Owned And Owner (13 page)

‘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 severely 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.

My loss of control created constant fear, especially early on when I didn’t know my master well enough to trust him. But it created the most profound excitement, and it felt
right
. As if the ship had reached her mooring.

I still struggled against it. No matter how much I wanted this, I couldn’t make myself give up any attempts to do my own navigating, not all at once. Trying to do things of my own volition, however, was a lot like coming up against the end of my chain, over and over. Like that creature in the vet’s waiting room, I had to learn that I wasn’t going anywhere.

One day it came to me that this might be just as well. I was in my master’s study, a chain between my
nipple
rings passed loosely through a ring on the side of his desk. It was a bit like being chained to the side of a house. He’d been working there for a while, and I’d been able to watch him, the perspective from the floor making him seem monumental in size, like a live statue in the park. I loved looking at him. His calm face generally changed very little, but I was becoming aware of slight changes around his eyes or mouth that signaled pleasure or amusement, or more frighteningly, disapproval. I watched his irises flick as they moved rapidly from one display to another. The light of the displays played over the bones of his face, making colored shadows below his eyes and along his throat. His hands moved quickly and with precision, never a wasted motion, no tapping, no hesitation.
Just watching the long-boned fingers at their work made my breath come faster.

I tried to concentrate on his hands and face mostly, and ration my glances at the rest of him. Henth has a warm climate, and the men don’t wear a lot – shorts or light trousers, loose tunic shirts, sometimes less. At home, working, my master might wear little more than a light robe. And if I looked too long at the incredibly long and muscled thigh nearest me, or the chest and shoulder in the colored shadows of the display, I did more than breathe faster. I wasn’t able to contain myself.

I did my best to keep still while he worked, as when he was busy any of my fidgeting or bids for attention got me into trouble. The chain between my nipples was a dead giveaway, because it made noise at my tiniest move. Too many disturbances and I ended up in solitary confinement. I was already quite familiar with the interior of a nearby cupboard. Just the other day he’d locked my hands behind my back, shoved me onto a shelf and closed the door. And it was an awfully long time before he took me out. Who knows how much time I’d missed in his proximity? So I tried to keep still while he was working.

Anyway, as I was saying, I was alone in his study, still chained to the desk. He’d been gone for a while, and I’d stopped watching the door for his return. I was looking around at the room instead. The
holo
above his desk still glowed: a russet field of plants, wet and dripping. From my angle, I was down among the roots looking up at a deep turquoise sky through the stalks; a pleasant illusion. I could see a few of the controls; they reminded me of the time I had sabotaged the
holo
net for an entire sector. I’d done it
twice,
actually, before they figured out it was me. That created a fruitful amount of chaos. On a more mundane level, there was a sink in the room that reminded me of some magnificent flooding I had caused in the town hall. They’d had to replace half the meeting room ceiling. And all I had needed to do was open up the water valves…

A yank on my nipples brought me back to myself with a start. I had gotten halfway up to my knees before the pain stopped me.

I sat back and interrogated myself fiercely. What was the matter with me? What did I think I was doing?

That irresponsible girl had certainly not been the real me; I’d invented her.
An elaborate charade of the complete young delinquent.
Prior to that I’d been a mouse of a child – self-effacing and compliant, too cowardly to put a foot out of place.
Living entirely in my head.
I suppose I thought of this as the ‘real me’, whatever that meant.

But was it? That delinquent act took up a third of my life, my whole adolescence. Every criminal stunt saturated in raging hormones. Could that be enough to imprint the behaviors on my brain? Had the role invented me a little?

They’d called me impulsive, which made me laugh. If anything I had ruminated endlessly on every course of action, every thought and meaning and emotion, driving myself crazy. When I decided to change my persona it took an enormous effort of will to act rather than analyze. I got paralyzed at the planning stages; once I stopped to think I was stuck; game over.

So I began to act first, think later. I acted reflexively, doing whatever my brain conceived. And it had worked. I suppose I’d also found out how much fun impulsive behavior could be, especially when you quite literally hate the world you live on.

The adults had pleaded with me to think about consequences, and I had dug in and been sullen. I knew the long-term result I was aiming for, and refused to care about what happened in the short term. I did what I had to do. But that was all over, now that I was where I belonged.

Well. Not really over, because my shipment to this place was supposed to be my punishment for all that, and a way to make sure I couldn’t do it again. And that move toward the sink made me wonder. I suddenly recalled a therapist they had dragged me to, rather a nice person, really, if she hadn’t been such a threat.

‘Tell me, what goes through your mind before you do these things,
Etrin
?’

‘I think of a good prank and I do it,’ I’d answered tonelessly.

‘So you never stop and think.’

‘No.’

‘But you used to think before you did things; why not now?’

‘I don’t know.’ I did know, but she was a professional therapist who would understand sexual perversion if anyone would. She’d probably want to cure me.

‘
Etrin
,
let me tell you something about the brain. Any normal brain has ways to control impulses, to say “no” to things that will have bad consequences. You obviously have this ability; you used to use it. But if a person stops using that mechanism, after a while the brain can lose the capacity. It may be a question of “use it or lose it”. You might want to think about that.’ I had, of course, been staring sullenly past her at the time, plotting my next calamity, but for some reason I had actually thought about that; briefly, anyway.

I looked down. My nipples were still stinging. I suddenly visualized myself at the sink, opening taps over blocked drains, and adrenaline leapt in my veins. My heart started beating like a monkey’s.