by John Norman
I looked about the case and it seemed that everything, considering the circumstances, was quite comfortable.
I stepped to the door and Vika, holding my arm, smilingand looking up into my eyes, accompanied me.
At the door I stopped and as she made as if to pass through the door myhand on her arm stopped her.
“No,” I said, “you remain here.”
“You are joking,” she said.
“No,” I said, “I am not.”
“Yes you are!” she laughed, clinging ever more tightly to my arm.
“Release my arm,” I said.
“You cannot seriously mean to leave me here,” she said, shaking her head. “No,” she said, “you can’t – you simply can’t leave me here, not Vika of Treve.” She laughed and looked up at me. “I simply will not permit it,” she said.
I looked at her.
The smile fled from her eyes and the laugh died in her lovely throat.
“You will not permit it?” I asked.
My voice was the voice of her Gorean master.
She removed her hand from my arm and stepped back, trembling, her eyes frightened. The colour had drained from her face. “I did not think of what I was saying,” she said.
Terrified, she, as the expression is, knelt to the whip, assuming the position of the slave girl who is to be punished, her wrists crossed beneath her as though bound and her head touching the floor, leaving the bow of her back exposed.
“I have no wish to punish you,” I said.
Bewildered she lifted her head and there were tears in her eyes.
“Beat me if you wish,” she begged, “but please – please – take me with you.”
“I told you,” I said, “my decision has been made.”
“But you could change your decision, Master,” she said, wheedling, “– for me.”
“I do not,” I said.
Vika struggled to restrain her tears. I wondered if this were perhaps the first time in her life in a matter of importance to her that she had not had her way with a man.
At a gesture from me she rose timidly to her feet. She wiped her eyes and looked at me. “May your girl ask a question, Master?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“Why must I stay here?” she asked.
“Because I do not trust you,” I said simply.
She reacted as if struck and tears welled in her eyes. I could not understand why this assertion of mine should have troubled one of Vika’s proud and treacherous nature but she seemed somehow more hurt than if I had administered to her when she had knelt the blows of a slave whip or the lashings of my sword belt.
I looked upon her.
She stood, very much alone, in the centre of the smooth plastic case, numb, not moving. There were tears in her eyes.
I was forced to remind myself in no uncertain terms of the cleverness of this consummate actress, and how so many men had weakened to her insidious blandishments. Yet I knew that I would not weaken, though I was sorely tempted to believe that she might be trusted, that the feelings she expressed were truly those she felt.
“Is this,” I asked, “how you chained men to your slave ring?”
“Oh Cabot,” she moaned, “Cabot-”
Saying nothing further I stepped outside.
Vika shook her head slowly and numbly looked about herself disbelievingly – at the mat, the jar of water, the canisters along the wall.
I reached up to slide the plastic door downward.
This gesture seemed to shake Vika and her entire frame suddenly trembled with all the panic of a beautiful, trapped animal.
“No!” she cried. “Please Master!”
She rushed across the case and into my arms. I held her for a moment and kissed her and her kiss met mine wet and warm, sweet and hot and salty with the tears that had coursed down her cheeks and then I drew her back and she stumbled across the case and fell to her knees against the wall on the opposite side. She turned to face me there, on her hands and knees. She shook her head in denial of what was happening and her eyes filled with tears. She lifted her hands to me. “No, Cabot,” she said. “No!”
I slid the plastic door down and clicked it into place.
I turned the key in the lock and heard the firm, heavy snap of the mechanism.
Vika of Treve was my prisoner.
With a cry she leaped to her feet and threw herself against the door, her face suddenly wild with tears, and pounded on it madly with her small fists. “Master! Master!” she cried.
I slung the key on its leather loop around my neck.
“Good-bye, Vika of Treve,” I said.
She stopped pounding on the plastic partition and stared out at me, her face stained with tears, her hands pressed against the plastic.
The to my amazement she smiled and wiped back a tear, and shook her head as though to throw the hair from her eyes and smiled at the foolishness of the gesture.
She looked out at me.
“You are truly leaving,” she said.
I could hear her coice through the vent holes in the plastic.
It did not sound much different.
“Yes,” I said.
“I knew before,” she said, “that I was truly your slave but I did not know until now that you were truly my master.” She looked up at me through the plastic, shaken. “It is a strange feeling,” she said, “to know that someone – truly – is your master, to know that not only has he the right to do with you as he pleases but that he will, that your will is nothing to him, that it is your will and not his that must bend, that you are hopeless and must – and will – do what he says, that you must obey.”
It made me a bit sad to hear Vika recount the woes of female slavery.
Then to my astonishment she smiled up at me. “It is good to belong to you, Tarl Cabot,” she said. “I love belonging to you.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“I am a woman,” she said, “and you are a man, and stronger than I am and I am yours and this you knew and now I have learned it too.”
I was puzzled.
Vika dropped her head. “Every woman in her heart,” said Vika, “wants to wear the chains of a man.”
This seemed to me quite doubtful.
Vika looked up and smiled. “Of course,” she said, “we would like to choose the man.”
This seemed to me only a bit less doubtful.
“I would choose you, Cabot,” she said.
“Women wish to be free,” I told her.
“Yes,” she said, “we also wish to be free.” She smiled. “In every woman,” she said, “there is something of the Free Companion and something of the Slave Girl.”
I wondered at the things she said to me for they seemed strange, perhaps more so to my ears than they would have to one bred and raised from infancy as a Gorean, one as much accustomed to the submission of women as to the tides of the gleaming Thassa or the phases of the three moons.
As the girl spoke and I tried to lightly dismiss her words I wondered at the long processesof evolution that had nurtured over thousands of generations what had in time become the human kind. I wondered of the struggles of my own world as well as on Gor, struggles which over millennia had shaped the blood and inmost being of my species, perhaps conflicts over tunnels in cliffs to be fought with the savage cave bear, long dangerous weeks spent hunting the same game as the sabre-toothed tiger, perhaps years spent protecting one’s mate and brood from the depredations of carnivores and the raids of one’s fellow creatures.
As I thought of our primeval ancestor standing in the mouth of his cave one hand gripping a chipped stone and perhaps the other a torch, his mate behind him and his young hidden in the mosses at the back of the cave I wondered at the genetic gifts that would insure the survival of man in so hostile a world, and I wondered if among them would not be the strength and the aggressiveness and the swiftness of eye and hand and the courage of the male and on the part of the woman – what?
&n
bsp; What would have been the genetic truths in her blood without which she and accordingly man himself might have been overlooked in the vicious war of a species to remain alive and hold its place on an unkind and savage planet?
It seemed possible to me that one trait of high survival value might be the desire on the part of the woman to belong – utterly – to a man.
It seemed clear that woman would, if the race were to survive, have to be sheltered and defended and fed – and forced to reproduce her kind.
If she were too independent she would die in such a world and if she did not mate her race would die.
That she might survive it seemed plausible that evolution would have favoured not only the woman attractive to men but the one who had an unusual set of traits – among them perhaps the literally instinctual desire to be his, to belong to him, to seek him out for her mate and submit herself to him. Perhaps if she were thrown by her hair to the back of the cave and raed on furs in the light of the animal fire at its mouth this would have been to her little more than the proof of her mate’s regard for her, the expected culmination of her innate desire to be dominated and his.
I smiled to myself as I thought of the small things on my old world that at such remoteness perhaps reenacted the ancient ceremony of the caves, the carrying of the bride over the threshold, perhaps as a prisoner, the tiny wedding bands, perhaps a small reminder of the primitive thongs that bound the wrists of the first bride, or perhaps later of the golden manacles fastened on the wrists of the daughters of kings, captive maidens led in triumph through cheering streets to the bondage of slave girls.
Yes, I said to myself, the words Vika spoke were perhaps not as strange as I had thought.
I looked at her gently. “I must go,” I said.
“When I first saw you, Cabot,” she said, “I knew you owned me.” She looked up at me. “I wanted to be free but I knew that you owned me – I knew that I was from that moment your slave; your eyes told me that I was owned and my most secret heart acknowledged it.”
I turned to go.
“I love you, Tarl Cabot,” she said suddenly, and then, as though confused and perhaps a bit frightened, she suddenly dropped her head humbly. “I mean-” she said, “I love you – Master.”
I smiled a Vika’s very natural correction of her mode of addressing me, for a slave girl is seldom permitted, at least publicly, to address her master by his name, only his title. The privilege of using his name, of having it on her lips, is, according to the most approved custom, reserved for that of a free woman, in particular a Free Companion. Gorean thinking on this matter tends to be expressed by the saying that a slave girl grows bold if her lips are allowed to touch the name of her master. On the other hand, I, like many Gorean masters, provided the girl was not testing or challenging me, and provided that free women, or others, were not present whom I had no wish to offend or upset, preferred as a matter of fact to have my own name on the girl’s lips, for I think, with acknowledged vanity, that there are few sounds as pleasurable as the sound of one’s own name on the lips of a beautiful woman.
Vika’s eyes were worried and her hands moved as though she wanted to touch me through the plastic.
“May I ask,” she queried, “where my master goes?”
I considered the matter and smiled at her.
“I go,” I said, “to give Gur to the Mother.”
“What does that mean?” she asked, wide-eyed.
“I don’t know,” I said, “but I intend to find out.”
“Must you go?” she asked.
“Yes,” I replied, “I have a friend who may be in danger.”
“A slave girl is pleased,” she said, “that such a man as you is her master.”
I turned to go.
I heard her voice over my shoulder. “I wish you well, Master,” she said.
I briefly turned to face her again and almost unconsciously I kissed the tips of my fingers and pressed them against the plastic. Vika kissed the plastic opposite where my fingers had touched.
She was a strange girl.
Had I not known how vicious and deceitful she was, how cruel and treacherous, I might have permitted myself a word of kindness to her. I regretted that I had touched the plastic for it seemed to express a concern for her which I had intended to mask.
Her performance had been superb, almost convincing. She had almost led me to believe she cared.
“Yes,” I said, “Vika of Treve – Slave Girl – you play your part well.”
“No,” she said, “no – Master – I love you!”
Angered at how nearly I had been deceived I laughed at her.
Now undoubtedly realising her game was known she covered her eyes with her hands and sank weeping to her knees behind the heavy transparent plastic partition.
I turned away, having more important things to attend to than the faithless wench from Treve.
“I will keep the female Mul well fed and watered,” said the Attendant.
“If you wish,” I said, and turned away.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
IN THE CHAMBER OF THE MOTHER
It was still the Feast of Tola.
Though the time was now past the fourth feeding.
It was almost eight Gorean Ahn, or about ten Earth hours, since I had separated from Misk and Mul-Al-Ka and Mul-Ba-Ta early this morning.
The transportation disk which had originally taken me to the chamber where I had found Misk I had taken to the entrance of the tunnels of the Golden Beetle and I thought it well that it should stay there, as if witnessing my entrance and my supposed failure to return.
I was less pleased to have left the translator with the disk but it seemed the better thing to do, for one would not have taken a translator into the tunnels of the Golden Beetle and if it were found missing from the disk it might occasion speculation not that I had returned from the tunnels of the Golden Beetle but more likely that I had only pretended to enter. The word of the two Muls by the portal might or might not carry weight with their Priest-King Masters.
I had not walked far from the Vivarium before I was able to regather my general directions in the Nest and, as I walked impatiently along, I spied a transportation disk docked, so to speak, hovering on its cushion of gas, outside one of the tall steel portals of the Hall of Commissaries. The disk was, of course, untended, for in the enclosed, regulated life of the Nest theft, save for an occasional handful of salt was unknown.
Therefore I may have been setting something of a precedent when I leaped on the transportation disk and stepped to the accelerator strips.
I was soon gliding rapidly down the hall on my, let us say, considering the significance and urgency of my mission, commandeered vehicle.
I had not gone more than a pasang or so when I spun the disk to a stop before another portal in the Hall of Commissaries. I entered the portal and in a few moments emerged wearing the purple of a Mul. The clerk, at my request writing down the expense to Sarm, informed me that I would promptly have to have the new tunic imprinted with the scent-patterns pertaining to my identity, record-scars, etc. I assured him I would give the matter serious consideration and departed, hearing him congratulate me on my good fortune in having been permitted to become a Mul rather than having to remain a lowly Matok. “You will now be of the Nest as well as in it,” he beamed.
Outside I thrust the red plastic garment I had worn into the first disposal chute I found whence it would be whisked away pneumatically to the distant incinerators that burned somewhere below the Nest.
I then leaped again on the transportation disk and swept away to Misk’s compartment.
There I took a few minutes to replenish my energies from the containers of Mul-Fungus and I took a long welcome draught of water from the inverted jar in my case. As I ate the fungus and sat in the case I considered my future course of action. I must try to find Misk. Probably to die with him, or to die in the attempt to avenge him.
My thoughts wandered to Vika in her own case
, though hers, unlike mine, was her prison. I fingered the key to her case which hung on its leather loop about my throat. I found myself hoping that she might not be too distressed by her captivity, and then I scorned myself this weakness and insisted to myself that I welcomed the thought that whatever miseries she endured would be richly deserved. I dropped the metal key back inside my tunic. I considered the heavy, transparent case on the fourth tier of the Vivarium. Yes, the hours would be long and lonely for the caged, shorn Vika of Treve.
I wondered what had become of Mul-Al-Ka and Mul-Ba-Ta. They, like myself, having disobeyed Sarm, were now outlaws in the Nest. I hoped they might be able to hide and find or steal enough food to live. I did not give much for their chances but even a piteous alternative to the dissection chambers was welcome.
I wondered about the young male Priest-King in the secret chamber below Misk’s compartment. I supposed my best way of serving Misk might be to abandon him to his death and try to protect the young male, but these were matters in which I had little interest. I did not know the location of the female egg not could I have tended it had I known; and, further, that the race of Priest-Kings should wither and die did not seem the proper business of a human, particularly considering my hatred for them, and my rejection of their mode of regulating in so many important respects the lives of men in this world. Had they not destroyed my city? Had they not scattered its people? Had they not destroyed men by Flame Death and brought them, willing or no, to their own world on the Voyages of Acquisition? Had they not implanted their control nets in human beings and spun the hideous mutations of the Gur Carriers off the stock of which I was a specimen? Did they not regard us as a lower order of animal and one suitably placed at the disposal of their lofty excellence? And what of the Muls and the Chamber Slaves and all those of the human kind who were forced to serve them or die? No, I said to myself, it is good for my kind that Priest-Kings should die. But Misk was different, for he was my friend. There was Nest Trust between us and accordingly, as a warrior and a man, I stood ready to give my life for him.
I checked the sword in its sheath and left Misk’s compartment, stepped to the transportation disk and swept silently, rapidly, down the tunnel in the direction in which I knew lay the Chamber of the Mother.
