Owned And Owner (2 page)

At first the solitude on the spaceship was an unbelievable relief. I could put the guilt away and bask in the elation, having survived the ordeal. But the wait soon became boring, imprisoned alone in my little cabin, and at the same time brutal in the urgency of my waiting for the end of it. Finally, after those months in custody on Raniz, there was no peephole in the door, and no one demanding my attention. They brought me my food three times a
day, that
was all. I had nothing to read or screen. All I could do was think, try to imagine what was ahead, and relieve the pulsing demands between my legs, brought on by the memory of those photographs, and by the knowledge of what I had accomplished. The fear made my belly tighten with surges of excitement, the fear of what they would do to me, of whether I could stand it.

I spent hours looking at my body in the mirror. Was it pretty enough? I had no way of knowing what men would like in a woman. I felt oddly detached from myself, as though my body wasn’t mine at all. It occurred to me with a thrill of fear that soon it really wouldn’t be mine, in honest truth. I watched my hands hypnotically stroking the full, pointed breasts, the slender ribcage,
the
smooth buttocks. I ran my palms over the silky skin of my inner thighs, and my breath came faster. I closed my eyes, thinking of whips. I had never been whipped, or even slapped. Opening my eyes, I examined my face. Pale skin, reddish curls to my shoulders, the gray eyes shadowed and fearful. I was smaller than average, and I knew men were tall. Helpless, I’d be helpless. The word made my belly contract with arousal. There was nothing I could do about it now. Still, now that I didn’t have to convince other people, I could admit to myself that I was well and truly terrified.

I was going to men to be owned…

All my life I had known that what I needed was not where I was. Just where it was located wasn’t clear to me for a long time, but I knew, in a gut level, primitive way, right from the beginning, that something was missing from what I saw around me. Maybe it was the fact that unlike us, animals came in male and female, but I think it was more than that. There was something – actually, the absence of something – a gap, a chasm.
Something indefinable, because I had nothing to go on.
Everyone else seemed to feel complete and whole. I felt an ache of loss, and I didn’t know what was gone, a yearning for I knew not what. It kept me separate and alone; it turned me silent.

I began to hear about a planet full of monsters
somewhere, that
used to have some mysterious and awful connection with us. Then the lesson in history class that focused the monsters into something even more fascinating: Men. I’d always had vague fantasies, ‘stories’ I told myself each night before I fell asleep, or whenever I played alone. I knew enough to keep these to myself, that they were shameful. The new information fitted into the fantasies like a ship into its octagonal mooring – perfectly. Suddenly my imaginings had the right kind of hand on the whip, the right kind of body controlling and invading my own. My longings, now with an object, became the most agonizing of needs, but at least they were clear to me. And my need for secrecy became more urgent than ever.

I was an adolescent; desperately isolated by the split between the inner life I was living, and the ordinary one I walked each day, when I heard about the Third Option.

I found myself starting to misbehave.

My outward life ceased to be so ordinary. First my high marks in school went to hell, and I stopped being where I was expected to be. Then I started taking things apart, usually literally. At first it was excruciatingly difficult, doing something other than what was expected. I had always been an inhibited, compliant child, so upset by disapproval that my tough womb-mother had worried about me. After a while I got better at it, began guiltily to enjoy the turmoil I caused. I had never really belonged to these people, that is what I felt, so why should I care if I hurt them? Sometimes I hated them for not being what I wanted so fervently. I made damned sure that no one could get close enough to make the task ahead of me any harder. The shame I felt for hurting people fed right into my need. After each incident I wished so hard for punishment, for someone to hold me immobile and hurt me. Why were they giving me all this freedom? I hated it.

Still, I didn’t always know that I would follow the plan all the way through. I had a million ways to get off the path to Henth if I wanted to. Right up to the end of the twenty-ninth day…

All through those years I told myself I could back out at any time, become responsible, that this was just a game I was playing.
A game of tension and risk, toying with the unthinkable.
Change was too much to hope for; this life on Raniz, hopeless as it was, was the one I had. How could I imagine that I could accomplish anything different? Only at night, in the dark, with the belts tightened around my naked body, the rope pulled into my vulva and tied front and back, my hands stroking, pulling, my inadequate female hands punishing, did I know, deep in my very center, that I would put myself into a man’s hands – a real man’s.

I would not turn back.

Garid

One of his home staff sent the news to Garid, and adrenaline rushed and flooded through each part of him until he vibrated with it. He still had four hours of work to do, all of it physical, and that was a good thing; he couldn’t have sat at a desk. It had been two years since the last opportunity, missed because he was off-planet; two long years of waiting for the next pet woman from Raniz. He’d had neither the money nor, really, the desire before that. He hadn’t been ready.
But he was ready now, more than ready, and he was damned if he would see her go to someone else at the auction.

Two years ago he’d still had some embarrassment about his strange tastes. The few men on Henth that would acknowledge themselves heterosexual usually went to two-sex planets if they could possibly afford it, for visits as he’d done, or forever. But to flaunt one’s heterosexuality on Henth
itself
was hard for people to take. Garid would have to brazen out the shock of those around him, when they found out that he had bought himself a human female as a pet and slave.

He had dinner with his father that night, a dinner planned several days before. Garid chatted amiably. He asked his father about the cases he was working on, described his latest project,
joked
about the
roboserver’s
manners. Finally
Liaske
asked, ‘Where are you tonight, Garid? Somewhere else, I see.’

Garid looked up, smiling a little. ‘You may not want to hear it, Dad.’

‘But you would like to tell me.’

Garid laughed. ‘You’re right, I would. It’s hard not to talk about it, but…
well,
I hate to spoil your pleasant dinner.’

‘Well?’

The younger man’s eyes glinted; just like his father not to tolerate evasion.
He leaned back in his chair. ‘Another woman is being sent here from Raniz.’

The words hung suspended between them. The silence lengthened. Garid kept an eye on his father’s face, and waited.

Liaske
finally stirred and
spoke,
his voice only slightly less firm than usual. ‘And you would like to buy her?’

Garid pushed his plate away a little and glanced up again. ‘Yes.’

Another lengthy silence.

‘Keep an uncontrollable criminal in your house?
A female?’

‘I can control her.’ The glint was back in
Garid’s
eye.

‘Make a spectacle and a sensation whenever you walk her?’

‘They have to have some fresh air.’

‘Garid, be serious. What about your career? Woman owners are notorious perverts; how can you do that to yourself?’

Garid leaned back in his chair and sighed. ‘Dad, I’m sorry about the notoriety, but unusual sexual practices are more acceptable these days. I work for myself, and frankly I have enough money to get by now even if I never get another contract. Anyway, only the really educated people know it’s a perversion. The rest of the world thinks of them as unusual pets.’

As he listened,
Liaske
observed his son with care. The calm surface and casual words didn’t fool him; they were millimeters deep, over a depth of intensity that
Liaske
had never seen before. Garid had always been determined, but this went far beyond determination. The facts and impressions he already had sorted themselves into new configurations. ‘I suspected that you were – heterosexual – since you never seemed to have any partners.’ He looked away. ‘I was relieved that you didn’t decide to move permanently off-world. But this…’

‘You wish I would move off-world after all?’

‘No.’ The father looked surprised at his quick answer,
then
thought for a while, his eyes on his wine. ‘It would save me some embarrassment, but – no. Do what you must.’

Garid thought about his father’s words later. ‘Do what you must.’ This was no reluctant retraction to keep his only son’s company on Henth. The acceptance was genuine. His father didn’t use words like ‘must’ idly; he had somehow understood that this was at the level of need, not self-indulgence. Given how much both of them valued self-control and the concealment of emotion,
Liaske’s
intuitiveness was uncanny. It was also characteristic of his father to refuse to make obstacles. Sometimes that attitude had irritated Garid, when he’d been up for a fight and found that no fight was forthcoming. But in recent years he’d found it restful.

A different part of
Garid’s
mind was traveling from Raniz with the ship.
A female on it ready to be owned.
Weeks only till he would see her.
That night, Garid lay between sleep and waking, seeing a woman in front of him, something he owned and controlled. A soft woman’s body, with that beautiful, grasping wet orifice, designed for his cock. Breasts, breasts he could squeeze and pinch.
Flaring woman’s buttocks that would shudder and twist under a whip or beneath his hand.
He saw the rounded thighs and arms, the slender neck, waist, wrists, ankles, and he clasped them in restraints.

He could not have accepted coercion. The history of the universe was full of forced servitude; it disgusted him. He would not,
could
not be that kind of tyrant. He had to have consent. And yet the dominance games he’d played off-world had been just that – games. It was pretense, as easily dropped as taken up. This would be different. This would be the real thing.

Henth and Raniz

I suppose I should give you some background on how my society got to be the way it is. Despite my perversion, I still forget that men and women of the same species on separate planets is not the galactic norm. In fact, I don’t think it’s happened anywhere else, so I’d better give you a fast history lesson, like they gave me when I was a little girl in school.
Plus a few of my own asides.

The planets Henth and Raniz were discovered around the same time, during what was called the Great Expansion – practically prehistory, unless you like to study that kind of thing. The planets are in twin systems, next door to each other by galactic standards, but pretty isolated from anyone else. The next habitable system is ninety-six light years away, and as it’s only barely habitable, there’s hardly anyone there to be neighborly. You’d have to go another twenty-seven light years to get more than stopgap repairs for a damaged spacecraft.

The original population was sent as colonists to Henth, the better resourced planet, easy to adapt for human habitation. There was no faster-than-light travel back then, so such journeys were forever, and colonists were more or less on their own. These particular colonists were happy with the isolation. Although they kept up a bare minimum of contact with Galactic Central on
Eies
4, they had arrived on Henth with some grievances, which solidified into real xenophobia. I was fed some paranoia in school about galactic-level conspiracies. Reading between the lines, I suspect that in fact the colonists – a rather weird sect from Old Earth – had pulled a few fast ones with the original territorial contract, and were lucky not to have been hauled into court before they left. Going back would probably have seemed out of the question. Within a few generations they had pretty much written off the rest of the universe, and a few generations after that they hardly remembered it existed. They don’t seem to have been a pleasant lot. I bet Galactic Central was glad to see the back of them.

The group was odd in ways well beyond a general suspicion of the universe. They belonged to a sect that preferred widely different male and female behaviors and approaches to life, virtually different cultures. They worked differently, played differently,
entertained
themselves differently. They even ate quite different foods. The sexes were more or less equal in status; mainstream culture had influenced them that far. Equal, but tending to eye each other warily from a distance. On Henth they were able to spread out, and their differences had more room to flower. Even the languages diverged. While the land was being developed for food production, they needed to keep the population down. Perhaps this had something to do with an increasing homosexual population in both sexes, I don’t know. Maybe there had been a strong genetic tendency in that direction. In any case, over time men and women lived more and more separately. Even the heterosexuals supposedly in partnerships didn’t have much in common and began to live with their own sex. A lot of the antagonism was based on fear, according to the stories: women feared men’s strength and domination; men feared women’s power.