Assigned a Guardian (2 page)

“The men in your group,” Marjorie said, “were woken yesterday. They are already down on the planet. So—” she checked the tablet she carried, “—Heather Ross, Bella Gutierrez, Maria Maldonado, and Heather Salieri, your husbands are just fine. They had their briefing yesterday, and today they’re being presented with their career options. Things are going to be different for you ladies, however.”

Something in the way she said it with a hint of stern authority kept anyone, even Kayla, from raising her hand.

“I regret to inform you—though I have to say I don’t regret it all that much, so don’t run crying to me for sympathy when you get your bottom smacked because you bratted at your guardian—that gender relations on Draco follow a different pattern than they follow on Earth—at least the last time we heard from Earth.” Marjorie said this with such a grim air that Kayla instantly knew something had gone very, very wrong with the subspace link.

“I’m not going to candy-coat this for you ladies. Women on Draco are subservient to men.” She paused to let the little gasps and exclamations of disbelief fade away. “Everything went to hell, ten years after we got here. We lost the subspace link because a premenstrual woman, who happened to be the chief of engineering at the subspace array, closed a relay she should have left open. She blew out fifteen relays up the line, fused them solid. We had enough of the alloy we needed to repair two relays. The
Jupiter
—” Marjorie slapped the internal metal wall, which rang back a hollow sound, “—is carrying enough for two more. So far, we haven’t found what we need here on Draco to make any more. But I digress.”

The women in the room were murmuring now, trying to make sense of what they were hearing. Marjorie held her hands up for silence.

“This happened fourteen years ago. A political party that had already begun to gain a little strength, whose candidates supported a strong central authority and a traditional division of labor…”

Kayla couldn’t contain herself now. “Traditional?!” She stood up, feeling woozy from the aftereffects of cryo-sleep but determined not to show any weakness if she could possibly help it.

Marjorie walked calmly over to confront her. “Kayla, I understand how hard this is going to be for you—for you more than for every other lady here. But this is the way it is on Draco.”

“You cannot be serious.”

“I’m telling you that I’m serious, Kayla Lourcy. You’re not going to enjoy what happens if you refuse to sit down and hear what I have to say.”

“What?” Kayla asked defiantly. She had had just about enough of this ‘senior matron.’

“Sandra,” Marjorie said to her assistant. “Please get my paddle.”

“Your
what?
”

“Go to the front of the room, please, Kayla. Bend over and put your elbows on the table. I’m going to show you and every other lady here how things work on Draco, under the administration of Governor Leary, who happens to be my husband.”

Kayla, like all the other women, was wearing the standard issue colonist’s blue jumpsuit. Now she noted, though she hadn’t before, that Marjorie wore a dress—really a rather short dress, actually—of rather rough gray fabric, belted at the waist.

Sandra returned from, Kayla assumed, the shuttle that waited to take the colonists to the surface, carrying a long, flat object that seemed to be made of heavy plastic. Its face was pierced by several holes. She handed it to Marjorie.

“Kayla, please do as I’ve said.” The matron tapped her palm meaningfully with the paddle.

What the hell was going on? This woman could not be serious. Corporal punishment?

“You have got to be kidding me. I’d like to talk to Patrick McDowell, please.” Kayla tried to keep her voice even, but she could hear a little hysteria rising in it.

“I assure you, Kayla, that I’m not kidding. You’re going to be paddled, now. Your only choice is how it happens.”

Now Kayla was nearly shouting, with vocal cords that ached with the effort, after having been idle so long. “I want to talk to Patrick McDowell. You’re not going to do this, so you had better just calm the fuck down with your corporal punishment bullshit.”

Marjorie remained utterly, maddeningly calm. “We learned the hard way here on Draco that order and discipline are much more important things when you’re fighting the environment for your very survival than they are when you’re just making money off your rich daddy’s business.”

“How dare you?! My father drove himself to an early grave…”

Marjorie nodded to Sandra. Kayla’s voice trailed away at the sight of that nod. Sandra, who Kayla now noted was a very sizable woman of twenty or so, reached out and grabbed Kayla, spun her around, and twisted her arm behind her back. Kayla tried to struggle, but the weakness from cryo-sleep made her feel like she had about as much strength as a newborn kitten.

“What are you doing? I’m Kayla fucking Lourcy!” she screamed. Even as she screamed it she realized it was far from her proudest moment, but goddammit, she was indeed Kayla fucking Lourcy. Draco was
named after
her fucking stuffed animal.

“Kayla,” Marjorie said. “I understand how hard this is. I really, really do. But our lives here depend on our ability to trust that everyone will do what he or she has to do. Governor Leary and the planetary council have decided that in order to maintain trust throughout our society, public corporal punishment is a necessary evil. For women over eighteen, that means the paddle, outside their clothing. Are you going to put yourself in position, or is Sandra going to have to hold you down?”

Kayla could do nothing but stare back at Marjorie Leary, wild-eyed. To travel eighteen light-years and then to get paddled on her rear end within an hour of waking up from a twenty-two–year sleep seemed something she simply didn’t have an appropriate reaction for. She suddenly remembered asking Patrick about whether people dreamed in cryo-sleep. Maybe that was what was happening now?

“Put her in position, please, Sandra,” Marjorie said wearily. Sandra instantly began marching Kayla toward the front of the room. If Kayla had been able to process what was going on, she would have accepted the fact that she was about to be paddled and she would have gone unforced to the table, and perhaps retained a shred of her dignity. It all unfolded so fast, though, that Sandra had to push her fairly hard all the way until she pressed Kayla’s thighs against the metal tabletop.

Kayla finally managed to make her muscles stop resisting at that point. Sensing her compliance, Sandra let go and said quietly, “Elbows on the table, Kayla. Bottom well out for the paddle.”

“I want all you ladies to understand,” Marjorie said, as her voice approached, “that your husband or guardian will discipline you as necessary. Female government authorities like me also have that power, but their punishments must be witnessed. Sandra, please witness. Kayla Lourcy, ten swats for unruly conduct plus five swats for disrespect.”

“Witnessed, matron,” Sandra said.

Kayla looked down at the dull finish of the tabletop, feeling like her brain consisted of exactly the same sort of dull stuff. Nothing made any sense.

“Kayla?” Marjorie said.

It took her a moment to understand that the woman had addressed her.

“Kayla, I hope we’re not going to have a problem, going forward.” Now Marjorie’s voice grew much sterner. “Let’s try that again. Kayla?”

“Yes?” Why did she feel that even though her jumpsuit was still on, this woman had somehow bared her bottom just with her voice?

“You must thank me for punishing you.”

“What?”

There was no noise, nor any puff of air; Kayla guessed that the holes in the thick plastic ensured that. But suddenly a muffled thud sounded from the direction of her backside, and a sting coursed through her body.

“Ow!”

“That didn’t count, Kayla, because you haven’t thanked me.”

“Oh, God. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” Marjorie said, and then she continued the paddling. Every stroke landed in the same place, full across Kayla’s bottom-cheeks. Marjorie delivered them slowly, lecturing all the while.

“Kayla here,” she said to the women, “should serve as an example to you all.”

Even the first stroke had hurt. The fifth made Kayla cry out and start to squirm, bouncing her backside up and down a little to try to take away some of the sting. Sandra quietly counted the swats as they fell.

“Really, the paddle isn’t the worst part.”

“Ah!” Kayla cried, at the tenth. “I can’t! Ah!”

“The worst part is the humiliation.”

Kayla cried; she sobbed like a little girl. Kayla Lourcy, daughter of the founder, executive vice president of Lourcy Industries, sobbed into the metal table as the senior matron paddled her bottom to make an example of her.

“Fifteen,” said Sandra.

“You may go back to your seat, Kayla,” Marjorie said.

Kayla winced as she rose. She didn’t look at Marjorie. At first she thought the woman hadn’t been correct about the paddle not being the worst part, because Kayla’s rear end stung like ten thousand bees had decided she was their mortal enemy. Then she realized that whereas the last time she had walked among the colonists, as she went to lie down in her cryo-bed, twenty-two years—and four hours—before, she had held her head high and smiled grandly; now it wasn’t just Marjorie and Sandra’s eyes she couldn’t meet. As she moved stiffly back to her seat, where she perched on her hip to avoid the pain, all she could think was,
Kayla fucking Lourcy just got a paddling, and there definitely appears to be more where that came from.

Chapter Two

Sitting in the little bedroom—more like a closet, really—assigned to him in the men’s dormitory wing of the Draco administration building, Patrick McDowell read the Draconian Basic Law, adopted by two-thirds majority in the plebiscite held twelve years before the
Jupiter
arrived at Draco. He read it in growing disbelief. To codify gender roles that way… it seemed to him medieval.

Exactly,
he realized. The colony had been reduced to medieval conditions, and a medieval division of labor seemed right to them. More, it had made them feel like they were doing something about the problem. When John Leary, at the head of the values coalition, declared that a new era of prosperity could dawn on Draco if only the colonists would see that evolution itself had decreed that men and women were fit for different jobs, and that one of the jobs men were fit for was taking charge of their wives and daughters, the values platform had instantly gained a 55% approval rating in the polls. When the plebiscite occurred, in which women actually voted away their right to vote, bestowing it on their husbands and, for single women, on the new role called ‘guardian,’ the resolution had won handily, with 70% of the vote.

Patrick had to study the Basic Law and its history because he would be tested that day, in order to be admitted to full citizenship. He probably would have spent a few hours reading the materials they had pointed him to on the data-net even if he had come across them randomly somehow, back on earth, though; it was just such an incredible experiment in social engineering.

Two things appeared to have made it possible for the Basic Law to gain passage: the incident at the subspace link station and the way the values coalition had cleverly emphasized the ten-year sunset clause they had written in. The original law provided for its reauthorization at the end of ten years by another plebiscite, and the colony had apparently in fact reauthorized it two years before, with adult women given a full vote for the occasion.

There didn’t seem to be any doubt that PMS had in fact caused the
de facto
destruction of the subspace link. Jane Loggins, the chief engineer on duty that day, had a documented history of irritability that accompanied her monthly cycle. She had closed the wrong relay right after having a heated argument with a colleague about the staff refrigerator. Her own account of the incident made for riveting, horrifying reading. Being a scientist, and working with scientists, she had carefully recorded the facts of her behavior at different points of her monthly cycle in her journal. She had even written there, on more than one occasion, “I’m not sure I should be on duty today.” The values coalition’s greatest coup, and the key moment in the campaign to pass the Basic Law, had been Jane Loggins’ own endorsement of the movement.

It seemed to Patrick that taking away the vote had started out as a maximal position on Leary’s part, which he had probably intended to bargain away. But the Loggins incident, as it was known, had suddenly put that position within reach. One of Leary’s more extreme allies had given a speech in which he begged women to search their hearts and ask themselves if voting for the wrong candidate, or the wrong resolution, was really any different from closing the wrong relay at the subspace link station.

Whereas the colonists of the planet Draco face hardships that make certain freedoms to which modern people are accustomed unsafe to maintain, and whereas the colonists wish to secure to themselves first safety, and, later, prosperity, therefore be this basic law adopted and enacted as the foundation of good order on the planet Draco, this fifth day of January in the year 2187 of the Common Era, by Earth reckoning, and the year 12 of human life on Draco.

An article about the post of governor, which had far-reaching executive powers, followed. Then came an article about the governor’s council, which served as the colony’s legislative body. The specifications for the court system followed. Then the real innovations, if they could be called that, began.

By recommendation of the governor, and ratification by the governor’s council, all recognized forms of gainful employment shall be classified as appropriate either only to men or also to women. No woman shall be gainfully employed in a post designated as appropriate only to men. Forms of gainful employment designated as appropriate to women shall be further placed under the direction of a male agent of business, ordinarily the head of household in authority over the woman occupied in such employment. These forms of employment shall be further designated as ‘women’s work,’ and any remuneration for them shall be delivered to the agent of business.