Buying His Mate (6 page)

“And for a kind of sex that expresses our dominance over them and their people so very clearly,” Erika supplied. Martin couldn’t tell whether she did it to help him or to make fun of him, and decided at least to act as if it were the former.

“Exactly. It… well, should we
foster
that, is my worry, I guess.”

“Shouldn’t we pretend we don’t want to whip these girls, and fuck them long and hard, you mean?” Erika said in an even tone that made Martin wonder where exactly the woman’s own desires lay.

“No,” Martin said slowly.

Diana spoke next. “Did we ask you to come and
celebrate
that, Martin? Or to
foster
it?”

Erika laughed. “Don’t be so hard on him, Diana. You know that the very existence of the club seems to every adult Athenian to be doing just that. You also know that that was our intention.”

“Really?” Martin asked.

“Really,” Erika replied. “But absent Diana’s snide tone, the question does remain: did we invite you?”

“No, of course not,” Martin said. “But I want children, and the club would let me have a girl out of service, as a mother, wouldn’t it, if I were a member?”

“Yes,” Heather said. “But if you look at the cost of a membership, and the annual dues, you’d be paying a lot more, wouldn’t you?”

She had him there. He had concealed it from himself, perhaps, but there it lay: Martin’s idea of visiting the Maenad Club hadn’t arisen from mere curiosity about taking a club girl home with him to be the mother of his children.

“Well,” Erika said into the little silence that had fallen. “Why don’t you spend some time here, and enjoy a girl if you like. On the house, as a thank-you for this stimulating conversation.”

Heather handed him a card with an elegant
M
and a picture of a Maenad being forcefully taken by a satyr, his horsetail proudly rising behind his back as he fucked the girl over a bench of some kind. “Just give this to any of the girls in the training room or the dance studio. She’ll take you to a private room, or you may use her right there, if you like. The barre in the dance studio is very good for that. Whomever you choose, treat her right.”

Martin cleared his throat, wondering if the three women could see how much his pulse had just sped up. His cock swelled and pressed a little against the front of his pants.

“Drinks are free tonight,” Diana said. “I’m guessing you’ll want to start in the bar.” She smiled with only a hint of snideness and pointed to the quieter of the two rooms, from which Martin now heard the sound of a piano, playing an old, old song about it being “too darn hot.”

He did go in there, after pocketing the card that felt like it might burn his hand. He had taken a seat at the bar before he realized that the brown-haired girl playing the piano so skillfully was dressed only in underwear that came straight out of Victorian England, by way of an old-west North America bordello. Martin ordered a martini, something he did often, always with a secret smile at his unshakable notion that the drink belonged to him, because of his nowadays very unusual name. He was the only Martin on Athena, as his father had been the only Robert. One of the strange consequences of a falling birthrate, he sometimes thought.

The bartender, another relict girl, redheaded, wore nothing but a pair of see-through bikini panties that showed her fully waxed pussy to great advantage. She responded to his order with a submissive, “Yes, sir. Welcome to the club, sir,” that made Martin want to reach out and fondle her breast, just to see if it was true that all the girls were for the pleasure of the club at all times.

“Samantha, come here,” called a voice a few seats down, and Martin saw a distinguished-looking man who had just finished a glass of champagne.

“Yes, sir,” said the bartender, and walked over there, having set Martin’s drink in front of him.

“You’ll want to see this,” said the member to Martin. “Just to give you an idea of what things are like here.” He turned to Samantha, now standing before him behind her bar. “Panties down, girl,” he said.

“Yes, sir,” said Samantha, and lowered her panties to mid-thigh to reveal a sweet little cleft, from which peeped a hint of her pink secrets. Martin couldn’t keep himself from swallowing hard as he watched the older man’s hand reach out and begin to fondle the bartender between her legs, as she closed her eyes and bit her lower lip.

Then a female voice behind Martin said, “Jack, come on. I’d like a drink. Treat that girl right.” Martin turned to see an equally distinguished-looking woman, whom he thought he had seen in an award-winning series of vids about modern philosophy.

The man, still fondling Samantha’s pussy, chuckled. “Alright, Marilyn,” he said. “Don’t worry. Samantha, you’ll serve your next five drinks with panties down, please.”

“Yes, sir,” she whispered as Jack withdrew his hand. “Thank you, sir.”

Martin finished his martini and slipped out of the club, his cock very hard and his mind very conflicted.

Chapter Seven

Fifteen naked girls now waited in the entertainment room, as Gretchen began to think of it. They had started the vid about the Taking again, once it had finished, because the girls who had come in after Beth wanted to see it. Beth and Gretchen sat in a different part of the room from the view screen, flipping through the books they had found in another chest and talking from time to time about the very different lives they had led—at least since Jerry had taken Gretchen and her mother to the enclosure.

“So,” Beth said, “you can use the water without boiling it? So you don’t need to keep a fire going all the time?”

Gretchen explained patiently, once again. “We don’t have fires at all. The power comes from the sky-people’s compound, to cook and wash and even to heat our houses.”

“But how do you know who’s in charge, if it’s not the man whose woman keeps the fire?”

Gretchen laughed. “In the beginning it was a tribe chief the sky-people chose, but after that the adults elected a council, and the council chose a president.”

Beth’s mouth opened wide. “Like in the old days?”

Gretchen shook her head. “Jerry—that’s the man who brought us here—says that it just means the person who presides, and that just means someone who sits in front.” She could tell that she had utterly lost Beth, for whom the word
president
must mean a legendary figure who made the world run right, in the lost golden age. “Can you read?” she asked, changing the subject.

Beth shook her head, looking down at the book she had chosen, which consisted almost entirely of pictures and must be there, along with others like it, precisely for the use of girls who couldn’t read. Gretchen had caught a glimpse of the title:
A Relict Girl Comes to Athena
. There seemed to be a series of titles in the series, much like the series of vids the other girls were watching, and Gretchen found to her surprise that her heart had started to beat faster as she wondered whether any of them covered the part of a relict girl’s life that, when the vid brought it up, had turned her face scarlet.

She herself had chosen
Pride and Prejudice
because it was familiar, and she wanted Beth to see that she knew what literature was. With a little embarrassment, Gretchen realized that the proud—she smiled, thinking of Mr. Darcy—attempt to make herself feel superior was utterly lost on Beth, who must only see something inexplicable and incomprehensible.

On the view screen, the vid about the Taking had just reached the embarrassing part. Gretchen saw that Beth had turned her attention back to it, and she couldn’t help also hearing the calm narration, and then turning to watch the screen again.

“According to the provisions of the Enclosure Act, we are required by our laws to tell you that the act specifically calls for the use of your body both for reproduction and for sexual pleasure.”

The screen showed a naked girl, lying on a nicer bed than any Gretchen had ever seen, in a bigger bedroom than she had imagined a person might ever inhabit. A long viewport above the bed showed the Earth going by as the space station rotated. Gretchen tried again to grasp the idea that she would soon be on Athena herself, and failed. Still less could she seem to understand that she must share the fate of the girl in the bed, who wore a resigned expression that included a little smile as if she knew she must be pleasing to whomever entered the room.

A door slid open, on the screen, and a man entered, wearing the clothing of an elite.

“Oh, he’s handsome,” said one of the girls who had recently come through the door, and another giggled. Gretchen looked at her uncomprehendingly. How could any girl take this so lightly?

As the man in the vid smiled at the girl in his bed and began to undress, the narrator said, “Most relict girls belong to men, but your purchaser could also be a woman.”

The scene changed to another bedroom, very similar, in which another naked girl lay in another bed. A woman of about thirty-five sat on the bed, stroking her relict girl’s hair and talking to her softly, though her words couldn’t be heard.

Gretchen looked again at the girl who had called the man in the first scene handsome. Her jaw had dropped. Gretchen had grown mostly used to being naked in a room of naked girls, but every few minutes something seemed to make her recall how very strange and—shameful it was? Or, maybe, she thought with an odd little flutter of her tummy—exciting? Now, watching the part of this vid that dealt explicitly with the very adult reason Gretchen and the rest of these girls would in just a little while go to the sky-star on a rocket shuttle, their nakedness made the flutter seem to move down into her pussy, and make her so warm there that she had a very difficult time not running her fingers stealthily into the crease between her thighs.

“If a woman purchases you,” the narrator continued, still over the scene of the girl having her hair stroked before… what? What would the older woman do, then, afterward—when she got into bed with her relict girl? “She will most likely inseminate you artificially, using a device like this one.”

The view screen showed a brief inset shot of a strange, long, plastic thing that reminded Gretchen most of a kitchen baster.

“Though,” the narrator continued, as the scene went back to the man’s quarters, where he, with his cock standing straight, had clearly told his girl that she must please him with her mouth, “some female owners send their girls to men for insemination, or invite men to come enjoy their girls while they watch, and even participate.”

The look on the relict girl’s face on the screen, framed by hair as blond as Gretchen’s own, as she sucked her owner’s cock, made Gretchen feel faint: eagerness to please, and perhaps a little fear that if she didn’t suck well enough she might be punished, along with something Gretchen felt she couldn’t name, even though she suddenly felt terribly sure she would look like that too, if Mr. Lourcy told her to suck his cock.

Without even realizing she did it, she put her hand on her lap and worked her middle finger between thighs that felt slick with the wet warmth the vid had called there.
Just a little rub, to make it easier.
She squirmed, looking around to make sure no one saw what she did. Somehow the thought that she was playing with herself in public made the whole thing even more arousing, and she gave a little whimpering sound. Beth looked over, and Gretchen bit her lip as she saw the pretty brown-haired girl’s eyes go downward to watch Gretchen’s wicked conduct.

The narrator continued, “It is of the utmost importance that you understand that the Enclosure Act provides to your owner the right to punish you if you do not comply with his or her commands in the bedroom, as everywhere else.”

Gretchen knew what was on the view screen, because she and Beth had watched it before any other girl had come in, both of them staring straight ahead in utter mortification. Now, however, Gretchen only had eyes for the other girl, and Beth only, it appeared, had eyes for the sight of Gretchen touching her own pussy.

The other girls gasped as they watched the vid, and the sound of a stiff leather paddle striking the bare bottom of the girl they had just seen sucking her owner’s cock came to Gretchen’s ears as she opened her thighs to show Beth just how wet her pussy had gotten, watching and hearing about the fate that awaited them both. Gretchen had never thought before that day of the pleasure girls might give one another, but the way Ms. Feld and Ms. Renton had inspected her, together with what they had seen on the vid, seemed to make the idea of kissing Beth almost unbearably alluring.

The girl in the vid was over her owner’s knee, just as Gretchen had been over Martin’s, Gretchen remembered, and the paddle was flashing down with force and regularity. The blond girl on the vid cried out in shame and discomfort.

“Remember that you will be inspected monthly to determine the state of your well-being. If your owner should punish you, the discipline must conform to the provisions of the Enclosure Act for the punishment of relict girls, and, unless you are very naughty, will not make you uncomfortable for more than a few days at most. We certainly don’t advise testing the limits, though!”

Something about the sound of the girl getting spanked, along with the memory of being over Mr. Lourcy’s knee and the lewd idea that Beth was looking at her pussy, made Gretchen wonder whether she would test the limits with her owner. The thought that Mr. Lourcy might punish her for playing with herself came upon her then and she guiltily—without daring to look at Beth again—closed her legs and took her hand away from her pussy. She returned her attention to the view screen, her cheeks burning, wondering what it all meant and whether Beth might want to kiss Gretchen, too.

“Finally,” the narrator’s voice said as, out of the corner of her eye, Gretchen saw the picture on the screen change back to a view of Athena, “we’re required to emphasize that although the Taking has been enacted as a way to procure your body for its reproductive potential, our legal traditions of the paramount importance of property and possession provide that in the absence of harm to your well-being your owner may do as he or she likes with you, for a period of two years, after which, if you have not yet become pregnant, you will be taken by the council and inseminated as the bureau of reproduction sees fit. After bearing four children, or being found to have become infertile, you will earn your citizenship on Athena. We’ll leave you with a last piece of advice. We elites know how to take care of our girls. Serve us well, and pleasingly, and you will have a very happy life on Athena, full of pleasures you never imagined. When your owner uses your body for his or her pleasure, be grateful that he or she finds you so pleasing. When he or she punishes you, try to feel grateful for the attention your owner is giving you, guiding you to your happiness in your new life. Most important, when your owner puts a baby inside you, be grateful for the gift of the seed of an elite man, which will ensure that your child will have a vital role to play in the reconstruction of civilization.”