Buying His Mate (4 page)

Heather looked at Diana. Erika got like this sometimes, and you never knew whether to ask for a story or to try to get her back on topic. But she found the main thread again, now. “So,” she said, lifting her beautiful face, its wisdom embodied in the few wrinkles and the snow-white hair always worn back in an elegant chignon. “Pandora gets a jar, full of all human evils. It’s the gods’ trick, but when you understand about Greek myth, that doesn’t make it any less a women-are-the-source-of-all-evil thing, because she opens the jar, and then slams the lid back down before hope gets out. Really, in Greek, the word pretty much means the future.”

She might not remember culture class, but Heather knew herself to be smart as a whip, like every other elite woman. “Children,” she breathed. “Children are locked inside women’s bodies.”

“So,” Diana said, with a bemused smile, “hope isn’t good or bad—it’s just what the human race literally can’t live without.”

Erika smiled. “Pussy. And that’s why we’ve got the Taking. And it’s also why you two are going to keep working for the ideals we share.”

Heather and Diana exchanged another puzzled look. “But, Erika,” Diana said, “we won, right? We can take relict girls ourselves, just like men.”

Erika’s eyes seemed to twinkle. “Ah, but that won’t
promote
our ideals. We’re going to found a club.”

At first Heather and Diana couldn’t figure out whether Erika was joking. “A club?” Heather asked. She searched her brain for information learned in culture class that might help. “You mean, like a
strip
club?”

Erika laughed. “No,” she said, “but I’m hoping that a lot of stripping will go on there. And, who knows, maybe one of the patrons will want to bring back the ancient art of the striptease. And I have to confess, as well, that I’ve always been fascinated by a strange thing in the historical records of eroticism called pole dancing. But, no, I don’t mean that kind of club. I mean a social organization founded with a mission to promote healthy ideas about dominance and submission. Now that we are going to be importing a lot of relict girls within an institutional power dynamic that will make them subservient and thus naturally teach them the value of submission on both an erotic and a domestic level, we need to build upon that foundation. Both for the pleasure of the new club’s membership and for the education of the elite more generally in an area that has long been neglected, I want you to join with me to form what I think we should call the Maenad Club.”

Erika looked at both of them briefly and continued with a smile, “No, I won’t make you try to dredge that one up from your culture class. The maenads were sexually abandoned female followers of the god Dionysus. They had sex with a mythological creature called a satyr, as well as, presumably, with Dionysus himself.”

“So,” Diana said thoughtfully, “a sort of women on top kind of affair.”

“Yes,” replied Erika, “but also women on the bottom. The relict girls specifically.”

* * *

Should we buy Gretchen for the club?
Heather wondered as she saw the girl’s lovely naked body come into view. The breasts were small but perfectly formed, with tiny pink nipples, and that lovely glimpse of pussy that showed through her golden nether fleece did draw the eye most movingly. But Heather and Diana had found that the best club girls tended to play with themselves at least once a week. On the other hand, Gretchen’s blush at the question might have indicated a little more interest in the practice than she wished to admit. Several club members, too, loved that kind of deep blush, which indicated an innocence that stood on the verge of lewd knowledge for which it yearned in spite of the shame it brought. Heather thought she could very easily find a club member who would pay in excess of five thousand credits for the right to have Gretchen first. Indeed she had in mind three candidates, two women and a man, all of whom had requested that Heather and Diana bring something back for them. Well, if little Gretchen was a club girl, she would show it now.

“Go ahead and walk around the circle, please, Gretchen,” said Fred, once Diana had sat back down. “Stop in front of each of us, and turn around so that we can see all your charms. Start with me, please.”

In silence, then, Gretchen turned to display herself, biting her lips and with her eyes apparently fixed on the carpet. When Fred put out his hand to stop her turning, so that he could caress the pretty backside Martin had spanked, and then move his hand around to her front and make her cry out when he gave her a little wank between the legs, she trembled, but made no more sound than a whimper.

“Very nice,” Fred said. “Thank you, girl. You may move on.”

Gretchen suffered similar gazes and touches from most of the other elites. When she came to Heather, she issued the command, “Your back to me, Gretchen. Bend over and touch your toes, please.” For a long moment Heather considered the lovely view thus exposed. Then she wet the first two fingers on her right hand in her mouth, and began to caress Gretchen’s pussy in a very matter-of-fact way. The girl gave a sobbing little moan.

Heather stopped then, nearly as soon as she had begun. “Thank you, dear,” she said. “You may move on.”

When Gretchen reached Martin, he said, even before she could turn, in a voice that sounded to Heather’s ears rather troubled, “You may move on, Gretchen. Thank you.”

Diana stood and kissed Gretchen when the girl reached her, putting her left hand in the girl’s blond hair to hold her head still. “Wh—” Gretchen said in surprise at the sudden gesture, and then Diana’s mouth came upon hers, and Gretchen’s face turned bright red as she shuddered, as if trying her hardest not to struggle.

Diana’s right hand came down between the girl’s legs and probed there. Heather watched her friend’s slim fingers move up and down, and then, gently, in and out, until Gretchen cried out into the elite woman’s mouth.

“Thank you,” said Diana, breaking the kiss suddenly. “You may move on.”

The final examiner was Jonathan Yan, who had Gretchen hold her pussy open for him. “She’s wet,” he said. “See what you did, Diana?”

A few of the other elites chuckled.

“Is it my fault if I know how to treat a relict?” Diana said archly.

“Alright, Gretchen,” Fred said. “We’re almost done. Hop up onto the table, please, and put your feet in the stirrups.”

The girl obeyed quickly, giving Heather a delicious view of her pink pussy-lips and even a brief hint of the tiny anus. Heather wondered why stolen glimpses like that excited her fancy so much more than what she now saw, as Gretchen assumed her place on the table, legs spread wide. Of course, the exposed position of the exam had its own charm, but it didn’t convey that lovely sense of having seen something that the girl herself didn’t know she had shown you.

Heather sighed as she watched Fred take his examination bag from under his stool and advance toward where Gretchen lay open before them. No matter how many years went by, since the night Erika Wendt had said to her and Diana, in the little restaurant on D level that looked toward Mars every few minutes with the turning of Athena, “You two probably haven’t even considered supporting my amendment, have you?” Heather still never seemed to become entirely accustomed to the idea that to have a relict girl at her disposal could make her heart beat so fast.

“Just relax, Gretchen,” Fred said, his voice a little exasperated. “I need to have a good look inside your vagina, and then your anus.” Gretchen made a whimpering little sound. “That’s better, girl. There we go.” A pause, as Fred carried out the vaginal exam.

The girl gave a little whimper on the table. Did she know how high a price she would fetch? Fred would want her, as well as Martin. A pretty face and a pretty pussy, together with a trim backside: Gretchen would do well at the club, too, with that fresh face—she’d be in very high demand. Heather and Diana should probably pass, though, since the girl didn’t give much evidence of the depth of her erotic nature.

“She’s intact,” Fred said, standing aside to show where he had opened Gretchen with a plastic speculum. “It’s a very healthy—and, I must say, a very lovely—prospect.”

Then Gretchen, undoubtedly in response to being spoken of that way while laid so very bare and open, suddenly gave a low, whining moan that came close to changing Heather’s mind about the girl. She looked at Diana, who raised an eyebrow back; she had heard it, too. Gretchen liked to be put on display. Various kinds of display made up a large proportion of the activities at the Maenad Club. A pretty relict girl like Gretchen who got aroused when spread upon a table for the prurient pleasure of ten elites could be a great asset.

Fred turned back to the girl’s widely spread thighs. He said, “Gretchen, I’m going to palpate your clitoris for a moment now, to test your responsiveness.” His last words were nearly drowned out, though, by the girl’s sharp questioning cry of gratification, cut off when Fred stopped his palpation.

“Now I’ll open up your rectum, Gretchen,” he said. “Just to make sure you’re healthy.” A little whimper from Gretchen. “Just relax as much as you can, girl. That’s it.”

Fred turned back to the other elites. “Everything looks to be in order, and even though she’s slim, her hips are well within the acceptable range.”

Chapter Five

Gretchen didn’t understand why she had made that sound, really; she just knew that something about imagining all those sky-people were looking at her,
into
her, had suddenly made her desperate for some kind of release from the ache between her legs. She felt her pussy flow with wetness around the speculum, and clench around the plastic.

Then the thing had left her, and Mr. Gramling said, with a little kindness but still as if to a livestock animal of which he felt fond—a productive milk cow, perhaps, “Go ahead and get down from the table. Don’t get dressed; you’ll be naked from now on.”

What?
The feeling of excitement at having her legs spread open on the table, which had faded a little as the minutes passed, returned full force.
Naked, from now on
.

“Yes, Mr. Gramling,” she whispered, blushing even in her arousal—indeed because of her arousal. When Ms. Renton had kissed her, and then Mr. Yan had made her display her pussy for him and pronounced it wet, Gretchen had wished the soft floor would swallow her up, but even that feeling seemed to make her feel even warmer and wetter down there.

Disoriented for a moment when she had gotten off the table, she looked around the room trying to remember where Mr. Gramling had told her to go.

“It’s over there,” she heard Mr. Lourcy’s voice say, and she turned to look at him. The one who had spanked her seemed the kindest of these sky-people… elites, did they call themselves? He pointed to the door on the other side of the circle. The rest of the elites were checking their little rectangular devices or chatting with one another.

Gretchen felt herself smile, in answer to the little smile on Mr. Lourcy’s face. “Thank you, Mr. Lourcy,” she said. As she walked to the door she thought,
Will he buy me?
She wondered why the hope that thought stirred seemed to find an answer in the troubling thought that Ms. Renton or Ms. Feld might buy her. Why had they touched her like that? To
see what kind of girl you are when it comes to sexual matters
. Were there different kinds? Was Gretchen the kind Ms. Renton was looking for? Or Mr. Lourcy?

She gave her head a little shake in puzzlement as she slid the door open and entered the large room on the other side, just as big as the square room in which the elites had received her, and just as square, empty of people except for her but quite full of furniture. Nearly twenty naked girls, of course, might be in here before the day ended, and the room was provided with stools for them as well as what seemed chests that held the entertainment Mr. Gramling had mentioned.

Gretchen thought about the girls who waited outside, wondering if, when the next one came through the door, naked like Gretchen, she would be able to talk to her at all, let alone try to make friends. She didn’t know any of the others who had been taken from the wild lands. The enclosure only had one girl taken each year, to avoid, Jerry said, the appearance of favoritism and the creation of a ruling class, while the search parties who went out to bring people back from the wild lands and into the safety of the enclosure might find six or seven girls eligible for taking in a wild village, living like animals, as Gretchen’s mother always said. Sometimes the rest of the village came to the enclosure when the search party took their young women for service on the sky-star, and sometimes they didn’t.

Sometimes, too, Jerry told her, they refused when their girls were taken but later came to the enclosure either in twos and threes or as a tribe. The sky-people had things in their enclosures that had not existed on Earth since the collapse: almost all of it beginning with electrical power, utterly—if gradually, with the dying of the batteries in the absence of the facilities, and then the skill, to replace them—destroyed when the food riots had turned every
nation
(such a strange word, Gretchen thought—as if it were possible for thousands of people to agree about things) into a chaotic mass of warring tribes, all of them trying to keep their children alive in a world where water had to be boiled and, after the matches and the propane were gone, only a few people knew how to make a fire to do the boiling.

Idly Gretchen opened a chest and found a collection of vids. She got to watch vids on the big white screen in the recreation hall on Friday and Saturday nights, and she loved them—all of them: the romances and the comedies and the adventures, and even the documentaries that ran before the main feature. She saw that in the chest there were some documentaries she hadn’t seen, on the little cards that somehow contained the moving pictures and sounds.

Athena and You: What is the sky-star?

Athena and You: Who are the elites?