Slave by Cheryl Brooks Page A

like a cross between a dog and burro, with long, waving tails and big, floppy ears. Then, as if all of these creatures weren’t amazing enough, I got the surprise of my life. They had horses.
    Nothing like the scruffy, scrubby, pathetic-looking beasts of burden that you saw on many other worlds, oh no! These were big, beautiful, and gleaming with robust health. Even on Earth, they would have been remarkable.
    I hoped that Ranata had one, for she had been horse-crazy almost from the time she was born. They were all being ridden double by a man and a woman, and apparently had no difficulty whatsoever carrying the extra weight. They were simply awesome!
    I tore my eyes away from them as we approached the building, noting that even the buildings themselves were beautiful, seeming to blend in with the flora to the point that they might have been made of leaves themselves.
    Perhaps they were, or perhaps the plants were just growing on the walls; it was difficult to tell. The man inside nodded and smiled at us, and I noted that while he certainly seemed friendlier than most of the males I’d observed, he was also a good deal older than any I’d seen
so far. Maybe they got nicer with age, and it was only the young bucks who were so mean.
    “Good day, my friends!” he said, beaming at us.
    “How may I help you?”
    Cat hesitated for a moment as if he were waiting for me to speak, but then recovered quickly, stating that he would like to sell some goods in the market. He wasn’t terribly specific about what those goods were, and I could have kicked myself for not having coached him better, for other than the ointment I’d used on him, he had no idea what I had in the hold of my ship.
    Fortunately, it didn’t seem to matter, for as long as we signed a statement that nothing we were selling was illegal, they didn’t give a damn what we sold. We were charged a small fee and then directed to an empty booth.
    The currency was standard credits, I noted, and the rate of exchange was about on par with that of other planets in the region. So far, so good, I thought. Now all we had to do was find someone else who’d seen another human female in the area. I hoped for the sake of simplicity that Ranata was the only one, but the way things had gone during my search, I knew I couldn’t really count on anything being quite so easy.
    Cat and I went back to the ship and loaded a few cases of various commodities on the load-lifter and went back to our stall. While we were setting up shop, I noticed that I was still attracting the attention of most of the females, and I couldn’t quite figure it out until an older woman with two young daughters in tow took me aside for a private word, which, I might add, was a bit difficult since I was still chained to Cat.
“He looks dangerous!” she whispered. “He should have two!”
    She moved off without further explanation, and, I’ll admit, I was still as much in the dark about the whole subject as I’d ever been. Two of what? And why did Cat look any more dangerous than any of the other men around, many of whom, from the best I could tell, were surly, rude, if not downright nasty! Cat, on the other hand, was polite and reserved in his dealings with the denizens of Statzeel. Granted he had some rather spectacular features and some very sharp-looking teeth, but he wasn’t mean! Maybe it was his penis that was so scary. I wouldn’t have said so myself, but it was certainly more interesting than any of the others I’d seen, all of which were pretty typical, at least by human standards.
    We spent most of the day in the marketplace, but if Ranata was there shopping, she never passed our way.
    The trouble was, with Cat and me having to stay chained together, I couldn’t just go off looking for her and leave Cat behind to man the booth. It would appear that we were either going to have to wait for information to come to us, or we were going to have to come up with a different search tactic. Besides,