that you have even been missed. Indeed, perhaps you will not be missed until morning!'
She moaned.
'Thus, we would have plenty of time to get you out of the city, as merely another slave. If we have a tarn waiting, you could be a hundred pasangs from here by nightfall, in any direction, and by morning, with a new tarn, five hundred pasangs from there, in any direction, and in another day, who knows?' She lifted her head with difficulty in the net, to look at him. His face was stern. She put down her head, frightened, lying on her left cheek.
'But perhaps,' said he, 'we have no intention of taking you from the city.'
'What?' she said, frightened, lifting her head again, with difficulty regarding him. Her eyes went to the dagger at his belt. His fingers were upon it. 'No!' she said. 'Surely you are not assassins!'
He merely looked at her, his hands on the hilt of the dagger.
'Surely you do not intend to kill me!' she cried.
He regarded her, not speaking.
'Do not kill me!' she wept. It was not irrational on her part, of course, to fear an assassination plot. Even if she believed herself generally popular within the city, perhaps even much loved within it, she would realize that these sentiments might not be universal. For example, the increasing resistance to Cosian rule in the city, the growing insurgency, the actions of the Delta Brigade, would surely have given her cause for apprehension, if not genuine alarm. 'Surely,' she said, 'I have not become a slave, simply to be slain?' He did not speak.
'Do not kill me!' she begged. It must have been painful for her to hold her head up, as she was, on her belly, in the furs, in the net, to look at Marcus. He did not speak.
'Please do not kill me,' she wept, 'a€”Master!'
'I am not your master,' he said.
She looked at him, wildly. 'Who, then,' she said, 'is my master?'
'I am,' I said.
I seized her by the upper arms, from behind, and half lifting her, pulled her up, and back, to her knees, tangled in the net. She turned wildly in the net, to see me over her right shoulder, and our eyes met, and she recognized me, and she gasped, and half cried out, and then I had to hold her on her knees, as she had fainted. I lowered her to the furs. I then threw the bracelets with the linked shackles on the furs to her left. I then removed her, carefully, from the net. Then, in a moment, she was in the bracelets, back-braceleted, with her ankles, shackled, pulled up, and back, attached by a short chain to the linkage of the bracelets.
'I shall sign the papers,' I said to Tolnar.
'And I shall stamp, and certify them,' he said.
27 We Take Our Leave
'Extend your left wrist,' I said to Milo.
He did so, and I unlocked the silver slave bracelet there, and handed it to him, with the key.
The new slave, the dark-haired, olive-skinned beauty who had but recently been the Ubara of Ar, was still unconscious. I had removed her from the couch and put her on the floor, on the heavy, flat stones, on her side, some feet to the left of the couch, as one faced it, from the foot, her wrists behind her, braceleted, chained to her ankles, her neck fastened by a short chain to a recessed slave ring. Near her, but not yet fixed upon her, were the makings of a gag.
'I do not understand,' said Milo.
'It is silver,' I said. 'Perhaps you can sell it.'
'I do not understand,' he said.
'And these papers,' I said, 'are pertinent to you. They are all in order. I had Tolnar and Venlisius prepare them, before they left.'
'Papers, Master?' he asked.
'You can read?' I asked.
'Yes, Master,' he said.
'Do not call me 'Master',' I said.
'Master?' he asked.
'The papers are papers of manumission,' I said. 'I am no longer your master. You no longer have a master.'
'Manumission?' he asked.
'You are free,' I told him.
Lavinia, kneeling nearby, gasped, and looked up, wildly, at Milo.
'I have never been free,' he said.
'No,' I said.
'Does master not want me?' he asked.
'I do not even have a theater,' I said. 'What do I need with an actor?'
'You could sell me,' he said.
'You are not a female,' I said.
He looked down, wildly, at Lavinia.
'Now that,' I said, 'is a female. That is something fit for slave.'
'But your loss is considerable,' he said.
'One tarsk bit, to be exact,' I said.
He smiled.
'For so little,' I said, 'one could purchase little more than the services of a new slave for an evening in a paga tavern, one still striving desperately to learn how to be pleasing.'
'Women are marvelous!' he exclaimed.
'They are not without interest,' I granted him.
Lavinia put down her head, as it had been she upon whom his eyes had been fixed when he had uttered his recent expression of enthusiasm. To be sure, when one sees one woman as beautiful, it is easy to see the beauty in thousands of others.
'I have always been a slave,' he said, 'even when I was a boy.'
'I understand,' I said.
'I was a pretty youth,' he said.
'I understand,' I said.
'And I have always been denied women, warned about them, scolded when I expressed interest in them, sometimes beaten when I looked upon them.'
'I know a world where such things, in a sense, are often done,' I said, 'a world in which, for political purposes, and to further the interests and ambitions of certain factions, there are wholesale attempts to suppress, thwart, stunt and deny manhood. This results, of course, also in the cessation or diminishment of womanhood, but that does not concern the factions as it is only their own interests which are of importance to them.'
'How could such things come about?'
'Simply,' I said. 'On an artificial world, conditioned to approve of negativistic ideologies, with determination and organization, and techniques of psychological manipulation, taking advantage of antibiological antecedents, they may be easily accomplished.'
'Even deviancy, and madness, threatening the future of the world itself?' he asked.
'Certainly,' I said.
He shuddered.
'Some people are afraid to open their eyes,' I said.
'Why?' he asked.
'They have been told it is wrong to do so.'
'That is insanity,' he said.
'No,' I said. 'It is cleverness on the part of those who fear only that others will see.'
