Savages of Gor by John Norman Page A

to thrive in a given town but an ample employment for their services and goods in a string of such towns. Such tradesmen and artisans commonly included some five to ten towns in their territory.
    "Do not fret, little beauty," said the man to the girl. "You will soon be properly marked."
    The girl lifted her head, and looked at me.
    "You see," said the man, "she is already curious as to the touch of a man."
    I see," I said.
    "What sort of brand would you like, little beauty?" asked the man. "Have no fear. Whatever brand you wear, I guarantee, will be unmistakable and clear."
    She looked up at him. With the back of his hand he lashed her head to the side.
    She then looked up at him, again, frightened. Blood was at her lip. "Whatever brand you wish for me, Master," she said.
    "Excellent," said the man. He turned to me. "That is her first, full, verbal slave response. She has had, of course, other sorts of slave responses and behaviors before this, such things as squirmings, strugglings, cringings, pain and fear, and behavioral presentations and pleadings, making herself pretty and holding herself in certain ways, presenting herself as a helpless, desirable female, trying to provoke the interest of attractive men."
    The girl looked at him with horror, but I saw, in her eyes, that what he had said was true. Even unbranded, she was already becoming a slave.
    "Please, Master. Please, Master," begged the girl at my feet.
    "What sort of brand would you like, my dear?" asked the man of the girl at the wall. "Have no fear. I am now permitting you to express a preference. I shall then, as it pleases me, accept your preference, or reject it."
    Her lip, now swollen, trembled.
    "Would you like a lovely and feminine brand," he asked, "or a rude and brutal brand, one fit for a pot girl or a tendress of kaiila?"
    "I am a woman, Master," she said. "I am feminine."
    I was pleased to hear this simple confession from the girl, this straightforward, uncompromising admission of the reality of her sex. How few of the women of my old world, I thought, could bring themselves, even to their lovers, to make this same, simple admission. What a world of difference it might make to their relationships, I speculated. Yet this admission, nonverbally, was surely made, and even poignantly and desperately, by many women of my old world, despite the injunctions and conditionings against honesty in such matters enjoined by an antibiological, politicized society. I hoped that upon occasion, at least, these admissions, these declarations, these cries for recognition and fulfillment, whether verbal or nonverbal, might in his kindness, be heeded by a male.
    It is an interesting question, the relation between natural values and conditioned values. To be sure, the human infant, in many respects, seems to be little more than a tabula rasa, a blank tablet, on which a society, whether sensible or perverted, may inscribe its values. Yet the infant is also an animal, with its nature and genetic codings, with its heritage of eons of life and evolution, tracing itself back to the combinations of molecules and the births of stars. Thus can be erected conflicts between nature and artifice, whether the artifices be devised or blind. These conflicts, in turn, produce their grotesque syndromes of anxiety, guilt and frustration, with their attendant deleterious consequences for happiness and life. A man may be taught to prize his own castration but somewhere, sometime, in the individual or in the maddened collectivity, nature must strike back. The answer of the fool is the answer he has been taught to give, the answer he must continue to defend and beyond which he cannot see, an answer historically deriving from an ethos founded on the macabre superstitions and frustrated perversions of lunatics, an answer now co-opted to serve the interests of new, grotesque minorities who, repudiating the only rationale that gave it plausibility, pervert it to their own ends. The sludge of