The Slave (6 page)

Robin shivered for a moment and drew her
knees up. “I don’t know,” she said softly. “I don’t know what to
say.”

“
To them, or to me?”

She looked up. “Both.”

“
Of the two, I would spend more time
worrying about me. Because if you somehow fail to assure me that
your behavior and dedication is perfect for the block, you won’t
have to say a thing to your family, other than perhaps explaining
why you suddenly left your old job. But if you manage to get into
the Marketplace, at the very worst, you can always simply tell them
the truth.”

“
Oh sure. ‘Hi, Mom, just wanted to
call and tell you that your daughter has run off to be a slave!
Love to Dad!’” Robin’s sarcasm sprang forth without thought, and
the horror came immediately after. Her mouth dropped open, and her
hand flew up to cover it. “Omigod, I’m so sorry, sir, I didn’t mean
that!”

Chris only smiled. “Yes, you did.
Apparently, you are so used to hiding everything about yourself,
the very thought of openly declaring it is utterly ridiculous to
you. But I tell you that almost half of the Marketplace applicants
do actually tell their spouses, parents, lovers, or best friends
about where they are going. Now go get the door and our dinner. We
will eat informally, in here.”

She had been so overcome by her
embarrassment that the light chiming in the background had gone
entirely unnoticed. Now, with a contrite nod, she leapt to her feet
and almost ran down the hallway.

Of all the stupid, dumb ass things to do!
Why can’t I watch my mouth? Why can’t I concentrate? Stupid,
stupid! You have to watch yourself, girl, or you’re back on the
streets with your resume and a lot of explaining to do, to an awful
lot of people.

There was a man at the door, bearing a
covered tray. He was tall and slender, with long blond hair,
wearing a light silk shirt that was open halfway down his bare
chest. Obviously, he had to have come from somewhere in the
building. But Robin focused upon his throat, around which was
wrapped a heavy gold chain, linked through a ring from which a
golden lock was suspended.

“
Hi, you must be Robin!” he said in a
friendly drawl. “Here’s dinner. Watch it, it’s a lil’ hot on the
right side. Please give mah respects to Chris, will you?” His voice
was as light as his attitude and clothing, and as he handed a tray
to her, he grinned. “And don’t look so worried, chile, you’ll get
all wrinkled up, like a prune!”

“
Thank you,” Robin managed to say.
“But... but... who should I give respects from?”

“
Heavens! Where have mah manners
gone?” The man drew himself up and bowed politely to her. “I’m
Leon, ma’am, and I belong to Mr. Reynolds, 14c. I ’spect we’ll be
seeing each other a few times while you’re here. Chris does like
mah cookin’!”

“
Thank you,” Robin said again, taken
slightly aback by Leon’s ease and friendliness.

“
You’re right welcome! My pleasure to
be of service.” He bowed to her again and headed off to the
elevator.

He sounds like he’s from far
away
, Robin
thought, taking the tray into the kitchen.
Texas? Arizona?
She opened the covered dish,
and a luxurious scent filled the air, making her mouth water.
Dinner was couscous, with spiced chicken and grilled vegetables on
the side. Not exactly what she expected from the blond cowboy at
the door.

Let’s face it, girl. Nothing is
like you expected it to be. The only thing you know for sure is
that you are not using the furniture in this house.
At least that was
something that she had read and heard about that seemed
true.

“
No, sit up here and put your plate on
the table,” Chris said, when she seemed ready to take her place on
the floor again. He patted the seat of one of the comfortable
chairs. “But you are correct to seek the floor until invited to do
otherwise.”

This time, she managed to catch the
exasperated sigh before it came out.

“
Leon sends his regards,” she told
him, cutting into a piece of eggplant. “He seemed very
friendly.”

“
Yes, he is. I used to liken him to a
large golden retriever.” Robin could easily see it; she nodded.
Chris continued. “His skill as a cook and a household manager made
him an excellent bargain, too.”

“
Then, he is...”

“
Oh, yes. He’s been in the Marketplace
for about six years. With his current master for almost two. Before
that, he was with a rather large family, and I think he misses
caring for a lot of people.” Chris indicated the food. “So, I
indulge him. And at the same time, his owner gets to show him off.
Now... while we eat, and for some time afterward, I want you to
continue your story. This time, I do want it from the beginning.
You’ve told and lived lies for too long. You must now get used to
exposing yourself, in many more ways than the obvious.”

Robin blushed, but at least she knew that
this was coming. She drank some water and composed her thoughts and
began to tell him just how much of a liar she had been.

Robin’s Story: Games of Youth

From the age of five, Robin lived a life of
deceit. There were no warnings, no hints that those thoughts and
dreams she was having were wrong or bad. But deep in her heart,
beyond any understanding that she could put in words, was the
knowledge that no adult should know what she was thinking. And no
grown-up should ever, ever know what she was doing.

It started with the games she played at
family gatherings, with cousins and friends. Their feverishly
charged, impulse-driven antics ran from quiet playing with blocks
and dolls to dashing through the rooms of the house, crawling under
tables and through the legs of the grown-ups, creating havoc until
their goal had been achieved. Temporary banishment, until their
silence became too mysterious, at which time they would be called
back to eat or nap or go home.

During those times of banishment, their
imaginations gave way to games that were shrouded in mystery and
secrecy. And although some of them were as uninteresting to Robin
as any of the earlier frolics, it was during those serious moments
that someone could suggest games involving the kinds of stories and
play she was so taken with.

For then, they played Pirates, or House, or
Spies, or any variation of a game where some of the kids turned
into some kind of authority figure with the power to judge the
others and cast sentences upon them. They used roles from Saturday
morning cartoons, and they used comic book heroes and villains.
They pulled their stories out of the books that their parents read
them and the ones they got in school. Some of the older kids
brought in ideas, characters and scenes from their favorite
movies.

And then Robin could relax. Because she was
one of the youngest kids there, they never let her be the evil
Princess, or the Lady Pirate. She couldn’t even be Natasha the Spy.
But she could be the Little Princess, the maid, the youngest
daughter (or the oldest one, when it seemed that she was the one
that was going to get ritually blamed for everything), or the
hostage taken by the evil villain to get the good guys to have to
come and rescue her.

And as kids do, they used their
overwhelmingly powerful imaginations to come up with scenarios
beyond the pat and G-rated endings they were subjected to. They
used their own experiences with parental discipline to create
fantastic, silly, and sometimes all-too-accurate portrayals of
threatened torments and fear. They were children.

They feared being abandoned, so they acted
out scenes of banishment. They feared being lost, so they
blindfolded each other. They feared being discovered, so they hid
in dark places and whispered. They feared adults and their
mysterious one-sided world, so they played at being tyrants and
victims.

Without having to say that she longed for
the times when cousin David would tie her to a chair and pretend to
be her kidnapper, Robin could throw herself into the role so easily
there evolved quiet agreement that these were the kinds of parts
she played. It was just as natural as when her older cousin Pete
also found himself to be always playing the part of the family dog
when they played house, or being the villain whose plots were
foiled and then had to be captured and pummeled ruthlessly with
pillows and plastic swords before he was finally defeated.

But as the children grew and the generation
was sealed for a while, the older ones drifted away from such
games. With no new young kids to initiate, and more sophisticated
games to tempt the participants, the imaginative scripts of evil
and good gave way. When cousin David got his own Nintendo, they
were destroyed forever.

And no one ever spoke of them,
except to laugh.
How silly we were
, they could say, so embarrassed at their past
play. By age 12, they started to forget.

Or at least most of them did. But Robin
never forgot. Because in many ways, Robin never outgrew those
fantasies.

I am different than everyone
else
, she
once observed, looking at herself in the mirror.
I don’t look like
it; at least I don’t think so. But I have thoughts that no one else
does. I think of things that no one talks about. When the other
girls are talking about make-up and hair, and which boy likes them,
I’m thinking about being kidnapped. While everyone watches the same
TV shows, I still like to watch those movies where bad guys tie
their prisoners up in dungeons and people get whipped. Why am I so
weird? Why can’t I just talk about what happened on TV last night?
There must be something wrong with me.

So she hid her secret perfectly, growing up
to be the perfect middle child. Her older brother was the star of
the family, her younger sister the baby.

Robin herself had a little of her brother’s
charm and magnetism, and some of her sister’s sweet nature. But she
was also the loner, the bookworm. She read precociously and
voraciously, earning excellent English grades in school. She had to
be prodded towards athletics, and endured girlish sports until
Junior High School, where she discovered track and field. Running,
especially alone, gave her even more time to explore her secret
thoughts.

To the rest of the world, she was perfectly
normal, smarter than average, good natured, and maybe a little
strong willed from time to time. No one could have guessed that as
she studied Greek and Roman history, she became a barbarian slave,
brought to Rome in chains, to be sold to the highest bidder. No one
knew that she deliberately sought out books about slaves and
prisons and societies that maintained second and third class
citizenships. She was always careful to mix these books in with
books on other topics, so that the librarians wouldn’t suspect that
she was having evil thoughts.

By that time, she knew that her fantasies of
surrender and degradation weren’t only unusual, they were very bad.
She knew because she read all these books. Slaves didn’t talk about
their former slavery in glowing terms. People were hurt, families
destroyed, and people died because of slavery. The whole country
went to war over it (or so she understood it), and the good guys
were the ones that didn’t want it.

To make things worse, she became aware of
the social realities of her time and life. When she read about the
beginnings of women’s emancipation, she decided to do a school
paper on women’s lives in earlier times. And much to her dismay, it
seemed that her mind had divided into two distinct parts which were
absolutely incompatible with each other.

One the one hand, she was absolutely
horrified at what women had to live with in the past, and even
right now, in different countries. She had taken much of her life
for granted. But the thought that few women ever attained the level
of education that she had right now, that they couldn’t vote, or
own property, that they couldn’t go to college or be doctors or
lawyers, this was all amazing to her. It made her angry.

Now she understood the news stories about
the women who marched in Washington, or through other city streets.
She extended her research to modern feminism, and liked what she
read. She was as good as any boy! She could be whatever she wanted
to be!

She was a teenage feminist.

Who had evil thoughts. Thoughts that were
just not acceptable to her political beliefs, but were in fact
betrayals of the simple feminism she had been exposed to.

Because even as she began her tentative
reaching out to the world of feminism, she also retained those
intense fantasies of her childhood. They invaded her dreams, and
they waited for her to lie awake at night, tossing and turning
until she knew that only one thing would let her sleep.

By now, those thoughts had evolved into
full-fledged, soap opera style stories. In one, she was a Greek
slave, clad in a short, diaphanous tunic, utterly owned, totally
dominated, available to the members of her master’s household. In
this one, she grew to a position of some authority, getting to
manage the other slaves. But when that became too threatening, she
imagined that the other slaves planned a revolt and that she was
terribly punished for not seeing it early enough, and demoted as
well. That scenario lasted for years.

In another, she was a rebel spy in some
mysterious, futuristic government. (This one came about after she
discovered science fiction.) She was captured by the ruling forces,
tortured, and often, brainwashed into joining them. That fantasy
was full of fetish images, boots and capes, cuffs and collars. She
imagined that they had drugs to make her fantasy character pliable
or confused, or to cause her pain. It was a much darker fantasy
than her Greek one, but it had its rewards.