed into him, he obeyed and this time he held still while I took his cock into my mouth.
He grunted in surprise when I bobbed back and forth, working his prick, and then he got into it and began to hunch at me in time with my own movements. His cock throbbed with the hauntingly familiar sensations of a true-human's prick, and then he groaned and I knew he was about to come. But I figured, he couldn't have that much juice in him, could he? He'd been down to a pint earlier that day.
But a pint of liquid is a hell of a lot to take on in the space of less than a half minute. He started shooting his wads, and I gamely drank it down as he shot, and in no time I couldn't swallow it fast enough and it filled my mouth, overflowed my chin and I had to let go and the last wads spun out of his prod and onto my chest.
"What the hell are you doing?" demanded Mikmal from the doorway.
I couldn't pretend innocence, so I turned and said, "I was giving this guy a second chance. I figured, if he and I got more comfortable with each other, he could increase his production."
"Too late for that." Mikmal said. "I've done arranged for the knacker to come get him and two others."
In raw desperation, I said, "Can I keep this one for myself?" I should have tried for all three, but I knew Mikmal enough by now to know that even one was a stretch.
True enough, Mikmal sneered. "Getting too attached to the livestock, are you?" he said. "You want a man to suck, you should have come to me."
"Can't we call off the knackers this one time?" I begged him. "Just one more night?" By morning, I could be gone, retrieved by my ship, gone from this world.
"Ahh!" Mikmal said in sheer disgust. "You aren't any more use to me than he is. You want this one so bad, you can have him in exchange for the wage I owe you. I'm being generous." he explained in case I missed it. "But you aren't the first one to fall in love with one of the herd. My dad found out and killed the Cow I had gotten sweet on. And he was right to do that. Men should stick to men, not animals."
"Thank you." I said, trying to drag Gunn out of his stall. But he wouldn't move. "Come on, Gunn, you belong to me, now!"
"God, you are stupid!" Mikmal grunted. "You don't even know how to move a Cow?"
"No." I admitted. "I lied about having cows when I was young."
"I figured that out this morning." Mikmal said. "Would have ignored it if you'd been a better hand. As it is, take this Cow and get lost."
He showed me the way, I had to put a blindfold over Gunn's eyes, and he calmed down then, my hands his only contact, he obeyed them easily. I got Gunn out of the barn and once we were clear of the farm and I could do it safely without being observed, I signaled for the retrieval ship.
As it hovered overhead, I said to the blindfolded Gunn, "I sure hope you're housebroken, because I'm not letting them keep you in a cage any longer."
The scientists ran some tests of Gunn, but I got to keep him the rest of the time, and the only cost was a notation in my file by the ship captain, accusing me of unprofessional conduct. Gunn adapted in a reasonably short time to life on the ship, I guess the close hallways and small rooms weren't that different from a stall. As for me, I did most of my work from my desk, with Gunn beside me, lying on the floor, head resting against or on top of my foot much like a loyal dog. At night, he would even snuggle up in bed with me once he learned I wouldn't punish him for doing that.
When I'm relaxing, Gunn stays close to me, he seems to be forming more and more a bond with me. He'll lay his head on my lap and I'll stroke his head like he was a pet, and he looks up at me, his dim-lit blue eyes gazing at me unendingly, without comprehension but with complete trust. His lovemaking is crude and abrupt, but he is learning to do things to please me, slowly and with errors, but learning how to make love to a man.
But questions plague me at times. Am I guilty of bestiality here? Is Gunn a human any longer? I know that Cows are not able to breed with mankind, their genes aren't completely compatible, births occur but are rare and the progeny deformed and usually dies before or shortly after birth.
I guess you can call Gunn a member of homo bovinus or some such (my Latin is sketchy at best!) His people have gone down a divergent evolutionary path than homo sapiens, and while it saved the human race on his world, Gunn's people have paid, and continue to pay, a price horrible beyond all imagining for that victory. We will recommend that food animals be brought to Marnicia, but that will take centuries to show results, even if the Galactic Council authorizes the enormous cost, and meanwhile, an offshoot of humanity is treated like a common beast.
But are they? Is Gunn a human being or an animal? Am I his lover or his master? I look at him and I don't know, I only know that he loves me and I love him. Most of the time, that's enough.
THE END
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