Still clutching hands tightly, Cammy and Alisa approached the entrance to the fair.

For Cammy, feeling Alisa's hand clasped in her own made her feel connected with the world in a way she had never been before. The copper glow of Alisa's hair in the sunlight made Cammy aware that all of the colors around her seemed brighter, more vibrant, from the green of the grass to the blue of the sky. The light, warm breeze ruffling that hair felt like an intimate caress. The gentle rustling of leaves in the trees sounded like whispers of secrets only lovers would tell.

Cammy was already feeling wet between her legs. She'd known she would, so she'd taken the precaution of putting an extra-absorbent pad in her panties, despite being a week past the end of her last period.

There was a line at the entrance to the roped-off area within which the fair was in progress. There was no admission charge, but all of the females were issued numbered tickets on entering, for a possible drawing later. As Cammy waited in the line, she leaned against Alisa, so that their arms were in contact from hand up to shoulder.

Once through the line, they entered the grounds, each putting her ticket stub in her back pocket. Cammy looked at Alisa. "Where should we go first?"

Alisa looked around, and pointed. Cammy saw where she was pointing and grinned. "Arts and crafts." There was a tent with that label. "I love that kind of thing!"

Alisa turned to look at Cammy with an open-mouthed grin, her whole face saying, of course you do! Giving each other's hand a squeeze, they walked to the tent and entered.

Within the tent was an array of booths, each displaying the work of a local (or widely traveled) artisan. Some were painters, some had designed ingeniously lovely wind chimes (with electric fans directed at them to make them sound in the windless tent), some specialized in macrame. Cammy's attention was caught by a hand-crafted guillotine that must surely be very expensive. Alisa had already started in that direction before Cammy could take a step.

Guillotines were readily available in hardware stores, of course, at prices of a few hundred dollars. This one, though, wasn't designed for the average consumer. It appeared, except for the shiny steel blade, to be made exclusively from wood, in at least two types: a pale yellow for the main structure, with trim in a dark brown. The sides down which the blade would fall were intricately carved, in scenes depicting barbecues (there were even wiggly lines arising from the cooking woman's body suggesting the irresistible aroma of roasting girlmeat), with dancing onlookers surrounded by bowers of flowers. There was a small card tacked to the side saying the price was twelve thousand.

The artisan sat near the guillotine, fielding questions from several people around her. Cammy said to Alisa, quietly and standing far enough from the artist to avoid being overheard, "Who'd buy one? I mean, it's gorgeous, but it's something you'd only use once."

Alisa bit her lip thoughtfully. "Maybe not. A family with several daughters might splurge on it."

Cammy nodded. "And I guess some people have enough money that they wouldn't even think about it. If my dad could afford it, I'd love to be snuffed in that. I know everybody at my barbecue would remember it."

Alisa nodded. "Exactly." She looked at Cammy. "Is that how you want to go? Guillotine?" It was one of the few personal subjects that hadn't come up last night in the library.

Cammy shook her head. "I haven't decided yet. There's a lot to think about, besides just the method. We did snuff my mom that way. I might want something different." She grinned. "Maybe a roleplay, where an executioner cuts off my head with a sword." She didn't need to mention that such an executioner was usually a professional, hired for the occasion, adept at cutting off the head with a single stroke. They both knew that.

Alisa nodded again. "What about hanging?"

Cammy paused, thoughtfully, then shook her head again. "I don't think so. One way or another, decap is kind of a turn-on. I just need to think it over." She looked at Alisa and grinned. "I'll want to bounce some thoughts off you. I'll get a better feeling for what I want if I say it out loud."

Alisa gave her hand a tight squeeze. "I'd love that." Cammy's breath caught. It was the first time Alisa had used the word "love" for anything personal between them. Cammy hadn't either, but she knew what she was feeling.

As they came out of the tent, a girl walked past Cammy from behind and brushed her shoulder. The girl then turned, about ten feet in front of Cammy and Alisa, smiling.

Cammy, who didn't know the girl, frowned at her in a puzzled way, then suddenly caught on and giggled, and felt at her back pocket. The girl then held Cammy's wallet out towards her, and a piece of candy.

Cammy laughed as she retrieved her wallet, which held her student i.d. and the small amount of money she had judged would be needed for the day. She knew the tradition. The girl was a professional pickpocket, one of (probably) several hired by the fair committee. If she was able to take your possessions without your awareness, she'd give you a piece of candy. If you caught her in the act, you'd get two.

Cammy returned the girl's wave and watched her resume her rounds. She put her wallet back in her pocket and considered the small foil-wrapped bit of hard candy. It suddenly occurred to her that she hadn't given her new -- okay, yes, it did seem fair to call Alisa her girlfriend -- any gifts yet. She held out the candy to Alisa, with a small smile.

Alisa beamed at her, took the candy and unwrapped it.

Cammy had a sudden mental image of sharing the candy back and forth with Alisa, transferring it directly from mouth to mouth. The tingling between her legs returned, at a new level of intensity.

Alisa, her voice a little unclear as she sucked on the candy, asked, "Where next?"

Cammy pointed at a tent, with a sign in front that featured the university logo, and the words, "Department of Women's Research." Underneath was the slogan: "Using Science to Benefit Womankind." Cammy smiled. "We probably can learn some new stuff in there." Alisa smiled back.

There were few visitors inside the tent. It seemed that Cammy and Alisa were rare in having been attracted by the sign. As they entered, Cammy's attention was immediately captured by a large video screen showing two women swimming submerged in a brilliant blue pool, nude, their hair flowing behind them, amid tall, seaweedy vegetation growing upward from a sandy bottom. There was a sand bar rising above the water line in the far corner of the pool. The most visually arresting thing about the scene was the bodies of the women: they were mermaids.

The arms of each woman had been amputated, and skillful plastic surgery had rounded off the ends of the shoulders without a noticeable scar. And their legs, below a normal pair of buttocks, appeared to have been joined together somehow into a single leg, ending in a fin. They must have had considerable practice swimming in that body-modified format: the movements of their single leg propelled each of them seemingly effortlessly around the pool, one chasing the other playfully around the seaweed stalks. As Cammy watched, the pursuing mermaid caught the other and kissed her, then darted away to be chased. They were beautifully graceful: as they swam, their bodies looked like flags rippling in the wind, though they didn't bend in any place a human body shouldn't bend. After a short time one, and then the other, beached herself on the sandbar, each breathing deeply, with beatific expressions on their faces. They kissed, then, more deeply than the playful one before, before diving back into the pool for another chase.

A woman, wearing a nametag on her blouse reading "Dr. Helena Smythe, Department of Women's Research," stood beside the screen. Alisa, gaping at the screen, asked her, "Am I seeing what I think I'm seeing?"

Before Dr. Smythe could respond, Cammy elaborated on what she was sure Alisa was referring to: "Do they each have just the one leg? It doesn't look like one was cut off. It's perfectly symmetrical. Like it's natural." She looked at Alisa, who nodded in confirmation that that had indeed been what she was wondering about.

Dr. Smythe nodded. "We're trying to make it natural. Our goal is to open this niche fully for women. There are so many who have grown up fantasizing about being mermaids. So far we're able to adapt the body morphology of our volunteers in a superficial way..."

Alisa interrupted, "How did you do the leg thing?"

Dr. Smythe looked back at the screen. "We start by making a full-length incision along the inside of both legs. After surgery to relocate the vagina -- see there, at the top front, where the mons pubis would normally be..."

Cammy looked closely at one of the women in the video, and blinked, saying under her breath, "So that's what that is."

"...we then fused the bones of both legs together. Muscles are left in place, or relocated in minor ways, and then the high-tech step is to form a scaffolding that encloses both legs, and we've developed a method to induce the woman's natural skin to grow along the scaffolding. Eventually the new skin growing from both sides meets in the center, in both front and back. We'd like to be able to make the skin below the waist express itself in the form of iridescent scales, but that's a long way off. Part of the ongoing research."

Alisa, entranced, asked softly, "The fins, are they real?"

Dr. Smythe smiled. "In a sense. The scaffolding extends to the end of the leg, and ends in that fin shape. Again, it's natural skin covering it, once the growth process is completed. The mermaid can't move her fin independently, as if it were a foot, because the existing muscle structure doesn't allow for that. We may solve that problem in the future. But the movement of the leg is enough to enable the fin to serve its purpose of helping propel her while swimming."

Cammy asked, "So, is the idea that people would own mermaids as pets -- like puppygirls except they're fish? Well, swimming mammals, I mean." The women in the video visibly remained very much mammals.

"That would be one way to go -- they might be pets in a home aquarium. They might also live freely. In pairs, of course, in either case, like you see here. Companionship is a must in a situation like this. We're a long way from being finished, by the way. We're having them breathe air with higher oxygen content, so they can stay underwater longer, but eventually we want to develop gills that can be implanted."

Cammy and Alisa spun towards her in synch, their mouths agape. Cammy said, "You're kidding!" while Alisa asked "You mean they could stay underwater indefinitely?" Her voice squeaked with astonishment.

Dr. Smythe nodded. "That's the goal, yes. We also want to change their body chemistry and digestive systems so that their wastes are biologically benign -- no harmful bacteria in them, I mean -- which would considerably simplify their lives. Right now safe waste elimination is a pretty elaborate process. Ideally we'd like to reach a point where they can feed from the water itself, something like a fish eating plankton."

Cammy and Alisa both stood staring for a time. Cammy said, "I can imagine thousands of women wanting to live like this."

Alisa nodded. "Especially after the development is finished. It would be such a beautiful way to live."

Dr. Smythe said with a cautious smile, "I don't suppose the two of you would like to volunteer? We have about a dozen pairs on a waiting list right now for surgery, but we're always looking for more."

Both girls shook their heads. Alisa said, "I wasn't thinking that, but what would I need to do to get in on the research?" She looked at Cammy, who nodded.

Cammy said, "We're both first-years, so we don't have majors yet. Where would we go from here?"

Dr. Smythe nodded, her smile expanding. "We need staff with a lot of knowledge in human physiology, and also bioengineers. If you major in pre-medicine, and take a few introductory engineering classes as electives, that would keep your options open to go either way in graduate school."

At this point another student came by, asking questions that Cammy and Alisa had already heard the answers to. Cammy saw another display to her left, proclaiming "Sperm-Free Reproduction!" The sign included a diagram. She said "Thank you" to Dr. Smythe, then got Alisa's attention and pointed. "Check that out?"

"Sure." They walked towards it.

As Cammy came closer, she was able to make out the details of the diagram on the sign: Two women, with arrows leading from them to two circles labeled "eggs," a bundle of wavy lines labeled "chromosomes" coming out of one egg and an arrow pointing from them to the other egg. An arrow led from this second egg to a baby. Another woman was in charge of this exhibit, with a nametag reading Dr. Ramona Colton.

Cammy studied the diagram, and said to Dr. Colton, "So you can fertilize one woman's egg with the chromosomes from another woman's egg? You can make a baby that way, with genetic inheritance from both women?"

Dr. Colton smiled and nodded. "We've finally been successful with the process. We've got three women who've just given birth in the last two months, and several more pregnant."

Alisa was fingering her lower lip absently as she considered the diagram. "The babies are all girls, right?"

Dr. Colton beamed at her. "Exactly. Since the genetic donors have only X's among their sex chromosomes, no Y's."

Cammy was once more impressed at the way her mind and Alisa's always seemed so closely synchronized. She'd just been opening her mouth to make the same observation. She said, "One of the women carries the baby, I'm assuming. The other is -- like -- kind of the father?"

Dr. Colton chuckled. "In a sense. We're avoiding that terminology, of course, but you could look at it that way. We've petitioned the City Council to change the official birth certificate form so that it has a space for 'Mother's genetic partner' in place of 'father.' "

Alisa frowned. "It seems like there'd be some opposition to this. Like men will feel they're not needed for anything anymore."

Dr. Colton shrugged. "A few men aware of the project have mentioned that. But there are always going to be women who have a sexual preference for male partners. Baby boys will continue to be born the old-fashioned way." She smiled. "The men may even get more female attention than usual. And a higher proportion of women in the population means more girlmeat, of course. Many people still can't afford to eat girlmeat every day, certainly not at every meal. All of us have to supplement our diets with other sources of protein. So everybody comes out ahead when there are more women. The men I've talked to have come around, if they've objected at first."

Cammy said, "It sounds like the research is over with, since the process works. I was thinking all of the projects here..." she gestured to indicate the entire tent, "...were looking for help."

"Oh, no, we're not at all finished. It took a lot of experimentation to make the process work to begin with -- we've been at this for years -- and we're still experiencing failures. It's tricky convincing an egg that it's been invaded by sperm. There turns out to be more to it than just inserting chromosomes. It took a long time to find the right chemical environment to make successful fertilization happen. We want to make the process smoother, more often successful, and also affordable. That's where both of you come in." Smiled at both Cammy and Alisa. "You've both been showing some insight we don't usually see from undergraduates -- you are, right?"

Alisa nodded. "First year."

Dr. Colton raised her eyebrows. "So you don't even have a major yet. Thought you might be pre-med. Anyway, you're smart, you're interested. Either of you might end up in my job."

Cammy asked, "So we should start out in pre-med?"

"If you are thinking about this, then yes, that would get you going in the right direction."

A few students now came by, and Dr. Colton started addressing their questions. Cammy looked at Alisa. "Lots to think about. Anything else here we should see?"

Alisa looked around. "Let's go outside. We can think about this anywhere, so let's get some fresh air."

Cammy grinned. "Great idea." Taking Alisa's hand again, they left the tent.