Assigned a Guardian (5 page)

They were sitting at the table in the little café in the lobby of the administration wing. Everything on Draco was a mixture of primitive and ultra-high-tech. The computers took absolute priority, after things like antibiotics and anti-bacterials. Coffee was low down on the list: judged a staple, it was planted in the hydroponic facilities where Joe and two hundred other men worked, but the beans were of course of the most easily grown, least easily killed, robusta variety, and Patrick already felt intense longing for the pure Arabian Mocca he had drunk daily on Earth. The drink was served out of enormous urns—no espresso machines, no blended drinks, no breakfast sandwiches. At least it was cheap, like all the staples: the Basic Law made for a very stable economy, it seemed. Patrick had been given twenty Draconian dollars, and he had been sure it wouldn’t go far, but the coffee was five cents per cup, and that made him feel so wealthy he had bought one for Joe.

“Where are your children now?”

“Oh, in daycare—and the two oldest are in grade school already. They’ve got fantastic teachers at the center. Frannie worked there before she got sick.”

Patrick pondered his next question, and finally decided that Joe was so forthright it didn’t make any sense not to ask it. “Did you spank your wife?”

He laughed. “Only twice in eight years—both times because she forgot to change the air filter in the garden. After the second time, she didn’t forget again.” Joe spoke the final words grimly. “First time was with my hand, over my lap. Second time I stripped her naked and bent her over the ottoman and strapped her until I was sure she learned the lesson. Every plant in that garden had died.”

Patrick swallowed involuntarily, imagining the scene: big Joe Moscone slapping his punishment strap against his hand, telling his wife to take off her clothes and get over the ottoman; his wife crying in fear, and then in agony as the strap fell upon her bare bottom over and over, until Joe had decided she had had enough.

Patrick wasn’t particularly happy to find that the thought of the corporal punishment of women aroused him as much as it did, but neither could he deny it, his scientific mind being accustomed to trying to take all the varnish off a fact so that he could examine it as closely as possible.

“What about the other stuff in the codicil—like shaving and diapers?”

Joe laughed again. “Not my thing. A few guys go that route, and I
have
heard that sometimes when nothing else will work, taking a girl back to childhood that way can put her on the right track, but none of my girls have needed it. They do say that Marjorie Leary was one of the ones who did, and that’s why it’s in the codicil, but they don’t talk much about it—in public, at least.”

Looking at Kayla’s door in the women’s wing now, Patrick tried hard not to picture Kayla in nothing but a diaper, and failed miserably. He knocked on her door again.

“Come in,” Kayla’s voice came through the door. Patrick opened it to find her sitting at the little desk, wearing the jumpsuit from the
Jupiter,
clearly having refused one of the simple rayon tunic dresses that, it seemed, every woman in the colony wore. Kayla’s room looked exactly like his own room on the men’s floor, with the exception that whereas in Patrick’s room a copy of the Basic Law had been posted prominently on the bulletin board, in Kayla’s, in the corresponding space, the powers that be had posted another of the graphics from the administration’s design office: a photo of a handsome, burly, bare-chested man, with the caption,
Did you really burn dinner again? Looks like you’ll be over his knee tonight. Poor you, girl.

“Oh, God,” Kayla said. “Patrick. I’m…” Then she burst into tears as she got up and hugged him. “They… I mean, I met my… my guardian, and… and…”

“Shh,” Patrick said. “Shh, Kayla, it’s okay. It’s okay.”

Patrick got her to sit back down at the little desk, while he sat on her bed.

“God, Patrick. I mean, he’s not… he’s not… mean, or anything. But…”

“It’s okay. I met him. The administration want to keep me in the loop. I don’t think he’s a bad guy.”

“No, he’s nice. He really seems to… to want to help. But…”

“But you can’t believe that he’s responsible for you.”

“No. I mean… what does that even mean? Responsible? No, don’t answer that—they told all of us what it means, I guess. I just don’t want to believe it, or pretend that I think it makes any sense.”

“Kayla,” Patrick said, trying desperately to do the job the administration had assigned to him, “it does make sense. I understand that it doesn’t make a kind of sense that makes you happy, but this is where we are, and we’re not going to be going anywhere else.”

“I know,” she sobbed. “And really everyone is nice, and understanding, even that Marjorie Leary. But I went to
business
school, Patrick. I’m an
executive
. The thought that it’s against the
law
for me to do what I was trained to do… I mean, the nurse at that horrible exam was really a doctor, but at least she gets to do what she trained to do. I have to… I don’t even know. Get
married
. Start a
family
.”

“You say that like it’s a horrible thing.” Patrick couldn’t keep his own frustration out of his voice.

“No,” Kayla said. “No—I always meant to, you know, have kids. But look at that poster.” She pointed to the bulletin board, where the hunky guy waited to spank the girl who had burned his dinner. “When the government is telling you that you have to, and, apparently, sending you suitors and making you talk to your guardian about dating them. It’s just… barbaric.”

“It seems barbaric to you,” Patrick said gently. “And I have to say that I think of it as medieval. But think about it. Barbarian tribes and medieval villages had no margin for error, when it came to staying safe and ensuring the future. Neither does Draco.”

Kayla seemed to consider it. “But wasn’t that because of the terrible mother and child mortality? Draco has modern medicine, so they don’t need to reproduce as fast, right?”

“I have a feeling that the Basic Law isn’t going to be around for all that long,” Patrick admitted. “The population is going to explode, and become much more diverse, if the trend here continues. But from everything I’ve seen and read so far, they’re still right on the edge of survival: everyone has to pull his or her weight. The Basic Law saved them from becoming a space-age Roanoke; you have to understand that the huge majority of them are going to cling to it.”

“But what does that mean for me?” Kayla wailed.

“It means that you can’t get out of it, if you want to have anything like a good life here. They’ll paddle you, and cane you, and then send you to the work camp on the outskirts of the colony if they have to, to sew clothing and can vegetables. No jails here; they can’t afford them.”

“And if I refuse to work in the work camp?” Kayla seemed to be trying to pursue the idea just to get the worst out of the way.

“They would cane you until you did, as far as I can tell. They don’t seem to have a problem with that.”

“And if I still refused?”

Patrick grimaced. “I think they wouldn’t feed you.”

“Oh.” Kayla looked down at her hands, folded in her lap. “I didn’t want to come here, Patrick. I mean, I
did,
but really I didn’t.”

Patrick knew what she meant despite the nonsensical way she put it. “I know. You loved your father, and your father could be a right bastard. And you loved his dream, but you wanted your own dream to live.” He opened his arms. “Come here, Kayla. Let me hug you, okay?”

She looked up at him, her eyes fierce though there were tears in them. For a moment, Patrick thought she would refuse to let him embrace her, but then she got up and crossed the tiny distance. He closed her in his arms, covered with the rough, undyed rayon shirt all men on Draco wore, and held her tightly for a long moment. He remembered the expensive French perfume Kayla had worn to work every day in the executive suite at Lourcy, and he felt a pang of longing for home, but there was something about the clean, scrubbed smell of her now that gave him a pleasing sense of potential—for change, for growth, for innovation.

“Promise me you’ll try,” he murmured.

“I promise. Do you think I want to get spanked any more than I have been already? The stupid
doctor
spanked me.”

Patrick laughed. “Seriously?”

“Yes! You have no idea the way it is for single women here. I have to take a
sex
class tomorrow.”

Now Patrick was really laughing, and so was Kayla. He released her from the hug, and she returned to the desk chair, nodding with wide eyes.

“I’m not joking, Patrick. I got the notice just before you got here.” She passed him her tablet.

Dear Miss Lourcy,

Because of your results in your sexual exam, you have been designated a 1A spousal prospect. You are therefore directed to attend a 1A informational and training session on 15 March at 2 p.m., in the third floor training room of the educational wing. We hope you take this designation as a compliment: the administration sees 1As like you as a vital resource in the building of Draconian prosperity.

Your initial training session will involve discussion of the best attitude for a girl like you, with a high sex drive and an interest in adventurous eroticism, to take while selecting spousal prospects. In future classes, if your guardian decides you should enroll in them, you will also learn techniques for enhancing your partner’s pleasure, and your own. You should be prepared to remove your clothing in order to facilitate discussion and practice.

We understand that we ask a great deal of 1As like you, Miss Lourcy, but we have a scientific basis for these requests, and we know that as a 1A, the time commitment you make to your training will provide pleasurable benefits to you as well.

With thanks for your service to your planet,

Marjorie Leary, Senior Matron

Director of Sexual Education

Patrick felt his jaw drop. “That,” he said, “takes the cake.” He looked at Kayla, unsure of whether he should inquire further. “Um, do you feel…? I mean, do you think they’re right? About you being a… 1A?”

Kayla sighed and nodded glumly. She made a sour face. “Doesn’t mean I want to do it in the service of Draconian prosperity, though.”

Chapter Five

Five other girls were at the training session. Marjorie Leary, not at all to Kayla’s surprise, was their teacher. The room was a small gymnasium, more or less, the floor covered with mats and various kinds of gymnastics-looking equipment standing against the walls.

“Girls,” the senior matron said, “have a seat on the floor, please.”

Kayla looked at the other students. Two of them she recognized from the
Jupiter:
they had slightly dazed expressions that Kayla was sure matched her own. The other three she had never seen before: they wore the standard rayon dress called a ‘Draconian’ as if they had been wearing it all their lives, which they undoubtedly had, for they were clearly second generation colonists. Theirs were various colors, unlike Marjorie’s gray one; the new colonists had been told that they might dye their clothes themselves, at their own expense. The clothes themselves, produced in a few very basic styles, were free.

Had they lived all their lives under the Basic Law? Probably not, for they seemed about twenty years old, but, Kayla thought with distaste, they must not be able to remember a time when they weren’t made to feel that their bodies were at the disposal of men.

“Introductions, first,” Marjorie said. “You all know me, of course. What you don’t know, probably, is that I’m a 1A like you.”

The three second-generation girls giggled loudly at this. Kayla looked at them in wonder. They had expressions of admiration—worship, even—when their eyes rested on Marjorie.

Marjorie smiled at them kindly. “That’s why John and I have eight children, of course.”

More giggles, and now Kayla’s two fellow
Jupiter
colonists joined in the mirth. Kayla tried to smile, but she couldn’t do better than not scowling. “I think you’ll be surprised how much I can teach you, and how valuable what we do here today will prove to your future happiness. As you
Jupiter
girls know, the way we live now, here on Draco, is very different, where sex is concerned, from the way they live on Earth. But I promise you that if you work to accept your role, your erotic needs are going to be fulfilled much more thoroughly here than they would probably have been on Earth.”

Marjorie looked around at her students, meeting each of their eyes for a moment. She came to Kayla last, and Kayla found that this woman who had paddled her so severely aboard the
Jupiter
was, under the tough-as-nails exterior, clearly well-intentioned. That didn’t mean Kayla sympathized with those intentions, of course. She would find a way out of this, but for now she would play along.

“Alright,” Marjorie said, “there’s someone else here who you probably all know—even you seconds. Kayla, why don’t you go ahead and introduce yourself? Please also say something about how you’re feeling about the Basic Law. I want this to be a safe space, so feel free to express your real opinion.”

She couldn’t mean that, could she?

Kayla looked at the faces around the little circle sitting on the gym mat. “I’m Kayla Lourcy. My dad was responsible for Draco getting colonized. As you may have heard, I didn’t really want to be on the
Jupiter,
but the Earth government was going to throw me into jail unjustly. They wanted a scapegoat.” Kayla realized then that Marjorie’s talk of a ‘safe space’ was making her let go of her emotions in a way she didn’t like. She blinked back the tears and gritted her teeth. “Anyway. I’m here. And the Basic Law. Well, I’m pretty sure the whole planet knows about what happened on the
Jupiter.
I didn’t take the news well. But… that’s the way it’s going to be, I guess, and here I am, to learn how to have sex with the man the administration chooses for me.”