Slave (10 page)

I sent Cat out to pay the docking fee and get the regulation list from the port authority while I got ready to venture forth onto a planet where I could only be a slave.

It griped my cookies to have to do such a thing, but there
was no help for it. I just plain had to, that’s all. I got in the shower and washed off the remaining stench of Orpheseus Prime but balked at dousing myself with some of the local perfume that I had gotten from the smuggler; it was sickeningly sweet and I certainly didn’t want to spend all of my time on Statzeel wondering if I was going to throw up at any moment. I mean, being chained up was bad enough, so I hoped it wasn’t a requirement. I’d have to check the regulation list to be sure.

I spiked my short hair in what I considered to be a provocative style—I’d seen plenty of prostitutes around the galaxy, and big, spiky hairstyles seemed to be almost a part of the uniform. To complete my toilet, I stuck my face into the make-up port—which I had never used before, by the way—and pressed the “Exotic Beauty”

button. It took only a second or two, but I must admit, the transformation was quite astonishing. I didn’t look half bad, I thought, peering at my reflection in the mirror.

Not as pretty as Ranata, of course, but not too bad. The nice thing about it was that until I stuck my face back into the port, the makeup job would stay put. Don’t know who invented that one, but whoever it was must have made enough on it to pay for the retirement of several generations of his or her family. Just wish I’d thought of it, myself.

The makeup job might have been okay, but the clothes were something else entirely! The shoes weren’t too horrible—at least I didn’t have to wear three-inch heels— and they were comfortable enough, though gleaming satin slippers weren’t my usual choice when it came to footwear. The dress was made of a very sheer, flowing,
peach-colored fabric that reached to about mid-thigh and had a matching sash tied at the waist. It was unfortunate that I didn’t have the big boobs to fill it out at the top, but aside from that, it seemed to fit me well enough. The collar and chain were quite decorative, as well, for they also matched the dress and were encrusted with gems—a lot like something you’d put on a French poodle, which, come to think of it, I was now no better than.

This would
definitely
take some getting used to! I wondered if I was even allowed to speak in public. If not, I could end up in some very hot water real quick, because if you haven’t figured it out by now, let me tell you that I am not, and never have been, the quiet, demure little lady that my mother had probably envisioned when I was born. After the disappointment she must have suffered with me, it was no wonder she’d waited another ten years before being brave enough to try again for a better daughter. Of course, Ranata had been well worth the wait. She was perfect.

The collar and chain only opened with a small, intri-cate key, I noted, and I presumed that the males carried these in their vest pockets at all times so they could release their slaves from time to time without having to search for it. I figured the women had to be let loose once in a while. I mean, surely they didn’t expect the men to accompany their slaves to the ladies room! Then again, maybe they got off on such things. Like I said, some places have some really weird customs.

I will admit that it was with some trepidation that I waited for Cat to return. I shuddered to think what his reaction would be to see me in this get-up—I mean, he’d
been hard enough to control when I was wearing my flight overalls; what on Earth would he do when he saw me wearing a dress that you could see right through?

The answer was quite simple. His jaw dropped.

For a moment he just stood there, not saying a word.

Then that persistent cock of his pulsed once and bloomed from its foreskin like a Tedrellian primrose at dusk. If I’d thought he’d been aroused previously, it was obvious to me now that I’d only seen him moderately excited before, for his cockhead not only developed the ruffled edge I’d seen on it earlier, but it also spurted a clear, viscous fluid that seemed to come from the point of each serration on the thick corona of the glans. I noticed something else, too; he had muscular control of his penis and seemed to be able to point it in virtually any direction; he snapped it up and hit himself in the stomach with it and then moved it in a circular motion while I stood there watching. I stared at it, thinking that turning him down had been perhaps the biggest mistake I’d ever made in my whole life. What was it he’d said about giving me joy unlike any I had ever known? I may have doubted it then, but I sure as hell believed it now!

“Holy shit!” I exclaimed. “You can’t go out in the street like that! We won’t be able to get ten feet outside the port without scores of women kneeling at your feet just to get a look at you!”

“No,” he replied seriously. “The men will all be looking at you, my lovely master.”

I grimaced. “Yeah, right!” I said skeptically. “I doubt it! You obviously haven’t seen my sister. She’s the beauty of the family.” I stared hard at his penis,
wondering how in the world we could ever even begin to attempt to blend in with the locals with that thing right out in plain sight. “Are you sure you don’t want to go and jack off or something before we go out?”

“Jack off?” Not surprisingly, he didn’t understand the slang.

“You know,” I said, mentally groping for the right description. “Masturbate—bring yourself to climax?”

“Why would I do that?” he asked, sounding quite surprised. “My desire is for you, not for myself.”

What a novel perspective! “Really? You mean you never do it to yourself?”

He shook his head. “I do not! In fact, I cannot, and if I did, it would diminish the experience of being with a woman! My desires have been…delayed for many years. I would not gratify them in that manner now, not when you stand before me with the scent of your desire filling my nostrils and the sight of your body filling my eyes. I have touched you and tasted you, my lovely Jacinth, and now I can see you. To end it, I must have you.”

“Do you mean to tell me that you’re gonna stay like that from now on until—?”

He nodded. “Until we mate. You may threaten me with your weapon all you like, but it will not diminish.”

“Well, piss! So much for being inconspicuous!” I paused for a moment to collect my thoughts. “I don’t suppose you noticed any other raging hard-ons out there, did you?”

He got the “raging hard-on” idea without any explanation whatsoever. “Yes,” he replied. “There are many men in this state.”
I threw up my hands in a gesture of capitulation. “Okay, then, I give up. Put my leash on your wrist and let’s get going, Cat. This is gonna be interesting, I can tell.”

And it was. I haven’t mentioned it before, but the inhabitants of Statzeel appeared surprisingly human; the only difference I could see—and I could see nearly all of the anatomy of every person on the street!—was that they had six fingers on each hand instead of five and that their noses seemed sort of flat. Skin tones varied, as did height and weight, but they all seemed at least moderately attractive with not a dog in the whole bunch. Which was a good thing since I had a cat! I know: Har-dy har, har! I can’t help it if my sense of humor was going wacky; I was under a good deal of stress.

Cat did seem to attract a fair amount of attention, but nothing like the stares that were directed at me, and, oddly enough, most of the people staring at me were women.

“Psst, Cat!” I whispered to him. “Have I grown horns, or what?” For the best I could tell, I was dressed just like everyone else and even the make-up job wasn’t too far off, though maybe I
had
gotten a little carried away with the hairdo.

“Perhaps it is because you are human,” he suggested.

“If humans attract this much attention here, then your sister should be easy to locate.”

“True. I just wish they’d stop staring, though! It’s giving me the willies!” I waited to see if he would ask me what “willies” were, but decided that, in this case, it was probably self-explanatory since I’d have been willing to bet that he probably had a decent case of the willies, too.
We continued to make our way toward the marketplace and I noted that, while there were many women without chains, every man I saw had a woman with him. The women seemed to outnumber the men by at least five to one, which were great odds if you happened to be male. I’d have bet that none of these guys would have any trouble whatsoever getting laid four or five times a day….

I decided that those women without collars were probably the “worker” females and the “pleasure”

females were the ones that the males had to keep on a leash. I couldn’t wait to find Ranata and get her to explain all of this to me. She would undoubtedly be one of the pleasure types, and I hoped she wasn’t too unhappy with her male, because many of them appeared to be every bit as belligerent as the one I’d seen offworld. I saw three men standing together arguing about something or other when the females suddenly stepped between them and began caressing their genitals. The argument ceased and the men smiled and continued their discussion in a much more pleasant frame of mind.

There were young boys with their mothers or with other males of their own age, but every male who appeared to have reached puberty had a female chained to him. It was downright bizarre!

We went up to one of the vendors and Cat asked who we needed to talk to about setting up our own stall. The man pointed out a large female chained to a much smaller male at a window in the building across the plaza, and, having thanked him for the information, we headed in that direction.
I haven’t described our surroundings yet, but suffice it to say, it was a tropical paradise, even in the town. Everywhere you looked there was green, riotous growth and brilliant blooms of every possible hue. Songbirds with vibrantly colored plumage flew from flower to flower, and large, hovering insects that reminded me of butterflies—only much larger and more spectacularly colored than anything I’d ever seen on Earth—sipped nectar, as well. The animals that roamed about the town were all sleek and shining and looked sort of like a cross between a dog and burro, with long, waving tails and big, floppy ears. Then, as if all of these creatures weren’t amazing enough, I got the surprise of my life. They had horses.

Nothing like the scruffy, scrubby, pathetic-looking beasts of burden that you saw on many other worlds, oh no! These were big, beautiful, and gleaming with robust health. Even on Earth, they would have been remarkable.

I hoped that Ranata had one, for she had been horse-crazy almost from the time she was born. They were all being ridden double by a man and a woman, and apparently had no difficulty whatsoever carrying the extra weight. They were simply awesome!

I tore my eyes away from them as we approached the building, noting that even the buildings themselves were beautiful, seeming to blend in with the flora to the point that they might have been made of leaves themselves.

Perhaps they were, or perhaps the plants were just growing on the walls; it was difficult to tell. The man inside nodded and smiled at us, and I noted that while he certainly seemed friendlier than most of the males I’d observed, he was also a good deal older than any I’d seen
so far. Maybe they got nicer with age, and it was only the young bucks who were so mean.

“Good day, my friends!” he said, beaming at us.

“How may I help you?”

Cat hesitated for a moment as if he were waiting for me to speak, but then recovered quickly, stating that he would like to sell some goods in the market. He wasn’t terribly specific about what those goods were, and I could have kicked myself for not having coached him better, for other than the ointment I’d used on him, he had no idea what I had in the hold of my ship.

Fortunately, it didn’t seem to matter, for as long as we signed a statement that nothing we were selling was illegal, they didn’t give a damn what we sold. We were charged a small fee and then directed to an empty booth.

The currency was standard credits, I noted, and the rate of exchange was about on par with that of other planets in the region. So far, so good, I thought. Now all we had to do was find someone else who’d seen another human female in the area. I hoped for the sake of simplicity that Ranata was the only one, but the way things had gone during my search, I knew I couldn’t really count on anything being quite so easy.

Cat and I went back to the ship and loaded a few cases of various commodities on the load-lifter and went back to our stall. While we were setting up shop, I noticed that I was still attracting the attention of most of the females, and I couldn’t quite figure it out until an older woman with two young daughters in tow took me aside for a private word, which, I might add, was a bit difficult since I was still chained to Cat.
“He looks dangerous!” she whispered. “He should have two!”

She moved off without further explanation, and, I’ll admit, I was still as much in the dark about the whole subject as I’d ever been. Two of what? And why did Cat look any more dangerous than any of the other men around, many of whom, from the best I could tell, were surly, rude, if not downright nasty! Cat, on the other hand, was polite and reserved in his dealings with the denizens of Statzeel. Granted he had some rather spectacular features and some very sharp-looking teeth, but he wasn’t mean! Maybe it was his penis that was so scary. I wouldn’t have said so myself, but it was certainly more interesting than any of the others I’d seen, all of which were pretty typical, at least by human standards.

We spent most of the day in the marketplace, but if Ranata was there shopping, she never passed our way.

The trouble was, with Cat and me having to stay chained together, I couldn’t just go off looking for her and leave Cat behind to man the booth. It would appear that we were either going to have to wait for information to come to us, or we were going to have to come up with a different search tactic. Besides, I was getting tired. We’d spent a whole day on Orpheseus Prime, flown to Statzeel, and were going through another day without sleep. Well, Cat had been unconscious for a while, but I certainly hadn’t, and I was wearing out.