by John Norman
“I know,” she said. “On Earth, I did not speak the depths of my feelings. I did not dare. I did not wish to be criticized by men, or by unhappy, frustrated women.”
I nodded. The cultural penalties inflicted on those who speak the truth can be severe.
“I kept silent,” she said, “and longed for a master.”
“Is not freedom precious?” I asked.
“I have been free,” she said. “I know what it is like.”
“Is it not precious?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said, “it is precious, very precious. And sometimes I miss it very much. Sometimes I wish I were again free. Sometimes, when I am chained at night, or whipped, or commanded, and must do things I do not wish to do, I wish I were again free. And sometimes I am terribly afraid when I think of the power my masters have over me.”
“I see,” I said.
“But then, too,” she said, “I find myself exquisitely thrilled, and responsive to, the very power, the force and discipline, to which I am subject. To know that I am a slave and must obey fulfills something very deep in me.”
“I see,” I said.
“Sometimes, at night,” she said, “I find myself, almost without thinking about it, licking the bars of my cage, kissing the steel on my wrists.”
“Do you fear your masters?” I asked.
“Of course,” she said, “they hold over me the power of life and death.”
“But yet,” I asked, “you find them exciting?”
“I find them terribly exciting,” she said, “both emotionally and physically. I can scarcely be near them without catching my breath, without feeling slightly afraid and trembling.”
“They own you,” I said.
“Yes,” she said.
“When they look upon you, do you feel sexual heat?” I asked.
“Often,” she said.
“And if they should snap their fingers and point to the floor?” I asked.
“Then I would swiftly lie before them, and as a slave,” she said.
“You are eager to please them?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. “I am eager to please them, fully and totally.”
“Because they are your masters?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said, “and I am their slave.”
She smiled at me. “Do these responses,” she asked, “startle you, coming as they do from a woman once of Earth?”
“There seems little in you now of Earth,” I said.
“True,” she smiled. She pulled at the thongs. “I am now only a Gorean slave girl,” she said.
I said nothing.
“The women of Earth are also women,” she said. “Do not despise them for it. Accept them for what they are. There is nothing wrong with being a woman. It is the complementary sex to that of the male. It is not our fault if, when placed in a proper context, a biological context, in a biologically congenial civilization, we behave as we desire, and must. Is your anger or dismay actually an envy of the Gorean brutes who throw us to their feet and put collars on our necks? Consider that. It may be true. Would you not like some delicious Earth woman as your total slave? If so, how are you so different from the brutes of Gor, who do with us as they wish? It is not our fault if, for whatever reasons, the men of Earth seem determined to turn us into men, and deny to us our precious and ancient natures. It is hard to be a woman on Earth.” She then pulled again at the thongs. “But it is not hard, Master, on Gor,” she smiled. “Gorean men see to it.”
“You are a slave,” I said. “Are you happy?”
“Yes,” she said, “radiantly happy.”
“Why?” I asked.
“I am now in the power of uncompromising and dominant males. I must serve them and please them, and as a woman, fully. I am owned by them. They bring the fullness of my womanhood out of me, and are content with nothing less. On Gor, for the first time in my life, I am a total woman. I am completely fulfilled. I am incredibly happy.”
“You are fond of your slavery?” I asked.
“I love my slavery, Master,” she said.
“Would you like to go back to Earth?” I asked.
“No, Master,” she said.
I regarded her.
“See my brand,” she said.
I did so. It was the common Kajira mark. It was the same brand worn by Miss Henderson. Both girls were left-thigh branded.
“My collar,” she said.
I regarded it. It was simple, narrow, close-fitting, of gleaming steel.
“The thongs on my wrists,” she said.
I looked at her bound wrists.
“And my naked body,” she said, “tied for a master’s, pleasure.”
“Yes,” I said.
“Am I not an exquisite slave girl?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“And yet,” she said, “I am from the planet Earth. Can you doubt, truly, then, that the women of Earth can be slaves?”
“No,” I said.
“I do not doubt it.”
“Perhaps you do doubt it,” she said.
“No,” I said. “No.”
“Untie me,” she said.
“Why?” I asked.
“I will prove to you that I am a slave,” she said.
I looked at her, not speaking.
“Have you held slaves in your arms?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said, “many times.”
“See, then,” she said, “If I am different.”
I regarded her.
“Touch me,” she begged.
I smiled, ignoring her plea.
She leaned back, her wrists, bound, at the rings. “You are clearly Gorean,” she said. “I see that I must wait upon your will.”
I sat, cross-legged, for some time, watching her. Then her eyes looked pleadingly at me. I could smell the heat of her.
“Do you beg to be had, and as a slave?” I asked.
“Yes, Master,” she whispered. “I beg to be had, and as a slave.”
I then slowly untied her.
“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 fo
r 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, again, fitted the bed. Perhaps the bed of Procrustes 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 antibiological 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.
“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.”