Slave (27 page)

“Well, yeah, he sold me, all right,” she said, “but that was mainly because I didn’t get pregnant. He wanted children that looked less ape-like, but when it didn’t work out, I was sold to another trader. This one thought I was too fat and didn’t feed me.”

Ranata had
never
been fat, and I couldn’t imagine why anyone would have thought that she was, and I said as much.

“Well, if you’d ever seen the guy, you would have known why he felt that way. He was a Kitnock and they basically look like…well, toothpicks.”

I didn’t have to think too hard to know just exactly who she meant. “Oh, yeah, I remember him! Tall, skinny guy with a mouth big enough to swallow a watermelon?”

“That’s the one,” she said.

I nodded. Oh, yes, I remembered him quite well, indeed! “I broke his arm trying to get information out of him,” I said, smiling at the memory. “I remember being ever so slightly sorry about it at the time, but now…”

“Oh Jack!” Ranata exclaimed with unsuppressed glee. “You didn’t!”
“Yes, I did,” I said firmly. “He was a real jerk about it, too. Tried to have me arrested for assault and battery—

or whatever they called it on that planet. I bribed the cop and he let me go—probably because he didn’t like Kitnocks anymore than I did.”

Ranata dissolved into helpless laughter, and for once, I was delighted to be able to report that I’d done such a thing, since it made her laugh. God knows, she’d had little enough reason to laugh over the past six years! Sort of made me wish I had been able to report, truthfully, that I’d ripped the gorilla’s balls off. Then something else occurred to me, and, of course, I just
had
to ask….

“By the way, Sis—and you don’t have to answer this if you don’t want to—but how was sex with the gorilla?”

Ranata made a face reminiscent of the one she’d made when Mom made her try some exotic vegetable or other (I forget just what planet it was supposed to have come from, though it was probably Io because they grow lots of weird stuff there) that was supposed to be extremely good for you, but which, unfortunately, smelled a bit like a wet skunk. “About like you’d expect,” she replied. “Rather disgusting, though fortunately it was usually quick. He weighed a ton, but, for his size, he had the tiniest little dick you’ve ever seen.”

Which tallied with anything I’d ever heard about having sex with a gorilla—well, guys that looked like them, that is. I’d never heard of anyone actually doing it with a real one. Then it occurred to me that, along with his sexual misconduct, I just might have another reason to go back there and kill him someday.
“How did you hurt your leg?” I demanded. “It wasn’t the gorilla, was it?”

“No,” she replied. “It was the next one after that.

According to him—his name was Crapenit, by the way—

I couldn’t do
anything
right, and when I’d finally had enough of being beaten, I tried to escape one night. I have no idea where I would have gone, of course, but I tried it anyway and got lost in the forest and fell over, well, a cliff, actually—though not a particularly high one—and broke my ankle. Crapenit was a real sadist and seemed to enjoy the fact that I was hurt and wouldn’t do anything about it, just made me hobble along using a stick for a crutch all the way back to the slave quarters. One of the other slaves helped me wrap it up, but it never healed right.”

“Can’t they do anything for it now?” I asked. “You know, like replacing the joint or something?”

“Probably,” she admitted. “But it really doesn’t hurt much anymore, it just healed crooked. I might get it looked at after the baby is born.”

I nodded. “You do that,” I said. “I want to be able to tell Mom that you’re in good shape, you know.”

“But I
am
in good shape!” Ranata protested. “Well, the best shape I’ve been in for a long time, anyway. No, really, Jack! I feel great!”

I was still pretty skeptical about that. “Well, don’t take this the wrong way, Sis, but you sure as hell don’t look it!”

“You do, though,” she said with a warm smile. “You look marvelous.”

“Aw, that’s just the makeup job,” I said with a dismissive wave. “Or it could be that you’re just happy to see me.”
“Well, you
are
a sight for sore eyes,” she agreed.

“You, too, Sis,” I said. “You, too.”

I got the weirdest feeling in my chest just then, like my heart hurt or something. Guess it was something tugging at my heart strings—either that or I was having a coronary. Wouldn’t that be just ducky, I thought. To finally locate Ranata and then go and have a damned heart attack! Of course, I knew full well that my heart was functioning just fine—if I could believe the medical scanner on the ship, that is. No, it wasn’t a heart attack, I decided; it was something else.

“Where’s Cat?” I asked, suddenly realizing what was wrong with me. I hadn’t been apart from Cat since I’d dragged him aboard my ship. All it was, was that I must have been missing him. I’d never loved a man enough to miss him, which was probably why I hadn’t been able to identify the feeling.

“He’s around here somewhere,” Ranata assured me.

“I’d better find Dantonio, though, and introduce you two before he finds Cat and freaks out.”

“And why would he do that?” I demanded rather hotly. “Cat’s a nice guy.”

“Well, you know how the men are around here,” she said. “One minute they’re doing just fine and the next they’re so mad you wouldn’t think they were the same person!”

“Oh, yeah, that’s right,” I said. “I was forgetting how testy they are. But you know, Cat has a theory about that. He thinks the guys just pretend to get mad so you women will be playing with their ding-dongs all the time.”
“Oh, I don’t think that’s true at all,” Ranata disagreed.

“They just have very volatile tempers.”

“I don’t know,” I said doubtfully. “The more I’ve thought about it, the more I think he might be right. We set up shop in the village and this one guy was calling Cat a liar one minute and then buying some tooth jelly from him the next! What I mean is, if he truly didn’t believe the sales pitch and it made him mad enough to nearly get into a fight with Cat over it, then why the hell did buy anything from us at all?”

Ranata was spared from having to reply to this when a man stormed into the room, demanding to know who that long-haired, pointed-eared fiend in the dining room eating cake was.

“Better grab his dick and shut him up before I kill him, Sis,” I growled, leaping to my feet and reaching instinctively for my pistol, which, of course I didn’t have on me because Cat was still carrying it. As a result, I was forced to resort to either verbal sparring or fisticuffs.

“For your information, Bucko, my Cat is
not
a fiend, and I’ll thank you not to be saying shit like that about him.”

Looking back, I suppose I could have stooped to his level and called him a flat-nosed, six-fingered freak, but at the time, “Bucko” was about as eloquent an epithet as I could conjure up.

Ranata’s reaction to this exchange was to burst out laughing. “Oh, Jack! Calm down!” she giggled. “This is my husband, Dantonio.”

I backed down just a bit, but still eyed him a tad suspiciously. So, this was the punk who’d had the audacity to buy my little sister as a slave! You know, in spite of all
she’d told me about her life and how happy she was now, it crossed my mind just then that she might have been brainwashed into believing all that crap. Then I remembered my original intention to kill the bastard, and I still wasn’t convinced that it wasn’t a good idea—and this was aside from the fact that he had just referred to my dear, sweet Kittycat as a fiend.

“Jack?” Dantonio echoed with surprise. He might have known who I was, or he might not, but either way, he still looked sort of pugnacious to me, and to be perfectly honest, I wouldn’t have minded getting into a fight with him—not one little bit! In fact, I was looking forward to it, if for no other reason than to knock some sense into the inconsiderate sonofabitch who had gotten my half-starved sister pregnant. Though as skinny as Ranata was, I was a little surprised she’d even been able to conceive at all—and perhaps he had been, as well.

Still, if anyone had consulted me—which, of course, no one had—I think I’d have recommended giving her some time to plump up a bit first. But then, a general lack of consideration for anyone but themselves was one of those things that I had disliked about many of the men I’d met throughout my life. So far, this one hadn’t impressed me very much because the way I saw it, he’d done nothing more than to pay for Ranata’s affection with a little food and a nice place to live. She hadn’t had the opportunity to fall in love with Dantonio and then marry him of her own accord; he’d fuckin’ bought her!

I know you’re probably thinking that I was no better myself, since I had done virtually the same thing with Cat, but I truly hadn’t; I’d never had any intention of
keeping Cat as my slave, nor had I wanted anything more from him than his assistance in finding Ranata—at least, to begin with, that is. And in my defense, Cat had been the one sniffing around me and wanting to mate; it certainly hadn’t been my idea! I hadn’t forced him to, nor had I asked it of him, but I wasn’t so sure about Dantonio. He might have forced Ranata, and, given all she’d been through in the past, it probably would have seemed like a whirlwind romance to her. I mean, after you’ve been raped by a guy who looks like a gorilla, how much worse could it get?

Dantonio and I just stood there for several moments, each of us trying to stare the other down, and I truly believe that if we’d been out in the open, we’d have been circling each other like a couple of angry dogs about to attack.

Fortunately for us—though mostly for Dantonio because I have no doubt that I could have mopped up the floor with him—Ranata had plenty of experience in toning down some rather explosive situations. “Yes,” she said firmly. “Jack. My sister. You know, your sister-in-law?”

Dantonio undoubtedly heard her, but his belligerent gaze never wavered. If his expression was anything to go by, it was quite obvious that he had already known exactly who I was and also precisely why I was there.

“You can’t have her,” he said evenly. “If you are here to take her away from me, I will fight you to the death if necessary. She is mine and she carries my child.”

My first thought was that, having made a statement like that, the men of Statzeel—or at least this one in particular—really didn’t know about the selective
breeding program, otherwise he’d never have known for certain that the child was, indeed, his own. Given the possessive manner in which he obviously viewed his wife and child, I would have hated to be the one to tell him that all of the rest of Ranata’s children wouldn’t share that distinction. On the other hand, I
was
feeling a bit spiteful, and might have enjoyed telling him, if only to make his life miserable. Of course, having been sworn to secrecy made it a moot point, anyway, so I didn’t.

Perhaps it was because I’d been listening to the story of Ranata’s horrific experiences over the past six years and was, therefore, primed for a fight; but instead of somehow reassuring me that Ranata would be loved and cared for, Dantonio’s words only made me realize that if I’d only managed to catch up with her just six months sooner, none of this would have happened. The way I saw it, he, and only he, was the reason I couldn’t take my sister home, and as far as I was concerned, he was just another slave owner.

“You should have waited!” I hissed at him. “Just look at her! She’s been beaten and starved half to death and what do you do right off the bat? You go and saddle her with a child! What were you thinking? ‘My child,’” I said, openly mocking him. “If you want to have any more children, Bucko, then you should have just a little bit more concern for the health of their mother! Hell, she might not even live to deliver this one! For pity’s sake, Dantonio! Couldn’t you have kept your dick in your pants for a little while longer?”

The absurdity of my last question hit Ranata hard and she began laughing hysterically and keeled over on her couch.
Casting a scathing glance in her direction, I muttered, “Well, no, I guess you probably couldn’t have, at that.”

Unfortunately, the sound of Ranata’s laughter caused my own anger to dissipate rather more quickly than I would have liked. Heaving a world-weary sigh, I realized that after six years, I was getting damned tired of fighting all the time. Besides, it was requiring way too much effort to sustain my anger, especially in light of the fact that Ranata still had the giggles.

“Sorry, Dantonio,” I apologized. “I guess I’m still pissed at all of my sister’s previous owners. I know it isn’t quite fair to be taking it all out on you, but to be perfectly honest, I think I’d like to kill a couple of them—unless Ranata thinks torture would be a better punishment. Maybe you could give me a hand.”

Dantonio was still staring daggers at me and I was beginning to think he had no sense of humor at all.

“Nah, maybe not. Maybe I’ll just go find my Cat. You know, the long-haired, pointy-eared fiend?” I looked at Ranata and asked, “Hey, Sis, do you suppose there’s any cake left? Cat really likes sweet stuff. He might have eaten all of it by now.”

“If there isn’t,” she said warmly, “then we’ll bake some cookies.”

“Sounds good to me,” I said. “Been a long time since I had any cookies. Remember the ones Mom used to make?”

“I sure do!” she said. “And would you believe that nobody here ever even heard of cookies until I showed up?”
“Doesn’t surprise me a bit,” I said. “Hey, if you don’t mind, could Cat and I stick around for a few days?”

“I’d be very disappointed if you didn’t,” she said. “Stay as long as you like.” Smiling mistily, she added, “And, Jack, thanks for coming after me. Honestly, if Dantonio hadn’t come along, I truly would have needed you.”

Yes, she was the same sweet girl she’d always been.

Didn’t look it, perhaps, but at least her experiences hadn’t left her bitter and vindictive.

“You’re welcome, of course,” I replied, “but like I said, Sis, there wasn’t anything else I could have done. I couldn’t have just let you go and then lived the rest of my life knowing that I’d let you down. And thank you, too,” I said to Dantonio—who was still not smiling, by the way. “At least I caught up with her this time, even if I was too late.” I took another gander at him, thinking that none of these guys ever seemed to smile unless some woman had their hands all over them! No sense of humor at all! “Hey, Bucko, lighten up!” I urged him.