“He is not with the cavalry,” I said.
“Very well,” said Lord Nishida. “His place then will be with the guard of Lord Okimoto.”
“He will then have the ear of Lord Okimoto,” I said.
“Yes,” said Lord Nishida.
Chapter Forty-Four
“Is Master troubled?” asked Cecily.
“Do not concern yourself,” I said.
“Master conceals his thoughts from his girl,” she said.
“Curiosity,” I said, “is not becoming in a
“The slave is wholly the master’s,” she said.
“Yes,” I said. “Every corpuscle, every hair, every trembling and shiver, every movement and expression, every feeling, every thought.”
“Might I not conceal a thought?” she said.
“Certainly,” I said, “as you might conceal a candy, but the thought is still his.”
“Everything in me is his,” she said.
“Everything,” I said.
“But I want to give my thoughts to my master,” she said. “I want him to know them. I want to offer them to him!”
“Then do so,” I said.
“But what if he rejects them?” she said.
“Then they are rejected,” I said.
“Of course,” she whispered. “We are slaves.”
One does not disparage a woman for her thriving in bondage, no more than one might denounce the tides, sunlight, wind, and rain, no more than one might denounce a flower for its blossoming, for the color, brightness, delicacy, and radiance of its petals.
No woman who wants a collar should be deprived of one.
Surely it is permissible for the slave to be herself.
By what authority is she to be denied this gift?
Let she who desires to submit submit.
Accept her submission.
She is then yours.
Let her beg to kiss the feet of her master, and let her rejoice, should she be given permission to do so.
Let her welcome the collar which encircles her neck, the thongs which, as she kneels with her head to the floor, lash her wrists behind her back.
On Gor such women are not castigated but coveted. They are not disparaged but sought. They adorn sales platforms as objects of value. They are bought and sold, bartered for, exchanged, traded about, and so on. Society is unwilling to do without them.
Are they not commodities of high regard, goods of high esteem?
They obey, and kneel, and serve, and kiss, and enrich a world.
They are beautiful, desirable, exquisite, and owned.
Surely the female slave is one of the loveliest and most valuable ingredients in a high culture.
Their presence, briefly and brightly tunicked, adds delight and charm to the markets, parks, and streets of a city, even to the remoter byways of rural areas.
The world is a thousand times richer and deeper for their existence.
And how pathetic and impoverished would be a puritanical and dictatorial culture, should any exist, which would permit them no place, which would deny them their most profound fulfillments.
I recalled Cecily, from when she had been fresh from Earth. How she had striven and struggled against the insistent whispers of her heart, as she had, even on Earth, for years, trying to deny her deepest needs. Yet, in a way, even on Earth, how clearly she had understood such things, even then, that she was, wanted to be, and should be a man’s property, the abject, yielding, humbled slave of a powerful male, and yet, obedient to her background, education, training, and conditioning, how desperately she had struggled against such insights and truths, how frantically she had fought against them.
Indeed, reacting against the acute ambivalences she had felt concerning her own sexuality and men, products of the war between her genetic nature and needs and the provisional idiosyncratic enculturation prescribed by her current milieu, and hysterically attempting to counter the insistent claimancies of her dreams and fantasies, she had, on Earth, habitually, as though in a compensatory vengeance for her own unhappiness and bitter frustrations, delighted herself with leading on, and tormenting, men and boys, gratifying herself by the misery she could induce in culturally confused weaklings eager to impress, placate, and please her. Her greatest pleasure seemed to be flirting with, arousing, and then frustrating males, none of whom would take her in hand, strip her, and put her to their feet, teaching her she was a female.
Then, Priest-Kings, for their own purposes, had brought her to the Prison Moon. There, in fear of her life, in the midst of a Kur raid, she had proclaimed herself slave. The slave, of course, cannot unsay such words, for she is then a slave. At that moment, whether she had understood it or not, she had become a slave. Later, on a far world, far beyond the Prison Moon, a Steel World, as there were slavers there, and her attractions warranted this, she had been simply taken in hand, and branded and collared, routinely so, they not even understanding at that time that she was already a slave, not that that would have spared her the brand and collar, for such details are in order, and prescribed by merchant law. It had been done without thought, with indifferent and impersonal efficiency, precisely as it would have been done to any similar female in such circumstances. Indeed, had she not already been a slave, she would then, as thousands of other women, not self-proclaimed slaves, have become a slave. Branded and collared, of course, she is clearly identified, indisputably, publicly and legally, as what she is, a slave. And so what she was, from that time forth, was clearly displayed, for all to see.
She was marked and collared.
No longer would she frustrate men.
Her status and condition were now clear.
She was a female slave.
“Ohh,” she said softly, suddenly.
It is pleasant to have a slave in one’s arms.
She gasped. “You will give me no choice, will you, Master?” she said.
“No,” I said. “You are not a free woman. You are a slave. You will be done with as a master pleases.”
“I am content,” she whispered.
“Would you have it another way?” I asked.
“No, my Master,” she said. “No.”
I looked down on her. “The collar is lovely on your neck,” I said.
“It is yours,” she said.
“And so, too, is its occupant,” I said.
“Yes, Master,” she said.
“Perhaps you should remove it,” I said.
“I cannot, Master,” she said. “I am a slave. It is locked on my neck.”
It was late, past the eighteenth Ahn.
The small, glass-enclosed tharlarion-oil lamp, moving with the motion of the ship, provided a dim illumination in the cabin.
“Oh,” said the slave, suddenly. “Oh!”
On a peg to the side hung the whip. I had seen to it that she had well pressed her lips to it.
