The Totems of Abydos

by John Norman

  Brenner regarded her.

  She had lifted her head then and Brenner saw that there were tears in her eyes.

  “Very well,” said Brenner. “I will stay the night.”

  “You will take pity on me?” she said, hopefully.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “As a male upon a female?”

  “If you like,” he said.

  “Thank you!” she said, delightedly. “Thank you!”

  “Do not approach more closely!” he warned her.

  “Yes, sir!” she said.

  He was not certain he could trust himself.

  She leaned back, on her heels, happily. How beautiful, how sexual, she seemed!

  He glanced uneasily at the large, soft bed.

  “Oh, the bed is yours, of course!” she said. “I am often slept beside it, naked, on the floor. I would request a sheet, if I might, to cover myself, if you deign to grant it to me.”

  He regarded her.

  “I am often slept there,” she said, “when my contract holder’s client is finished with me, at least for the time. Then, later, perhaps as he awakens refreshed, he may order me again to his side.”

  “And you are naked?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “In that way I am more convenient for the guest. He need not strip me.”

  “Dreadful,” said Brenner, shuddering. On the other hand, he had to admit that the thought of her there, lying there on the floor, beside the bed, naked, perhaps under a sheet, summonable to his side in the night or early morning, was not without its appeal.

  “Many women,” she said, “are not even permitted the dignity of the couch.”

  “I see,” said Brenner.

  “May I rise to my feet?” she asked.

  “Of course,” he said.

  There was a tiny sound of the disk against the chain. Brenner was curious to see that device more closely, but he did not call this to her attention.

  She went to the door and checked it, to make certain, apparently, that Brenner had locked it from the inside. Then she stood there, with her back to the door, smiling, and her hands behind her, leaning back against the door. Her hands might have been cuffed behind her, Brenner thought. She looked at him, happily. “Thank you for remaining the night,” she said.

  Brenner shrugged.

  “You have not finished your liqueur,” she pointed out.

  He lifted the tiny glass and stood up. He approached to where, now wide-eyed, she stood by the door.

  Her shoulders were very white, and soft, and well set off by the yellow of the silk. Her hands, behind her, drawing her shoulders back, accentuated her figure, excitingly, subtly. Brenner supposed that women were sometimes tied in that fashion, for such a purpose, in slave markets.

  “You may have half of it,” he said.

  “No!” she said.

  “Please,” he said.

  “I have not had anything like that since I have been on contract,” she said.

  “Please,” he said.

  She drew her hands from behind her back and took the tiny glass, looking up at him. She steadied her right hand with her left. “Thank you,” she whispered. Then, carefully, she drank a little less than half of the ruby-colored beverage. “Thank you,” she said, again, handing him back the glass.

  Brenner finished it, and put the glass back on the table. He then turned to look at her again, she standing by the door. The palms of her hands were now back, at her sides, against the door. “It was not too good, was it?” she smiled. “No,” said Brenner.

  “This is Company Station,” she said.

  Brenner grinned.

  “But I loved it,” she said. “You are very kind. Thank you.”

  Brenner shrugged.

  “Little things mean much to us,” she said. “Some men give us a candy, or a pastry, in a wrapper.”

  Brenner nodded.

  “Generally we are fed only with mush or gruel,” she said. “The zard has read of diets for us.”

  “I see,” said Brenner.

  “For which,” she said, “we are muchly charged.”

  Brenner did not respond.

  “If we eat less, we are charged more.”

  “You are nonetheless paying off your contract?” asked Brenner.

  “No,” she said. “Things are so arranged that we cannot pay it off. I had not realized that at the time of my contracting. We are helpless. We cannot free ourselves from our contracts.”

  “I see,” said Brenner. He had, of course, surmised this, from remarks of Rodriguez.

  “Why did you ask for permission to rise to your feet earlier?” he asked.

  “Why should I not have asked?” she asked.

  Brenner found it difficult to respond to this. To be sure, she was a female, and under contract.

  “Some men,” she said, “require us to keep one knee on the floor or ground at all times, except when we are lying down. To be sure, we may depart from this injunction in certain transitional movements, as in ascending to the couch, keeping our bellies in contact at all times with its side or surface.”

  Brenner regarded her, she standing there, her back to the door.

  “I am here for your pleasure, you know,” she said.

  “You are safe,” he said.

  “Thank you for staying the night,” she said. “Thank you for the liqueur.”

  “It is nothing,” he said.

  “Do you not find me attractive?” she asked.

  “It is immoral for a man to find a female attractive,” said Brenner.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “Surely you know,” said Brenner, angrily.

  “No,” she said.

  “It degrades her,” said Brenner, “to see her in such terms.”

  “Why?” she asked.

  “It debases her,” said Brenner. “It makes of her a mere object.”

  “Surely you know that is false,” she said.

  “No!” said Brenner.

  “It is not my fault that not all women are attractive,” she said. “That not all are attractive does not mean that it is wrong for some to be attractive, if they are.”

  “Attractiveness in a woman, as you must know,” said Brenner, “is a most deplorable feature, a most unfortunate and dangerous property. It can detract attention from personness.”

  She regarded him, puzzled.

  “It is easy to see why you have been removed from the home world,” said Brenner.

  “Doubtless,” she said.

  “As you know,” he said, “many women on the home world have had recourse to cosmetic surgery, to control and subdue their beauty, indeed, in many cases, to remove it altogether.”

  “I know,” she whispered, shuddering.

  “And this sacrifice did they make in the name of personhood.”

  “And thus did they improve their careers undoubtedly!” she said.

  Brenner shrugged. He did not doubt that, on the whole, the women who were “persons,” usually the homely, the fat, the belligerent, and such, discriminated unmercifully against their more beautiful sisters. There seemed to be some sort of instinctual enmity between these “persons” and these other creatures, who were doubtless less than persons. Brenner was not quite clear on the source of this obvious hatred. To be sure, it was true that the more beautiful women tended to bring higher prices in slave markets and such. Did the women who were “persons” hate these others because they feared they might become like them, so pathetically needful and beautiful, or because they suspected they could never become like them?

  “Attractiveness in a woman is populationally dangerous,” said Brenner.

  “Surely you are aware that unattractive women can be bred,” she said, “and that conception in any woman may be controlled.”

  Brenner shrugged, irritably.

  “I could not conceive now, if I wished to do so,” she said. “It is chemically precluded. The zard has seen to it.”

  “Doubtless,” said Brenner.

/>   “What is personness?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” admitted Brenner.

  “Surely we must not limit it to such accidents as having had a course in algebra or political science?”

  “I suppose not,” said Brenner.

  “Perhaps it is to be equated with subscribing to a certain platform of political values?” she asked. “Perhaps that is the touchstone of personness?”

  “Perhaps,” said Brenner.

  “But what if those values are treacherous, if they are inimical to, or betray, or deny, or make impossible, the fulfillment of the whole person, in her biological and emotional nature?”

  “Such factors are unimportant,” said Brenner. “They may be ignored.”

  “I do not regard them as unimportant,” she said, “nor do I choose to ignore them.”

  “Disagreement with the prescribed values, as they exist currently,” said Brenner, “is a sign of immaturity, ignorance, stupidity, iniquity, or insanity.”

  “And tomorrow,” she said, “something else will be a sign of such things.”

  “Doubtless,” said Brenner.

  “What is the criterion?” she asked. “What is the standard?”

  “I do not know,” said Brenner.

  “Surely it is what we are, really, our own nature, and what will fulfill us,” she said.

  “The prescribed values are such,” said Brenner.

  “You do not believe that, do you?” she asked.

  “No,” said Brenner, angrily. “I don’t!”

  “Nor do I,” she smiled.

  Brenner looked away.

  “You are angry,” she said. “I am sorry.”

  Brenner did not respond.

  “There may, of course,” she said, “be different sorts of human beings. That is an interesting possibility. But if that is true, then it would seem irrational to require all, or the whole, to subscribe to the values of some, or a part.”

  “If it pleases you,” said Brenner, angrily, “the values of the home world are not accepted, even by members of our own species, in many places in the galaxy.” This would be particularly true, of course, on the sorts of worlds Rodriguez had characterized as “strong worlds.”

  “I know,” she said.

  “You seem highly intelligent,” said Brenner.

  “I am intelligent,” she said. “Do you think we become less intelligent if we are put under contract, or if a brand is put in our flesh, or our throat is encircled with a locked collar?”

  “Of course not!” he said.

  “I am not stupid,” she said.

  “I know,” said Brenner.

  “Does that dismay you?” she asked.

  “No,” he said.

  “I sense that I am not as intelligent as you,” she said, “but I am not stupid.”

  “Come now,” he said. “It is well known that women are much more intelligent than men.”

  “That is ridiculous,” she said.

  “The tests prove it,” he said.

  “As they once purported to prove that the intelligence of men and women was identical, by balancing masculine and feminine items in the test, and summating statistically. One begins with the proposition to be proved, and then designs the test in such a way as to confirm it. Very scientific! Some types of items are such that women tend to be better at them than men, but there are also types of items, though this is not much publicized, at which men tend to be better than women. All that is done now is to define intelligence in terms of tests constructed largely in terms of feminine items, on which sort of items, as might be expected, women tend statistically to do better than men, particularly masculine men. The facts seem to be that there is a feminine sort of intelligence and a masculine sort of intelligence, and that they are not identical. It is difficult then to crosscorrelate the tests without summations which blur the interesting differences. Too, intelligence seems well understood as being much richer than a set of responses to a particular test. Surely it has something to do with judgmental assessments in actual situations, sensitivity to numerous factors in a real world, organizational capacity, ability to plan, to look ahead, with creativity, with imagination, and such things.”

  “Perhaps,” said Brenner.

  “The fact that I am intelligent, and have feelings, and such,” she said, “would, I hope, make me more, and not less, attractive to you.”

  Brenner was silent.

  “I have heard that such things tend to raise the price of slaves,” she said.

  “I have heard that, too,” said Brenner.

  “All this talk of objects, and such,” she said, “is stupid. It assumes a man would be as content with a mindless machine, or an inflated dummy, as a live female.”

  Brenner nodded. He had never really understood the value of such propaganda, even to those who devised it. On the other hand, he granted that he might be naive. Perhaps it did have an appeal to certain sorts of minds, perhaps to those incapable of reason.

  “To be sure,” she said, “it is not unusual for a woman, upon occasion, wearying of the platitudes of personness, the complexities of banal, tortuous interrelationships, and such, to wish to be handled and treated as an object, not a mindless object, or an inflated object, perhaps one filled with air, one without feelings, or such, of course, but rather as an intelligent, fully sentient, fully emotional object, who understands that she is now to be put, whether she wishes it or not, to the purposes of another. In this way, she rejoices to be reduced upon occasion to her feminine essentials.”

  “I shall not listen to this sort of thing,” Brenner informed her.

  “It disturbs you?” she asked.

  “Yes!” he said.

  “But you will still stay the night?” she asked, anxiously.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “You would prefer the blonde?” she asked.

  “No,” he said.

  “You do find me attractive?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Even though you suspect it may be immoral to do so?”

  “Yes,” he said, angrily.

  “It is not immoral to do so,” she said.

  Brenner shrugged. He supposed that was true.

  “It is even natural to do so,” she said, “I would think, assuming that I am attractive, and that you are sensitive to such things.”

  “One supposes so,” said Brenner. It was all he could do to refrain from leaping up, seizing her, crushing her to him, bruising her lips, and flinging her to the bed beneath him, to ravish her.

  “A woman prefers to relate to a male who is more intelligent than she,” she said. “This does not mean we think that we are stupid, or anything. It is rather merely that we prefer, no matter how intelligent we are, for the male to be even more intelligent. That is a difficulty faced by some highly intelligent women, to find a male to whom it is appropriate, and natural, for them to subject themselves.”

  “I see,” said Brenner.

  “To be sure,” she said, “the crucial matter is not really intelligence, particularly in a narrow sense, but the wholeness of the relationship, and her needs. In the human species, males, if not crippled, are dominant. There are in our species, as in all others, dominance/submission ratios, and, in ours, as in several others, a significant sexual and psychological dimorphism between the sexes. In our species, as in many others, the female cannot be fulfilled without, in one way or another, in effect, being in the power of the male. To be sure, there can be various pathological substitutes for the male, such as a myth, another woman, a movement, a religion, the state, and so on, but these are always ultimately inadequate. Accordingly the crux is the domination which she requires. And thus, for example, even slaves who doubtless upon some occasions are far more intelligent than their masters, squirm beggingly, pleadingly, helplessly, rapturously, in their arms, owned in a sense far deeper than those to which experts in property law are accustomed. To be sure, the ideal is that she shall be, or know, or sense herself to be, less intelligent
, at least in a full, generalized sense of intelligence, than he within whose sphere of domination she finds herself.”