Rogue of Gor (15 page)

"So," she asked later, smiling, lying on her stomach beside me, "am I so different?"

"No," I said.

"You put me well to the test," she laughed.

I touched the collar, lightly, at her throat.

"Do you doubt that I am a slave?" she asked.

"No," I said.

"You see," she said, "that I am a superb slave."

"It is true," I said.

"Have I not been appropriately and fittingly imbonded?" she asked.

"You have been," I said.

"Do I not belong in a slave collar?" she asked.

"There is no doubt about it," I said. "You do"

"Tasdron had me for a silver tarsk," she said.

"A cheap price," I said. "You are worth more."

"I am better now," she said, "than when Tasdron bought me. I have learned much."

"I would say you are worth now at least two silver tarsks."

"Thank you, Master," she said, warmly, kissing me.

"It is hard to believe that you are from Earth," I said.

She laughed. "But I am, Master," she said. "You saw me there yourself, in the restaurant."

"Yes," I said.

"When you saw me there," she asked, "did you want to have me?"

"Yes," I said.

"And now," she laughed, "you have done so, and may again, and again, as it should please you."

"Yes," I said.

"Master," she said.

"Yes," I said.

"When I saw you, too, at the restaurant," she said, "I wondered what it would be like to lie in your arms."

"A bold admission," I said

"For an Earth girl, who thinks she is free, perhaps," she laughed, "but not for a slave. Slaves may speak such truths."

"That is true," I said.

"But never for a moment did I dream," she said, "that I would lie naked in your arms as an obedient, collared slave on an alien world."

I then took her by the arm and threw her again beneath me. She looked up, happily. "Is Master going to have me again?" she asked.

"Yes," I said.

"Peggy is pleased to have been found worthy of the attentions of Master," she said. "Oh," she said, "Master is strong." Then she said, "You are Gorean. I know you are Gorean!" Then she said, "I yield me to my Gorean Master!"

It is pleasant to have a woman yield to you as a slave. I know of nothing which so exalts the power and manhood of the human male. Too there is apparently nothing which so deeply releases the emotions and yielding sensuality of the human female. In these matters something is touched which obviously bears deeply on the fundamental nature of the sexes. Here, in human relations, is yet another exemplification of one of the major and incessantly recurrent themes of nature, that of dominance and submission. The realities of nature must be denied, I suspect, only at one's own peril. And certainly human beings cannot be fulfilled, nor can they know themselves, until they have become themselves. The nature of human beings precedes the fleeting parades of mottoes and slogans. It lies latent and obdurate, in ambush, if you like, in the genetic codes.

"Permit me to kiss you," she said.

"You may do so," I told her.

Is there a human animal beneath the conditioned ideologies? It seems not improbable. We may torture and mutilate the human animal; we may deny that it exists; but it lies within us, in the chemistry of every living cell in our bodies. In denying it we, truly, deny only ourselves. In hating it, we hate our own hearts, and our own blood. We are not so terrible, really. It is only that we are men and women, and not something else. Perhaps it-is wrong to be men and women. Perhaps we should be something else. Perhaps we should consider ourselves images and inventions. Perhaps we should participate in the mythologies convenient to the manipulative purposes of self-serving elites. Doubtless the question is difficult. It is always hard to know the truth and pretend not to believe it. Perhaps we should not be men and women. Perhaps we should not be true to ourselves. But even if we should deny ourselves, and starve, and torture and frustrate ourselves, we would still, in the end, be ourselves. We would remain men and women, only then, perhaps, mutilated and sickened men and women, useful tools in the schemes of others, of cunning and pathological frustrates, themselves often as confused and miserable as the uncritical creatures they would systematically delude.

We are what we are, and will remain so, regardless of what we may be taught to believe. Fearing ourselves does not make us not ourselves. Can the human reality, in the fullness of its truth, be truly so fearful a thing. I do not think so. Human nature may be despised; it may be thwarted; it may be distorted and denied. This may be accomplished by conditioning programs, obedient to their own antecedents and developing in accord with their own histories and social dynamics. It is clearly possible to educate the young to distrust and fear themselves, and to injure and torture themselves. And, in turn, as a function of their own conditioning programs, they may dutifully bequeath their own tortures to their own young in turn. Yet how much pain must be endured, how much crime and madness, how much unhappiness and misery, before human rationality, that pathetic reed, that frail staff, that small weapon, that fragile tool, must revolt and cry, "No!" How obvious must it be before human beings are willing to realize that a grotesque and biologically inimical inversion of values has taken place? What would be accepted as evidence, if not disease, madness, misery, irrationality, frustration, criminality and sickness, that a tragic disparateness now exists between the needs of human beings and the imperatives of society. Must it be human beings who must be Wrong? Perhaps it is, rather, those sociological imperatives which have, gradually, over the centuries, diverged from their original instrumentalities to follow their own disconnected and remote trajectories.

In ancient Attica it is said there was a giant, Procrustes. He would seize upon travelers and tie them upon an iron bed. If the traveler was too short for the bed, he would disjoint and break their bodies until they fitted it; if they were too long for the bed, he would cut their feet from them, until they, (gain, fitted the bed. Perhaps the bed of Procrutes is the truth and men must be broken or cut to pieces that they may fit it. On the other hand, clearly there is an alternative, although Procrustes seemed not to have heard of it. The bed could be made to fit the guest. Is the bed to conform to the guest, or is the guest to conform to the bed. From my own point of view, I would prefer a bed which considered the nature of human beings. I would make the human being the measure by which I judged the value of beds. I see little of profit in making the bed the measure of the human being, and requiring that we remake, if by torture and mutilation, the human being until it fits the bed. Besides, we cannot remake the human being to fit the bed, truly. We do not make new human beings or better human beings by this method. All we make by that method is broken or mutilated, human beings.

"Have me again, Master," she begged,

"Very well," I said.

And as she moaned and gasped in my arms, and cried out, and I held her so closely she could not escape, I pondered the nature of human beings. And then I, too, cried out and with force owned her as a woman. In those obliterating moments I knew who I was, and who she was. "Be had, Slave," I told her. "You give me pleasure." "Yes, Master," she wept.

Later we lay quietly together, side by side.

Perhaps it is wrong to be men and women. But, on the other hand, perhaps it is not wrong to be men and women. It is what we are. Perhaps it is not wrong to be what we are. That is a genuine possibility. Perhaps it is not wrong to be what we are. If that is so, then it may quite possibly be right, or at least morally permissible, to be what we are. And if that is true, we may be entitled to our own natures, and the happinesses attendant upon the fulfillment of those natures. How then I envied the Gorean brutes, to whom such questions could scarcely arise. The Goreans, for example, have not been conditioned to exalt thirst, or to wonder if it is morally permissible to drink water, and, if so, under what conditions and subject to what restrictions. In dehydration they find nothing morally commendable. Indeed, naive folk, it does not even occur to them to debate such questions. They are, however, in virtue of this attitude, at the least, spared certain eccentric neuroses.

"On Gor," whispered the girl next to me, "I have learned that men and women are not identical."

"Yes," I said. I smiled to myself. I knew at least one culture in which this obvious, biological truism would count as political heresy, to be punished by ostracism, slander and, when possible, by economic penalties. What a tragic world and culture that was. How I pitied those who, in order not to jeopardize their careers in an antibiologicaI environment, were forced to subscribe publicly to such doctrines. How rare is courage.

"And men," she said, "or Gorean men, or men of a Gorean type, are the masters."

"Yes," I said.

"And women such as I are their slaves," she said.

"Yes," I said. "Lick and kiss me."

"Lick and kiss you?" she said.

"Yes," I said.

"You command me like a Gorean slave girl," she said.

"That is what you are," I told her.

"Yes, Master," she said.

"You do it well," I told her.

She trembled. "Tasdron taught me," she said.

I smiled. I could well imagine Tasdron teaching her and she, knowing him her legal master, desperately striving to learn. If she did not do well she would know that she might be whipped to within an inch of her life or fed, alive, to hungry sleen. Under such circumstances, girls learn quickly and well.

"Ah," I said.

"Is Master pleased?" she asked.

"Yes," I said.

“Then Peggy, too, is pleased," she said.

"Complete your work," I said.

"Yes, Master," she said.

Later she lay beside me, her head at my thigh. My hand wandered to her hair, and then to her neck, inclosed in the narrow, steel collar. I fingered the lock at the back. She put her mouth to my thigh. I felt the warmth of her breath on my thigh. I felt her lips, the pressing of her teeth. Then she kissed me, and lay again, quietly, beside me.

"You treated me like a Gorean slave girl," she said.

"That is what you are," I told her.

"Yes, Master," she laughed. "It is true." She kissed me again. "I knew that I had convinced you," she said.

"How did you know?" I asked.

"In the past Ahn," she said, "you commanded me as casually and thoughtlessly as you might have any Gorean slut in a collar. Thus, in joy, I recognized that you had come to regard me, quite properly, as one of them."

"I see," I said.

"You see," she said, "I am the same. I am no different. I am only another girl in the collar, another woman who must obey you and serve your pleasure."

"Are you content?" I asked.

"Yes, Master," she said, "as would be any woman in the arms of a man such as you."

"Are you happy?" I asked.

"I am joyful, in the fulfillment of my nature," she said. "I am a slave. At last I have come to a world where there are men who wish for me to please them, and will see that I do so, and want me, and will have me, a world where there are masters."

"I must be going," I told her.

She looked up, frightened. "Do not go yet," she said. "Let me please you again."

"Appetitious slave," I said.

"On Gor," she said, "my appetites have been ignited. It has pleased men to ignite them."

"Are you dismayed?" I asked.

"No, Master," she said. "On this world I need not be ashamed of my appetites. On this world it is appropriate that I am hot, and belong to men."

"In your belly there is slave fire?" I asked.

"Yes, Master," she said. "In my belly there burns slave fire. I do not pretend that it does not."

"Shameless slave," I said.

"Yes, Master," she said.

"For whom, in this moment," I asked, "do your slave fires burn?"

"You, Master," she whispered.

I hesitated.

"Be merciful, Master," she begged. "Satisfy me."

I put her beneath me, in the capture position, and subjected her to swift slave rape.

She cried out with pleasure, yet used so harshly and brutally.

I struck her away from me and drew on my tunic. I must to work early at the wharves. At dawn I wished to be in the hiring yard. I looked down at her.

"Are all women such slaves as you?" I asked.

She smiled up at me, curled on the furs. "Yes, Master," she said.

I turned to go.

"Master," she said.

I turned again, to face her.

"You have made much of the fact that I am an Earth girl and a slave," she said.

"Yes," I said.

"There is another girl in whom you are interested, isn't there," she asked, "an Earth girl?"

"Perhaps," I said.