Slave by Cheryl Brooks

to collect my thoughts. “I don’t suppose you noticed any other raging hard-ons out there, did you?”
    He got the “raging hard-on” idea without any explanation whatsoever. “Yes,” he replied. “There are many men in this state.”
I threw up my hands in a gesture of capitulation. “Okay, then, I give up. Put my leash on your wrist and let’s get going, Cat. This is gonna be interesting, I can tell.”
    And it was. I haven’t mentioned it before, but the inhabitants of Statzeel appeared surprisingly human; the only difference I could see—and I could see nearly all of the anatomy of every person on the street!—was that they had six fingers on each hand instead of five and that their noses seemed sort of flat. Skin tones varied, as did height and weight, but they all seemed at least moderately attractive with not a dog in the whole bunch. Which was a good thing since I had a cat! I know: Har-dy har, har! I can’t help it if my sense of humor was going wacky; I was under a good deal of stress.
    Cat did seem to attract a fair amount of attention, but nothing like the stares that were directed at me, and, oddly enough, most of the people staring at me were women.
    “Psst, Cat!” I whispered to him. “Have I grown horns, or what?” For the best I could tell, I was dressed just like everyone else and even the make-up job wasn’t too far off, though maybe I had gotten a little carried away with the hairdo.
    “Perhaps it is because you are human,” he suggested.
    “If humans attract this much attention here, then your sister should be easy to locate.”
    “True. I just wish they’d stop staring, though! It’s giving me the willies!” I waited to see if he would ask me what “willies” were, but decided that, in this case, it was probably self-explanatory since I’d have been willing to bet that he probably had a decent case of the willies, too.
We continued to make our way toward the marketplace and I noted that, while there were many women without chains, every man I saw had a woman with him. The women seemed to outnumber the men by at least five to one, which were great odds if you happened to be male. I’d have bet that none of these guys would have any trouble whatsoever getting laid four or five times a day….
    I decided that those women without collars were probably the “worker” females and the “pleasure”
    females were the ones that the males had to keep on a leash. I couldn’t wait to find Ranata and get her to explain all of this to me. She would undoubtedly be one of the pleasure types, and I hoped she wasn’t too unhappy with her male, because many of them appeared to be every bit as belligerent as the one I’d seen offworld. I saw three men standing together arguing about something or other when the females suddenly stepped between them and began caressing their genitals. The argument ceased and the men smiled and continued their discussion in a much more pleasant frame of mind.
    There were young boys with their mothers or with other males of their own age, but every male who appeared to have reached puberty had a female chained to him. It was downright bizarre!
    We went up to one of the vendors and Cat asked who we needed to talk to about setting up our own stall. The man pointed out a large female chained to a much smaller male at a window in the building across the plaza, and, having thanked him for the information, we headed in that direction.
I haven’t described our surroundings yet, but suffice it to say, it was a tropical paradise, even in the town. Everywhere you looked there was green, riotous growth and brilliant blooms of every possible hue. Songbirds with vibrantly colored plumage flew from flower to flower, and large, hovering insects that reminded me of butterflies—only much larger and more spectacularly colored than anything I’d ever seen on Earth—sipped nectar, as well. The animals that roamed about the town were all sleek and shining and looked sort of