Buying His Mate (5 page)

Athena and You: What are the enclosures?

Athena and You: What is the Taking?

The documentaries Gretchen had seen now seemed to her like perhaps they had been preludes to these. She remembered how fascinating she had found the
Journey to the Sky
series, which had mixed dramatic re-enactment with a kindly sounding narrator talking about how much the sky-people regretted having to leave Earth. Though she sometimes heard Jerry and her mother talking about how if the sky-people hadn’t left the collapse might not have happened, but the vid seemed to make it clear: her ancestors—the ancestors of everyone in the wild lands—hadn’t wanted the advice of people like the ancestors of the sky-people. The vid showed the first sky-people trying over and over to get the leaders of the nations to do something about the environment, and those leaders saying again and again, “The nation won’t support it.”

She took the card marked
What is the Taking?
and looked around for a screen, finally noticing that there seemed to be a slot in the wall right next to the chest in which she had found the vids. As soon as she put the vid card in the slot, the blank wall came to life with a picture of the sky-star—Athena—much closer than you could see it from Earth, though of course Gretchen had seen pictures and vids that showed it from nearby. Suddenly, though, now that she knew she must go there as a relict girl, it seemed both a more complicated and a more menacing place: an enormous ring turning around a central axis on shining spokes—a marvelous, frightening wheel in space.

A pleasant female voice said, “This viewer responds to voice commands. To pause, or unpause, simply say those words. To raise and lower the volume, say
up
and
down
.” Then the vid began, and Athena’s wheel began to turn as a male narrator said, “In the Earth year 2988, by plebiscite of the citizens of Space Station Athena and act of the Athenian Council, what we call the Enclosure Act, or the Taking, became law. In this video, we will explain what that law means for you, whom we call relicts, who have become subject to its taking provision.”

The image changed to what looked like an aerial view of the enclosure: a fence, studded with weapons controlled automatically from the info center, with a big square compound in the middle, ringed with the prefabricated dwellings the sky-people had brought for the families in the enclosure to inhabit. Gretchen thought it looked as if the picture had been taken years earlier, before they had widened the enclosure greatly, as more families had come to live there.

“Whether you found this vid while waiting for the completion of the auction, or you are watching it in the orientation center on Athena, we think you will find it answers many of the questions you naturally have about the Taking. The most important thing about the Taking is that it’s part of a bargain we Athenians made with the people left behind on Earth—that’s what
relict
means. That bargain is about the enclosures, which we hope will become a new foothold for civilization.”

Images of elites helping unload equipment from one of the big space shuttles followed.

“As you have already seen, in the enclosures it is possible to live a productive life of the kind that has not been seen on Earth in more than two hundred years.”

Fields, tilled by agricultural machinery, then children watching a cartoon vid in the recreation hall.

“Hope has returned to Earth, but if that hope is to grow, the Athenians must ask a great favor of the relict people of Earth.”

Girls, standing naked, in a big room like the one Gretchen had just come from. Elites moving among them, talking to them. Gretchen felt the blood drain from her face at the sight, and then rush back again.

“What are you watching?” a timid voice said from her right. Gretchen turned with an open mouth to see a girl with dark hair and dark eyes, naked like herself, standing just inside the doorway.

“Pause,” Gretchen said, and the vid froze where it was. “It’s about the Taking,” she said, trying to decide whether the new girl seemed nice. “I’m Gretchen.”

“I’m Beth,” the girl said. “Did you… I mean, did they… those things…?” Beth had turned bright pink. Gretchen decided yes, she definitely seemed nice.

“Touch me?” she said softly. “And ask terrible questions?”

Beth nodded.

“Yes,” Gretchen said. “Did you, um, get… spanked, or anything?”

Beth’s eyes went wide, and she shook her head. “Did you?”

“Well,” Gretchen said, “I tried to fool them.”

“You did? Why?”

“I didn’t want to be taken.”

“Oh,” Beth said. “I thought it wouldn’t matter what I did. They said, when they came to our village, that we would both have to go—Adaline and me, I mean.”

“Sometimes they let girls go if they’re… simple. They let one girl go last year, and I thought maybe I could pretend, but they knew immediately.” Gretchen felt her mouth twist in a wry smile.

“And they spanked you?” Beth said. Gretchen nodded glumly. “Which one?”

“Mr. Lourcy. It was weird, because they had a little auction and he bid fifteen.”

“What does that mean—fifteen?”

“Money, I think,” said Gretchen. A thought occurred to her. “Did Mr. Lourcy… did he seem… I don’t know, interested in you?” She tried to ask the question as innocently as she could, but she could see that Beth understood exactly what she meant.

“No,” Beth said, shaking her head. “Mr. Gramling seemed to like me, though.” She blushed anew. “He touched me for a long time.”

It was Gretchen’s turn to let her mouth fall open. “Oh, that must have been…” Then, thinking of another question, “What about Ms. Feld and Ms. Renton? Were they interested in you?”

“No—were they in you?” Beth seemed a little shocked.

Gretchen nodded. “Ms. Renton kissed me, and… touched me between my legs while she did it.”

“Really? That… I mean, those women seemed… different from us, didn’t they?”

Gretchen giggled. “Very.” A pause ensued, as they looked at one another. The door behind Beth slid closed, as if one of the elites had shut it. Gretchen realized that the same thing must have happened when she entered, and she shivered at the thought though she didn’t really know why—something about the control these sky-people had taken of them.

“Do you want to watch this vid with me?” she asked, suddenly feeling a little shy.

“Sure,” Beth said. “I’ve never seen one before, though people sometimes tell stories in my village. Do you live in the enclosure?”

Gretchen nodded.

“So you see vids all the time?”

“Every week,” Gretchen said, feeling a little proud to be civilized, though she knew it had happened through no fault of her own. “This one’s just a documentary. We should watch a romance, next—you’ll love it!”

Chapter Six

Martin had decided the instant he heard that moan Gretchen made, with the speculum displaying the inside of her pussy to the gathering of the elites, that he must have her. He also suspected he would have competition from Heather or Diana. Why did the moan affect him that way? Was it because he knew it would also put Gretchen in line for the Maenad Club?

As Martin watched the inspections, one by one, of the fifteen relict girls who came after Gretchen, girls from the wilds, all of them, he tried to puzzle out how he really felt about the Maenad Club. Yes, he realized, he did want to save little Gretchen from that fate. But… something else lay hidden there, something about his own desires and wishes for the girl he couldn’t prevent himself from thinking of now as his future wife.

Martin had only gone to one Maenad Club event, two years before. Since the passage of the Enclosure Act, he had been saving his credits to buy a relict girl. When he had four thousand, which was just a little less than the average girl went for at the auctions, he realized one day that he also had enough to buy membership in the Maenad Club, which gave its members access to a range of relict girls chosen for their special submissive quality. Girls who had served at the club for two years were available for reproduction at no additional charge, while the wealthier members of the club could pay a surcharge for a month’s exclusive sexual rights over chosen girls who had just arrived from Earth.

Non-members could come to a special night, once a month, to see the club and, with the payment of a hundred credits, sample its wares. The Athenian economy, with taxation based on consumption, with the garnishment of all capital above one million credits, and with one hundred percent death duty, rewarded creative production above all things. Because most of the members of the Maenad Club were thus creatives in one way or another, the interior of the vast storage hangar converted by the club’s early members themselves into a social space resembled a sort of artistic paradise, with something for every aesthetic taste, opening out from a columned classical entrance like a Greek temple—a tribute to Erika Wendt, of course, as well as to the founders of the station, who had taken such inspiration from antiquity—into a series of branching rooms created from wood-composite partitions and drop ceilings whose variety even Martin, a systems engineer and designer for the agricultural section, found extremely diverting.

Of course, on Athena even systems engineers had their aesthetic senses cultivated, according to the classical education laid down by the basic law of the station. Elites could not escape such manual labor as remained on a station so thoroughly automated—Martin loaded compost into the fertilizer tubes every morning, for example. They also, however, could not escape culture, and no young man or woman of eighteen was allowed to move on to his or her chosen career without first passing his or her
cults:
rigorous examinations in history, philosophy, and at least one chosen language and literature other than English.

Heather, Diana, and Erika greeted the prospective members in the classical antechamber just inside the columns; behind them Martin could see two doors, one leading it would seem into a very quiet, elegant restaurant with a beautiful bar, the other into a much darker area from which loud, rhythmic music emanated when the heavy swinging door opened to let a woman who had preceded Martin into the club pass through.

“Martin!” Heather said, holding out a cheek for him to brush his own against as they clasped arms in the traditional Athenian greeting for old friends.

“Heather,” Martin said. “Diana.” The three had been in school together, of course, and they had renewed the acquaintance the previous year when Martin had gone with a Taking party, as many of the younger elites did when they had come close to accumulating enough wealth to buy a relict girl. Heather and Diana had of course gone on both trips—January to the Southern enclosure and July to the Northern one—every year since the first parties in 2988. At a guess, they had bought, using Erika’s capital and that of the other members, two hundred of the four hundred or so girls taken since the institution of the Enclosure Act.

Many of the Maenads, as they called themselves, sat right below the million-credit threshold and used their relatively extravagant spending on the club to feel that their money wasn’t all going into the council’s coffers. Of course the taxes grew with the level of consumption, and a Maenad might find him or herself paying, tax included, upwards of three hundred thousand credits for a particularly pretty girl’s first month. One girl, the year after Martin’s visit to the club—one year ago, now—had fetched six hundred thousand, something that had made headlines and seemed unlikely to be repeated, occurring as it had as a result more of a quarrel between two Maenads over a review one had written of the other’s latest novel than of the girl’s stunning beauty.

“Erika,” Heather said, “meet Martin Lourcy. Diana and I were in school with him, and he’s finally in the market for a girl.” All three women wore elegant, simple dresses of a vaguely ancient Greek style—Heather’s in black, Diana’s in white, and Erika’s in a deep, shimmering purple. Martin felt underdressed, though he had worn the blue tunic-and-pants suit he reserved for important meetings. Some Athenian men had begun to layer their clothing again, after many years of it being out of fashion, and Martin suddenly longed for a jacket of some kind, over a tighter-fitting tunic.

Erika Wendt had reached sixty by then, but her presence remained very imposing. She gave him her cheek to kiss, as the gesture was still called though no kissing was ever involved. “Welcome, Martin,” she said. “Are you considering joining us?”

“I am,” Martin said as forthrightly as he could in view of the fact that he wasn’t sure he told the truth.

“How do you feel about the club?”

How do you feel about the Maenad Club?
had replaced
How do you feel about the Wendt Amendment?
as one of the dominant political and social questions of the last ten years, occupying a position right after
How do you feel about the enclosures?
and before
How do you feel about removing Plato’s Theaetetus from the cults syllabus?

The Maenad Club, after all,
really simply represented the Wendt Amendment—in its simple form,
and pleasure
—put into effect and given a tangible existence. Much debate had arisen in the council about whether any restrictions should be placed upon the owners of relict girls, beyond holding them accountable, at a monthly inspection of all the girls, for the basic well-being of their human property. The Wendt Amendment, and now the Maenad Club, had militated and now continued to militate squarely against that: during their two years of club service, the club girls had birth-control injections and served the lusts of the Maenads. Their purpose, despite their fertility and despite the need to raise the birthrate on Athena, was to provide pleasure to the elites lucky enough to purchase a membership in the club.

“I’m not sure,” Martin answered Erika frankly. “I supported the Taking, and your amendment.”

“But?” Erika asked, smiling an encouragement not to hold back his opinion.

“But to create a place that… well, celebrates using the relict girls for sex…”