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Adult Content Warning - this material may contain adult themes, including general sexual activity, non-consensual bondage/slavery and forced sexual acts. If you are under the lawful age for such materials (18 in most jurisdictions) or if you would find such material offensive, please go elsewhere.
Safety Warning. This story may contain descriptions of practices that are decidedly unsafe, either in general, or if performed by someone without adequate training. There are a number of good books available on safety in the BDSM scene. Most large cities, and some not so large ones, have organized BDSM groups that will usually welcome a newcomer. I’m not going to point out which practices are safe, and which aren’t. Any practice is unsafe if performed by someone with inadequate training and experience, or if performed when not paying attention. Please think before you act. Don’t make yourself a candidate for a Darwin award.
Now on to the story...
Chapter 3. Shirley Gets a Clue.
Chapter 4: More Questions, and an Answer.
Deana looked at the girl walking toward her table during one of her Gorean association’s first level monthly get-togethers. She gave an almost invisible sigh. She wasn’t at all sure whether this cloud had a silver lining, or whether it was a case of a silver lining always coming with a cloud.
The girl dropped to her knees in front of Deana. “Mistress...” she started.
“Are you owned?” Deana asked.
“Uh. Not yet, mistress.”
“Then get your ass up on a chair. Now.”
The girl looked at her with wide eyes, and then hurriedly rose to her feet, pulled out a chair and sat.
“You’re Shirley, right? I don’t believe we’ve met before.”
“A ...” Shirley looked at Deana’s eyes. “Yes.”
“You were going to ask me to take you on for slave training, right?”
“Yes.” The girl looked at her with wide eyes.
Deana laughed. “I’m not a mind reader. You’ve been coming to Gorean functions for several months, and in general making an ass of yourself. It was a matter of time before you asked a master or mistress to train you. Do you think we didn’t notice? You’ve already asked three masters, and they’ve turned you down.”
“Oh.”
“Oh. Exactly. The Committee gently suggested that I take you in hand if you approached me. They’re getting tired of you, and want you to either straighten up or leave. So I will.”
The girl’s eyes flared.
“IF.”
She pulled back a bit.
“Take you in hand doesn’t mean train you as a slave. You haven’t managed to learn enough about us to take the next steps, or even learn whether you want to. That’s what we’re going to talk about. First I’m going to ask you a few questions to find out what you know.”
“Uh. OK.”
“Tell me why the first three masters you approached turned you down.”
“They didn’t want to do it?” she guessed.
“That wasn’t it. In actual fact, one of them would have taken you on if he could have. It would have completely eliminated you as an irritation.”
“He couldn’t?”
“Correct. I can’t take you on for slave training right now either. One of the rules is that we are not to train any Gorean slave unless she has lived as one of us for long enough to understand what she is doing. There is a very practical issue. The way we train requires that the slave be a member of the Gorean Association first; there are pieces in that contract which provide for submitting to Gorean slavery, and being trained as a Gorean slave. If we didn’t have that contract, parts of the training would be illegal, and there are no good alternatives. There are a couple of exceptions, but you don’t fall into any of them.”
“That’s ...”
“Not according to the canon stories? Actually it is, although you have to think a bit to see it. In the stories, a woman learns what it is to live as a free woman when she grows up; she’s captured and enslaved later.”
“Oh.”
“Right. Oh. I noticed when you joined that you were collared as part of the ceremony. Does that have anything to do with the way you’re acting?”
“Uh, yes. I thought that made me a slave.”
“Does wearing a control collar make a woman a slave outside of here?”
“Uh. No.”
“Right again. What do the canon stories say about slave marks?”
“A brand makes a girl a slave for the rest of her life, a collar has her owner’s name engraved on it?”
“Right. What do you see here?”
“Um. A lot of the girls have their owner’s names displayed instead of the standard symbols.”
“Exactly correct. One of the things you need to learn is that there are things we do at members-only gatherings like this that we don’t do on the street, and that is one of them: Gorean trained slavegirls’s collars display their owner’s names. It’s canon, it’s easily visible at a distance, and it doesn’t matter what she’s wearing. It’s also completely automatic. When she enters the space her collar changes what it displays, when she leaves it changes back. Since your collar doesn’t do that, what does that mean?”
“I’m not a slave.”
“Right. So why were you collared as part of the level one membership ceremony?”
“I don’t know?”
“Honest answer. Good. We require that all female members over the age of 10 wear a control collar. That makes us consistent with the Gorean Hunting Preserve, other national Gorean associations and several other nations. Of course, that only applies to members. Once you joined, that code applied, and you were collared as part of the ceremony.
“One of the issues the Committee has with you is that you haven’t contracted with a trainer to learn how to use it. Members of the Guild of Slave Trainers will be quite happy to contract with you for that task; it is not slave training. You’ll most likely get one of our advanced apprentices or junior journeymen.
“Now. Is that part of the reason you were acting like a slave?”
“I thought I was supposed to, mistress!”
“I can see that. I’ll mention it to the Committee; I’ve seen it happen before. This is something that really should be explained up front. If your attitude is that a control collar is for slaves, then you should have gotten it before the ceremony. If your attitude was that it was part of the requirements, then doing it during the ceremony is a good piece of ritual.
“Before we leave this, there’s one more piece. We’ve discussed the collar; what was the other piece?”
“Branding?”
“Right. We can’t brand our girls as a regular practice; the Health Service wouldn’t like it. What have you noticed about the girls who are wearing camasks?”
“Um. They’ve all got a letter K on their left thigh?”
“Exactly right. That’s the mark. All Gorean trained slavegirls are marked that way. Did you notice anything else about them?”
“Well,” she thought a moment, “some of them seem to be a solid purple, and some seem to be several different colors.”
“Good observation. The solid mark is the old style; it’s permanent in the same sense that Slaveowner’s Consortium ID numbers are permanent: it’s a DNA mod to the skin that either has to be reversed or removed surgically.”
“So we really do follow the stories.”
“As closely as it’s possible to get here and now. Sometimes it’s closer than others. Now the second kind means that they’ve got the advanced version of the Environmental Enhancement modification. We integrate the kef in three places: on the left thigh and on the front and back of the left shoulder. The coloring is the same as the kef they would show on their control collar, and it will change in about 20 minutes if that coding changes.”
“Um.” Shirley thought a moment. “I think I see.”
“That’s actually preferred for a number of reasons we won’t go into for a while. Let’s go back to the first question. There’s another reason the first three masters you approached turned you down. What was it?”
“Another reason?” Her brow furrowed. “They don’t do this?”
“Got it. They mostly don’t do the introductory orientation, so they haven’t memorized the list of points to cover. I do occasionally.
“Now that you understand this, you are going to quit acting like how you imagine a slavegirl should act. You are not a slavegirl. You will not be until you’re trained, you submit and you’re marked. Once we accept your submission you will act like a slavegirl because that’s what you will be: you won’t have any choice in the matter.
“Right now you are a first level association member, which means that, while you are not precisely an outsider, you are exploring the scene to determine where, if anywhere, you fit. You are Shirley. You are interested in exploring whether your true nature is to be a marked Gorean slave girl. You are not going to call anyone master or mistress until you’re trained and we accept your submission. Then your owner will tell you how he wants you to address him. Understand so far?”
“Uh, yes, m.. Oh!”
“I’ll overlook it. Once. You’re learning. You can call clearly dominant men sir, and clearly dominant women ma’am. The operative phrase there is clearly dominant. If you would not use that honorific on the street, you are not to use it here unless someone who is clearly in authority directs you to. Understood?
“Uh, yes ma’am.”
“Good. I’m a dominant female. It’s appropriate. It’s not appropriate to use it in every sentence.”
Shirley nodded.
“Before we go on, who do you think we are? That is, Goreans.”
Shirley frowned. “I thought I knew. Now I’m not sure. The association site isn’t clear!”
“You’re right about that. Sometimes I think the Caste of Scribes holds contests to see who can write the most stultifyingly boring prose, and the winner gets to work on our public presence. I could say we’re a lifestyle organization; while it’s true it doesn’t say a whole lot.
“We’re a number of things, depending on how you look at us. Legally, we’re organized as a Private Relationship association, or rather a layered collection of associations. Membership is by contract. We have over a million members, and we’re growing several percent a year. That gives us a bit less than one percent of the authorized population of the North American Association. We are, in fact, the largest non-religious life-style organization.
“We’re based on the canon of Gor stories from the middle 20th century, as far as it’s possible to be here and now. We have a lot of members from before we reorganized in the mid 40s who feel that it’s quite important to keep as close to the canon as possible.
“Our view of slavery is based on the Gorean canon, and is quite different from the common view in either the North American Association or elsewhere in the world. Our way of training slaves does things that can only be understood in view of the canon stories.
“We have very specific expectations for how our members organize their lives. We have roles for free men, free women, pleasure slaves and work slaves as well as some less usual roles. Whatever the role, we expect our members to live it, and the Council is not lax in taking disciplinary action when a member strays too far. We train our slaves to very high and specific standards.
“We expect free men to be in control of their females without being tyrannical about it. We expect free women to accept that their men make the final decisions without being meekly subservient. In fact, we expect that most relationship decisions are made by mutual consent after an appropriate amount of discussion. When whatever it is doesn’t resolve though, we expect that the men have the final word.
“Above all, we are a lifestyle organization. Our membership is mostly composed of people who like living in a more structured environment than the outer society provides; they also like the ideas behind the Gorean canon.
“I think that covers the basics. Before we go on, I’ve got one more question. How do you think a Gorean slavegirl differs from the usual run of NAA slaves?”
“Um. I’m not sure?”
“Clearly. It’s possible to read the canon stories for pleasure without getting the essential pieces, and that’s one. There’s a saying ‘a slave is to be used’ that’s central to how slavery works in the larger society outside of this one. Within the canon stories there’s a theme that a woman’s function is to be pleasing to men. There’s another theme that a slave is an animal; that is, not fully human. There’s a fairly complicated interaction among the three notions. One of the irritations people have had with you is that you’ve been focusing on the peripheral details while completely missing the central points.
“Let’s start out with the notion that a woman’s function is to be pleasing to men. This is one of those places where the canon stories almost get it right, but are far enough off the mark to be confusing.
“A woman’s function as a female, as distinct from a male, is to bear and raise children. That’s basic: without children there is no next generation. There’s nothing that says that any specific woman has to do that, and a fair number don’t. However, enough have to so there is a next generation.
“Being beautiful and being pleasing are not primary functions in the same sense. They are instinctive strategies for attracting men with prime genetics to sire her children and support the family while she’s raising the kids. As a society we’ve delegated when a woman can get pregnant to the Birthright Lottery, which takes all that into account: you get preference for family stability, good genetics, good earning potential and a bunch of other things that go along with them.
“The Gorean Association emphasizes those aspects of femininity. That’s one of our attractions for women: we support aspects of a woman’s life that she’s attracted to naturally, that is, instinctively.
“One of the foundation pieces of a Gorean female’s life is to bring pleasure and harmony to the people around her. It has to do with the effect her presence has on the other people in the environment through such things as how she’s dressed, how she speaks, how she moves. That does not mean either being useful or being sexy. It also goes way beyond simply not being irritating or distracting. That’s background.
“The foreground is just as important: bringing pleasure to a specific person. As a free woman, you would, of course, concentrate more on your free companion’s pleasure; as a slavegirl you would concentrate on your owner’s pleasure. Regardless, you always work on making your presence contribute to the harmony, beauty and enjoyableness of whatever activity you’re participating in for everyone present. That doesn’t necessarily mean an active participation; a lot of your contribution is the way you dress, the way you talk, the way you move. That’s something you can start right now, and it’s something you’ll continue to improve for the rest of your life. With me so far?”
“Sort of. Once question? You said sexy wasn’t part of it?”
“That’s a common confusion. Sex is a natural function, and we expect most of our members to be good at pleasuring their partners. Sex isn’t something you do for hours on end, day after day. At least you don’t do it unless you’ve got one of the sex slave enhancements installed! Sex appeal is only part of being beautiful, and it’s something that a woman has to learn to turn on and off, or at least moderate or emphasize, depending on the situation. There are some signals that indicate whether a woman is interested in male attention from other than her free companion or owner. You’ll learn them. We aren’t amused by sexual predators, and we aren’t amused by women who are constantly on the prowl, either.”
Shirley nodded.
“Another piece is that the canon stories regard slaves as somewhat less than human. While that’s a typical exaggeration, it has a kernel of truth. We, that is to say human beings, tend to form groups, and we have standards of conduct we adhere to with people in our group, and different standards of conduct for our interactions with people that aren’t in our group. Gorean free men and women form one group, Gorean slaves form a different group. The saying ‘a slave has no rights’ is not precisely accurate, but it’s close enough to form a touchstone for our standards of conduct. Let’s look at that for a moment. What’s a right?”
“Life, liberty...?”
“From the Declaration? Those are examples of specific rights. I’m looking for the underlying definition. How do you tell whether something is a right, here and now, without looking at a law book or a civics textbook?”
“Hum,” Shirley said as she sat back a bit. “That’s something I never thought about.”
“Well, people normally don’t. It’s actually easy: a right is something that a society guarantees to its members. Rights aren’t something that a person has intrinsically, regardless of the fine rhetoric of the Declaration. A right is something that someone has as a member of a specific group or society. When the right is violated, someone will do something about it. Different societies expect people to defend their rights more or less vigorously, but the key point is that other people will rally around to also defend that right if it’s violated. So how do you think that applies here and now?”
“You can’t take away my rights as a citizen, surely?”
“Of course not. However, and this is the crucial point, it’s up to the slave’s owner to make sure that how he treats her is in accord with the laws, regulations, codes and so on and so forth. That’s part of the Gorean Association’s code, and the member’s clan or the member’s city council will intervene if he gets out of line. He should never let the situation go far enough that there are Health Service or other legal entanglements.
“We interpret ‘a slave has no rights’ to mean that it’s not her responsibility to defend her rights. Many slave girls don’t bother learning any more about them than they need to in order to please their owners. It’s not just a waste of time, knowing it could interfere with what her owner wants her to do.”
“Couldn’t that get abusive?”
“It could, but it usually doesn’t. You do know the ways that a regular slave is protected, right?”
“I know they are, but I’m not at all sure of how.”
“Lots of people aren’t. There are two major systems. One is the national auction. It matches what the owner wants with what the girl can do and will find acceptable, and it also matches their personalities and management styles. The pool is large enough that it finds really good matches most of the time.
“Ah. I knew that. I think.”
“The second one is that the Health Service and the police services monitor all control collars and wrist controllers.”
“They do what!”
Deana had to fight to suppress a giggle. “They monitor your control collar. It’s so they can do emergency intervention quickly, but it works just as well to spot persistent patterns of unhappiness or abuse. It’s all done with AIs, of course; you don’t get a real human involved unless the AI signals that something’s wrong.”
“Oh! That explains how they react so quickly. I’d never thought of how they did it.”
“That’s how. We have our own internal auction that does just about everything the national auction does. We also monitor all of our member’s control collars and wrist controllers, as well as their outside slave’s control collars. We try to stay out ahead of the AIs, and also look for some different things than the Health Service or police services.”
“So what you’re telling me is that a slave’s rights are protected in a practical sense. That does make sense, now that I think about it; if they weren’t there would be real trouble. Now I really don’t understand ‘a slave has no rights’.”
“You’re looking at it from the outside. Look at it from the inside: not having rights means that there isn’t anything she can object to because it’s wrong from a societal view. She can certainly object because she can’t do something, she doesn’t know how to do something, she thinks it will turn out badly and her owner needs to take that into account and so on and so forth. She can, and should, object if she gets major emotional pushback. She can’t disagree because it’s simply wrong. Once we’re done with core training she understands that on a very fundamental, almost instinctive, level. That doesn’t necessarily clear out all past habits, of course. There’s no practical way to find all of them, for one thing. It’s really kind of a touchstone: when she finds herself thinking that her owner has violated her rights, she has an almost instinctive reaction: ‘oops!’ She’s not allowed to let it fester, she has to discuss it. So we don’t just say it and let it lie there, we actively take advantage of that attitude. Many owners will take it a lot farther.
“Let’s start with the classic example from the outer society: a slave has a right to renounce the contract at any time, for any reason or no reason at all. Her owner does not have to make it easy, or even possible, for her to do so. How does that work in practice?”
“That’s what the Devotion is for.”
“The Devotion is for Transferable Unrestricted Use contracts. It can’t be used for any other form of slave contract. Other contracts use something like the Slavegirl module. Our system will let a slave exit cleanly, which isn’t possible with the Devotion, but she won’t except for really unusual circumstances.”
“I suppose you’re not going to explain that further?”
“Not right now. Let’s take another example. What are most of the girls here wearing?”
“Camasks.”
“Do you know why?”
“Um, because it’s code?”
“Well, partly. We try to keep the codes as simple and general as possible so our members don’t have to be lawyers, and so that we keep disputes to a minimum. The slave’s dress code is relatively simple once you’ve worked through it.
“The underlying principle is that slaves will wear something that shows their kef, or one of their kefs. A slave tunic is also acceptable, of course, but it’s getting less and less so unless the girl has one of the later versions of the Environmental Enhancement that puts the kef on both the front and back of her left shoulder. So both tunics and the daytime casual outfit of shirt and shorts are fine. With me so far?”
Shirley caught up her notes. “So an off the shoulder style would be fine as well? At least if it shows a kef on the shoulder?”
“Of course. Beyond that, there are three levels.
“The first level is for outside, open and family friendly meetings and office use. It says that she should wear whatever is generally acceptable in the outer community for general, everyday wear. That’s going to be a slave tunic for on duty time, and daytime casual for off duty time, at least if it’s the standard shirt and shorts that season. Some communities may allow other kinds of outfit.
“The second level adds camasks as well as anything you’d see in a more risque club. That’s for first level meetings and gatherings. This happens to be a fairly stuffy community, so it just adds camasks. Other parts of the NAA can be quite different.”
“OK. Like some of the things I’ve seen on the vids from New Rio?”
Deana laughed. “A lot of those fall into the third category: anything goes. Anything, of course, still has to display the kef, but it allows anything from full nudity through sex outfits and fetish gear. That’s the code for at home and full members gatherings and meetings: anything goes as long as it’s either a tunic or it shows the kef.
“Whoever is giving a private gathering or running a club gets to set the acceptable dress code. That’s almost always going to be one of the three I’ve just mentioned. We’re at a first level club, which is why you see a lot of camasks. You haven’t been to a full member’s only event yet.
“Beyond that, a slave wears what her owner tells her to wear. That’s part of our general philosophy: most of our codes are written very simply and broadly so we give our members lots of room to interpret them. If there’s a dispute, everyone has to testify under verification, and if someone was trying some sharp practice, he loses.
“The only ones you can predict are the ones assigned to association staff functions: they’ll wear slave tunics in our licensed black and white diagonal striped pattern. Again, that’s canon: that’s what the city government’s slavegirls in Glorious Ar wore.”
Deana paused to let Shirley catch up her notes and check that she’d gotten it down.
“A camask is one of the canon slave outfits from the early stories, so you’d expect it to be fairly popular. A large part of the reason why more of them are wearing camasks than are wearing tunics is historical: before slave marks were clarified in 2065 we had to use ceder tunics, and many of our members didn’t, and still don’t, like ceder tunics. We got used to camasks, and now we find that we like the style.
“There are several other reasons why camasks are popular.” Deana paused, obviously expecting an answer.
“It exposes the kef on her left leg, but what are the others?”
“That’s the first reason. A second one is that, while the cut of a camask is pretty standard, the patterns and colors can be chosen freely, with one very important exception. Originally it was free style, but then some of the larger clans and families started having standard patterns. That’s evolved into a formal system of coding, and the coding system is registered. While nobody is required to use it, people are not allowed to fake it. If you know the code, you can read a girls’ owner’s clan and family, as well as some other information, right off her camask. We like both the fashion freedom it gives us, as well as the identification. It’s possible for a slavegirl to have several camasks in her wardrobe that superficially look very different, but that all have the same identification coded into them.
“The last reason is that, in many places, the camask violates outside social norms for propriety. It isn’t street legal. The open sides and lack of any undergarments emphasize that she wears what her owner wants her to wear, regardless of the current style, fashion or propriety.”
Shirley frowned. “So if I saw one of our slavegirls outside, she’d either be wearing a tunic or short shorts?”
“Yes. A tunic says she’s on duty, shorts say that she isn’t.”
“So the main point of this is that she doesn’t choose what to wear?”
“Right. Her style or look is her owner’s decision. How detailed an owner gets is also his decision. Most owners aren’t going to micro-manage to the extent of picking her outfits and dictating which one she will wear when, although some do. Of course, an owner with any sense will display her so she looks good since it reflects on his social standing, and most male owners will accept her advice. I know a number of woman who chose their maid’s outfit as part of accessorizing their own.”
“So ‘a slave has no name’ is the same thing?”
“It’s part of it. For most people their name is bound up with their identity. The only standard identity a slavegirl is allowed to have is that of ‘so and so’s slavegirl’. Everything else is at her owner’s whim. When someone buys a slave, he’s going to give her a name that pleases him, and he’s usually going to make sure it’s not one she’s had before, and also that it’s different from any other woman in his immediate environment. So if someone learns that her friend Shirley became a slavegirl, she can look for Shirley all she wants, but she won’t find her. The slavegirl formerly known as Shirley is now known as Tina, or Laverne, or whatever. The privacy laws won’t let her former friend do searches that could find her unless she’s got an overriding reason, and then she’d have to engage a professional to do the actual search.”
“That...” Shirley frowned. “Oh, I see. A slavegirl’s duty is to her owner. So one of the rights she doesn’t have is to maintain her old social network? I never thought of that as a right before!”
“Absolutely correct. Let’s take another one. According to the canon stories, a slave has to obey any free person who gives her an order. That’s impractical in general, but we do it to a limited extent at gatherings like this, and don’t permit it on the street. In other situations it’s up to whoever owns the space to say which set of rules is in effect. Can you tell me the reason?”
“Um. I’d think it would be to eliminate expectations?”
“Right. We could cover a lot more examples, but it’s something you have to experience to really get. Once a girl gets it, everything that stands between her and pleasing her owner drops away. That usually happens during core training; it’s very obvious, and a lot of girls find it very freeing.”
“I’ve noticed that most of them seem to be really happy.”
“They are. The closer you can get to the core personality and the more you strip off conflicting social expectations, the happier someone is going to be. We try to get as close to natural, that is instinctive, behavior as we can. However, I think we’ve beaten this topic to death.”
“Uh, yes.”
“The next topic is the path between where you are now and being a marked Gorean slavegirl. There are two distinct parts: becoming a free woman in the association, and then becoming a slavegirl. You can’t start the second part until you’ve accomplished the first.”
“Why? I want to be a Gorean slave, not a free woman!”
“I understand. However. In the stories there are a number of ways of becoming a slave. There are, for example, bred slaves. I believe that several countries are experimenting with breeding slaves, but here it’s not just illegal, it’s impossible. A slave can’t get a Birthright. There are also captives the Kuuri bring to Gor from Earth. That’s also impossible. All other slaves begin originally as free men and women.”
“Oh. Right. I guess it is canon, but I still don’t understand.”
Deana thought for a moment. “I could say it’s policy, and that would be correct, but there’s a deeper reason. Our version of slavery is different enough from the standard version that an outsider couldn’t give valid consent at a contract machine. The concepts just aren’t there. Living as a free woman for the better part of a year will let you absorb what it means, and make an informed decision.”
“Oh. That makes sense. I think.”
“Good. You’ve taken the first step by becoming a level 1 member. The next step is to join a clan; the clan will assign you an aunt and uncle who will prepare you for full membership. Once you become a full member, it will take several months for you to learn to live by the codes well enough for them to settle in so they’re background.
“That’s when you can start the process of becoming a Gorean slavegirl. It begins with a formal career planning process called Exploration: a guild member explores with you what you want to do. If you still want to become a slavegirl after you finish Exploration, you enter a training contract. That’s actually the critical step. While it’s technically possible to withdraw at any time during core training, we organize it so it’s practically impossible after the first couple of training sessions.
“There are two separate threads that go on from here. Your aunt and uncle will handle training you for your role as a free woman in the Gorean Association. I’ll discuss any further questions you’ve got for your eventual role as a Gorean trained slavegirl. Technically this is part of the Exploration phase; we’re starting it early because you need someone to hold your hand a bit. As long as we’re discussing it you need to explore your feelings and beliefs enough to have a list of questions for me each month, beginning with the next one. We may go out together in between. When we do, I am Deana, you are Shirley. Understood?”
“I think so.”
“Good. Now let’s hit the high points on becoming a full association member. I’ve already said you have to affiliate with a clan and get an aunt and uncle, right?”
“Yes.”
“The reason for that is that we’re organized similarly to the canon stories. The author used Classical Rome as the background. Part of the reason is that, rather than depend on written codes, the clan head, and the head of your family, has broad, sweeping powers to maintain order within the clan or family. If you run into problems you can take it to your aunt and uncle, your family or your clan to discuss it and get some guidance on how to proceed.
“There are several couples who could adopt you as their niece if you approach them properly. That relationship is for us; it’s not a formal adoption in NAA law. It is a matter of contract. One of the contract terms is that you will act as their niece for all association matters until you find a more appropriate relationship. It does not matter how old you are. Until you kiss the Home Stone they are your guardians. They have the usual rights of a guardian over someone who is not regarded as competent. The couple who adopts you will guide you through learning what you need to know, petition the Council for the Home Stone Ceremony, sponsor you in it, and act as your protector while you’re a free woman until you find other arrangements. The husband will be your uncle, his wife will be your aunt. Your new uncle will guide you in the general culture, laws and codes; your new aunt will guide you in proper behavior as a free woman. Since you haven’t contracted with anyone to teach you how to use your control collar, they’ll select a suitable trainer.”
“I have to find an aunt and uncle as sponsors?” Shirley said a bit hesitantly.
“Correct. They’ll do the rest. If you weren’t interested in becoming a slave, I’d be out of the picture at that point, unless they selected me to do your collar training. That is, by the way, unlikely. Collar training is usually done by an advanced apprentice or junior journeyman.”
Shirley nodded.
“Now. Timing. It’s possible but very unlikely that you’ll be ready to kiss the Home Stone next month. The month after is quite possible, and I’d be surprised if it takes longer than three.
“After that, you’ll simply live by the codes. Fluency will come in time as long as you’re diligent in learning and practicing them. You’ll associate with people, possibly find a Free Companion.
“That’s the process for joining. Your aunt and uncle will guide you through it. With me so far?”
“Yes.”
“Now how a free woman becomes a slavegirl. There are several possible paths that are described in the master contract. The one we’re discussing right now is the most common one. It requires that you live as a free woman for several months after you become fluent before we can start the process. Now a question: how long is it going to be before that can happen?”
“Um. Four months?”
“More likely seven to nine, possibly more. Figure two before the Home Stone Ceremony, two to three to learn how to live smoothly as a Gorean free woman, and another three or so to live as a Gorean woman before a trainer will start the exploration.”
“That long?”
“It takes a while, and not all of it is learning to live by the codes themselves. The really major part of it will be learning to be pleasing, in the sense that your presence brightens up the environment and contributes to a feeling of well-being and harmony, regardless of whether you do anything more than stand there. You can start learning that right now; you’ll continue learning it in greater and greater depth as long as you live, and you’ll do that regardless of whether your role is that of a free woman or a pleasure slave. It takes time to get to a platform where your presence is not a distraction or an irritation.
“Once you’ve lived by the codes for a few months, you’ll be ready to start the Exploration. Whoever you select as a trainer will determine if you’ve lived as a free woman long enough to make an informed and responsible decision.
“Exploration begins with an agreement between a trainer and a free woman that she wants to explore whether becoming a marked slavegirl is an appropriate life choice. It’s not a formal commitment; many explorations end by deciding to do something else. You could consider it intensive career counseling.
“Training begins once exploration has ended with a decision that becoming a Gorean slavegirl is not only an appropriate life choice, it’s the one she wants to pursue if she’s suitable and there are no other circumstances which would prevent it. The training agreement is a formal agreement that requires verification. Once a girl starts training, she’s almost always going to complete it; it’s very rare that she withdraws in the middle of core training, or does not make the Declaration. It’s rare because the trainee’s intent is part of what’s verified: she won’t be allowed to start unless there’s a commitment to finish.
“Training has six major pieces: core training, withdrawal, extra training, submission and marking, kennel and corral training and final integration. Some of them are done in parallel, and some of them are done in sequence.
“Training starts with three of the pieces: core training, withdrawal and extra training. The submission and marking ritual is done after core training and withdrawal is complete; kennel and corral training are started after submission and marking. Final integration is done after both core training and submission. With me so far?”
“Um, I think so,” she said as she looked at the diagram.
“OK. Core training does two things. It implants an almost instinctive level knowledge of the Gorean slavegirl role into your brain, both as you would live it and as a free woman would interact with a slavegirl, and it locks it in so it can’t be changed. It also creates a link with your control collar so that if it says you’re a Gorean slavegirl, then you’ll live that role, and if it says you aren’t, then you won’t. It’s a totally automatic switch.”
“That’s, um, interesting.”
“Very. I’m not going to say more about it now. Withdrawal is what it sounds like. You need to withdraw from your old life. Leave your job, say goodbye to people, dispose of property, all that kind of thing. The last thing you’ll do is move out of your apartment. That’s done just before the meeting where you submit and are marked.”
“OK. That makes sense.”
“Additional training varies tremendously. We’ll decide what to train you for based on what we got from Exploration, market conditions and your first owner’s wishes, if you have one.”
“So that’s completely open?”
“Right. We can’t tell in advance. A large part of creating a happy slavegirl is to train her to do what she really wants to do.
“The next piece is submission. That’s done at a first level or full member’s meeting or gathering. The new slave does the full submission ritual under verification. As soon as she’s done that, her status changes to being a slavegirl, and she begins living the role we’ve just implanted. Then we mark her, and she dons a slave tunic.
“Final integration is the last piece: we go through everything she’s supposed to have learned and do any final fixup training. Then she’s either advertised for sale, or she goes to her first owner. Questions?”
“You’re telling me that if my control collar says I’m a Gorean slavegirl, I’ll automatically believe I am one?”
“Exactly correct. Why do we do it that way?”
“I’m not sure?”
“It lets us do that part of training while you’re still a free woman and then leave it. The only noticeable effect is that almost intuitive understanding of what a Gorean slavegirl is about. It also lets us free a slavegirl cleanly in the unlikely event that it’s appropriate.”
“Um. Oh! I see! It’s a module in my brain; you can turn it on and off like a switch.”
“Right. There are also technical reasons for doing it as a module.”
“Oh.” She paused to look at her notes. “Extended training?”
“Core and final training are pretty standard. Extended training is anything but standard. One of the things we do during Exploration is find the girl’s core personality, her talents and interests. That, market demand and her first owner’s desires if she already has one shapes what we do during extended training.”
“So I get to choose part of the training?”
“Why do you think we’d ask you?”
“Huh? Oh. A slave has no rights.”
“Exactly correct. Her responsibility is being open enough to the Exploration that we can find her core personality, talents and interests. We’ll decide what to train her for. The key thing is that any slave needs to enjoy whatever it is her owner has her do, so we need to find things she’ll enjoy doing. If an owner wants a dancer, we need to find a girl who wants to dance and train her to dance; if he enjoys discussing literature, we need to find a girl who enjoys reading and discussing what she’s read, and train her in critical evaluation.”
“That makes sense. I think,” she looked at her notes again, “I don’t have any more questions. Right now at least!”
“Good. Let’s recap.”
“First the legal background: the master contract you will sign with the Gorean Association when you kiss the Home Stone has a section that defines Gorean slavery, and sections that define some of the ways in which a person can become a Gorean slave. Those sections are activated when you enter a training agreement. The training sequence has a number of parts; you become a slavegirl in the middle during a public submission. From that point forward you’ll do what your owner tells you, and behave the way you’ve been trained while doing it.”
“Um.” Shirley frowned. “You keep emphasizing that a slave acts the way she’s trained. What if something unexpected happens?”
“That’s a good question. It doesn’t matter how thoroughly someone has been trained, there’s always some variation, some adaptation to circumstances. There are some situations, such as these gatherings, where we can train a girl to handle everything. In other contexts we allow them to exercise choice. We don’t generally allow them to learn new ways of behaving without asking their owner’s permission, and that’s a key difference.
“Let’s take an example. How do the girls you see here react to orders?”
“Um. They obey immediately?”
“That’s a good observation. The reason they react quickly is that they don’t have to think about it. We trained them so they behave that way, and we removed all the alternatives they may have had previously. The removal is important: if we didn’t remove the old patterns they would have a choice of which patterns to use. That’s the basis of choice on the level of the brain: having more than one pattern that can be used in a situation. Since we removed the other patterns they have no choice: they will act the way we trained them.
“The way they behave at gatherings is part of core training. It’s completely automatic. When she walks into a space where our gathering rules are in effect, she shifts into that set of behaviors. She not only doesn’t have a choice about it, her owner doesn’t have a choice about it either. It’s part of our rules.”
“Oh!”
“Right. The other side of it is that they don’t behave this way anywhere else.”
“So things are a lot more complicated than I thought.”
“Right. It takes a while for it to sink in to where it’s simply the way things are.” Deana paused as she noticed that Shirley looked slagged over.
“Recap. What have I said that’s important enough to take immediate action?”
‘Um.” Shirley shook her head to reorient herself and then consulted her notes. “Three things? First, I’m to quit acting like a slavegirl. Second, I’m to affiliate with a family or clan so I have an aunt and uncle that will take me on as their niece. Third, we’re to get to know each other. I know what you said, but I’d think that it would get in the way of your training me as a slavegirl.”
Deana laughed. “You’d think that. Part of being a Gorean free woman is learning that occasionally acquaintances, sometimes real friends, will become slavegirls, and that you need to behave appropriately when that happens. The first few times it happens will be difficult, possibly a bit traumatic. That’s one of the things your aunt and uncle will help you through. After that, well, losing someone is never easy.
“Right now my attitude toward you is that you’re considering joining the Association. Once you kiss the Home Stone, my attitude will shift: you’ll be an association member. As far as I’m concerned, you won’t be a slavegirl until you finish Exploration and enter the training contract. Once you do, my attitude toward you, as well as every other member’s attitudes, will shift. The first few times can be rough, and sometimes a member needs a bit of counseling. The reason it doesn’t bother me is that it’s my job: I can’t do a good job of Exploration without getting to know the person, and around half of them are going to become slavegirls. I’ve done it enough times that it’s not a loss: it’s simply someone moving on to express her true nature as a slavegirl.
“Anyway, you’ve got the three areas you need to deal with right now.”
Shirley walked into the club and and looked around for Deana. When she couldn’t find her, she picked up a drink. Then she noticed two items of furniture that she hadn’t seen before, standing next to the usually unoccupied girl cages. She wandered over to look at them. They looked like some kind of bondage rack. Curious. Even more curious, each of them had a large display, currently turned off, next to them.
She found a table to settle in to enjoy the current group on stage while she waited for Deana. She reflected that things were certainly a lot friendlier than before, now that Deana had gotten her straightened out and Stan and Karen had taken her under their wings.
Several minutes later a man walked in, followed by two male slaves who were each pushing a handcart with a girl box, each complete with its boxed slavegirl. Shirley sat back and admired the view; those two guys were handsome specimens, with the combination of slightly feminine features and hard muscles that most people seemed to prefer in male slaves. The skin tight black and white striped slave tunics rippled with their movement. She briefly wondered if either of them was available for a short term lease.
They pushed the boxes against the two slave cages. The sides slid up, letting the girls crawl into the cages and stand. They pulled thick hoses out of the bottom of the boxes, snapping one end to the girl’s bottoms and the other to the base of the boxes. Life support units, Shirley thought. They must expect the girls to be in there a while.
A few minutes later Deana walked in, leading a young woman on a leash. The girl wore a cheap daytime casual shorts outfit, and had her hands cuffed behind her. She led the girl to one of the racks and looped the leash through a ring on the side. She took the cuffs off the girl’s wrists, gave her a big hug and a quick kiss and then turned and walked away.
Deana picked up a drink and joined Shirley.
“What’s that?” Shirley asked, gesturing at the tethered girl.
“What do you think?” Deana replied.
“She’s being punished for something?”
Deana laughed. “No. Go read the display.”
Shirley got up and walked over, being careful to pay attention to how she moved. She didn’t notice as Deana watched her closely and then nodded in approval.
The girl watched calmly as Shirley walked up. “You’d like to buy me, mistress?” she asked softly.
“Uh,” Shirley said, a bit confused. “I’ve never seen this before. Why are you leashed here?”
“Oh. You’re new. I’m a captive; I’m going to submit and become a slavegirl.” She gestured at the display.
Shirley looked at it. It said that the girl’s old name was Terri, and she’d been captured a bit over a month before. Deana was her trainer. Her current Beauty Index was 123, her estimated BI by the time she’d be ready to be sold would be 137. It could be raised to 148 if her first owner didn’t mind changing her so she wasn’t recognizable. She’d be offered for sale in another month, and she was being trained as a singer and actress. Shirley selected another screen and saw a checklist of standard trainings and surgeries. Many of them were checked off, several of them had a ‘todo’ mark.
“You’re going to submit?” Shirley asked.
“Well, of course.”
“You could, like, refuse?”
“Now why would I do that?”
“I’m not sure. It just seems so, like, unreal.”
Terri laughed. “You really are new. Our slavegirls know they’re going to be slavegirls for the rest of their lives. I thought I knew that when I started training; now I really know it.” She gestured toward her heart. “It’s, like, the way it should be. Obvious, really. Like the sun coming up in the morning.”
“Oh,” Shirley said. She shook her head and turned to look at the two girl cages. One of the girls was watching the crowd, the other was looking at a display she’d mounted on the side of the cage where she would notice anyone walking up.
The display on the side of the first girl’s cage proclaimed: Faux Slavegirl! Just Trained at the Gorean Hunting Preserve! Five year contract! You can take this luscious sexpot home tonight for the next five years for only CR 9,000! In smaller print it said that the minimum bid was CR 2,000.
The amount made Shirley’s eyes widen. She flipped the display to the next page. Personal Service Professional Sex Worker trained at Happy Harry’s Sizzling Slavegirls! Happy Harry’s logo, she thought, was definitely not family friendly. Or work safe. Any hotter and it might melt the display. She giggled at the vision of a melting display.
“I like girls too,” the sultry voice knocked her out of her inspection of the data plate. Shirley felt herself flush. Then the voice giggled. “I do sultry well, don’t you think?” the girl asked in a more normal voice.
“It’s certainly got me hot!” Shirley agreed. “Unfortunately,” she shrugged.
“You don’t have that kind of money,” Lot 57 agreed. “You also don’t look like the kind of girl who would enjoy her own personal sex goddess enough to keep the sex goddess from asking to be sold to another worshiper. That’s fine,” she shrugged slightly, putting her entire body into the movement and not incidentally causing Shirley’s eyes to widen. “I don’t think they’re expecting to sell me tonight; I’m on display to announce that I’m a faux slavegirl now. Not that I expect anyone to notice.”
“Oh? You’re hot enough to wreck a few eyeballs!”
“Sure. That. Nobody’s going to recognize me; they changed my appearance to get me up to a BI of 173.”
“Why should anyone need to recognize you?”
“They put us on display so people know what we are now. It’s lots better than an announcement. Now Lot 38 is still recognizable.” She waved at the girl in the next cage. “At her price someone might walk off with her tonight. She’s a good housekeeper, can keep her owner’s bed warmed more than adequately, keep his records straight and do most of his research. Any scholar in his right mind ought to snap her up like a shark takes a swimmer.”
“And you?”
“I’m not so bad at housekeeping that my owner has to have another girl to straighten up after me.”
“Almost,” Lot 38 put in.
Lot 57 laughed. “Off with you!” she giggled at the gesture.
Shirley was halfway back to her table before it occurred to her to pay attention to her walk.
“Startled you, didn’t it?” Deana asked as she sat.
“Um, yes. Why is she so calm about it? I expect I’ll have butterflies when I’m up there!”
“You’ll be just as calm.”
“I will?”
“Sure. She knows what she is, and, to her, that’s exactly what she should be. She knew she wanted to be a slavegirl before she agreed the training contract; she’s had that calm certainty that she was a slavegirl since about a week into core training. Intellectually, she knows that submitting is a critical legal step, but as far as she’s concerned emotionally it’s just a piece of ritual that her owners insist on as part of training. For her, moving from her old apartment into our facility is more meaningful; now her training can go faster. If we’d have had to stop before the end for some reason, she’d have been really disappointed.”
“Now I’m getting confused!”
Deana laughed. “Of course. You know the core of the slave contract. Not the words, the usually unstated agreement between owner and slave, right?”
“I guess not.”
“A slave wants someone else to make her life decisions for her. When someone cedes rights, what she’s saying is ‘I don’t want to have to decide what to do with my life. Here, you do it for me’.”
“I’m going to have to let that settle.”
Deana laughed again. “Seeing a submission ritual is one of the experiences you need before you kiss the home stone. Your aunt and uncle would have made sure you saw one. A few candidates decide not to go on after seeing it.”
She laughed again. “Not to change the subject or anything, how do you like Stan and Karen?”
“I wish I’d have had them while I was growing up. We’re discussing whether I should move in with them.”
“That could get interesting. They set you up with a collar trainer?”
“Yes. I’m half way through Basic Collar Obedience. That’s weird! The reader stuff is very useful. Especially the wrist display they had me get.” She flexed her left wrist so Deana could admire it.
“It certainly is.”
“I always thought they were guy things.”
“Well, they are. They’re also very useful fashion accessories for us girls.” Deana laughed. “You’ve adapted to the lie detector?”
Shirley shook her head ruefully. “It took a couple of days for it to get through to me that I couldn’t lie to either Stan or Karen. What I find spooky is that they’re so understanding. They’re strict: they won’t let me past whatever it was until I tell them the truth, but there’s no punishment. There’s not even any disapproval.”
“There won’t be as long as you keep making progress on telling the strict truth all the time with them. Truth is almost the hardest lesson to learn before you are allowed to kiss the Home Stone. Gorean females are not allowed to lie. It isn’t permitted. All of the foster parents teach their nieces that truth is the only policy. It not only takes a while to settle in, you’ll find lots of places where you’re not even aware that you’re not telling the truth. And you’ll find that truth has a lot of depth that you were never aware of.”
“There’s something that I’m not getting about the finances. I’m paying the association my monthly dues, but I’m not paying Stan and Karen, and I’m not paying for my collar training. Something is very strange.”
“You won’t pay for your slave training either. The association pays for all of that. I’m not going to talk about our finances. First, I’m not the best person to talk about them, and second it’s none of your business until after you kiss the Home Stone.
“I take it you’ve got a list of questions?”
“Several. I finally realized there was something weird about how we sell slaves. Most of them aren’t slaves according to the NAA; how do we sell them? Stan and Karen said to ask you; that’s not really in their area of expertise.”
“We don’t sell them. It only looks like we do.”
“Huh?”
Deana laughed. “That gets just about everyone. There’s a national slave auction where we buy and sell slaves. It’s obvious, right?
“The NAA doesn’t have slaves, so we obviously can’t sell what we don’t have. We sell the owner’s rights in Transferable Unrestricted Use contracts. That’s one of those legal fig leaves that lawyers love.
“Most of our girls are members at large of the national association; the rest are owned by the national. If you buy or sell one, you’re actually buying or selling the right to use her.”
“Oh. That makes sense. Now I’m wondering about the games. Stan and Karen didn’t want to talk about them too much.”
“They wouldn’t. It’s better to go to one and see it for yourself. I take it you’re puzzled about how a girl gets offered as a prize?”
“Right.”
“It’s very common. Many of the prizes for warriors are slavegirls; there’s something in the male psyche that really does like to fight over who gets the girl. To enter a contest he has to have a female to put up as a prize. While trained slavegirls are not all that expensive, an adequate ransom fund only has to cover what a dealer is likely to pay for an untrained slavegirl, plus some other stuff. That’s substantially cheaper than buying a slavegirl to offer as a prize for the first contests. Back when my ex-boyfriend and I were going to the games we’d buy a girl from a dealer as a starter. Pete is well above average as a warrior; we usually ended up with several girls. We financed our trips by selling them.”
“You sold them?” Shirley asked, wide-eyed.
“Usually. Some of them were already slavegirls, some of them were captives. Most of the time we already had a perfectly adequate slavegirl of our own. Whether we accepted what was left of a captive’s ransom fund or enslaved her and sold her to a dealer depended on what the dealer was offering.” She paused a moment.
“When you didn’t have one?”
“We usually took one of the captives we liked. My ex-boyfriend and I liked doing most of our own training, and we liked to start fresh.”
“You did your own training?”
“Yes. A lot of our members like to do their own training. Think back on what we discussed last time.”
Shirley looked at her notes. “There’s core training, final training and additional training?”
“Right. Core training has to be done by the Guild, and corral training was done by the dealer we used to keep her during the games. We took her into town to be marked, and then we did enough initial training to hold her until we could get the Guild to do core training. We did the additional training ourselves.”
“I see. You can do that to a captive?”
“Yes. Captives have no say in whether or not they get enslaved or ransomed. It’s strictly her captor’s decision. Look at it this way: if she isn’t part of her captor’s social network, he’ll do what benefits him, and if she is, he can’t afford to look weak. I do know people who would accept the ransom if it wasn’t too far under the dealers’ best bid, but it wasn’t usual.”
“Oh! So she could wind up anywhere.”
“Not really. We have a master contract with the Games Authority: if one of our members is enslaved, she stays with us rather than becoming a GHP citizen. We won’t assign the use of any of our members to outsiders except in limited circumstances. If someone who wasn’t a member of the NAA Gorean Association won one of them, the association would only assign her use for the duration of the Games. He has to accept her ransom or sell her to a dealer when he leaves. Then the dealer would have to sell her to an association member.”
“I need to let this settle. I’m sure I’ll have more questions later.”
“Well, hold them. We’re about to do the submission ceremonies.”
“Oh! I want to see this,” she said as they turned to look at the space.
Deana gave her hand a squeeze, then she rose and walked to the front. She went to the girl she’d led in, and took the leash, gently leading her to the center of the open space.
She pointed at the floor in front of her and said one word. “Submit!”
The girl looked at her, grinned and then flowed fluidly onto her knees. She bent forward to where her body was horizontal to the floor, hands stretched out over her lowered head, wrists crossed.
Deana slid a pair of cuffs over the waiting wrists, and gently pressed them together. A bong from what sounded like a hanging gong rang out.
Deana held the kneeling girl as she ripped her clothes off, piece by piece. Then she pulled her up by the leash and pointed at the frame.
The girl walked over to it, stepped up on the low platform and turned around. Deana swiftly tied her immovably to the device. Then she took out a stencil and carefully smoothed it over the girl’s left thigh. She sprayed it with a solvent. She did the same to the girl’s belly and the top of her left breast.
She stepped back and nodded once. “Your new name,” she said in a voice that carried to the rest of the room, “is Lot Number 49.”
“Thank you, mistress,” Lot Number 49 replied. Deana fiddled with her wrist controller for a few seconds. She checked what the display and the girl’s control collar showed, and then stroked her encouragingly. She turned and walked away, leaving the girl tied to the rack while the inks soaked into her skin.
“You’re just going to leave her there?” Shirley asked as Deana sat down.
“Depends on how much attention she attracts. If she attracts a lot, I’ll hook up a life support unit and leave her on the rack until I’m ready to leave. If not, I’ll put her in a girl box in about an hour. She’ll go to the dealer’s corral with the others.”
Shirley took a deep breath as she watched one of the other trainers walk up to take the second girl’s submission.
After the second girl had submitted and been marked, she took another deep breath. “Not to change the subject or anything, but you did mention keeping them in a corral?”
Deana laughed. “It’s how we warehouse our slaves when we’re training them or holding them for sale. Corrals are the same as kennels; they’re outside rather than inside and the elements are packaged differently. The first sight does tend to drive human rights ideologs up the wall like they had a rocket assist.
“Remember that a slave has no rights. She doesn’t get to choose how she’s kept. As long as we stay in legal and regulatory compliance we can keep her however we want. Corrals, slave pits and cages are part of the canon. We’ve even had a few dealers experiment with girl herds, but that only works for ponygirls and centaurs, and then not always. Corrals and slave pits are a lot cheaper than the usual warehouse module, and corrals are portable.”
“Oh. That kind of makes sense.” She frowned at the display on her wrist controller.
“Another one. How do you do it?”
“Do what? Training?”
“Yes.”
Deana laughed again. “You tell me one first. What’s your impression of how you’re being collar trained?”
“It seems too easy, somehow.”
“Good observation. It is easy. Most of the staff in a kennel are slavegirls; kennels don’t buy them for their intelligence or their ability to follow complex procedures and make intelligent decisions on the fly. Quite the opposite: the mix in a kennel is below average even for the typical high school dropouts that become slavegirls. It has to be easy.
“All the conditioned routines use a standard control collar module: the Conditioned Response Installer. Each one has its own AI. What the trainer does is provide some explanations and direction, mostly from the instruction manual, and cheers the trainee on. The AI could just as well give the instructions through the earplugs.
“So one of your answers is that we use the same basic technique for most of the actual trainings: the Conditioned Response Installer and a standard or tailored AI. Most of the behaviors we train you can get elsewhere; our AI’s are tailored for us, but they’re not that different.
“Our unique expertise in the Guild is the core training module. I’m not going to tell you how it works; just that it’s an advanced technique that you can’t get elsewhere. The rest of our expertise is in putting the entire package together into a functioning Gorean slavegirl who doesn’t stand out as anything unusual when she’s taking her time off.”
“From what you said a couple of weeks ago, I’d think she wouldn’t be able to take time off.”
“Oh, come on Shirley. You’re still a bit too far into the canon stories. We’re in the NAA, and she’s a citizen or a resident. An owner has to pay attention to working hours and conditions.
“We expect our slavegirls to be able to find something they’ll enjoy doing on their time off. We don’t expect them to miss it if they don’t get it. Remember that, in our view, a slave has no rights. Time off isn’t a right for the slave, it’s an obligation for the owner because of NAA regulations. It’s also good slave management. You know: ‘all work and no play...’. Part of slave training is to make sure they can take time off and fit in smoothly. Your aunt and uncle will cover how the codes require you to behave when you see a Gorean slavegirl on her time off.
“A second point is that we expect to enjoy our girls, not just get work out of them. An enjoyable slavegirl is intelligent and has a well stocked mind, or at least something she does well that can keep her owner amused and his attention engaged. She doesn’t get that from watching bored housewife comedies or reading romances.
“A third point: there’s no way we can hide the kef if the current casual style is short shorts, and it is most seasons, so we don’t bother.”
“Oh. That makes sense.” Shirley took a moment to look at her notes. “Let’s see if I’ve got this straight. A Gorean slavegirl is not a slave in a legal sense; she’s been trained to act like one.”
Deana frowned. “I don’t think you’re clear on how contract slavery works.”
“I thought I was, but I guess not?”
“I don’t think you’d have said it that way if you really were clear on the concept. If it looks like a penguin and it waddles like a penguin, it’s got to be a penguin. This time it isn’t. Quite.
“The first key concept is that the NAA does not have slavery as a matter of law, it’s a matter of contract. The legal system allows a person to cede rights, and it regulates the process, but that’s as far as it goes.
“The next key point is that the legal changes in 2050 defined it precisely. Ceding rights, or rather ceding a rights list that includes the slave platform, is what makes a person a slave in the common use of the term. Whether that’s ordinary rights, extraordinary rights or the rights list we have for Gorean slavegirls makes no difference.”
Shirley looked at her notes again. “Let me see if I’ve got it this time. She’s a slave, but she’s been trained to act differently than the standard model of slavery.”
“I think that’s got it.”
“Well, maybe.” Shirley frowned at her notes. “It’s the two girls in the slave cages that have got me now. They’re what? Faux slaves?”
“Right. Did you notice their kefs?”
Shirley shook her head. “Lot 57 had me going enough that I didn’t.”
“She’s something else, isn’t she? The first two segments are yellow and blue.”
“Yellow? Something about a kennel? Blue is the association, of course. How does that work?”
“The usual course glosses over the Slave Platform and Kennel Platform because you almost never see them by themselves. The Kennel Platform is the most a girl can cede and still be considered to be a faux slavegirl. It’s our form of a Limited contract, and it’s not all that easy to set up properly.
“Those two signed a contract with a facilitator who handles the process. He guides them through withdrawal, monitors their progress through kennel training here and core training at the Gorean Hunting Preserve, and collects whatever they bring at auction. It isn’t his major income, but he does make a pretty good bit of change at it.
“It’s usually about two months from the end of withdrawal to when they’re delivered to their first owner.”
“Um. Why did she decide to be a sex slave?”
“She didn’t. Remember that a slave has no rights. He had the kennel run a career assessment, and then sent her to Happy Harry’s for sex slave training. Five years from now she’ll probably submit formally; there isn’t a whole lot of demand for sex goddesses as independents that can’t manage to handle their own affairs, and she can’t. Or at least she hasn’t been able to.
“Now Lot 38 is in a very different position. If she gets snapped up by a scholar she’s going to have five years to learn his business. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if she marries him after her five years are up; if not she’ll almost certainly go back to university and then into the same field.”
“How’s it going?” Deana asked Shirley. The two of them were sitting at a back table at the monthly gathering, watching a pair of dancers on the stage execute a carefully choreographed dance illustrating a recent piece of political nonsense. Half the audience was laughing; the choreographer was excellent and his troupe of slave dancers was very well trained.
“I’ve finished collar training,” she answered. “I don’t think I’ve got the basic modules down all that well yet, but they’re coming. You were utterly right about truth telling: Aunt and Uncle just keep drilling down. I’m past being chagrined; now I’m wondering what they’ll find next. They’ve moved me in and they’ve started teaching me the codes. My head is spinning; some of them are so strange!”
“That’s not surprising; etiquette usually makes no sense. It just is.” Deana laughed. “You have questions?
“Lots. I want to start far away: I don’t understand why girls put themselves up as prizes at the games. I’d think they have a death wish.”
“I think I mentioned that there’s a financial incentive for the warrior: an adequate ransom fund is less expensive than buying a trained slavegirl to use as a prize. Even so, most of them are gamblers. Once they’ve been in one of the dealer’s corrals for a while as a captive, they swear off. Then they’re right back the next year: that kind of risk taking is addictive. The stats are that one in ten becomes a slavegirl. That’s over the span of one session of the Games. If you go to the well too often, though, eventually your luck is going to run out. Look up the Birthday Paradox to see how to work the problem.”
“Oh! I’ve heard of that one. So,” she looked at her wrist controller, “if it’s 90% chance of surviving one Games session, then its, um 81% chance of surviving two and, um, 73% of three and, um, 65% for four. It’s less than half for seven. Pardon for being unladylike, but that um. Well, just um.”
“It does add up. If you offer yourself as a prize once a year, the odds are that you won’t last ten years.”
“How does it work, though?”
“Remember that in the stories, she doesn’t become a slavegirl immediately when her champion loses. She becomes the winner’s captive. So to enter the games she has to put up a ransom fund. It’s up to her captor whether he accepts her ransom fund, enslaves her or keeps her as a captive for a while. If she’s beautiful and passionate, he may well use her as an untrained slavegirl; it’s legitimate to use captives that way. If she isn’t, she’ll probably be put in a dealer’s corral until he needs her for a prize.
“If he turns her over to a dealer, the dealer is allowed to charge her ransom fund for one training, one DNA mod or surgery, and for keeping her in his corral. The first time he’s always going to give her the Environmental Enhancement DNA mod and basic collar and corral training if she hasn’t had them. Our members always have basic collar training, of course, and many of them have the Environmental Enhancement mod as well.
“There are limits on how much the dealer is allowed to take, both on absolute cost and proportion of her fund, whichever is smaller. The way it works out, he can take around half of her fund. That’s for smaller funds, although for larger funds he may go for more expensive modifications and trainings.
“When the games are over, her current captor will decide whether he wants to take what’s left of the ransom fund or enslave her. If he enslaves her he’ll usually sell her to a dealer, but he might keep her to train himself. That’s his choice; if he doesn’t want to keep her he’ll decide based on whether any dealer has a better offer than what’s left in the ransom fund. If he doesn’t accept the ransom, it goes into a pool that’s paid out to the surviving free women who put themselves up as prizes.
“Another consideration is that if she happens to be an NAA Gorean Association member, and he isn’t, he doesn’t get the choice of keeping her. That’s part of our association’s master agreement with the Games Authority, so he’ll either accept the ransom or sell her to the dealer or an association member.
“Dealers don’t always do an additional mod and training. Whether they do depends on a lot of factors. When they do, it’s either to drain her ransom fund or to pump up her price. Or both. A lot of times, if they figure a girl is a keeper, they’ll have a trainer do core training. Once she’s had core training, she’ll leave as someone’s slavegirl. It doesn’t always happen, but it’s very rare that she’s ransomed.
“All the dealers have their own private methods of improving girls’ estimated sale prices. I saw one girl who had what she thought was an adequate ransom fund. It should have been, except that one of the dealers ran her genome through a beauty enhancement program with his own private AI, and it came up with a cheap way of improving her beauty index from 120 to 160. Her estimated sale price went through the roof, and her ransom fund looked pitiful in comparison. I happened to see her afterwards. He managed to squeeze it up to 165, and whoever he had train her gave her all the moves. She was one flaming hot slavegirl!
“There’s another consideration: becoming a Gorean slavegirl is one of the possibilities for a female member. A fairly large number of female members decide to go that way; you’re obviously thinking of it. If a girl puts herself up as a prize, she’s taking a risk, but it’s a risk that still keeps her within the same environment. For a lot of them, the greater risk is losing her boyfriend.
“A final consideration: the reason that more captives aren’t enslaved is that the dealers limit the number of untrained girls they’ll take each session. An untrained girl is going to sit in inventory until she’s trained, and there are a limited number of trainers.”
Deana laughed again. “You have another question?”
“Well, yes. I don’t know if you want to answer this one, though. What keeps them conditioned? Well, you mentioned that a slave has no name. What keeps her from suddenly deciding that she wants her original name back?”
Deana frowned thoughtfully. “We lock the description of a Gorean slavegirl so it won’t change; there’s a collar module that keeps it stable. It’s proof against just about any attempt to change it. She knows that her name is whatever her owner wants to call her; it would never occur to her that her original name matters. She knows it’s there on the official records, but she can’t access it, and she wouldn’t bother if she could.”
“Could you reverse it?”
“There’s no need. If the contract registry in her control collar says she’s no longer a Gorean slavegirl, she’ll pick some other role as her overall place in society. She’ll still know what it is to be one, but as far as she’s concerned, it’s someone else, not her.”
“So that’s how she exits if she does?”
“Right. The contract registry in her control collar defines her overall role in society. That’s part of the core training. It’s a completely automatic switch: the contract registry changes, her understanding of her role in society changes. It’s immediate. It can also be a bit jarring.”
“So how would she exit?”
“Assuming she thinks she’s got a good reason, she asks her owner to free her. He’s required to discuss it. If he agrees he takes it to his clan, and they’ll take it to his Gorean Association City’s council. If they agree, they’ll endorse the petition to the national. Then if the national association’s review board agrees, they’ll release her. They make sure there’s a feasible transition plan as well.”
Shirley said: “Now I’m wondering why the ‘a slave has no name’ rule. It seems like it’s, um, just something from the canon that doesn’t do much here and now.”
“You’d think that. Actually, it does quite a bit. Remember that I said I’d give her a name that I hadn’t used for any of my slavegirls before?”
“Uh, yes.”
“I’d also make sure it was a name that none of her previous owners had used either, and that it didn’t duplicate the names of any women in my acquaintance or household. That helps both of us start off the relationship with fewer old expectations than otherwise, and it prevents a lot of confusions.
“By the way, she isn’t allowed to access her history at either the national records or the association records, and she isn’t allowed to access her legal name at all. All she can access about herself is her current status.
“Then how do they change records?”
Deana frowned. “Oh, you mean how does the system identify who you’re talking about?”
“Uh, right.”
“The primary link is always the direct link from a control collar or wrist controllers, otherwise it’s biometrics. If I want to change one of my slavegirls’ name, it goes from my records through my contracts to her records. Names are totally irrelevant except to identify what contract I’m talking about, and that’s within my records, not the national or association records.
“The national records have a slot for a legal and a use name; the association records don’t record anyone’s name. If I want to find a legal name I’ve got to link to the national records. In fact, I can’t find my Panther Girl’s legal name at all: she’s a Gorean Hunting Preserve citizen. Our national records refer to the GHP’s national records, and they don’t record a legal name for slaves. I’d have to go all the way back to the European Union to find her old legal name, and I don’t have the need to know. She quite literally doesn’t have a legal name. Since I’ve never asked her, she’s the only one that knows what it used to be, and she might not remember.”
“Thanks. Another one.”
Deana held up her hand. “Shirley, there’s something a bit off here. Your questions are all about how it works. That sounds more like you’d like to be an apprentice in the Guild rather than a slavegirl. Someone who wanted to be a slavegirl would be asking questions about what she’d be doing. Or else not asking them at all.”
“Oh. That’s how you learn.”
“Huh?”
“You learn by doing it.”
“Now you’ve got me baffled. Unless you’re planning on waiting for your next lifetime to apprentice with the guild.”
“Oh!” Her face went pale. “I never thought about that.”
“Obviously,” Deana said, a bit dryly. “I’ve got two comments. First, I suspect that means that you need a bit of practice in seeing the obvious consequences of actions so you can make responsible choices. That’s something to talk to Stan and Karen about.
“Now answer me honestly,” she put her arm out in front where she could look at the display on her wrist controller, “was your attraction to being a slavegirl because you wanted it, or because you were confused about how to learn how it worked? Or possibly because of the collaring when you joined?”
“Uh.” The expressions on her face shifted a few times. “Um. Not because I wanted to be a slavegirl permanently. Kind of the rest. I think.”
“That’s what the scanner is showing. You’ve still got a lot of confusion that I’m going to suggest you talk to Stan and Karen about. They’re quite good at helping their nieces and nephews through confusions, at least if it affects how they fit into the Association.
“Now, the next thing I’m going to say is that, if you want to apprentice with the Guild, I’m not yet a Master. We go with the old nomenclature: a Master is entitled to take on apprentices. I’m not that far. I’m fairly close; we don’t do the guild thing where there are a fixed number of Masters. If you want to go with me the next time I go to the Games I might be able to get permission to take you on as my first apprentice, with another Master supervising both of us. I just came back, so it won’t be for another eight or nine months. I had you tentatively scheduled as the last job before I left.”
“Oh, my.”
“One final point. It really is a good idea to experience how it works from inside, and you’ll do that rather thoroughly as part of apprenticeship. However, we do it under circumstances that get the maximum learning for the apprentice safely.”
“Oh.”
“Well, you’re asking a lot of the right questions. Talk it over with Stan and Karen. I’ll mention it to the Guild. Another thing. You haven’t been to one of the weekend or week-long gatherings yet, have you?”
“Uh. No. I didn’t think I was allowed at them.”
“Well, you’re not allowed at full member gatherings until you’ve kissed the Home Stone, but there are several weekend gatherings where first level members are welcome– if they behave themselves - and you have been recently. I’m pretty sure some of them have members of the Guild of Slave Traders, so you’ll get to see what a corral looks like. Talk to Stan and Karen about taking in one or two. If you want to apprentice with the Guild, I’ll introduce you to a guild member who will let you work weekend gatherings to get experience. After you kiss the Home Stone. That’ll be on the very bottom: monitoring the girls, making sure they’re fed and groomed, cleaning out the portable latrines, that kind of thing.”
“Oh my!”
“It’s not a special deal; it’s a necessary set of experiences for an apprentice in the Guild of Slave Trainers. How you do lets the Masters look you over to see if you’re suitable.”
“This time I’ve got a really strange question,” Shirley asked Deana. “Stan and Karen have helped me clear up a lot of my confusion around what I want, and now I’m wondering why we get so many free women who want to become slavegirls?”
Deana shook her head. “That’s a question that I’m just digging into myself as part of my studies to become a Master in the Guild. There are a number of factors, some of which appear to be deliberate. One factor is that we’re not independent of the wider culture around us, and there are a lot of forces in that culture that tend to push women into becoming slaves. Two centuries ago most women didn’t have a choice of career: it was find a husband and raise a family. A century ago it was pretty wide open. Today it’s narrowed again: the choices are husband, family and children; slavegirl or career as a professional, and to be a professional you’ve got to be good. Finishing high school is too tough for some people, university is really tough.
“We’ve got three women for every two men in the younger generations so a lot of women won’t ever have a husband. Raising a family is a young woman’s job: if you start at 25 and space the kids at three years, which is the way the lottery is biased, you’ve shoved the last of them out the door before you’re in your middle 50s. Now what? We encourage wives to stay home and raise their families. Modern medicine has given us another 80 or so years, and lets us look like late teens and early 20s looked a century ago for much of it. Most women have no idea what to do once the last of her brood leaves. In the Gorean Association we encourage our women to serve their Free Companions; once the children leave if she can’t find something else going the rest of the way to becoming a slavegirl is very attractive.
“Our society portrays being a slavegirl as a valid career choice. You’ve got shows like Tumbling Through Time. Goodwife never mentions the possibility of a career for women, and they’re very influential. For a lot of women, it really is a career choice: low end jobs are almost all filled by slaves, and the matching in the national auction makes sure that a girl is matched with a job she can do and that she’ll like, with supervisors that are compatible with her personality and preferred way of being managed. If she can’t find a husband, and she can’t manage the university preparation for a professional career, she doesn’t have any other options.
“I had a relatively low level professional career before I got into the Guild. I got into the Guild because my ex-boyfriend and I did quite a bit of training of our slavegirls, and I liked it. We probably do more training of the free women in the community to enhance their ability to please their companions than we do actual slave training.
“I suppose the easiest way to summarize it is that we’ve discovered we’re riding a tiger, and we’re not sure where it’s headed or how to get off. So we enjoy the ride.”
Shirley shook her head. “That means a lot of studying to figure it out. Now I know the next answer is going to be no. The question is: is there any way I can experience being a Gorean slavegirl for a short time, kind of like a Limited slave contract?”
Deana looked at her strangely. “You’ve forgotten those two girls in the cages last month?”
“Huh. It did say something about five years, but that girl was just so sexy!”
“She got to you, didn’t she?” Deana giggled. “Happy Harry has a reputation.”
“Well deserved, if he turns out girls like that.”
“Regularly. Even so, she was something else. However, you need some background. Those two were faux slaves. You know what that means?”
“Almost or not quite?”
“Literally. If you’d been able to see their kefs, the top frond would have been orange with a red modifier, green, green with a green modifier. Which means?”
“Um.” Shirley pulled out her reader to call up the encoding chart. “Kennel Platform, association, assignable. The red bar is us, the green bar is a limited contract. Kennel platform is strange?”
“Faux slaves always either have that or the Slave Platform. Ours always have the Kennel Platform plus other things that are in the association contract. So why the Kennel Platform?”
“I’ve never looked at faux slaves,” Shirley shrugged.
“I understand. It’s not what you wanted. The difference is fairly simple: the Slave Platform and the Kennel Platform have shared control: the owner sets the context, but the slave has the right to reject most policies, and she also has the right to put in policies that limit what he can do with her. She can also end it early.”
“They’re just playing, right?”
“Not really. The fact that they’ve got those rights doesn’t mean they exercise them at all regularly. For one thing, they had to have a verified intention to see it through before we let them cede rights. We use Core Training on most of them; they quite literally can’t get themselves to believe it’s possible to exit before the contract says they have to.
“Let’s make another distinction before we continue on this: we’ve also got pseudo slaves. Most of our members who are doing the pseudo slave thing really are just playing. You don’t see most of them here because they’re just playing at home. There are a few that are playing real hard that you do see, but our rules make most of them impossible to spot unless you see them in two different contexts. And you won’t if they’ve gone full time.”
“Those two weren’t, though?”
“Right. The ones that are playing have a boyfriend or a Free Companion who acts as owner. Those two were at the extreme other end: what they wanted was something like a Transferable Limited contract.”
“There is one?”
“Not in the wild. The reason it works for us is that core training makes it unlikely that they’ll exercise the freedom. They may ask to be sold, but they won’t try to bail before the end of the contract.”
“Also, five years was longer than I wanted.”
“Well, there’s some background to that. The people who are playing start small and go through a fairly predictable progression to full time. Most of them never get there: playing at home with their boyfriend or Free Companion is all they want.
“Those two girls wanted what you seem to want: the full experience of being a Gorean slavegirl for a limited time. There are people who facilitate that. They have the experience and the contacts, so they can do it in a single step that takes around two to three months. They insist on at least five years so they get a good price at auction. You can do it for shorter periods if you want to do it with a boyfriend or set it up yourself.
“It also depends on what you mean by short. If you set it up yourself it’s an absolute minimum of three to six months before you go full time. Once you go full time you’ll spend at least a year as a faux slavegirl; the system only gives you choices of one, two, five and ten years.”
Shirley nodded. “That’s still a long time.”
Deana laughed. “You’re young. You’ll probably live to 140 or so; the difference between a year and five years isn’t all that important. If you’re interested we can dig into it a bit more.”
“I’m fascinated.”
“OK. We don’t talk about this option much because it’s non-canon. The canon stories suggest that once a slave, always a slave, and they don’t countenance pretending to be a slave. A person either is or isn’t a slave.
“This is a place where we throw canon out the window; we can’t pretend that the Natasha Fan Club, Limited contracts and a number of other situations don’t exist in the wider society outside of us. Also, just about every slave society in history had ways of freeing slaves, and most of them had limited term indentures as well. We took the pseudo slave thing from the Natasha Fan Club and made it work for us: there’s a chapter in the Association Contract specifically about faux slaves, and another about pseudo slaves.
“Some of our faux slavegirls went for it directly, through one of the facilitators I mentioned. The rest fell into it mostly by playing George and Natasha at home, and expanded from there. There’s a fairly stereotyped sequence: part time at home, fetish events, all association events, full time. Then there’s several things that can be done at different times: full slavegirl kennel training is at the start, but you can do withdrawal any time before going full time. Make sense?”
“So they go through the progression?”
“Some do and some don’t. A lot of them just want to play George and Natasha at home. Another fairly large group goes to fetish events in role, and has no desire to go any farther. Once they start going to association events in role, they’ll probably go all the way to becoming a faux or real slavegirl within a couple of years.”
“That I can see. It’s making more sense. How would I do it?”
“Well, you’re missing a two things.” Deana paused.
“Um. Full membership?”
“That’s one. The other one is?”
Shirley thought a moment and shrugged.
“A boyfriend to play George.”
“Oh. Right.”
“Let’s go back to how a member becomes a faux slavegirl. The facilitators use a bridging contract that pulls everything together. That contract is also part of the Association Contract. I’ll describe it in the order the facilitators do it. First is withdrawal. The facilitators do it first because they intend to go right through to sale, and they don’t want to stop in the middle. They don’t have to worry about how long anything else takes, as long as they keep to the codes and regulations.”
“Makes sense,” Shirley said, taking a note.
“The twist here is disposing of property. On the regular slave path you find someone to give it to since you won’t have any use for it again; on this path you sweep it into an escrow account so you’ve got it for reentry.”
“Ah! I hadn’t thought of that.”
“It’s one place where I think we do it better than some others. Anyway, the next piece is training. You can be a faux slavegirl without core training, but you can’t be a faux Gorean slavegirl without it. We could use the Slavegirl module, but it’s nowhere near as good.
“The really big twist here is that, while we could do Core Training here, we usually won’t. We do it here for the pseudo slavegirl route and the Gorean slavegirl route, but we don’t have the training depth locally for what the facilitators want. For example, we couldn’t have trained either of those two girls last month. The facilitators prefer to go to the Games Enclave at the Gorean Hunting Preserve, or at the Outlaw Nations. The one has some serious issues, the other is very expensive: you’re not going to get training costs back in the first sale. You’re not even going to come close.”
Shirley stared at her reader a moment, and then made a note. “So that means I’d have to go to the Games?”
“The Games Enclave is also a convention and resort site; they do training continuously, not just during the Games. In any case, the facilitators are going to do kennel training and several mods and surgeries here, and then subcontract core and additional training to a factor at the Games Enclave.
“The last piece is that the facilitator delivers her to the Guild of Slave Traders for sale on the auction system. That’s also got a twist. Before that, she was still a member of her home city, after that she’s a member-at-large, the same way as our regular slavegirls. That’s what lets us put her on the auction to reassign her use right.”
“So that’s the facilitator path?”
“Right. That path is streamlined. When the girl is ready to clean out her apartment at the end of Withdrawal, the facilitator or the cleaners will dump her in a girl box and deliver her to the kennel. The kennel will have her shipped freight to the Games Enclave in a girl box; the factor at the Enclave will ship her back as freight. If it wasn’t for the time off the factors at the Enclave give their girls, she’d be in a box, kennel, corral or girl cage from the time she left her apartment to the time her new owners unpacked her. The pieces that look like they need her approval are all pre-approved.”
“Wow. They’ve got that organized!” She consulted her notes. “So the options are either to find a boyfriend that wants a pseudo slavegirl and take the progression a step at a time, or find a facilitator and have him train me?”
“Or go the full Gorean Slavegirl route.”
Shirley frowned. “It sounds doable, but ...”
“It’s best to contract with a facilitator. Boyfriends have got this thing; once they’ve put the effort into training their girlfriend properly, they tend to want to keep her. If you want the result doing it yourself is risky and not really worth it.”
“What’s the problem with the GHP?”
“The Games Enclave is administered under the Priest-King’s laws, and they apparently regard the sight of a free woman playing close to the edge and falling over to become a slavegirl as hilarious. Women who put themselves up as prizes in the Games ought to know the risks; you don’t want that kind of risk. Our negotiators are working on something, but when it’ll happen? Who knows? There’s supposed to be an immanent breakthrough, but there’s supposed to have been one for the last five years.”
“Umph. What’s the arrangement with the Outlaws?”
“We’ve got a reciprocity agreement with them on both levels: Transferable contracts and also between our Gorean Associations. If you do it yourself, there’s a bridging contract that pulls all the parts together; that’s what the facilitators use. You’ll pay someone to help withdraw and set up the contract; the training will be done by our opposite numbers in Darwin’s Delight’s Gorean Association. When they’re done with you, you’ll go right to sale; your sale price less commission and expenses will be swept into your reentry escrow account. The reciprocity means you won’t be shipped back here first; you might spend your entire time as a faux slavegirl in the Outlaw Nations.”
“So it’s either take a longer contract than I want, find a boyfriend I don’t have, or spend money I don’t have at one of the Outlaw Nations. That sucks!”
Deana laughed again. “I think that summarizes it quite nicely.”
“If I do it for five years, what’s the likelihood of reentering successfully?”
“Um.” Deana consulted her wrist controller. “For five year contracts, about 50% submit within a year of reentry. It levels off at 70% within five years. Of course, it depends a lot on what she’s trained for and what she’s been used for. If you suggest what you want the Outlaw Nations are likely to do something in that general area if it looks like it’ll work; you’re the one that’s paying them. The facilitators are quite a bit less likely; they’re going to go for whatever they think will maximize their return on the first sale.”
Shirley frowned thoughtfully. “Five years still sounds a bit more than I wanted. Are there other paths?”
“Yes. You’ll do it for real if you apprentice with the Guild.”
“OK. That makes sense.”
“Finally,” Deana laughed and gave it her best evil grin. “Become a member and then commit a felony.”
“Huh?”
“Major felonies usually carry enslavement as a possible sentence, and the justice system will assign the convict to us if she’s a member or if she asks and we accept. Since our training allows an exit, she’s got the option to exit when the sentence runs out. That’s a legal mandate, although most don’t take it.”
“I guess you didn’t hear the news,” a voice said from behind Deana.
“Oh, hi, Mellor.” She flowed out of her chair and offered one to him. “Master Mellor, I presume you’ve seen Shirley around, Shirley, Master Mellor is one of our Masters in the Guild of Slave Trainers.”
“Don’t mind if I stay a couple of minutes.” He made an imperious gesture to a slavegirl who looked like she wasn’t doing anything and ordered a drink.
“You mentioned news?”
“Yes, I heard you talking to Shirley about the faux slavegirl process, and thought you might not have heard that the Gorean Hunting Preserve has just announced splitting the Games Enclave off into a separate legal environment.”
“Oh, really?”
“Yes. The overview from our negotiators said that the plans for Peaceforce intervention in Africa got them moving; they decided to get the major part of it out and keep talking about the rest.”
“Now that makes sense.”
“When the Peaceforce exercises, the Totalitarians all break out in a sweat.”
Deana giggled at the image.
“At first glance it looks like the Games Enclave is going to be a lot safer as a training destination. I haven’t had the time to look at the details yet, although they did say there was going to be an equivalent to a safe corral training contract. The national’s negotiating team is supposed to send a more thorough overview in the next week or so.”
“That’ll be great!”
“Well, gotta run. Invite Shirley to a gathering; from all reports she’s been behaving herself.”
If you enjoyed this story, please e-mail the author and let him know. He likes to hear from his loyal fans, and it gives him some motivation to keep writing this stuff. Of course, if you're a publisher and you'd like to buy some of these stories, please let him know. The starving author in the garret makes a great story, but it sucks in real life.