Tribesmen of Gor (2 page)

     
"You will learn," I told her.

     
"She is so sensual," said the girl, angrily.
 
"How can men think of her as anything but a woman!"

     
"You will learn," I told her.

     
"I do not want to be a woman!" she cried out.
 
"I want to be a man! I always wanted to be a man!"

     
She squirmed in the harness, fighting its restraints.
 
The straps, the rings, held her, of course, perfectly.

     
"On Gor," I told her, "it is the men who will be men; and the here, on this world, it is the women who will be women."

     
"I do not wish to move like that," she wept.

     
"You will learn to move as a woman," I told her. I looked down at her. "You, too, will learn to be sensual."

     
"Never," she wept, fighting the straps.

     
"Look at me, Slave," I said.

     
She looked up, tears in her eyes.
 
"I will speak to you kindly for a moment," I said.
 
  
"Listen carefully, for they may be the last kind words you will hear for a long time."

     
She regarded me, the guard's hand in her hair.

     
"You are a slave," I said. "You are owned.
 
You are a female.
 
You will be forced to be a woman.
 
If you were free, and Gorean, you might be permitted by men to remain as you are, but you are neither Gorean nor free. The Gorean man will accept no compromise on your femininity, not from a slave. She will be what he wishes, and that is a woman, fully, and his. If necessary you will be whipped or starved. You may fight your master. He will, if he wishes, permit this, to prolong the sport of your conquest, but in the end, it is you who are the slave; it is you who will lose. On Earth you had the society at your back, the result of centuries of feminization; be could not so much as speak harshly to you but you could rush away or summon magistrates; here, however, society is not at your back, but at his; it will abet him in his wishes, for you are only a slave; you will have no one to call, nowhere to run; you will be alone with him, and at his mercy. Further, he has not been conditioned with counterinstinctual value sets, programmed with guilt, taught self-hatred; he has been taught pride and has, in the very air he breathes, imbibed the mastery of females. These are different men.
 
They are not Earthlings. They are Goreans. They, are strong, and they are hard, and they will conquer you. For a man of Earth, you might never be a woman. For a man of Gor, I assure you, my dear, sooner or later you will be."

     
She looked at me with misery.

     
The dancer moaned, crying out, as though in agony. Still she remained impaled upon the slave pole, its prisoner.

     
"The Gorean master," I told the blondish girl, "commands sensuality in his female slaves."

She stared at the dancer, her eyes wide with misery. The hips of the dancer now moved; seemingly in isolation from the rest of her body, though her wrists and hands, ever so slightly, moved to the music.

     
"You cannot even move like that now," I told the blondish girl. "Yet muscles can be trained. You will be taught to move like a woman, not a puppet of wood." I grinned down at her.
"You will be taught to be sensual."

     
Samos, with a snap of his fingers, freed the dancer from the slave pole. She moved turning, toward us. Before us loosening her veil at the right hip, she danced.
 
Then she took it from her left shoulder, where it had been tucked beneath the strap of her halter. With the veil loose, covering her, holding it in her hands, she danced before us. Then she regarded us, dark-eyed, over the veil; it turned about her body; then, to the misery of the blondish girl, she wafted the silk about her, immeshing her in its gossamer softness. I saw the parted lip, the eyes wide with horror, of the kneeling, harnessed girl through the light, yellow veil; then the dancer had drawn it away from her, and, turning, was again in the center of the floor.

     
"You will learn your womanhood," I told the blondish girl. "And I will tell you where you will learn it"

     
She looked up at me.

     
"At the feet of a master." I told her.

     
I turned away from her and, following Samos, left the chamber. "She will have to learn Gorean, and quickly," said Samos, referring to the blondish girl.

     
"Let slaves, with switches, teach her," I said.

     
"I will," said Samos. There was no swifter way for an Earth girl to learn Gorean, providing that candies and pastries, and little favors, like a blanket in the pen, were mixed in. Learning was closely associated, even immediately, with reward and, punishment.
 
Sometimes, months later, even when not under the switch, a girl would, upon a mistake in grammar or vocabulary, wince, as though expecting a fresh sting of the switch. Goreans do not coddle their slave girls. This is one of the first lessons a girl learns.

     
"You learned little from her?" asked Samos.

     
I had interrogated the girl when she had first came to the house of Samos.

     
"Her story," I said, "is similar to those of many others. Abduction, transportation to Gor, slavery. She knows nothing. She scarcely understands, now, the meaning of her collar.

Samos laughed unpleasantly, the laugh of a slaver.

     
"Yet one thing you had from her seems of interest," said Samos, preceding me down a deep corridor. In the corridor we passed female slave. She dropped to her knees and put her head down, her hair upon the tiles, as we passed.

     
"It seems a random thing, meaningless" I said.

     
"In itself, meaningless," he said. "But, with other things, it induces in me a certain apprehension."

 
    
"The remark she overheard, in English, concerning the return of the slave ships?" I asked.

     
"Yes," said Samos. When I had probed the girl in the pens, mercilessly, forcing her to recall all details, even apparently meaningless scraps of detail, or information, she had recalled one thing, which had seemed puzzling, disturbing. I had not much understood it, but Samos had evinced concern. He knew more than I of the affairs of Others, the Kurii, and Priest-Kings. The girl had heard the remark drowsily, half stupified, shortly after her arrival on Gor. She, stripped, half drugged, the identification anklet of the Kurii locked on her left ankle, had lain on her stomach, with other girls, in the fresh grass of Gor. They had been removed from the slave capsules in which they had been transported. She had risen, to her elbows, her head down. She had then been conscious, vaguely, of being turned about and lifted, and carried, to a different place in the line, one determined by her height. Usually the tallest girls lead the slave chain, the height decreasing gradually toward the end of the chain, where the shortest girl is placed. This was a "common chain," sometimes called a "march chain" or "trekking chain"; it was not a "display chain: in the "display chain," or "selling chain," the arrangement of the girls may be determined by a variety of considerations, aesthetic and psychological; for example, blondes may be alternated with brunets, voluptuous girls with slim, vital girls, aristocratic girls with sweet, peasant wenches, and so on; sometimes a girl is placed
 
between two who are less beautiful, to enhance her beauty; sometimes the most beautiful is saved for the last on the chain; sometimes the chain is used as a
 
ranking device, the most beautiful being-placed at its head, the other girls then competing with one another constantly to move to a new wrist-ring, snap-lock or collar, one higher on the chain.
 
She had been thrown to her stomach in the grass, and her left wrist drawn to her side and down. She had heard the rustle of a looped chain, and the periodic click of the wrist-rings. She felt a length of chain dropped across the back of her thighs. Then, about her left wrist, too, closed the wrist-ring, and she, too, was a girl in a coffle. A man had stood by, making entries in a book. When her identification anklet had been removed, after she was in the wrist-ring, the man removing it had said something to the man with the book,
 
and an entry had been made. When the girls were coffled, the man with the book had signed a paper, giving it to the captain of the slave ship. She knew it must be a receipt for merchandise received. The cargo manifests, apparently, had been correct. She had pulled weakly at the wrist-ring ,but it of course, held her. It had been then that the man with the book had asked the captain if he would return soon. The man with the book spoke in an accent, Gorean. The captain, she gathered, did not speak Gorean. The captain had said, as she remembered it, that he did not know when they would return, that he had received orders that there were to be no more voyages until further orders were received. She was conscious of the departure of the ship, and the grass beneath
 
her body, and the chain lying across her legs, and the steel of the wrist-ring. She felt the chain move as the girl to her right stirred. Her left wrist was moved slightly behind her. They lay in the shade of trees, concealed from the air. They were not permitted to rise. When one girl had cried out, she had been beaten with a switch. Miss Priscilla Blake-Allen had not dared to cry out. After dark, they were herded to a wagon.

     
"Why," asked Samos, "should the slave ships cease their runs?"

     
"An invasion?" I asked.

     
"Unlikely," said Samos, "If an invasion were to be launched soon, surely the slave runs would continue. Their cessation would surely alert the defense and surveillance facilities of Priest-Kings. One would not, surely, produce a state
 
of apprehension and heightened awareness in the enemy prior to an attack."

     
"It does not seem so," I admitted, "unless the Kurii, perhaps, feel that just such a move might put the Priest-Kings
 
off guard, that it would be too obvious to be taken as a prelude to full war." "But this possibility, doubtless," smiled Samos "too, is one which will not fail to be considered by the rulers of the Sardar."

     
I shrugged. It had been long since I had been in the Sardar.

     
"It may mean an invasion is being readied," said Samos.
 
"But I think the Kurii, who are rational creatures, will not risk full war until reasonably assured as to its outcome. I suspect their reconnaissance is as yet incomplete. The organization of native Kurii, which would have constituted a splendid
 
intelligence probe, and was doubtless intended primarily as such, yielded them little information."

     
I smiled. The invasion of native Kurii from the north, survivors and descendants of ship Kurii, for generations, had
 
been stopped in Torvaldsland.

     
"I think," said Samos "it is something other than an invasion." He looked at me grimly.
 
"It is, I suspect, something which would render an invasion unnecessary."

     
"I do not understand," I said.

     
"I have much fear," said Samos. I regarded him. I had seldom seen him so. I looked at the heavy squarish face, burned by the wind and salt of Thassa, the clear eyes, the white, short-cropped hair, the small golden rings in his ears. His face seemed drained of color. I knew he could stand against a hundred swords, unflinching.

     
"What is it" I asked, "which would render an invasion unnecessary?"

     
"I have much fear," said Samos.

     
"You said you had other information," I said.

     
"Two things," said Samos. "Follow me." I continued to follow him through various corridors, and down stairways in his home. Soon the walls became damp, and I gathered we were
 
beneath the levels of the canals. We passed barred doors, heavily guarded. Passwords, appropriate to different levels and portions of the house, were given and acknowledged.
 
These are changed daily. For a portion of our way, we passed through certain sections of the pens. Some of the ornately barred, crimson-draped cells, with brass bowls, and rugs, and cushions and lamps, were quite comfortable; some of the cells held more than one occupant; some Of the girls were permitted cosmetics and slave silk; generally, however, girls in the pen are raw, totally, save for their collars and brands, as are male slaves; the costumer, the perfumer, the hairdresser then does with them what he is instructed; most retention facilities in the pens, however, are not so comfortable; most are simply heavy cages; some are small cement kennels, tiered, with iron gates that slide upward; once we walked over iron gratings, beneath which were cages; we passed through two processing rooms; off one corridor was a medical facility, with mats and chains; we passed exercise rooms, training rooms; we passed the branding chamber; I saw heated irons within; we passed, too, the dreaded room of slave discipline; there were, in this room, suspended rings, whips, a large, heavy stone table.