by John Norman
That they can be trained for simple tasks is more than enough.
It is interesting to consider how easily the continuities of tradition or civilization may be broken.
Absent a species for a single generation from socialization and we have not even barbarians, only animals.
Clever animals, but animals.
This done, let us return our attention to the slight, but shapely, occupants of the container in question.
Both of the females, of course, were naked.
It is thus that Priest-Kings commonly keep their prisoners.
It was not originally clear for what reason the females were introduced into the container. Perhaps, one supposed, they were merely gifts for him, rather as might have been food, for another of his appetites. Certainly it seemed clear, at least at first, they were not used for purposes of torture, for then they would have been placed, presumably, in an adjacent container, where they might have been deliciously exposed, but inaccessible, rather as hot, savory food might have been placed just beyond the reach of a chained, starving man. One supposes, too, they were not placed with him in the container for purposes of breeding, for that would make little sense under the circumstances. Presumably Priest-Kings, if interested in such matters, would select appropriate seed and eggs, fertilize them, and then tend the consequent embryos, at least for a time, in a secure laboratory environment. They might then be raised for a time in containers, several months, say, or implanted in the bodies of various host mothers, of various suitable species, human or otherwise, for a natural birth later. Some Goreans breed slaves, of course. This is commonly done by agreement amongst masters. There are, too, of course, the slave farms. Some members of the caste of physicians, incidentally, concern themselves with such matters, for example, by implanting fertilized eggs in host mothers. In this way, a prize slave may be used to produce numerous offspring. The same thing is done routinely with other domestic animals. On the whole, however, this is rare with Gorean humans, who tend to be traditional in such matters and accordingly are inclined to refrain from such practices. In this respect, they are much like the Kurii, who are also reluctant to avail themselves of such devices, and who, indeed, interestingly, profess to find them unnatural and distasteful. The Kurii, for example, when they wish to breed humans, commonly chain them, left wrist to right wrist, right wrist to left wrist, left ankle to right ankle, right ankle to left ankle. After a time, this works rather well. I mention this in passing. One does not know the views of the Priest-Kings on these matters. In these respects, the Sardar is silent.
We supposed, originally, then, that they were placed in the container for his pleasure, for human males commonly derive great pleasure from the females of their species, a pleasure of which they avail themselves avidly and frequently, a pleasure not limited to certain hours or seasons, but one sought, it seems, at any hour, and in all seasons. On the other hand, as it turned out, and as we should have surmised, as the male was a prisoner, this was not the case. Rather a most insidious form of torture was intended, at least for a male of his particular type.
In order to understand the nature of this torture, one might note that the two females involved had not been selected for their role in this matter at random. They had been selected with great care. Both had, of course, been selected for their unusual desirability as human females. They were both of the sort which could drive a human male mad with desire. The girl from the Steel Worlds, of course, was no more than an animal, but she was doubtless familiar with, if contemptuous of, human males, whom she knew, of course, too, as animals, speechless animals like herself. She had been, after all, the grooming pet of a Kur master, and held herself, accordingly, superior to others of her species. Certainly she had not been bred, nor did she wish to be. She was special, in her way. She knew her name in Kur and could respond to certain commands in Kur. She could not speak it, of course, as her vocal apparatus was unsuited to the formation of its phonemes. As the pet of a Kur she had an unusual status amongst the few humans in the Steel Worlds. Doubtless she was somewhat aware of her effect on males, and was not disinclined to take pleasure in their discomfiture. She was a vain little thing, not unaware of her charms, and the pleasures of utilizing them to taunt and frustrate weak and helpless males, from whom she had nothing to fear. On the Steel Worlds she would have had the protection of her collar, which was wide and locked on her neck. It identified her master in Kur, and gave her much standing amongst those of her species. It was not a slave collar, of course, as she was not a slave, but merely an animal. It served much the same purpose as might a collar on, say, a dog on Earth. She was an animal, of course, but a very clever animal, a sly, cunning, vain, shapely, little animal. It is supposed she was included with Tarl Cabot and the other female not simply for her attractiveness, which was considerable, but for at least two other reasons. First, there was her basic raw animality, and, in its way, its associated simplicity and innocence. She would be unfamiliar with the touch of men. In this she had something of the charm of a virgin and the fascination of an unacculturated, primeval, shapely beast. Such, it is supposed, would present a normal male with an interesting, unusual, and naive object of desire, one which could be interestingly exploited, and conveniently and ruthlessly ravaged, doubtless to her bewilderment, and consternation, rather like the young female slaves who are raised in isolation from men and do not even know men exist, until, after being drugged, they are rudely awakened, to shouts and music, to find themselves in a collar, and being seized at feasts of victory, to be well ravished, afterwards to be distributed to favored officers. The second reason she was included in the container was doubtless to complicate the social interactions, so to speak, even to the point of hatred and anguish, in the small environment she shared with her fellow prisoners. This would have little to do, of course, with any initial indecision which might perplex or trouble the male, however briefly, confronted with such riches, for he might eventually, surely, enjoy either as he might please, and in any order or frequency he might find interesting or convenient.
For example, it is not unknown for a Gorean man to have more than one slave, that they may desperately compete with one another, each striving zealously to please him more than the other, that she may become his favorite. To be sure, this is a situation commonly productive of misery, jealously, and hatred amongst the slaves. Which female wishes to found inferior to another? Even a female not yet broken to her collar will strive to be found not less pleasing than another. Her own womanhood insists on this, as does her pride, her self-image, her concern for her own desirability, her sense of her own worth and value as a female. How intolerable to be found less a female than another! But then perhaps, at a moment, one even unexpected, kneeling, she looks up, into his eyes, and sees suddenly that he is her master, in a sense a thousand times more profound than the indisputable and perfected legalities in which she is irretrievably enmeshed, and wholly helpless to alter or qualify. Then perhaps the other woman is marketed, who may hope then to find a private master, as well. She who has been kept is now the single slave of a private master. She is humble and grateful. She is zealous to be such a slave to him that he will not desire another. She lives to love and serve. She fears only that he may find her in some way insufficiently pleasing. She rejoices. She has been found worthy of a man's collar. What a dignity, to wear a man's collar! What a badge of selection and excellence is that insignia, proving that she is lovely enough and desirable enough to be a slave! How free women, pretending to despise her, and her radiance, and happiness, envy her that distinction!
The anguish, the tumult, the distress, the rage, the conflict, the jealousy, in the container, as disturbing and irritating as it might be to the male, would be largely, doubtless calculatedly, consequent upon the interactions of the two females. Which female might be chosen, so to speak, or favored, and what would be the consequences of that choice with respect to the other female, and the male? Females, of course, compete for the attention of males, as would be
biologically anticipated. They dress for them, they concern themselves with their appearance, their posture, their speech, and behavior. They wish to be found attractive to males.
Men, of course, compete for females, sometimes with the sword. But females, too, in their way, compete for men. Who has not seen the difference in the behavior of even veiled free women when in the presence of men, how they stand, how they hold their heads, how they speak, with such pretended, insouciant indifference? And, too, who has not seen the even more obvious competitions amongst the girls on a slave shelf when a handsome fellow is in the vicinity, their languorous poses, as though unaware of his presence, or, say, their smiles, their vivacity, or perhaps even, with the rustling of chains, the lifting of their small shackled limbs to him, begging that a bid may be made upon them?
The female from the Steel Worlds may have seldom seen another human female, unless perhaps to drive her away from the vicinity of her master, with hissing, and teeth and nails, lest she should attempt to groom him. But she would certainly in any case be acutely aware that the lovely stranger in the enclosure with her was another female, and thus an enemy, or competitor. And the English girl, aside from her confusion and consternation at finding herself as she was, unclothed, not even a thread upon her body, inexplicably confined in the small, narrow, glassine, ovoid container, within an arm's reach of a similarly confined male, would be only too aware not only of the presence of the male but of the other female, as well, who was startlingly young, beautiful, and desirable. Too, there was something about the other female that seemed somehow incomprehensibly different from the women with which she was familiar. There was something somehow animallike about her. She seemed untutoredly, rawly, primitively, radically female. Never had she encountered such a female. How could she, as a civilized creature, even stripped, compare with such a sensuous little beast? In her presence, she was acutely sensitive of her own deficiencies, her deficiencies as a female animal, one reduced to its biological essentials. A hundred transparent, inhibitory wrappings swathed her about, constricting her; a culture's tendrils and trammels had been tightened about her; she had been shaped by frowns, images, propounded exemplars, small remarks, sneers, customs, and scoldings for years, subtly taught, by a multitude of cultural stratagems of which she was scarcely aware, to belittle and discount, if not despise, the very substance of herself, the very core of her being. She had been taught that her femaleness was a matter of historical idiosyncrasy, a societal convention, a social construction, and one perhaps somewhat regrettable. It was to be understood as a fabrication peculiar to a locality, a particular place and period, something of no more than transitory significance. At best it was an unimportant contingency, irrelevant to important matters such as advancements, politics, and promotions, a contingency to be ignored, if not deplored, as much as possible, saving perhaps as it might be politically utilized to obtain unearned advantages.
And now she was naked in a container.
What a simple refutation of absurdity is nudity.
The girl from the Steel Worlds, and the girl from England, as indicated, had not been selected at random.
In particular, however, we should note that the English girl had been selected by her captors, the Priest-Kings, with particularly great care, and with all the expertise and wisdom of their advanced science, to be a match with the male in question. Each would be intensely, irresistibly attractive and desirable to the other. She would be exactly the sort of woman he would relentlessly bid upon to bring into his collar, and he would be exactly the sort of man into whose collar she would long to be locked. This matching, of course, was scarcely accidental, or gratuitous. It had its role to play in what would prove to be an interesting and remarkable, if duplicitous and guileful, gambit of Priest-Kings. Each would seem to be a gift to the other, in the most profound modalities of male/female relations, but a gift, as it turned out, which had its ulterior purposes, one intended to further the designs of Priest-Kings.
The blondishly pelted female from the Steel Worlds was the first to recover consciousness. It seems probable that she was the most lightly sedated of the three, doubtless that this might occur.
She awakened something like an Ahn before the disruption.
As she was essentially an animal she, as most animals, accepted her surroundings rather as a given, as no more or less explicable than a great number of other possible givens. A dog, on Earth, for example, accepts electric lighting without amazement, or inquiry into its nature. It is just the way his world is, in that time and place. He will, of course, as would a sleen, take cognizance of his surroundings, familiarize himself with this new territory, and such. He does not, however, wax hysterical, doubt his sanity, or such.
The first thing the little beast did was flare her nostrils, perhaps trying to catch the scent of her master. Then, gingerly, slipping, putting her hands out, she examined the peculiar barrier through which she could see, but could not pass. She examined, and took the scent of, the male confined with her. He was much larger, and somehow much different, it seemed, from the few males of her species with which she was familiar. He was quite different, of course, from her master. In her blood there were stirrings with which she was unfamiliar. Her lip wrinkled, and a canine was visible, as she inspected the other female in the container. A slight, tiny hiss of displeasure escaped from betwixt her well-formed lips. There was no pan of food or water in the container, she noted, nor could there have easily been, given its curvature. These things did not please her. There was a hoselike tube near the top of the container, but it would be difficult for her to reach it. Too, she did not understand its purpose. She put her hands to her throat, feeling for her collar, but it was not there. This puzzled her, for her master had always kept it on her. It had had a ring on it, to which he sometimes attached a leash, when he walked her. She was very proud to be walked by her master, and she did not wish to be confused with others of her species, inferior sorts, whom she despised, strays, scavengers, and such. In particular she would not wish to be confused with the cattle, crowded and fattened in their pens, for she knew they were eaten. It made her uneasy to be without the collar. Indeed, she was afraid. Sometimes catchers, small Kurii, badly pelted, only four or five hundred pounds in weight, prowled the habitat, searching for loose humans, escaped or strayed, usually to be hamstrung and put back in the barred pens, then unable to walk, unable then to do much more than feed at the troughs, fatten, and wait, usually ignorantly, for the butchers. But she was not ignorant. She was apprised of the usual fate of such. It would not do, at all, to be mistaken for one of them. It would be one thing to lead them to the knife, they following unsuspectingly, docilely, and quite another to be confused with one of them. That would not do at all. Where was her master? She wanted her collar. She felt understandably uneasy without it. Her master had had only one pet, her. Hopefully she still belonged to him. Certainly, too, she would not wish to share her importance and status with another pet. She looked angrily at the other female. She, too, of course, must be a pet. What else, as she was, could she be? She did know there were other pets. That must be one of them. She resented the other female, and feared her, and what she might mean. She snarled, softly. Her fingers crooked. Her master had had her nails clipped and filed, but even so, even had they not been, they were poor weapons, certainly compared to the claws and fangs of the masters. There could be no doubt as to the relationships involved, nor as to the rankings of species, nor as to her own nature, and the appropriateness of it, that of a harmless, caressable pet. But surely not harmless to such as herself. She could scratch and bite, and hiss, and she had, more than once, to the amusement of her master, driven other females, bloodied and shrieking, from his vicinity.
But the master was not here?
Where was he?
She did sense the maleness of the larger human in the container, and this maleness intrigued her, and fascinated her. She also had strange feelings in his presence, feelings which she had not experienced in the vicinit
y of the few males she had encountered in the habitat. It never occurred to her that he might have speech, for only the masters, the Kurii, had language. Animals, such as she, and others, were incapable of such things, just as they were incapable of building pens, making rooms light and dark, burning objects at a distance, and such.
They could not even make the chains and shackles in which they were sometimes so helplessly placed.
She, at least, had not yet been chained to a man.
But clearly the male in the container was the nearest thing to her master, and thus she, as any smaller animal would, had a lively sense as to where lay the power in this small world, and, accordingly, in which direction lay her best interests. It would be with the larger animal. She was unfamiliar with larger animals who had been turned against themselves, who were hampered, crippled, neutralized and vitiated by the knives of social engineering. She would not have understood them. She was certain then she must ingratiate herself with him, and appease him, and certainly so with the other female in the container. She could not drive her off, of course, given the peculiar enclosure in which she found herself, but she could certainly warn her off, and, hopefully, so terrify or intimidate her that she would not dare to offer the least challenge to her priority. The male was to be hers; the other must not be permitted to intrude; accordingly, she must, in one way or another, be eliminated, physically or psychologically, or both, as a possible competitor or rival. The female from the Steel Worlds regarded the other female. She did not think it would be hard to teach her terror, and her place. If the male were a Kur, she would groom him, smoothing and licking his fur, and searching for insects. Sometimes her master permitted her to wipe and dry his teeth with her hair, in which activity she could scavenge for meat particles. Too, not unoften he permitted her to clean his nails and claws with her tongue. These were largely hygienic pursuits. Little of a symbolic nature was involved here. She was simply a docile pet serving her master. It was quite unlike the practices of the Red Savages of the Gorean Barrens who not unoften put their white female slaves naked on their bellies before their lofty, silken mounts, the kaiila, in helpless, servile prostration to the mere beasts of their masters, whose paws and nails they must then clean with their lips and tongue. This is because of what, in their traditions, is called the Memory. Few white men are allowed in the Barrens. Commonly they are ridden down and killed. Lovely white women, on the other hand, are accepted as slaves, and are sometimes, at trading points, bartered for, usually with the skins of the Pte, or Kailiauk. Occasionally, too, they are raided for, and then carried deep within the Barrens. Sometimes they are kept in herds, guarded by boys, but normally, in their colorful, beaded leather collars, they serve in the lodges. The native women, unless prevented, treat them with great cruelty. The slaves perform much work in the Barrens and give their masters much pleasure in the lodges. Some white women flee to the Barrens, that they may become the slaves of such men.