Prize of Gor (2 page)

So it is difficult for her to speak simply and clearly of her age, not because of any personal embarrassment or vanity, which she might once have felt, and would not now be permitted, but because the matter put in one way would be extremely misleading and put in another way might appear at least initially surprising. Her age now then, one supposes, would be least misleadingly, and most informatively, understood as that which it seems to be, and that which, in a very real sense, it actually is. Her age, then, is that which you would suppose, were you to look upon her, were you to see her as she is now. Perhaps, better, it is that which it is, in actuality, biologically and physiologically, in all respects. It is that which it would be determined to be, after a thorough and careful examination by a qualified physician, of any world, even the terribly thorough physicians of this world.

That is the age she is, for better or for worse, on this world.

But it was not so, on another world.

Now let her note that this document is composed with a certain guarded anonymity. The name she bore is, of course, unimportant, and certainly so now, on this world, and it might have been any name, perhaps yours or another’s. So we will not give her a name, not until later, when one was given to her. Too, in accordance with the admonitions to which she has been subjected, she will attempt to conceal the names of institutions, and references to streets, and localities, museums, theaters, parks, shops and boulevards, and such things, which might serve to identify or reveal, even tentatively or remotely, the
venue
of this story’s beginning. The purpose of this injunction is not altogether clear to her, as it seems to her that they have the power to come and go, and do, much as they please. Who could stop them? But certainly she will honor it in detail. Doubtless they have their reasons. Perhaps they do not wish you to be on your guard. She does not know. What difference would it make, if you were on your guard? What difference would it have made, had she been on her guard? Would anything, truly, have been different? Perhaps they do not wish you to know the areas, or locales, in which they work. But it is her impression that their doings, their functions or operations, if you prefer, are not limited to a particular city or town, or even nation, or hemisphere, or season, or year. There seem many reasons for supposing that. But she knows, actually, very little of these things. She, and those like her, are commonly little informed, commonly kept much in ignorance. Such things are not their concerns. Their concerns are otherwise, and are commonly supposed, they are told, to be more than ample to occupy their time and attention. Still, of course, they wonder, not that it makes any difference in their own cases. That is the sort of entities, or objects, that they are. So she will speak with care, concealing details which, in the fullness of the case, may not much matter anyway. Too, she dares not be disobedient. She has learned the cost of disobedience, and she shall obey, as she must, instantly, in all things, and with perfection. Yet she would suppose, from her narration, that some will understand more than she has dared to write. She would surmise that the city involved, and such, may be sufficiently obvious, even concealed beneath the cloak of an imposed discretion.

But that, of course, is left to the reader, if there eventually should be such.

She adds that this manuscript is written in English. She was literate, quite so, on her first world. On this world, however, she is illiterate. She cannot read, or write, any of its languages. She can, however, speak what seems to be this world’s major language, or, in any event, that spoken almost exclusively in her environment, and she can, of course, understand it. These things are needful for her.

Lastly she might call the reader’s attention to what has seemed to her an oddity, or anomaly. On her first world she understood, or knew, little or nothing of this world. She was familiar with, at best, allusions to this world, seldom taken seriously, and most often, it seems incredible to her now, lightly dismissed. She has now wondered if various authorities on her old world did not know something of this world, at least a little something. It seems some of them must have. How could they not know of it? But perhaps they did not. She does not know.

The oddity, or anomaly, has to do in its way with law.

The state, or a source of law, it seems, can decide whether one has a certain status or not, say, whether one is a citizen or not a citizen, licensed or not licensed, an outlaw or not an outlaw, and such. It can simply make these things come about, it seems, by pronouncing them, and then they are simply true, and that, then, is what the person is. It has nothing to do, absolutely nothing to do, with the person’s awareness or consent, and yet it is true of the person, categorically and absolutely, in all the majesty of the law. It makes the person something, whether the person understands it, or knows it, or not. The person might be made something or other, you see, and be totally unaware of it. Yet that is what that person, then, would be. It is clear to her now that she must have been watched, and considered, and assessed, perhaps for months, utterly unbeknownst to her. She had no idea. She suspected nothing, absolutely nothing. But her status, her condition, had changed. It seems that decisions were made, and papers signed, and certified, all doubtless with impeccable legality. And then, by law, she, totally unaware, became something she had not been before, or not in explicit legality. And she continued to go about her business, knowing nothing of this, ignorantly, naively, all unsuspecting. But she had become something different from what she had been before. She was no longer the same, but was now different, very different. Her status, her condition, had undergone a remarkable transformation, one of which she was totally unaware. She did not know what, in the laws of another world, one capable of enforcing its decrees and sanctions, one within whose jurisdiction she lay, she had become. That she finds interesting, curious, frightening, in its way, an oddity, and anomalous. She did not know what she had become. She wonders if some of you, too, perhaps even one reading this manuscript, if there should be such, may have become already, too, even now, unbeknownst to yourself, what she had then become. Perhaps you are as ignorant of it as was she. But this reality was later made clear to her, by incontrovertible laws, and deeds, which did not so much confirm the hypothetical strictures of a perhaps hitherto rather speculative law, one extending to a distant world, as replace or supersede them, in an incontrovertible manner, with immediate, undeniable, unmistakable realities, realities not only independently legal, and fully sufficient in their own right, but realities acknowledged, recognized and celebrated, realities understood, and enforced, with all the power, unquestioned commitment and venerated tradition of an entire world, that on which she had found herself.

That world did not long leave her in doubt as to what she was.

Chapter 2

SHE BEGINS HER STORY

She was not a particularly bad person, nor, one supposes, a particularly good person. She was perhaps rather like you, though perhaps not so good. Have we not all been upon occasion petulant, selfish, careless, arrogant, sometimes cruel? Have we not all upon occasion behaved disgracefully, unworthily? Have we not ignored others? Have we not, in lesser or larger ways, injured them, and enjoyed, if only briefly, the smug gratifications of doing so? What happened to her might happen to anyone, one supposes, to those gentler, kinder and deeper than she, and to those more shallow, more petty, nastier than she. It is true however that such as she, and her sisters, so to speak, under discipline, are quickly brought into line, the gentlest and the sweetest, and those who hitherto, perhaps in their unhappiness and lack of fulfillment, in their vanities and impatience, and haughtiness, were not only permitted but encouraged by an androgynous society to abuse their liberties. We are brought into line. Our lives are changed, profoundly. We are taught many things, all of us, including ourselves.

We do not know, in full, what their criteria are, for such as she, and others, not at all why such as she, and others, are selected.

It does seem clear that their criteria include high intelligence. If one’s intelligence is high, they seem to find that arousing, literally arousing, perhaps unaccountably to one accustomed to the criteria prized on my first world. It seems to considerably increase our value. In virtue of it they seem to relish us all the more, and then dominate us all the more imperiously and ruthlessly, making us all the more helpless and at their mercy. Perhaps, too, they are pleased to know that we understand clearly, and in the depths of our very being, more than might some others, what is being done to us, what we have been made, what we now are, helplessly, fully, incontrovertibly. Our intelligence then, like certain other properties, is sought; it is a desideratum. It gives them pleasure, and, of course, in virtue of it, as perhaps a not negligible pragmatic consequence, we train more swiftly and surely. They tend to be demanding and impatient. Little time is wasted on us. Too, if we are selected, or often are, at least in part, on the basis of our intelligence, one supposes that we would be more likely to be more alert, more sensitive, more inventive, more attentive than might otherwise be the case; we would be likely to be better, for example, one supposes, at reading the subtlest of expressions, the brief, shadowed flicker of a mood, perhaps a sign of danger. One quickly learns to apply one’s intelligence,
per force
, to new ends, in new spheres. No choice is given us. Their intelligence, incidentally, seems to us to be dimensions beyond ours. Intelligent as we are, our intelligence does not begin to compare with theirs. I do not know why this is. Perhaps it is a matter of genetic selections, or a simple result of an honest, freer, less debilitating acculturation. I do not know. Forgive this lapse into personal discourse.

It came as a great shock to her, after the performance, following the curtain calls, the lofting of roses, of bouquets, of so many flowers to the stage, to see the male in the audience.

The house lights were on now.

Others about her were discussing the performance.

He looked the same, absolutely the same. But surely thirty, or better, years had passed.

She rose from her seat; she stood still, almost unable to move, her eyes on him. Others desired to press past her. “Please,” someone said, not pleasantly. She moved, not steadily, trembling, toward the aisle, unable to keep her eyes from him. He was chatting, it seemed, with a companion, a charming, but, she thought, a surely stupid looking female. She felt, unaccountably, a wave of anger. Surely he could do better for a woman. And he was so young. “Please,” said someone, irritably. She moved into the aisle, unable to take her eyes from him. She backed up the aisle. Others, impatiently, moved about her. She then stopped, and, in a moment, stepped back into an empty row, the next closer to the exit, still not taking her eyes from him.

He looked the same. But it could not be he, of course. The resemblance was remarkable, the build, so large, so muscular, the carriage of the head, insolently, as she recalled it, the shock of carelessly unmanaged hair.

It was like seeing again something she had seen long before, and had not forgotten. Many of those memories remained as fresh today in her mind as they had in that time before, so many years ago.

She was then again, it seemed, in the aisle, near the exit, at the edge of the empty row. Somehow she was again in the aisle.

“Excuse me,” said someone.

Why was she in the aisle? Why had she left the empty row? Why had she not exited the auditorium?

Was she putting herself before him?

Did she want him to see her?

Surely not.

If so, why?

How strange is memory!

She was tempted to approach him. Surely he must be a relation, perhaps even the son, of he whom she had known, so many years before.

It could not be a simple, merely uncanny coincidence, surely not.

There must be some relationship with the other, he from long ago, a cousin, a son, a brother’s son, something.

To be sure, her relationship to him, that of his teacher, she then in her late twenties, in a graduate seminar on gender studies, in which he was one of the few males in the class, had been a strained one. He had failed to conform. He had not seemed to understand the nature of the class, which was to selectively and unilaterally propagandize a view, or, better, to raise the consciousness of such as he. She had failed him, of course, for his consciousness had not been raised. That could be told from a number of perspectives. He had not accepted her pronouncements without question, though they were, for the most part, merely being relayed by her, almost verbatim, from the
dicta
of various scholar activists in the movement, women who had devoted their lives to the promulgation of a political agenda. He had pointed out the weaknesses and failures of a number of studies she had favorably cited, and had, worse, brought to the attention of the class a considerable number of other studies of which she would have preferred to have had the class remain in ignorance. Too, she herself had been unfamiliar with many of these other studies, not having encountered them in approved gender literature, which, also, it seemed, had ignored them. The tenor of these various studies, or of most of them, clearly inveighed against the simplicities and dogmatisms of the propositions to which the students were expected to subscribe. His questions, too, were unacceptable, inviting her to explain the universal manifestation in all cultures of embarrassing constants, such as patriarchy, male status attainment and male dominance in male/female relationships. When she tried to cite cultures in which these properties were allegedly absent, he would inquire into the original source materials, the original ethnological accounts, and show how the constants were indeed acknowledged, even insisted upon, in the primary sources, though that might not have been clear from a sentence here and a sentence there, a paragraph here, and a paragraph there, judiciously excised from its context. The semester was a nightmare. Even militant young women eager to hear men criticized and denounced, who had taken the course to be confirmed in their ideological commitments, who had anticipated having a ritualistic quasi-religious experience, were confused. What they had enrolled to hear, and wanted to hear, and demanded to hear, was not what they heard. Some of them blamed her for not replying adequately. They had been angry. It had been humiliating. She had little with which to respond to simple, clear points having to do with fetal endocrinological hormonalization studies, hormonal inoculation studies, animal studies, and such, let alone the overwhelming cultural evidence with which she was confronted. She insisted, of course, on the irrelevance of biology, the insignificance of human nature, if it might, in some trivial sense, exist, the importance of ignoring millions of years of evolutionary history, the meaninglessness of genes, of inherited behavioral templates, and such. But the semester, by then, was muchly lost. How she hated a student who thought, who criticized, who challenged! Did he not know he was there not to question but to learn, or subscribe? He could have had at least the courtesy of pretending a hypocritical conversion to the prescribed doctrine. Others did, surely. One supposes he could have done as much, but he had not. Politeness, if not prudence, would have seemed to recommend such a course. She insisted on the importance of social artifacts, for example that men and women were not natural beings, but mere social artifacts, the manufactured products of culture and conditioning, that that was all. He had then asked for an explanation, or speculation, as to why all cultures, without exception, had designed their social artifacts in exactly such a way as to produce the various constants at issue. Since the most obvious, simplest, uniform, universal explanation for this fact would seem to be congruence with biological predispositions, with human biogenetic templates, she had dismissed the question as naive and pointless. She had declined to clarify why the question had been naive or pointless. Lastly, she had insisted, in anger and confusion, on fashionable postmodernistic analyses, on the alleged social aspect of, and role of, “truth,” as a weapon of ideological warfare, on the right of the scholar activist to alter, conceal, suppress, invent and falsify in order to comply with political requirements, that “truth” must be politicized, that propaganda must have priority, that one must practice the pragmatics of intimidation, that reality, objectivity, truth, and such, were only deplorable inventions, manufactured by men to oppress women, and such. He then asked her, if this were her view, if her earlier assertions, and such, had surrendered any possible claim to objective truth, and might be dismissed as mere propaganda. She refused to respond to the question. He then asked her if her general views on truth itself, its alleged subservience to political ends, its relativity, subjectivity, or such, were themselves true, or not. Did she claim that her theory of truth, that there was no objective truth, was itself objectively true, or not? Again she ignored the question. She looked away from him, dismissing him, and his questions, and addressed herself to others in the class, inquiring into their views of an assigned reading. After the class she detained him, to speak with him alone. “Why have you taken this class?” she asked. He had shrugged, looking down upon her. Now, it seemed, it was his turn not to answer her question. How she then hated men, and him! He was so large, she felt so small, almost insignificant, almost intimidated, before him. She was older than he, of course. She, at that time, was in her late twenties. He may have been in his early twenties. This difference in age, as well as her status as the instructor, should have given her dominance in this encounter. That she knew. But, oddly, it did not seem to do so. He seemed muchly different from other students. Suddenly, unaccountably, before him, she felt strange, unusual sensations, which seemed to swell upward through her body, permeating, suffusing it. She had never felt exactly this way before. She felt suddenly weak, delicious and helpless. She put her head down, and she knew that her face and under her chin, and the very upper part of her throat, and her hands, and the exposed parts of her body, all of it not covered by the tight, severe, mannish, professional garb she affected for teaching, the dark suit, and the severely cut white blouse, buttoned rather high, closely, about her neck, had suddenly turned crimson. Heat, and confusion, welled within her. She drew herself up, angrily. “You may leave,” she informed him. He turned away, and left. He had not taken the midterm examination, and he did not, of course, take the final examination. With a clear conscience, and with not a small sense of pleasure, she filled in the grade report at the end of the semester with a failing grade for him. She was pleased that he had taken no examinations. She did not think that he had been afraid to do so. Perhaps, she wondered, from time to time, to her irritation, if he had not regarded her as competent to examine him. There were certainly many facts indicating that he deserved to fail the course, his questions and recalcitrance, for example. Too, clearly, he had failed to meet the most important requirement of the course, the adoption of its ideological viewpoint. Certainly his consciousness had not been “raised.” That could be told from, if nothing else, how he had looked at her in class. How uneasy he had made her feel, though his face was almost expressionless. She suspected that that was why he had registered for the class, why he had taken the course. It was not because of the subject matter, which he doubtless found less than congenial, and with which he had little brief, but because of her. He had come to see her,
she
. That had been most clear, though suspected constantly throughout the semester, that day she had called him forward to the desk after class, the last day he attended class. No, his consciousness had not been “raised.” That could be told from the way he had looked at her. She had never been looked at like that before.