Owned And Owner (3 page)

As time passed, understandably under the circumstances, artificial insemination became the norm. Children were raised by adults of their own sex. Then some women began to object to birthing sons and handing them over to the virtual strangers that were their biological fathers. Sperm separation allowed these women to bear only daughters. Male birthrates dropped, and men, alarmed, began to threaten. There were some ugly scenes, and peaceful coexistence began to look impossible.
At last, to everyone’s relief,
Agime’s
team managed to develop a safe and reliable artificial uterus.
The male birthrate went up, and tension went down, but any remaining trust was essentially gone. After a few years of uneasy peace – maintained by some careful geographic distance – efficient ways of combining the genetic material of two males or two females were developed, and the sexes were free of each other forever. The women celebrated by moving their entire population to the other nearby habitable planet, scarce in resources, but great in freedom.

Of course, on separate planets the two cultures really storm-tunneled off onto separate paths. The women deliberately reinvented their language to rid it of what they considered to be male-dominant constructions. They made it as different as possible, despite the years of confusion this created. Another change on the women’s part was to save their scarce resources by selecting for smaller size. At the same time men were gaining in height, though I’m not sure whether this was deliberate or a side effect of reproducing without us smaller females. And both sides now had another reason for their xenophobia; the rest of the galaxy was full of people of the opposite sex. They stayed at home.

In my furtive researches into the matter, I caught hints that there were always a few people who weren’t happy, who wanted the others. A few of them took advantage of the occasional trading ship (once faster-than-light travel had been invented), made the long, expensive journey to two-sex planets, and mostly stayed there. No one ever came out and said why. On Raniz, people who left were called ‘
bezikam
’. The word described someone with an inexplicable and unfortunate wanderlust and implied disapproval over the abandoning of responsibilities. Heterosexuality was a whisper, a phantom,
unmentionable
.

Raniz didn’t let any males past their own port boundaries, and after a couple of adventurous sightseers were almost killed by frightened mobs, kept any male landings there secret and extremely brief. Incidents at the Henth spaceport led to similar restrictions. After forty generations of this, the populations hardly remembered that the other gender existed at all. I can tell you that the Raniz history lessons skipped over that period pretty rapidly; an hour digging in the school garden and you’d miss it.

Gradually, over long periods, there came to be minimal amounts of trade between the two planets. But the suspicions continued, and interactions were restricted to an extremely small number of government officials or port authorities. Then something interesting happened at a rare trade talk between the two planets. The representative of Henth, a closet heterosexual dominant, but wealthy and powerful enough to make and break laws, made a suggestion to the Raniz envoy. His idea was that her
government send
incorrigible women as slaves to Henth. Oddly enough, the Raniz envoy took him up on it, thinking that just the mention of it as a possibility would shake up a few delinquent young women. She never expected that anyone would take the option.

The central tenet of Raniz social philosophy, drilled into me until I was sick, is that people take active responsibility, use initiative to improve the world around them. A world scarce in
resources, that wants little to do with the rest of the universe,
needs all the help from its population it can get. A girl who cannot demonstrate such responsible behavior by early adulthood is pretty marginal in that society. If on top of that she is destructive or delinquent, steps are taken; she is brought to trial, and if convicted is given a choice: intensive rehabilitation, exile, or sale to the men on Henth who like such things. The first choice is not unkind. The second allows a woman to go to seed as she likes in some shabby spaceport town off-world. The third is used as a bogey to frighten irresponsible children. Only the rarest of the incorrigible, not only heterosexual but deeply, secretly submissive, ever choose the Third Option.

Those many years ago, the envoy of Raniz was astonished, and her counterpart on Henth delighted, when the first woman made her way to his bonds. He was not allowed to keep the ones that came after; other powers on Henth got into the act. By law the females from Raniz have to be auctioned to the highest bidder, the proceeds naturally being scooped by the State.

There was a certain amount of ferment on Raniz, of course, when the first woman went to Henth. A lot of shouting in the
Eosad
, the governing body, and a few crazies predicting an invasion of slave-hunting men, taking up old – by now, really old – hostilities. However, anyone informed about Henth knew that very few of them were interested in women at all. For most
Ranizens
, men had become practically a myth and were not believable as a threat. And another tenet of Raniz philosophy is keeping its word; there was loss of face in backing out of the agreement. The envoy resigned and ended her career right there. But the statute remained.

The Landing

The last few days before we reached Henth I was crawling with nerves, could feel my heart jumping, could almost feel myself being handled. I started pacing restlessly, bumping myself deliberately against the walls in my agitation. When would we get there? I had been waiting so long. I had to know what would happen – had to. Then I started to worry that they would notice what I was doing, think I had really gone crazy, and somehow cancel the whole thing. That calmed me down in a hurry. I tried to go still. I sat on my bed, and breathed slowly and went passive. It had worked for me in detention, but I had first learned to do it when I was forced to stay at home instead of wandering around getting into trouble.

Once we were finally inside
Henth’s
atmosphere and cruising toward our destination, the door opened. Two warders stood there. One of them, a chunky blonde woman, I knew only in that she had wordlessly brought me my food. The other, a gray-haired muscular type, I barely recognized. They looked sternly away from me and told me to take off my clothes. Still gazing off into the middle distance they directed me to relieve myself,
then
took me out shivering to stand by the
doorlock
. I resisted the urge to mouth off at them; really, I felt too embarrassed to try it. They tied my hands behind my back, buckled a collar with a leash around my neck and hooked it to the wall, and then they fastened some kind of bit between my teeth. The gray-haired woman said, with evident irritation and a curled lip, ‘The men expect you to be as naked as an animal, since to them you are one. And animals may bite or scratch or try to run away.’ Then they went back to their work, leaving me standing there.

After all those weeks of privacy in my cabin this sudden exposure was intoxicating, terrifying. I pulled at the bonds on my wrists, at the collar and leash; nothing gave, and joy started to well up in me. It was starting. The crew went about the business of landing, indifferent to the cargo at the
doorlock
. I guess their disapproval had run its course, and now they were mostly interested in engine cool-down and what kind of cargo would make up my price. In any case they avoided looking at me any more than they had to. They started to pile some crates close by.

My humiliation was intense. I couldn’t cover myself. Just being naked in front of all
these people was
the stuff of dreams – exciting, shame-filled dreams, especially with my hands unable to offer any protection. The collar, leash and bit made it clear I was not a human prisoner but an animal one. Worst of all was the bit, pulling at the corners of my mouth. I was afraid it made me look ugly. Soon men would see me, the men I had been waiting for all these years. They would see me as a collared and bitted animal. As exciting as this was, I was very scared that they would laugh at me or be disgusted. ‘But you’re not here as Star Empress, stupid girl,’ I said to myself. ‘What did you
expect,
that they would fall down and worship you because you’ve made a gift of yourself?’ In the meantime my insides were melting, and my nipples weren’t hard only because of the chill. I stood staring at the
doorlock
, willing it to open.

I remember that the word going through my mind was
Yes
. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Yes to whatever was out there. I had also never been so scared in my life; my heart was slamming in my chest.

At last the ship landed, and the door was opened. I felt the warm alien breeze brush against my front, the chilly, stale air of the ship still at my back. I had to wait for the crates to be unloaded, with a slow deliberation that seemed provocative. If I hadn’t been leashed to the wall I might have made my own way out and to hell with them. Finally the gray-haired woman led me out of that dark metal cave into the sunlight. I blinked, unable to see for a moment. My skin was bathed in very warm, strangely scented air. The light seemed more yellow than I was used to, as if I was looking through colored glass. As I was tugged down the gangway the spaceport opened up around me.

And then I saw the men. A few were waiting at the foot of the gangplank to receive us, but activity in the spaceport seemed to have stopped everywhere, and all the eyes I could see were on me. I shrank back involuntarily, but the leash pulled and step by step I found myself following. The strange faces all looked curious, even fascinated – the kinds of faces you’d see around an odd exhibit at the zoo.

When I reached the bottom of the gangplank I was surrounded by giants. Nothing had prepared me for the size of them. It wasn’t just their height; there were broad shoulders under those clothes, hard, defined muscles in the forearm nearest me. I had never seen beards before – except on that old warder – and the deep voices seemed to vibrate through my naked, vulnerable body. I was breathing too fast, I was hyperventilating, and the new world started to move and shift. I was blacking out, so I sank to my knees and put my head down. I was hoping that this tribute would be acceptable, as I couldn’t for the moment stay upright.

I was ignored, I think, for the few minutes I needed to recover. Then the leash tugged on my throat and I sat up on my heels, trying to breathe slowly around the bit in my teeth. My warder still held the leash, her mouth wry with displeasure. She probably thought I had done it on purpose, the old bitch. I kept my eyes at the level of the knees around me; there was almost nothing I could see from down there anyway. I heard the hand-held computers translating the formalities. I was dimly aware of cargoes examined, receipts exchanged. Although I was no longer fainting, something was making me feel weirdly off-balance, primitive, excited. I traced it to the unfamiliar smell coming from the men, a male smell apparently, and realized it made me want to do things, things that didn’t require words: touch, beg,
open
.

At last I felt another hard tug on my collar, and I got to my feet again. The leash was handed over to one of the men; this seemed to be the final formality. I looked up at him timidly, very conscious of the bit in my mouth. He was middle-aged, huge, with a calm, authoritative face. He took the leash up short, next to my neck, and walked me away from the ship. The crowd parted around us, like a canyon opening up. I looked back through the gap behind me with some difficulty, to see the women busy with the larger cargo, some already walking back into the ship. None spared me a glance.

My new keeper turned my collar so that the ring was on the side,
then
pulled upward, his enormous fist holding the leash tight next to the collar, below my ear. He walked me across the spaceport in this way, my hands still fastened behind my back, almost unbalanced by the pull, completely controlled by the choke of the collar and the tightness of his grasp. I had to half run awkwardly along next to him, up on my toes. My mind flashed on the image of big dogs controlled in this way. My thoughts were confirmed when we boarded a large
airtruck
, and I saw animals in cages. Within moments I was pushed down on my knees in front of a small cage. My hands were released from behind me and I was shoved, crawling, into the enclosure. Straw rustled under my hands and knees. I heard the door lock behind me. A hand reached in and unbuckled my collar, then replaced it with a heavier one, which locked with a snap. The bit stayed in place; I felt a lock snap on that also. It was very wet with saliva by this time, and with my head down I couldn’t help drooling.

Looking through the bars I saw the other cages occupied by dogs, clearly pedigreed, beautifully groomed. There were also two ocelots and a capuchin monkey, a plumed
vraag
, and a pig-like
sireuch
. These were the only cages I could see from my position. The smells and the noise of animals invaded my consciousness in a wave, my own smell among them. The keeper was gone. I crouched in my small prison, unable to sit up fully or stretch out at all. I was so scared I had to breathe deeply and slowly to keep from losing it.

While I slowed my breathing I guessed at what was going on. The keeper was, as I had thought, an animal handler; evidently I was one of a cargo of exotic animals, probably being transported for sale. He didn’t wait to see if I would be docile, he just made sure I had no opportunity to misbehave; it probably saved him time. Or maybe my reputation had preceded me? I curled up in the straw, my back pushed up against the solid bars. Even if I had been able to speak intelligibly, no one here knew my language, and the
Henthen
language is, believe me, not on the curriculum in Raniz schools. I had known this, of course, but it really began to hit home.