Owned And Owner (12 page)

‘Not bad at all.’ Garid sipped his wine. ‘Lave is too easygoing with that woman, though.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Tidbits at the table – loose with only an ankle hobble – free to wander around the house when he’s out?’

‘She’s not free to wander, she’s on a chain.’ Therin licked hot sauce off his fingers. ‘Anyway, not everyone has staff or automation at home; it makes sense to have her do the housework.’

‘I know. I’m lucky I can keep mine the way I want her.’

‘He’s not slack. Just a different – what shall I say?
– paradigm from yours.’

‘Meaning what?’

‘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

‘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?’