Kajira of Gor by John Norman Page A

smiled.
    “The yellow fits in nicely with the yellow of your belt,” I said, “and the
    yellow flowers on the tunic.”
    “Yes, Mistress,” smiled the girl. The sleeve I saw now could function rather
    like an accessory, perhaps adding to, or completing, an ensemble. It did, in
    this case, at least, make its contribution to the girl’s appearance. “The belt
    is binding fiber, Mistress,” said the girl, turning before me. “It may be used
    to tie or leash me, or even, coiled, to whip me.”
    “I see,” I said. It was a part of her ensemble.
    “And the flowers,” said the girl, “are talenders. They are a beautiful flower.
    They are often associated with love.”
    “They are very pretty,” I said.
    “Some free women do not approve of slaves being permitted to wear talenders,”
    she said, “or being permitted to have representations of them, like these, on
    their frocks. Yet slaves do often wear them, the masters permitting it, and they
    are not an uncommon motif, the masters seeing to it, on their garments.”
    “Why do free women object?” I asked.
    “They feel that a slave, who must love whomever she is commanded to love, can
    know nothing of love.”
    “Oh,” I said.
    “But I have been both free and slave,” she said, “and, forgive me, Mistress, but
    I think that it is only a slave, in her vulnerability and helplessness, who can
    know what love truly is.
    “You must love upon command?” I asked, horrified.
    “We must do as we are told,” she said. “We are slaves.”
    I shuddered at the thought of the helplessness of the slave.
    “We may hope, of course,” she said, “that we come into the power of true
    masters.”
    “Does this ever happen?” I asked.
    “Often, Mistress,” she said.
    “Often?” I said.
    “There is no dearth of true masters here,” she said.
    I wondered in what sort of place I might be that there might here be no dearth
    of true masters. In all my life, hitherto, I did not think I had ever met a man,
    or knowingly met a man, who was a true master. The nearest I had come, I felt,
    were the men I had encountered before being brought to this place, those who had
    treated me as though I might be nothing, and had incarcerated me in the straps
    and iron box. Sometimes they had made me so weak I had felt like begging them to
    rape or have me. I had the horrifying thought that perhaps I existed for such
    men.
    “How degrading and debasing to be a slave!” I cried.
    “Yes, Mistress,” said the girl, putting down her head. I thought she smiled. She
    had told me, I suspected, what I had wanted to hear, what I had expected to
    hear.
    “Slavery is illegal!” I cried.
    “Not here, Mistress,” she said.
    I stepped back.
    “Where Mistress comes from,” said the girl, “it is not illegal to own animals,
    is it?”
    “No,” I said. “Of course not.”
    “It is the same here,” she said. “And the slave is an animal.”
    “You are an animal-legally?” I asked.
    “Yes,” she said.
    “Horrifying!” I cried.
    “Biologically, of course,” she said, “we are all animals. Thus, in a sense, we
    might all be owned. It thus becomes a question as to which among these animals
    own and which are owned, which, so to speak, count as persons, or have standing,
    before the law, and which do not, which are, so to speak, the citizens or
    persons, and which are the animals.”
    “It is wrong to own human beings,” I said.
    “Is it wrong to own other animals?” she asked.
    “No,” I said.
    “Then why is it wrong to own human beings?” she asked.
    “I do not know,” I said.
    “It would seem inconsistent,” she said, “to suggest that it is only certain
    sorts of animals which may be owned, and not others.”
    “Human beings are different,” I said.
    The girl shrugged. “So, too, are tarsks and verr,” she said.
    I did not know those sorts of animals.
    “Human beings can talk and thinkl” I said.
    “Why should that make a difference?” she asked. “If