Support Groups of Gor

By Harold

Foreword

This story is a sequel to “Hitchhikers of Gor” and will probably make a little more sense if you read that story first. I have tried to write it to function as a stand alone story. It is a satire of John Norman’s Gor novels, so an additional level of humor should be accessible to those who have read them, but I would hope the story could be enjoyed without this prerequisite.

This was more like it. I had a job. I was the bartender at the Earth Weenie Social Club. It was sort of a private paga tavern--members only. The membership consisted exclusively of immigrants from Earth. I was both member and employee. I didn’t get paid all that much, but the job came with room and board. I still didn’t have a slave girl of my own at the moment, but I didn’t really need one. One of the perks of the job was that I was in charge of the club’s slave girls. There were about a dozen of them and maybe two thirds were Earth immigrants, although their immigration had not been voluntary. The club’s name, by the way, was always pronounced in English, never in Gorean.

I had been surprised when they offered me the job. A few weeks before, I had tracked Lysol down and told him I was in need of help finding a job. He’d invited me to the next meeting of the support group. The group met weekly at the club. There were about fifteen or twenty guys at the first meeting I attended. They seemed like a pretty average bunch, but were suspicious of me. They asked tons of questions. They wanted to know how I’d gotten here, all about my life on Earth, what skills I had, had I ever been in the military, and how did I feel about Gor and Goreans.

Finally, I got sick of the grilling. “What’s with the inquisition? I thought this was a support group.”

“Sorry,” said Bardol (he seemed to be in charge). “We just need to know who we’re dealing with. We can’t have the wrong sort of people in here. Besides, the more we know about you, the better we can help.”

I wondered who the wrong sort of people might be. “I need a job. You don’t need to know too much about me to figure that out.”

“Don’t take it personally,” Lysol said. “We’re always willing to help a fellow Earthman, but we have to do it in our own way. This is your first meeting, so go with the flow until you know the ropes.”

“Hey, I’m not trying to be a pain, but this isn’t like any support group I ever heard of.”

“Well, hang onto your hat,” said Bardol. “We aren’t done. Did you bring a gun?”

“Yeah, I’ve got a .45.”

“So if you came with Octavius, you’ve probably got fifty rounds. He always pulls that shit.”

“Forty-nine. I had a run in with a sleen.” I described my encounter with the sleen.

“If you hit that thing in the head while it was charging, you’ve got a cooler head and a sharper eye than average.”

“I do.”

“That’ll come in handy. How many rounds did Octavius keep?”

“A hundred and fifty.”

“A bit skimpy, but it’ll have to do. I’ll set things in motion to get them back.”

“What do you mean?”

“Octavius, and most of the other pilots, usually confiscate ammo when they can get away with it, then sell it back to us at a premium. A little business they run on the side. As to your current problem, we’ll get to work on finding some sort of employment for you. In the meantime, you can borrow what you need to keep afloat from the group. We keep interest rates reasonable among ourselves, but it would be a bad idea to get carried away. Only borrow what you really need.”

The discussion turned toward general problems and complaints. As an immigrant community, we faced a number of problems. Ar was the most cosmopolitan city on Gor, but was nonetheless quite provincial. Our accents, which marked us as outsiders, and our lack of marketable skills in this economy meant that making a living was more of an adventure than any of us really appreciated. It was apparent from listening that the group was headed toward building it’s own economy.

The meeting was being held in English, a fact which I appreciated. My Gorean was still a bit shaky. “Are these meetings always in English, or are you just doing it for my benefit?”

“We always do it in English,” Lysol said. “We want to maintain fluency; also, it’s more secure.” Bardol gave Lysol a look that suggested security had just been breached.

They loaned me enough money to get me through the week until the next meeting. I thanked them and left. They said that in the meantime they’d beat the bushes for some kind of job for me. I was confused as to the exact nature of this support group. I had expected a social gathering where everyone would commiserate about how mean and nasty the world was treating them. This was run more like a business meeting. The members seemed prosperous--well dressed and confident, albeit cliquish to the point of paranoia. I went back each week for several weeks. Each week they would probe a little deeper into my past and present activities, then loan me some more money and tell me they were still looking for a job for me. The overall atmosphere reminded me vaguely of the Teamsters--paternal rather than fraternal and benevolent as long as you were part of the group and didn’t break the rules. I wasn’t entirely sure what the rules were, so I tried not to make any waves. They were obviously checking me out, getting to know me and evaluating.

Finally, on my fifth visit, I was told they had something for me. Prego, the current bartender at the club, was being promoted and the position was available if I wanted it. I accepted and moved out of my rundown insula and into the club. My duties were less than onerous. In the morning, I’d get the slave girls up, feed them, then set them at their tasks. They did all the work except make the drinks. I took pride in doing that myself. That was one of the differences between us and the average paga tavern. We had real drinks. Most paga taverns served paga (something like a strong ale) or various wines, but nothing stronger. The Goreans seemed to have discovered fermentation, but not distillation. We had a couple of stills out back where we made bourbon and a pretty good brandy from the local kalana wine. The club was generating some income by supplying these to other taverns around Ar and there were plans to enlarge the distillery.

I hung out at the club all day. I wore a white apron over my tunic and when things were slow I would wipe the bar down and philosophize to whomever would listen. As the days went by and I got to know the various members better, I began to get a picture of what was going on. The club had it’s fingers in a number of pies, and liquor sales was one of the more legitimate ones. Apparently, the Goreans had also neglected to invent organized crime and the club was hard at work repairing this lack (organized crime being defined as crime carried out on a businesslike basis by organizations other than governments). I still wasn’t sure what all the club was into, but it appeared to be prospering. I realized that my job was a way for me to start at the bottom and work my way up. In the meantime, I was where everybody could keep an eye on me. I didn’t mind. I knew that cohesion was extremely important to make it all work and it would take time for everyone to know me well enough to feel secure about me.

I set about reorganizing the staff and their routines. The slave girls were required to line up in front of the bar and stand at attention when they had no other duties. When a member came in, the girl assigned to the area in which he sat would leave the bar and attend to him unless he was known to have a favorite girl. The minute he left, she would clean his table, wash the glasses and dishes, and return to the line. When the number of occupied tables exceeded the number of girls, they were required to circulate constantly in their assigned areas. If a girl’s area should be empty, she was to help at the most populous adjacent area. This seems like a small change, but service had previously been random, with some girls overloaded at peak periods while others had little to do. The members commented to me on the improvement in service.

At closing, I would lock all the girls who weren’t occupied in their quarters. There were rooms available for members who wanted to spend the night with a girl (the girls weren’t allowed out of the club), but this was uncommon, since most members had their own slaves. Like all Gorean taverns, there was no extra charge for the girls. They came with the price of a drink. Most commonly, members would stop by of an afternoon for a beer and a blow job.

The slave quarters consisted of several large well appointed rooms in the basement. They were accessible through one heavy door which I locked behind them every night. They were equipped with sleeping rooms, toilet facilities, their own kitchen and a stock of food, and whatever else we felt they might need. Unlike the Goreans, whom we considered to be a bunch of wackos, we made no effort to impress the girls with their servitude every waking moment. The tables were not equipped with slave rings (in fact, there were none in the club--we didn’t feel the need of them) and the girls were encouraged to address the members by name. We preferred that to the generic and impersonal ‘master’ the Goreans were so adamant about. Despite all this, there was no question as to their status. They were slaves. We didn’t put a lot of effort into impressing them with this fact. They would either get it or they wouldn’t. If they didn’t, they were punished or disposed of.

One afternoon, after I’d been on the job about a month, a couple of Goreans wandered in. I could tell from their red tunics they were warriors (‘rarius’ in Gorean--also translated as ‘asshole’). Trouble was guaranteed. The girls, as per policy, ignored non-members. The intruders began shouting for service, but were still ignored. A girl waiting on a nearby table passed, ignoring their demands. Being ignored by a slave was too much. Enraged, one stood, grabbed her and drew his sword. It was obvious he was going to kill her. I had a cocked crossbow behind the bar. Even if there had been time to pull it out, set it against my shoulder, aim, and fire, there was a distinct possibility of hitting the girl. I’d never practiced much with that weapon. I whipped out my .45. Shooting a gun indoors is not recommended. My ears rang for hours. The slug took the warrior in the side of the head and he pitched backwards, a chunk of his skull missing. His cohort, who by now was also standing with sword drawn, dropped his weapon and started backing toward the door, waving his arms as if to ward off evil spirits.

“Not another step, fart orifice.” This was about as close as I could come to “Freeze, asshole!” in Gorean. He halted as I trained the gun on him. I shot him right between the eyes. There were to be no witnesses.

I am a man of only one talent. I have no skill at literature or science or diplomacy. I often do not understand the ramblings of learned men. What I am is a marksman. I have often thought it would be more honorable to be an excellent baker or potter or such, but I am what I am: the best shot on planet Gor. I had been kind to the second warrior. I could easily have shot his balls off--one at a time.

I had a mess on my hands. Use of firearms is frowned on by the club. We didn’t want the Goreans or the priest kings to know we had them. Had I been more experienced in the ways of Goreans, I would have known what was coming and had the crossbow ready. The girl that the warrior had grabbed was hysterical. She was a Gorean and had no experience of guns. I assigned a couple of the Earth girls to take her in hand and calm her down. I got two of the members to help me and we stripped the bodies and carried them out. The other slaves were assigned to clean up the blood and bits of skull. I wanted the place spotless by the time I came back in. We fed the warriors’ remains to the sleen, meanwhile throwing their clothing and other combustible accouterments into the furnace which heated the stills. I wrapped their swords and non-combustible possessions in a parcel with a couple of stones and dispatched a member to drop them in the river. Then we retrieved the remains unconsumed by sleen and buried them in the lime pit. The warriors were gone without a trace, just like Jimmy Hoffa.

A couple of days later, a warrior came by looking for the missing men, but we played dumb and he went away.

We discussed the incident at the next weekly gathering. I was criticized for using the gun, although allowance was made for my inexperience. A couple of guys thought I should have let the warrior kill the girl, but I told them point blank that nobody was killing any of our girls on my watch. Members who had been present at the time defended my actions. Although feelings were mixed over my shooting the first warrior, I garnered universal approval for my actions from that point on. Bardol in particular was impressed by the way I had kept my head, eliminated the only outside witness and then cleaned things up efficiently and methodically. What could have been a terrible black eye actually ended up being a feather in my cap.

Shortly thereafter, the membership voted a raise for me. I had been living on half salary, since I’d devoted the other half to retiring my debt to the club as fast as possible. My debt was now paid and the members had rewarded my diligence in the matter with a pay increase. With my debt paid, this more than doubled my take home. I could now afford my own slave girl again, but didn’t feel the need as long as I lived at the club. I slept with a different girl every night. I had a couple of favorites, but didn’t play favorites. I wanted to know as much as possible about my staff, so I chose a different girl every night in rotation.

One night, as I was locking the girls in their quarters, I heard one of the Gorean girls say something to another girl in halting English. She was quickly shushed. I pretended not to hear and went away, returning stealthily a few minutes later. I listened at the door, curious as to what was going on. The door was too thick and I could hear nothing.

Three nights later, it was my night with Marika, the Gorean girl who had spoken English. After the other girls were locked up, I hung her by her wrists and whipped her soundly.

“Now, Marika, we’re going to have a conversation. What language shall we have it in?”

“What do you mean, Master?” I lashed her savagely. “Please, Master. Please. Why do you punish me so?”

“You know what I want to know. Why are you learning English? What’s going on?”

She told me the whole story. It seemed Susan had gotten curious about what went on at our meetings. The slaves who served the meetings were always the Gorean girls, since they couldn’t understand us. This was obvious to the girls, and Susan had decided to investigate. She talked Marika into cooperating and started teaching her English. Marika would also memorize snatches of conversation from the meetings and repeat them to Susan for translation. The other girls were getting interested in the project and I was about to have a major conspiracy on my hands.

I gagged Marika, bound her, slung her over my shoulder, and returned to the slave quarters. The girls were startled when I barged in. I dumped Marika on the floor.

“OK, girls,” I yelled. “Line up.” The girls did as I bid. I walked down the line behind them binding each one’s hands behind her then gagging her. They were trying not to look at Marika whimpering on the floor, but couldn’t help themselves. I stood next to Marika and addressed them.

“It seems we have a small conspiracy in progress, so we’re going to nip this thing in the bud. As you can see, Marika has been punished and I’m sure you all know why. I still have one more miscreant to punish before I deal with you as a group. Susan, come over here.” Susan turned pale and stood rooted. I stepped toward her and she turned to run. I caught her easily.

“Now you’re in really big trouble, slave girl.” I slung her over my shoulder as I had Marika. “The rest of you, don’t move a muscle until I get back.”

I carried Susan back to my quarters and hung her by her wrists as I had Marika. Then I gave her an even more severe whipping than Marika had received. I carried her back and dumped her on the floor next to Marika. Both girls were hogtied and helpless. The other slaves were standing where I had left them. Marika and Susan would remain in the center of the floor all night as a lesson to the others. The others would spend the night gagged with their hands tied. I told them to go to bed and contemplate their folly.

The next day I released all the girls and set them about their duties. The weekly club meeting was scheduled for the afternoon and I locked all the girls back in their quarters before it began. The members noticed the lack of servants and I told them what had happened and what I had done about it.

One of the guys thought it was my fault, but Bardol disagreed. “Vitalis had nothing to do with this. It’s obvious the girls cooked this up on their own and it probably started before Vitalis even got here. If anything, we owe him our thanks for catching it, although he was perhaps a bit lenient in his reaction.”

This seemed to be the general sentiment. The guys were a lot more pissed off about this than I had thought they would be and after discussion, we voted to make an example of Susan and Marika. Security was a top priority and we didn’t want the girls knowing of our plans or activities. On Gor, slaves could legally be questioned under torture, so this whole thing was a bigger security risk than I had first realized. Bardol said he would take care of it and assigned Lysol, Prego, and myself to assist.

Lysol hung out at the club with me and early in the evening Bardol and Prego showed up. Each bore a withe cage and a heavy backpack. Upon their arrival, Lysol and I brought the girls up. They had been locked in their quarters most of the day. We tied their wrists behind them and gagged them again, then lined them up and joined their collars together with lengths of chain, except for Susan and Marika. These two each had a cage strapped to her back. The cages were square and a bit wider than their shoulders. They extended from their necks to just below their knees. We led them outside. Susan and Marika were led on individual leashes, while the others followed along behind in coffle. Lysol and I carried the packs.

We wended our way through the city and down to the river. The chain of slave girls caused no comment except for the occasional admiring glance. We marched them out onto an unused pier. We lined the coffle up along the side and chained the outside ankle of the girl at each end to a convenient slave ring (and they were convenient--you couldn’t go ten paces in any direction in this town without encountering one of the ubiquitous slave rings). Then we unburdened Susan and Marika of the cages which we laid down on the dock. I held their leashes while Bardol and Prego placed a heavy stone in each corner of each cage. Lysol took Marika’s leash and led her toward the cages. I tightened my grip on Susan’s leash. Marika was hogtied and placed face up in a cage, then her gag was removed, but she was too frightened to speak. The top of the cage was closed over her face and locked. Bardol and Prego lowered it over the side. The water was high, only about eighteen inches below the dock. Our captive audience had a fine view of her. As the water touched Marika’s back, she found her voice and began crying and pleading. She was lowered ever so slowly, the water rising about her until her pleas changed to splutters and gurgles as she lay on her back desperately pressing her face against the bars. Once her head was completely under, the ropes were loosed and she sank into the murk.

Now it was Susan’s turn. Her offense was deemed to be the greater, so she had been forced to watch as Marika was drowned. She wet herself as Lysol and I bound her and removed her gag. She begged and wept as we placed her in the cage. Bardol and Prego lowered her even more slowly than they had Marika. Her last wail was stifled by the water as her face finally submerged, then she too was lost in the murk.

The other girls were all weeping hysterically into their gags, their faces wet with tears. I myself was not unaffected. I had been fond of both girls, but discipline and security were a priority. We had considered simply selling the two girls as a sound business decision, but ultimately concluded that the financial loss we would suffer by drowning the girls would generate a greater return in terms of education and discipline among the remaining slaves. If one of them ever tried anything like that again, the others would probably kill her themselves.

Marika and Susan now slept with the fishes. Their drowning had gone largely unnoticed. That was one of the problems with Gor. The advantage of criminal enterprise was that the risks deterred most people from engaging in it. That meant that those who did pursue such endeavors could charge monopoly prices. But for this to work, there had to be laws to break. We were having problems with that. Many of the traditional mainstays of organized crime just didn’t work on Gor. With a major population of slave girls, prostitution made no sense. Gambling was legal, so there was no real money to be made there. Murder for hire was legal with an established caste of assassins. Robbery didn’t even work. To carry that out on the scale we were interested in would require the hijacking of caravans. Since they were always well defended a small army would be required and we were not prepared to lose the number of men necessary to make it work on a regular basis. We were interested in business, not heroics. Bootlegging and smuggling had been considered, but there wasn’t anything to bootleg or smuggle. The local idiots didn’t seem to have laws against much of anything.

One scam that was working fairly well for us was insurance. We combined standard insurance with the protection racket. Earth Weenie Fire and Casualty was selling policies to businesses all around our area. Those who bought policies were indemnified against loss. Those who didn’t suffered fire and casualty. Policyholders made regular payments to our agent, Prego. (That was the promotion he had received which made the bartender job available to me--he had been promoted to bag man.) We actually paid off on legitimate claims. Our innovative methods of operation and outrageous rates made an actuarial department unnecessary, an additional savings which we did not pass on to the customers. We even visited customer locations and advised them on fire prevention measures and security precautions.

Shortly after the drowning of the slave girls, we had our first ‘insurance fire’. Tantrum, a local perfume merchant, had been having considerable trouble making his policy payments. We knew he was in financial trouble, so no one was surprised the night his business burnt to the ground. One of the members, Pennzoil, had been a claims adjuster on earth, so we sent him to check it out. He knew every scam there was. Pennzoil could hardly contain his mirth. The Goreans were unsophisticated in this sort of chicanery and poor Tantrum had made every mistake in the book. Pennzoil found multiple points of ignition and empty containers with traces of accelerant on the trash heap out back. There were no valuables in the rubble. The safe, the closets, and most of the stock room had been emptied prior to the blaze. Tantrum himself had been out of the city with all his slave girls on the fateful night (a too convenient alibi was always a red flag to insurance investigators, and the ‘out of town’ ploy was a classic). We paid to rebuild his business, then canceled his policy. About a month later he had another fire in which he himself perished, having foolishly chained himself to one of his own slave rings shortly before the fire broke out. Once again, there were no valuables in the rubble and his four slave girls had apparently run away. Everyone got the message.

The club now had four new slave girls. Three were Gorean in origin and one was an Earth girl, so we were now back to our original complement of slaves plus two more Gorean girls. I was a bit disappointed. It would have been my job to go to the auctions and replace Susan and Marika. I enjoyed auctions and it would have been fun to spend the club’s money. Not that I would have spent it foolishly--I would have taken pride in getting the club the best deal to be had, but it still would have been fun to be able to shop upscale from what I myself could afford. Perhaps another time.

The club was always looking for new avenues of enterprise. At the next meeting, I suggested we take another look at gambling. It had always been considered a loser because there were no laws against it, making it necessary for us to compete on a level playing field which we didn’t like to do. The only other option seemed to be to try to put a fix in on the public games. The problem there was that would have drawn attention from high places. The lack of laws cut both ways. They would simply have killed us all.

What I had noticed was that other than the public games, there was really no organized gambling, no way for someone to hit the jackpot. I thought a numbers racket would work. We could run it like the state lotteries on Earth. We would make it convenient and promote the hell out of it. All the individual betting that went on was small stakes stuff. We could set up a system where a person could make a small bet and have a chance to win really big. Of course, like the state lotteries, the chances of winning big were about the same whether you played or not. “You can’t win if you don’t buy a ticket,” had been the prevailing sentiment on Earth. The thing was, your chance of winning was vanishingly small, but your chance of losing was considerable. A more accurate statement would have been, “You can’t lose if you don’t buy a ticket.” We needed a piece of this kind of action and there was no state monopoly here. The house take on this deal was so great we could afford to run an honest game, so we did. When somebody won we paid off promptly and whooped it up. We made it convenient, sending runners out every day to collect the bets. People could play without even leaving their homes or businesses. We came to them. Whenever there was a big winner, we would have a public ceremony and make the winner a celebrity. People loved it and the money rolled in. This was criminal enterprise at its finest. It was legal, it was popular, and it was such a scam. The Goreans were even more mathematically illiterate than the denizens of Earth. They gave us their money in bushel baskets. We paid out less than fifteen percent to winners.

I had noticed on Earth that the lottery customers came disproportionately from among the poor. The same was true on Gor. Beggars in the street would eagerly surrender the meager contents of their begging bowls to our runners. On Earth, I had settled on the superficial explanation of equating poverty with stupidity, but on Gor I finally got it. These people knew the odds, but bad as they were, it was still their best and perhaps only hope of escaping the poverty trap. We could actually pretend we were performing a public service. Every once in a while, we would, by Gorean standards, make someone rich.

I had displayed an unexpected flair for this sort of thing, so Bardol put me in charge of the operation. Unlike the crime families on Earth, we were not a tight hierarchy. Things were done by consensus. Bardol was the de facto leader. He was well liked, fair, and competent. His decisions could be overruled, but he always made sure he knew what the consensus was likely to be before doing anything important. The group would not have held together as well as it did without him.

Drixoral, a promising new immigrant, took over my job as bartender and I moved into new, more lavish, quarters. I still didn’t have a slave girl of my own. I would have to do something about that soon. For now, I spent time with the club’s slave girls. I was fond of all of them and had considered asking if the club would sell me one or two of them.

Fortunately, three of our members had been accountants on Earth. This didn’t really surprise me. You can imagine how sitting around doing people’s taxes could make you long for something more exciting. The field produced a lot of Walter Mitty types. Three of them had taken matters into their own hands and found their way to Gor. I put them to work keeping track of the club’s money. They found it quite ironic that they had escaped the humdrum of their lives on Earth to the barbaric splendor of Gor, only to be pressed into service as accountants here. They bitched their asses off about the lack of computers (I couldn’t blame them–they had to do everything by hand). But they did crank out an accurate P&L every month. Double entry bookkeeping was largely unknown on Gor, so we were probably the only business on the planet that knew where we really stood at the end of every month. We were evolving into a structure resembling a limited partnership and I felt it was important that there be an accurate set of books for the membership to examine.

The numbers operation had grown to the point where we needed more runners than we had members. We hired a bunch of our customers to work as runners. We were actually creating jobs. We advertized this fact, pointing out to whoever would listen how beneficial we were to the local economy. This was extremely cynical. We were a parasitic organization. Our sole function was to siphon money from the pockets of the citizenry into our own. We had no interest whatever in a true exchange of value (goods or services in exchange for money).

Hiring outside help generated a new set of concerns. The problem with numbers runners is keeping them honest. Since the vast majority of bets lose, it’s easy for a runner to simply pocket a few of them. Who would ever know? I reassigned all the members who had been runners as auditors and hired new runners. The auditors would circulate, following runners, interviewing customers, and whatever else they could dream up to check on the runners. The horde of auditors circulating added to the impression we ran an honest game. Early on we caught one of the runners pocketing about a third of the bets. We posted his name and a description of what he had done on the public boards. The next day he was cornered by an angry mob. They doused him with oil, set him on fire, and chased him through the streets until he died. Then they dragged his body around town, abusing it and shouting. It was reminiscent of the scenes broadcast from Somalia. Our customers proved to be an excellent deterrent to employee theft. They were enraged to find out that the bets they made had never actually been placed.

I was now rather wealthy. Besides a generous salary for my work on the numbers game, I received a monthly distribution of profits (as did all the members). Gor was my idea of the land of opportunity–a whole planet full of suckers.

I also had more time to wander the city now. The bartender at the club was really facilities manager for the clubhouse. I had been stuck there most of the time. Now I could not only explore some more, I had money to spend. I wished there had been something to spend it on. Gor was rather lacking in consumer goods. On Earth I could have bought a fancy car, a new stereo, maybe a fine rifle. I just couldn’t get all that excited about a sleek tharlarion, the most dashing style in tunics, or the latest in crossbows. Some of the food and drink was interesting, but a lot of it was repulsive. Besides, the best of it was available at the club at subsidized prices. One of the reasons we made sure there were a number of Earth girls on the staff was to have access to Earth style cooking. Gor’s sole attraction (besides the barbaric splendor/squalor of it all) seemed to be female slavery. But that was a biggie. Even so, I would never again hear the three B’s (Bach, Beethoven, and the Beatles). Gorean music really sucks. Consequently, I found myself spending a lot of time at the slave auctions. There wasn’t much else to do when I wasn’t working. So I suppose it wasn’t all that surprising that I found her. I didn’t recognize her at first. She was slouched despondently in her cage, staring vacantly off into space. This was so different from her previous demeanor that it was small wonder that I nearly passed her by. I stepped closer, examining her. The look of pure hatred told me she recognized me well enough. She was gagged, so she couldn’t say what she was thinking, but it wasn’t necessary. She could communicate quite clearly. I later learned she had been gagged to keep her from screaming insults at passers by. It was the blond bitch, of course. The sign on her cage indicated she would be auctioned in two days. My mouth was dry and my knees weak. I had to have her. I hurried off to rearrange my schedule. I would be at that auction.

They had to carry her onto the stage. She refused to walk no matter how they much they whipped her. The auctioneer introduced her as a “girl with spirit”, a challenge to any but the most masterful of men. The crowd went crazy. Bidding opened at five silver tarsks, quite high for a barbarian. I didn’t bid until nearly everyone else had dropped out. The bid was at seven golden tarn disks. I bid eight. I finally won the bid at eleven. This was a fortune. It would impact my finances for weeks to come.

I picked her up after the auction. She was standing with her wrists locked behind her and a short chain joining her ankle cuffs. I paid, signed the papers, and snapped my leash on her collar. Then I removed her gag.

“Asshole! You’re the son of a bitch who did this to me. Creep, slime, pervert!” I stuffed the gag back in when she paused to inhale. Actually, I wasn’t the one who had done this to her, but I would be the one doing it to her from now on.

Her ankle chain was too short for her to walk, so I removed it. She kneed me in the groin. I punched her in the solar plexus, knocking the wind out of her. This pacified her sufficiently for me to reattach her ankle chain. I slung her over my shoulder and carried her off.

She was quite a trial. If she wasn’t gagged, she would insult me. If she wasn’t bound, she would attack me. The only way to fuck her was tie her down securely. As a result, she was bound and gagged nearly twenty four hours a day. I was eventually able to feed her without her trying to bite me. I worked with her for weeks. After a while, she didn’t attack me if I unchained her. A bit later, she stopped insulting me. Later still, she would submit to sex without stringent restraint. Finally, some weeks after her acquisition, I thought she was ready to do a blow job. I chained her wrists behind her. She knelt before me and opened her mouth submissively. This was the moment I had been waiting for. It was the moment she had been waiting for. As I slipped into her mouth, she bit down–hard. The look of triumph on her face told me all I needed to know. Her submission had been feigned, a setup. I wrapped one hand around her throat and squeezed, pinching her nostrils shut with the other. After a couple of minutes she passed out, relaxing her grip on my dick. I chained her collar to a convenient (sic) slave ring and hurried off to tend to my bleeding member. I had nearly been unmanned, so to speak.

The next day, I had Prego get me a withe cage. I hogtied the blond bitch and put her in the cage, then loaded it onto a cart and took it to the docks. I lugged the cage to the end of the pier, then removed her gag and locked the cage again. She began screaming insults. I lowered the cage slowly into the water. “Beg,” I thought. “Please, beg. If only you’ll beg, I won’t have to do this.”

She continued as before. “Fuck you, assho...glub.” She was gone.

Women can inspire such ambivalence–I mean, what an appropriate end to Miss Blond Bitch. What a terrible waste. I sat on the end of the dock and wept, my tears falling on the water where she had disappeared. What a cruel world was the planet Gor.

Copyright 1999