Buying His Mate (2 page)

Chapter Two

Martin Lourcy didn’t think he would buy Gretchen, but he certainly didn’t mind buying the right to spank her. As he pulled up her sweet little blue dress to expose the pert ovals of her bottom cheeks, though, he wondered—perhaps, he would admit, in part because of how very prim they looked, and yet how invitingly round—whether the rebellious streak she had just shown them in trying to avoid the Taking might actually make her a better ‘wife’ for him than some other, more docile relict girl. She wore no underwear, of course; nor would she, if he bought her, except perhaps on special occasions.

The most important thing now, though, whether or not he decided to bid on Gretchen in the auction, lay in keeping his intentions veiled—above all from Heather and Diana, who almost certainly already suspected that Martin had forbidden notions about family structure. Even with the inviting prospect of Gretchen’s little bottom over his knee, he gave an inward sigh at the sheer idiocy of the attitudes held by so many of his fellow elites and the vicious tenacity with which they held onto those attitudes, seeking to punish not just anyone who questioned them but also anyone who appeared not to hold them himself.

It wouldn’t bother Martin if every other elite on Athena kept his or her relict girls like slaves, whether for procreation or for pleasure. And Martin couldn’t deny, either, that he hoped to buy a relict girl who could provide to him both those things, as he saw fit. But to declare illegal any attempt to establish an ongoing partnership with a girl to care, with her, for one’s own children seemed to Martin both foolish and tyrannical. Indeed, it seemed to him the same kind of fascism the Athena colonists had tried so hard to abolish, three hundred years before. Then, there had been five thousand of them on Athena and the basic law had prohibited cohabitation because of the dual need to inculcate the new Athenian culture in their children and to give women the freedom they required to work as full citizens.

Now, with fewer than a thousand Athenians aboard the station and the birthrate finally growing again thanks to the drastic step of establishing the Taking, it seemed to Martin that the ideas of the men who had been prosecuted two years before—the so-called
Cohabitant Three
—made a great deal more sense than any of his fellow Athenians wanted to admit. At the very least, Martin wanted to try, despite the fate of the Cohabitant Three, expelled back to Earth with their wives and children remaining on Athena, the children in school and the wives auctioned to others.

Martin supported the Taking, of course. He had just come of age in time to vote in the referendum and, like everyone he knew, he had voted
Yes.
What choice did the Athenians have? The only way to continue civilization and the human race itself remained locked within the bodies of young women.

By the time of the referendum on the Enclosure Act, which established the Taking, Athena had doomed itself to genetic non-viability, and only a drastic measure would answer. The sheer impossibility of forcing elite women to bear children had brought down a system whose founding egalitarianism had proven both its glory and its Achilles’ heel.

Because the vast majority of elite women simply declined to sacrifice their rich, intellectual, passion-driven lives to the carrying and early nurture of new elites, the population at the time of the referendum had fallen disastrously. It was so low, in fact, that the number of genetically allowable mates for each Athenian was sometimes zero. Martin himself had grown up knowing that there were only two women on Athena with whom he might reproduce. Without new DNA—without girls who could be made to bear children—the space station whose citizens justifiably, Martin thought, viewed themselves as the only hope of the human race, would soon become a dying orbital hulk.

A very few men and women had said “So be it, and let’s hope that the interstellar colony made it.” The colony ships of the twenty-second century had gone with much fanfare and much hope to Sigma Draconis and the subspace radio had told an encouraging tale, before all contact with Draco colony had been lost. That was five hundred years before Earth civilization’s final cooperative effort had thrown station Athena into the heavens, and the full collapse had followed hard upon its heels.

Martin supposed that statistically there must exist some chance that Draco colony had survived—and indeed he had a strange kind of personal interest in its survival, because its founder had been a very distant uncle of his, and a woman he supposed was his first cousin a great many times removed had actually gone as a colonist. But even if they had
known
that Draco were still out there, Martin had been thoroughly persuaded by the argument that Athena still had a responsibility not just to itself but also to the Earth over which it hung.

The Taking was the only answer.

He brought his hand down hard on the middle of Gretchen’s little bottom, thinking that this spanking actually represented the situation and its problems in an interesting sort of microcosm.

Gretchen cried out much louder than the spank had warranted, he thought, and Martin found that he felt the need to express, much as Heather or Diana might have, exactly what he thought this spanking should teach the girl. She needed not merely to understand that she would be punished when necessary, but also why.

He spanked her again, harder, in the same place, and now she tried to get away, off his knee. Heather, still standing there watching, snorted in derision, but Martin took firm hold of the girl’s hips, and spanked her again as her legs kicked out wildly and she yelped in discomfort and protest.

Not stopping the spanking, he said over her cries and tears, “Young lady, it’s very clear to me that you don’t understand much about the Taking.”

“Ow!” Gretchen said. “I understand enough!”

Now Martin gave her one hard spank on a right cheek over which a nice shade of pink had spread.

“And what do you think is enough?” he asked. He put his hand down on her bottom, and rubbed her there firmly, which drew a little whimper from her unseen mouth, with the rest of her face turned down to the carpet and veiled by her golden hair. He had made the girl’s backside quite warm; he thought he could get used to the sweet sensation of having her over his knee for this sort of lesson.

From the beginning of the debates in the Assembly, thirteen years before, alongside high-minded discourse on both sides about genetics and the saving of human civilization had run a quite frank discussion about pleasure and punishment. Erika Wendt, the woman to whom Heather Feld looked for her inspiration in her treatment of relict girls, and the founder of the Maenad Club, the social club where any girl Heather bought today would end up, had proven herself very eloquent time and time again.

Erika’s most famous speech, given on the eve of the referendum, had truly not been decisive in any way, because the passage of the plebiscite stood in no doubt whatsoever at the time. Martin, however, often thought that it had decided his heart on such questions as whether he should feel guilty about the hardness of his cock when he rubbed little Gretchen’s pink bottom.

“I have spoken many time before in this chamber,” Erika said, “about the necessity of we elites exercising with ourselves scrupulous honesty about our motives in this matter.” Fifty-seven years then lay upon her, but she had still been as clear-voiced and as vigorous as she had been on the day she proposed an amendment to the original motion proposing to authorize
the taking from Earth of young women between the ages of eighteen and thirty, by force if necessary, for the purpose of procreation.

The Wendt Amendment, as it instantly became known in 2986 and after, even when it had changed its form to fit the changing form of the motion itself, read,
and pleasure.

There at the end of the three-year process leading to the plebiscite, Erika held her focus. The question on the floor was the last version of the Wendt Amendment, now much extended with specific regulations governing the sexual demands and the corporal punishments that might be administered to taken relict girls. Its passage was assured, and Erika’s speech constituted the capstone of her long campaign.

“Unless we admit to ourselves from the beginning that we are bringing these girls to Athena as much to employ them sexually as to employ their reproductive capacity and their genetic diversity, we do them an injustice even more terrible than we have already purposed. Unless we inscribe their sexual use, and the way we may discipline them, into this law, I promise you that we will seek to pretend that we have brought them here only to raise the birthrate.”

Shouts of “Hear! Hear!” from her supporters, who included Heather and Diana. Fred Gramling had not been among them; Fred took a new relict girl every year and impregnated her, but would never admit that he chose his girls on any criterion but genetic viability.

“As you know,” Erika had continued. “I have conceded that the girls we take must all be inseminated. I do not view this as a concession to the justification of the Taking by the genetic argument, but rather as a practical, economic necessity. If we are to survive, every relict womb must earn its keep. But in my amendment I believe we have laid down with justice and honesty a scheme whereby we may both protect these girls and obtain from them the pleasure to which we have a right as their elite benefactors.”

Thunderous applause succeeded Erika’s final words, and they had stuck in Martin’s mind from that day forward.
The pleasure to which we have a right as their elite benefactors.

The right, if he bought little Gretchen, to order her to her knees, to take his cock out of his pants, and to suck it. The right to fuck her any way he chose, whether he intended to make her pregnant with his child or not. The right to give her pleasure and to deny it.

Gretchen said, her voice strained with the arousal Martin knew he had begun to teach her about, by rubbing her delightfully firm backside, easing and spreading the warmth of the spanking, “You have sex with us, so that we’ll have babies.”

“Well put,” Diana said dryly.

“But incomplete, sweet little Gretchen,” Heather said. “Martin, stop teasing the girl and let us all see what she looks like when she comes.”

Martin shot her a disparaging glance. Suddenly the contrast between Gretchen, with her simple blue relict dress pulled up, her lingering tears, her honest words, and her cute bottom, on the one hand, and his fellow elites as represented above all by Heather and Diana and the Maenad Club, seemed to make affection well up in him for the innocent girl over his lap.

“No,” he said. “If you buy her, that’ll be your right, but I won’t do that to her.”

“Oh, Martin,” Diana said, “it’s almost as if you want us to think you’re not hard.”

Martin sighed and turned his eyes to her, trying to tell her by the look that he accepted her premises about relict girls, because they were true, but their truth gave no warrant for the way she and Heather—and a few of the other men and women who ran the Maenad Club—flaunted their knowledge of simpler people’s desires. Not that Martin’s desires were simple, to be sure. But the Maenad Club didn’t seem to him really to uphold Erika Wendt’s clear-eyed vision of the erotic dimension of the Taking as much as it looked down its nose at anyone who didn’t parade his or her relict girl around the adult spaces of Athena dressed only in a leather harness.

His cock gave an instinctive little leap at the thought of this girl, Gretchen, in that kind of harness.
If you were mine, little Gretchen,
he thought,
you would only wear your harness at home. And I would make sure you liked it.

Chapter Three

Martin smoothed Gretchen’s dress back down over her rear end. “I hope you’ve learned your lesson, young lady,” he said in a voice that sounded far kinder than she would ever have expected. Something about the way the women—Heather and Diana, Ms. Feld and Ms. Renton—had spoken about her had made him take her side, she could tell, though she understood nothing else. How could she help liking this man Martin for that?

“Yes, sir,” she said quietly as he helped her stand up.

“Alright, enough wasted time,” said the man they called Fred. “Come stand before us, in the middle of the room.” Unsure of why she obeyed so readily now, and willing to blame the lingering sting of the humiliating spanking she had just received, Gretchen moved to comply, looking at her bare feet and holding her hands clasped before her.

“My name is Mr. Gramling. You will address us formally, as Mr. or as Ms. When you have been purchased, you will call your owner
sir
or
ma’am,
unless he or she tells you another title by which to call him or her. With me here today to take girls back to Athena I have Mr. Lourcy, Ms. Feld, and Ms. Renton, whom you already have met in some sense. Also, here are Mr. Fretter, Mr. Yan, Mr. Morton, Mr. DeFios, Mr. Zachary, and Ms. Lawlor.”

As he spoke each name, one of the sky-people sitting in the semi-circle of stools nodded, some pleasantly, some more seriously. Gretchen didn’t even try to remember the names or the faces. She found she couldn’t stop darting little glances at Martin—Mr. Lourcy—to see if he were looking at her, but he seemed to be absorbed in a little device, a sort of small, glowing rectangle he held in his hand. Only once, as Mr. Gramling spoke, did she catch Mr. Lourcy looking at her, though with a sort of faraway look in his eyes. When their eyes met, he gave a little smile. Gretchen looked down at her hands again, blushing. Something about being spanked by this man, of all things, seemed to have made her unable to stop thinking about him.
Well, of course. I’m worried that he’ll hurt me again, aren’t I?

“I’m going to tell you about what will happen to you,” Mr. Gramling continued, “over the next few hours and days. I am afraid that you cannot avoid any of what I will describe: your only choice, Gretchen, will be whether to comply willingly with it, or to undergo correction until you do. Do you understand?”