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high-heeled boots. How she’d put her hands on her hips and smiled at herself in the mirror. Everything about her was innocence and warmth.
    His hand burned, the lube soothed and his come squirted out of him to the waiting towel.
    “Katarina!” he shouted, the word falling flat against the walls of his tiny bedroom.
    “Katarina,” Calder repeated softly as his frustration eased the slightest bit.
    But not enough. His cock was still hard and hot, wanting more. He wiped off his hands and dribbled another dose of lube on his stubborn, needy cock.
    Fuck.
    *
    Katarina glared at Calder’s rusty door on Barkelo Street the next afternoon as the sun slowly roasted her. Her thumbprint wouldn’t open the door and there was no response to her knocking.
    Of course he would have changed the thumbprint code. That was probably his standard procedure.
    So here she was, standing forlornly on the street like a fool, wanting—needing—to see him again. Damn.
    Passersby eyed her in suspicion. Her highborn robes made her stand out on this backstreet, a person who clearly didn’t belong here.
    Face heating, Katarina moved away.
    She turned the corner, heading back toward the clinic. She’d taken a hovercab to Calder’s street, dismissing it before she’d approached the door. But she was too restless now to hunt another, and besides, she needed to walk.
    The street held a market of tents and metal awnings, temporary structures that could quickly be pulled up in case of one of Bor Narga’s deadly sandstorms. Katarina glanced at the boxes of colorful fruits, bright cloth, piles of robot and computer parts,

and tables upon tables of cheap, gaudy jewelry. Everything for sale, nothing that held her interest.
    She wasn’t sure why Calder’s refusal to answer his door cut her so much. He was only a Shareem, after all.
    In Bor Narga’s carefully striated culture, Shareem were persona non grata. They were less than the lowest workers because they contributed nothing to a society that had abandoned carnality. Children were conceived outside the body by mixing DNA from carefully chosen partners. Sex was no longer needed and considered unnecessary, even gauche.
    Eons ago, Bor Narga had been a barbaric place where women served men—the women on their backs and on their knees. Never again, said the women who now controlled the planet. Never again.
    Shareem were created at a time when sexual pleasure had been a form of entertainment, a guilty pleasure. DNAmo, a genetics company already successful at creating the perfect servants, had come up with the ultimate male for pleasuring women.
    DNAmo became famous throughout the galaxy for their creations and had exported Shareem to many planets—before the Shareem were deemed dangerous to women’s safety. The Bor Nargan government shut down the company. The ruling council then had to decide what to do with the leftover Shareem, now taboo. The government didn’t want to spend the money transporting the rest of the creatures off world—if they could even find a planet that wanted the refugees—nor did they want the Shareem to remain on Bor Narga.
    The highborn women who ruled Bor Narga debated a long time whether to simply terminate the subjects. Shareem weren’t truly human, they reasoned, so it wouldn’t be murder.

In the end, someone pointed out that wholesale slaughter of the Shareem might make Bor Narga look barbaric to other worlds with which they traded. Bor Narga couldn’t afford to lose trade over a hundred Shareem.
    So Shareem were granted a stay of execution. Those who’d hidden themselves when DNAmo shut down were required to turn themselves in to the Ministry of Non-Human Life Forms. All Shareem were to be scanned and registered.
    Shareem had to agree to visit approved clinics every six months for the rest of their lives to receive inoculations that would prevent sexual diseases and procreation. The penalty for not submitting was termination. DNAmo had claimed that they’d bred