by Anneke Jacob
‘Human slave, not animal, I suppose.’
Garid nodded. He was pleased for Therin, whatever he felt about Lave’s paradigm, and glad that someone other than himself had done the favor. He was more than sure of his current need to keep his own woman to himself.
He told his friend about Liaske’s visit.
‘How did he like your jeedy?’ Therin asked.
‘Surprisingly, he thought she was rather cute. He’s taking this remarkably well.’
‘It’s not as if he has other sons to disown you for.’
‘True.’ Liaske had raised Garid on his own by choice, when most boys were raised in good-sized families of fathers and uncles and brothers.
‘My dad doesn’t even know women exist,’ Therin said indistinctly around a mouthful. ‘And I’m not going to tell him.’
‘My father’s the one who told me about women, back when I was a kid. Part of his wide-ranging educational methods; I knew a lot more about the universe out there than most children.’
Therin swallowed. ‘Most adults, too, probably. I heard about women in university, and I almost lost my scholarship just thinking about them. You were just a kid? What was that like?’
Garid thought about this for a minute, eyes in the distance. ‘I always knew I wasn’t going to be interested in men’s bodies. But I hadn’t really started to worry about it – too young – when he told me about women. Do you think sexuality is identity?’ he asked suddenly.
Therin looked taken aback. ‘I don’t know – yes – a big chunk of it, I guess.’
‘Well, I knew what I was then. I decided I was a throwback to ancient times. Really ancient; before we even left Old Earth. Some primitive slave owning civilization.’ He began evenly slicing his meat.
‘I used to play games like that, with my brothers and cousins,’ Therin said, grinning. ‘Always trying to tie them up.’
‘I wouldn’t have taken a risk like that. I never even hinted at it. Even when I knew that there were women on this planet who were property, it felt too private to talk about. I saw one once as a kid, did I ever tell you?’
Therin leaned forward, his face rapt. ‘No! Really? How young a kid?’
‘Adolescent. We were visiting friends in Gaweja. I was coming out of a store in
Tasit Street
, and they walked right by me. A small woman on a leash. I’d never even seen any pictures, hardly knew what they looked like, but I knew what she was all right.’
‘Did you follow them?’
Garid’s mouth twitched. ‘I wanted to, but I had such a hard on I thought I’d come if I moved at all. So I stayed put and tried to be inconspicuous. I was hoping they’d come back, but no.’ He thought back, remembering the woman’s rear view as she was led away from him, how shaken and aroused he had been. He couldn’t describe his feelings, even to Therin, who knew. He looked up and smiled slightly. ‘I had to lie to my father about why I was late for dinner.’
‘Which slave was it, do you know? What did she look like?’
‘I have no idea. I suppose it might have been Bereneff’s, though of course I didn’t look at him; I’m figuring it out in retrospect. He’s had his slave for a long time, and he lives in that area. She had very light hair, high, small round breasts; that’s all I can tell you.’
‘If it was Bereneff’s, they’re not so high now,’ said Therin. ‘But she’s still pretty cute.’
‘She turned up in my dreams for years.’
‘I can imagine. I managed to hack into the Oris Auction system and look at slave holos all through my first year at university. Almost losing my scholarship. I was all excited when they held one of their auctions close enough for me to get to, but of course it was only the usual exotic pets. The disappointment just about killed me. It wasn’t until I got to know a few owners that I got to see a woman for real. It was Lave’s Merti, actually. Right in front of me. On her knees…’ Therin was lost in reverie. They went back to their food, both of them thinking back and not talking.
At last Therin asked, ‘When was the next time you saw a real one?’
‘On Soichior.’
‘Not till then?’ Therin said, surprised. ‘But you’d just come back from there when we met on the network.’
Garid grimaced a little ruefully. ‘I wasn’t comfortable letting anyone know what I wanted, back then. I wasn’t ashamed of it, you know, just private.’ In fact, as a very young man, the thought of having his sexuality exposed was anathema to him. Far better to go to a two-sex planet, with some kind of privacy for one’s proclivities.
‘Oh, and you’re not private now!’ Therin had mopped up his food and was now playing with the sauce bottles.
‘I’m the star of some worldwide pervert-net now compared to what I was like then. On Soichior I was a stranger, and it didn’t matter so much what people knew about me.’
Garid had gone to Soichior, the sector capital planet, on a trip ostensibly for learning new reclamation methods. His research had shown that of the planets that were reasonably accessible to him, this one was most likely to provide a variety of sexual behavior. As usual, his research was impeccable. Everything he’d ever heard of was practiced openly on Soichior, as well as many things he’d never heard of at all. He was dazzled by the women, fascinated by their bodies, and had to use all his patience and control to keep from making a fool of himself with them before he learned some of the language and social behaviors, and knew appropriate ways to approach them. Fortunately his great height and his looks made him stand out even in that cosmopolitan capital, and the women found him.
‘Women everywhere… wow…’ Therin had never had the money to go off-planet.
‘They walked around free, and they wore clothes, you know. It took a while to figure out where to find the submissive ones.’
Garid had reveled in simple sex for a time, sex with someone with the right body parts, though he was careful to avoid any behavior that might suggest commitment. He asked the woman who was most friendly and open where he could find female submissives.
He could have found the information on nets and elsewhere, but was afraid his limited vocabulary would lead him astray. The woman directed him first to virtual holo nets, and then when she saw he was serious, to clubs with real people, that for him seemed a cornucopia of wonders. He hardly knew where to start, there seemed to be so many dazzling possibilities.
But he wasted very little time; soon he was in a room full of people who had discarded clothing for fetish gear, surrounded by fascinating bondage equipment, first watching and then learning and participating. Suddenly it was happening. Any study of reclamation methods went to hell.
Therin dipped his finger in one of the puddles on his plate, licked it, and said, ‘You told me about Soichior when we first talked. Can you imagine how much I envied you? I could never figure out why you left. Was it money?’
‘No, I could have worked there after a while, if I’d spent more time on the language. It was, I don’t know if I can explain this, but it wasn’t what I wanted. It sounds amazing, all those people wanting the same things I wanted, rooms full of racks and whips. Women who called themselves slaves. I couldn’t get enough at first.’
‘Not very private.’
Garid shrugged. ‘Light years away from Henth. No one knew me. Proud perverts all around me. And I was so caught up that I didn’t care. There were women who needed and loved to be dominated, and I bound them and beat them and made them crawl, and I couldn’t have been happier.’
‘So what happened?’
The roboserver showed up and they ordered desserts without paying much attention. Absently Garid watched the machine glide away.
‘Once the first – what shall I call it? – intoxication was over, I began to run up against the limitations.’ He looked down at his hands, thinking about how to explain, then his light eyes met Therin’s across the table. ‘It was play, Ther, that’s all. I could tie a woman to a frame and beat her, expose her wet cunt to the crowd
, have her crawl across the room to suck me off. Afterwards she’d thank me and go home.’ Garid had begun to find the scenes empty, the game playing farcical. ‘Each scene left me more and more dissatisfied. Things that had given me an instant hard-on began to bore me. This sexuality I thought I had, this strangeness I had thought was at my core – I began to wonder if it was real at all, whether I was mistaken.’
Therin gave him a skeptical look.
‘I mean it. But no, I didn’t have doubts for long. Away from the clubs, I knew what I was. But I needed something longer-term, something with more substance to it.’
Therin stabbed his baraze cake. ‘The place sounds like paradise. Just being there would have been enough for me.’ His look of frustration faded. ‘Except that the women weren’t really slaves, were they?’
‘That’s it,’ said Garid. ‘They weren’t.’ He spooned up a little cream, looking thoughtful. ‘I felt the same way as you, a few years ago. You know, when you’re young and horny and deprived, all you think about is equipment, human and otherwise. Body parts intersecting with each other. Bondage intersecting with body parts. Not that I didn’t have some idea of how I wanted the power differential to play out. But it was hard to imagine anything beyond scenes. I thought I’d do these things, and everything else would fall into place.’
‘You’d have the power, and she wouldn’t.’
Garid smiled in appreciation. ‘And it would go on that way. Yes. You understand more than you say you do. I tried to find women who wanted a real master-slave relationship. I came across a few, even lived with one for a while. But?’
‘But what?’
‘But all of the so-called slaves I found took it as a given that our relationship would be negotiated. Worked out to our mutual satisfaction. “I’ll do this, you do that”. Sometimes practically moment by moment. Damn, that was irritating. And they all had lives outside of what we were doing that had to be respected.’
‘Even the one you lived with?’
‘Sure. She had a family, friends, a job. She submitted to me at home. No where else. Oh, we played some games in restaurants.’ Garid looked around the room. ‘The kicker for me was that even if she had wanted to give me possession of her, she couldn’t. No contract would have been binding; slavery’s not legal there. No matter how much a woman seemed to want real slavery, on Soichior she could walk away whenever she changed her mind.’
Therin, stuck on a practically womanless planet, thought his friend impossibly picky; he could imagine himself quite happy with a part-time slave. On the other hand, he could see the importance of getting the power differential sorted out. Who really had the control? Over what? What was game playing and what was real?
He also began to see why Garid was spending such a long time alone with his slave. His friend, intense and serious, wanted a relationship, utterly unbalanced as to power, but meaningful, even profound. It was typical of Garid to want something so specific, and to refuse all compromise until he got it. Evidently he wanted no distractions that could weaken the bond. Once that bond was formed to his satisfaction, then perhaps he would share his woman. Therin hoped.
Garid spoke again. ‘I went back to researching, kept looking for the woman, the situation, the location that would be the key. Now that I knew more about what I needed there was a lot less in the way of possibilities, so I began a really wide, completely inclusive search. Of course the keyword “slavery” meant that Henth kept coming up, but I ignored those entries.’
‘Why?’
‘I wasn’t thinking about Henth at all back then; I was sure there was some other place that would have what I needed. There were a number of other planets to comb through where slavery existed in some form.’
‘It exists in other places? That’s interesting. Like here?’
‘No, not like here. The longer I looked, the worse it got. Ther, I was looking at planets with power divided along gender lines with women as an underclass, or planets where prisoners had been taken in wars and used for slave labor or for prostitution. Mostly these planets were being ostracized; what I was screening were indignant speeches, calls for liberation. I was feeling disgusted; this wasn’t the company I wanted to keep.’
‘No, I can see that. If the women from Raniz were here against their will – you’re right, I never really thought about it.’
‘Would you want one if they were?’
‘No.’ The word was uttered with finality. Therin seemed to surprise himself. ‘No, I’d play with the idea, but I’d never be able to stand it.’
Garid looked faintly relieved. ‘I was getting pretty indignant myself at some of the material I was reading.’ He leaned forward and put his elbows on the table, his brows furrowed a little. ‘In most of the universe women are people – you realize that, right? They’re entitled to respect, with freedom and choices to make like everyone else. And rightly so. Why shouldn’t they run their own lives, like men do? They want to and they’re capable. Look how few Ranizens choose to come here. That shows how few want to give up human status.
‘The women who aren’t free out there are victims of real oppression. I started to feel that the only way I could relate to them would be as some kind of liberation fighter.’ He shrugged and sat back, a little embarrassed.
Therin laughed. ‘Commander Universe and his legions.’
‘Absolutely. I used to have the costume in my toy cupboard. No, I wasn’t going to play out that fantasy. But I wasn’t going to become the Evil Overlord either.’
The roboserver came in and offered more coffee. Therin fiddled with cream and sugar, drank a little, looking meditative, and said, ‘Ironic, isn’t it, that off-world you could have all the women you wanted, even submissive ones, but not the way you wanted them. Here, practically no women, but?’
‘Yes. I started to think about Henth again. I don’t know what took me so long.’ The bill appeared on the table screen, and Garid thumbed the total. ‘A woman living on Henth is here voluntarily, but once she comes she’s legally non-human chattel. I checked every possible lead; believe me: Apart from Henth, there’s no other jurisdiction in the known universe that will uphold ownership of a human being, except the planets that base enslavement on coercion.’
‘That’s intriguing. I didn’t know we were that unique. But I do know what took you so long: that privacy you’re so fond of.’
‘That was probably the hardest part. It took me that long to accept that I was going to have to come out. I decided I’d take the risk of being known as what I was, and get a real slave if I could. The hell with world opinion.’
‘All the same, I bet you missed Soichior women, slaves or not.’
‘Oh, man. Yes. Worse and worse. But after that experience, I decided I’d rather live without women forever than go back to playing games.’
Housepet
I remember some of the specifics from the early months, but when I try to think about what happened, the memories seem to overlap and run into each other, sequence gone, as if time itself needed a language to proceed in an orderly fashion, a language I didn’t have. I had a language inside my head, Ranize, of course. But with no one to speak it to, nothing to read, my language seemed to lose its tether line, as it were, and drift through my head, like space debris in a trajectory that led nowhere.
They never did let me speak. They never even allowed me to learn what they were saying. Of course I picked up a few words and phrases, by watching what happened: ‘Shut the door,’ things like that. I learned the commands they used on me, like ‘kneel’, ‘stay’, and ‘spread’. Maybe twenty words in all. I also learned the word they generally used when they talked to me, ‘jeedy’, which I thought at first was a new name my master had given me. After a while it seemed to me that it was less a name than some kind of demeaning descriptor. I tried for a while to decipher the language, but it was too different, they spoke too fast, and I was never allowed the verbal interaction that would have helped me to learn. Quite the contrary; I was punished seve
rely for the slightest attempts at speech.
As a result I felt gradually less and less human. After all, language is one of the things that makes us feel different from animals, isn’t that right? These giants were moving freely around while I was tethered, my huge owner was walking me on a leash, and I could neither understand nor speak. I remember sitting on my heels, naked at my master’s knee one day, my leash in his hand, while he had an incomprehensible conversation with a visitor sitting opposite. All I knew was that for a while they were talking about me. The visitor, a graying man as tall as my master, seemed rather remote, but kind, and when he touched my face I felt very tempted to lick his hand.
At such times there was a moment of being whole, just a pet, an animal that obeyed and didn’t question. Then I would pull back into my head and begin to separate myself, to think and analyze again. But there came a point, I don’t know how long after it all began, when I no longer thought very much in words when I was near my master. Thinking in words seemed to make me more anxious, less pliable, and I got punished more. I was trying to figure out what might happen, guessing wrong, and messing up.
Bit by bit I gave up trying to think ahead. Actually, at the best of times I gave up trying to think at all, and just followed, docile, the tugs and slaps, the wordless gestures. I became very good at reading expressions, at obeying nonverbal signals without a thought. My mouth was for pleasuring my master’s body, for licking his shoes, for fetching, for gags, bits and occasional deep kisses. It was for licking up the food in my dish, or messes on the floor. It was not for speaking.
Still, communication without words was a long learning curve. One day I remember I was staring so hard into my master’s eyes, trying to read his expression, that I missed his gestures and had to be spanked into position. I suffered agonies when my bladder was full, trying to signal my need. I was caught in the genteel fear of making a mess. I finally gave up and resigned myself to waiting until I was walked, or peeing on the floor. Of course I was punished, but since that was clearly what he wanted, I had no choice. They would understand my signals or not, act on them or not. I would learn what was expected by trial and error, as an animal does. If what I wanted to understand or express required more than this, I was out of luck.
