been entered on the acquisition list, but so, too, were the others. And many were doubtless more beautiful. I thought that, in a first sale, she might bring something like a half tarsk. She was, in measurements with which those of her background would be familiar, some five feet five inches in height, and something like one hundred and eighteen pounds in weight. She was a brunette, with brown eyes, a common linkage, nothing special. She did have an excellent figure, but there was nothing special in that, either. One selects them with such things in mind. It was trim, well-turned, exciting, and slender.
I regarded her, more carefully.
She looked up at me. She squirmed a little. She realized herself well tied.
I found her personally of interest, but I doubted if, in a first sale, she would bring more than a half tarsk.
Perhaps if she had been strikingly beautiful? Several were. Still, a woman often becomes more beautiful. That is not unusual. It has to do, one supposes, with the life, with admission, with openness, with honesty, with fulfillment, with happiness.
Yes, I thought, in time she might become truly beautiful.
I recalled how she had kissed the whip, frightened, to be sure, but, too, seemingly gratefully. She had placed her soft lips upon it, gently, truly, fully, and had kissed it tenderly, deferently. In short, she had kissed it well. She had then completed the small ceremony, as instructed, saying “La kajira.” She had said this softly, obediently. She would not know what it meant. In time she would learn.
Perhaps she suspected its meaning. One does not know. She was extremely intelligent and, latently, despite the indoctrinations and conditionings of her unusual culture, profoundly, biologically feminine.
Chapter Three
I soon learned to call men ‘Master’ and, shortly thereafter, free women ‘Mistress’. The gulf between free and slave is profound and momentous, and such as I were brought, at least on the whole, to this unbelievably fresh and beautiful world, so bracing and green, as goods, no more than livestock, to be disposed of in markets. I was soon branded, that there would be no mistaking me, for what I was. How that simple mark transformed me! I was then different, radically so, from what I had been! And I knew myself so, and, yes, gratefully. Oh, I cried with pain, of course, helpless in the iron grip of the vise, my wrists fastened behind me, in the snug, unslippable metal bracelets, and sobbed, but, in my tears, did they know this, I sobbed, as well, with joy. At last it had been done to me. At last I was free! In a thousand dreams, had this not been done to me? Had I not, in a thousand dreams, been so marked, so designated, so proclaimed, so identified?
Am I terrible?
Perhaps, perhaps not.
Is it so strange that I, then humbled, then reduced, then subject to chains, the whip, the collar, was now free, at last free!
It was a freedom in which I had had no decision, but one forced upon me, and I would not have had it otherwise.
I was grateful to have been taken in hand, and simply treated as what I was, routinely, a female, only that, and gloriously so.
They would have of me what they wanted, and this was what I, too, wanted.
Since puberty I had sensed the radical difference between women and men, and had resented, but dared not rebel against, the lies, the pervasive, insisted-upon, venerated falsities with which I was regaled, and the pretentious, uncomfortable, alien roles which I was expected to assume.
I do not presume to speak for a sex, but I trust I may speak for an individual, myself. Doubtless women are quite different. One may wish for something which another does not. One may envy men, and another may find this emotion incomprehensible. One may hope to be served, and another to serve. One may hate, and another love. There are many things I have never understood, and how ignorant and stupid seem the ideologues, the tyrants, and fools, who see complexity in terms of conditioned, programmed simplicities. Who are the social engineers? Who appoints them? What shall be engineered? Who reviews their work? Need anything be engineered? Why should anything be engineered? Who will engineer a flower, or truth? Whose fingers draw the secret strings? How gross, narrow, and transparently self-serving, are so many manufactured values, principles, and injunctions. What are the credentials of a dictatorship which would review thought, circumscribe belief, and capture the coercive