How the fellow who had accompanied me in the van would have been amused, to see his prisoner, the vain, aristocratic young lady, indeed, the debutant, afflicted by need, slave need!
As the reader, if reader there may be, may have gathered, I had been much troubled on Earth, not knowing who I might be, or what might be my nature. I had been alarmed by casual thoughts, sometimes stealing upon me when I was unprepared to resist them, certain frequently recurring daydreams, and surely the strange, wild, unaccountable realities revealed to me in the astonishments of my troubled slumber. It was at such times, that I found it difficult, despite my upbringing, my education, and background, to see myself, and feel myself, as I had learned I should see myself, and feel myself. Who were others, to tell me who I was? How was this a freedom, to be told how to be? How strangely false and unsatisfying seemed the culture to which I was expected to conform, and that which I was expected to perpetuate! Was I truly an artifact, a meaningless, unhappy puppet of a dismal world, responsive to strings I had neither designed nor requested? Perhaps humanity, in its flight from nature, into its thousands of ideologies, superstitions, and pretenses, had unknowingly betrayed itself, building up about itself, brick by subtle brick, its invisible prison, satisfying only those who might profit by its exploitation. But perhaps, too, there are no prisons, other than those we ourselves make, or will accept. It would be interesting if the walls we most fear, within which we feel ourselves the most constrained, within which we most lament, do not exist. In any event, I knew that I carried in my body, as other human beings, a history and a heritage extending back to the first blind, reproducing forms of life, ages prior to the complex marvels of the unicellular organism. To such an organism could biology be irrelevant? Surely templates must exist in the human organism, as in other forms of life, perhaps subtler and vaster, but just as real. Could my behavior, my promptings, what would satisfy me, what I would need, be wholly independent of my form of life, be unique amongst all living forms, merely accidents and oddities imposed upon me from the outside, beginning with the first flash of light, the first breath, the sobbing birth cry of a small, bloody animal? That did not seem likely. The cultures which denied men and women to themselves, for their own purposes, in their own interests, inertial, self-perpetuating structures, productive of misery and alienation, were inventions of recent date, the mere tick of a clock, marking a moment in millenniums. If there was a human nature, had it been fabricated, truly, so recently? Might it not have been formed in other times and other places, a consequence of other conditions, as an entailment of alternative realities? Might we have been formed for one world and precipitated into another, a quite different world, an alien world, one in which our form of life finds itself homeless, finds itself in exile?
I saw no need for civilization and nature to be incompatible, to be enemies.
Might not a civilization be possible in which nature was recognized, refined, enhanced, and celebrated? In such a civilization surely there would be a place not simply for seasons and tides, for surf and wind, but for men and women, as well.
I had not been long on Gor before I was brought naked and back-braceleted into a round chamber. Its diameter may have been ten feet, or so. It was a plain room. The ceiling was domed, perhaps fifteen feet above my head. The walls were bare, but penetrated by two small, barred windows, some feet over my head, through which light fell dimly. The flooring was of large flat stones, as in my cell. The guard then turned about and left me there. The door was closed behind him, and I heard the bolt put into place.
I saw no one, but I was sure I was seen.
I lifted my head. “I am a free woman!” I said. “Return me to Earth!”
My declaration received no response.
I do not know how long I remained in the room.
The guard eventually returned, and, holding me by the left upper arm, conducted me back to my cell.
We stood without.
The bracelets were removed.
“Do you speak English?” I asked.
I was bent down, his hand in my hair, and I was thrust within the cell, and the door was closed, and locked.
I no longer wore chains within the cell, but I was left, as before, in darkness.
I felt about in the darkness, hoping to find food. There was a depression in the floor, which contained some water. Obviously I could not lift it, and, after trying to cup water in my hands, with little success, given the shallowness of the depression, I bent down, and lapped at it. I felt about and located the food pan, which contained some porridge-like material, and a thick crust of bread.
How could they treat me in this fashion? Did they not know who I was? Did they think me some waitress, some clerk, or secretary?
I would soon learn they thought me a thousand times less.
I cried out, in anger.
“I am a free woman! Let me go! Release me! Free me! Give me clothing! Give me decent food! Return me to Earth!”
My voice rang against the stones, in the small space. But I received no response to my cries.
I determined that I would show them what a woman of Earth could be, and a woman of my background, of my class, of my position, of my intelligence, and education. I would resist them.
Though I had often sensed myself a slave, and a rightful slave, I must now permit no countenance to such thoughts, to such suspicions, to such secret fears. I am a free woman, I told myself, over and over again. I am a free woman. I am a free woman. I am not a slave. I am a free woman!
I must be a free woman, I sobbed. I must be a free woman!
But what, I wondered, if I were not? What if I were a slave? What if I should be, as I had often feared, a slave, a rightful slave?
From time to time, in the darkness, I felt the white ribbon which had been twice knotted about my neck in the sorority house. Now it seemed grimy, and damp, from the cell. But it was still there.
The rounded, steel anklet which had been snapped about my left ankle in the house was gone when I awakened on Gor. I gathered that it had served its purpose, whatever that purpose might be.