She thought again of the garments of the free woman. She did not even know how to arrange such garments on her body. Too, she had no footwear. Too, there was no place to hide such garments, the tubs being turned and emptied at night. Too, such garments were counted, and would be soon missed.
Although Ellen had never been outside the house she understood that there was no escape for the Gorean slave girl, even outside. There was the brand, the collar, the garmenture. More importantly, there was no place to go, no place to hide, no place to run. The legal rights of the masters were everywhere acknowledged, respected and enforced. At their back was the full power of custom, tradition and law. The most that a girl might hope for would be a change of masters. If she managed to elude one master, and were not, when captured, returned to him, perhaps for mutilation and hamstringing, she would soon find herself in the power of another, and doubtless one far less likely than the first to treat her with trust and lenience, to mistakenly indulge her with abusable privileges. It is not pleasant to wear close shackles or a double-padlocked six-inch chain joining one’s ankles. The Gorean slave girl has no way to free herself or earn her freedom. She is simply and categorically slave. Her freedom, if she is to be accorded freedom, is always in the hands of another. Too, there is a Gorean saying that only a fool frees a slave girl.
Ellen thought, again, of the garment of the free woman.
She shuddered.
Even to put on such a garment, she knew, could be a capital offense for such as she.
No, Ellen did not think of freedom, for she knew that on this world that was not possible for her.
But more significantly she knew herself slave.
It was what she was, and wanted to be. It was right for her.
Too, for many years she had been free. Certainly she knew, and understood, and had enjoyed all that that condition could possibly bestow upon anyone. There was nothing in that condition which was unknown to her, or unfamiliar to her. Freedom, in itself, while undeniably precious, and doubtless a value, and doubtless appropriate for males, whom she now understood, having met true men, were the natural masters of women, tended, in itself, to be an abstraction, a possibility, an emptiness, in its way. It might be no more than a rootless boredom, in itself an invitation to nothing. Certainly those on her former world who most shamelessly exploited the rhetoric of freedom did not lack freedom, but rather wanted to use such rhetorics, and allied pressures and subterfuges, in order to have goods, unfair advantages, special privileges, and such, given to them, such as economic resources, prestige, and power. Their test for freedom was the receipt of ever-greater amounts of politically engineered unearned benefits. She had been free, and had not been fulfilled, or happy. Now, as a female slave, she suspected that her true fulfillment, her true happiness, might lie in a totally different, unexpected direction. The question, you see, was one of simple, empirical fact. Its solution was not essentially a consequence of a particular conditioning program, one of a possibly infinite number of such, or the inevitable result of some supposedly self-evident, axiomatic proposition, or some supposedly
a priori theory, but of the world, the nature of things, of simple, empirical fact. Perhaps freedom was not the ideal for everyone. Was that so impossible to conceive of? Perhaps people, perhaps the sexes, were really different. Certainly they seemed very different. One had to struggle not to see that. What if what might be best for one was not truly the best for the other? What was best for one, it seems, might depend, really, not on politics and conditioning, not on cultural accidents and the idiosyncrasies of an ephemeral historical situation, but on other things, say, nature, truth, fact, such things. Perhaps human beings had a nature, like other species. If so, what was her nature? Presumably, whatever it was, it would be a fact about her. She did recognize, of course, that freedom was not an absolute, and that even the most free, so to speak, were subject to countless limitations. At best, freedom was relative, even for the free. But these considerations were not germane to what concerned her most. She had been free. She knew what it was like. She had tried it, and found it wanting. She had been free, and had been free and lonely, free and unwanted, free and unnoticed, free and undesired, free and terribly miserable. Something within her had begged to belong, actually, to be overwhelmed and owned, something within her had cried out to love and serve, totally and helplessly, to give herself unreservedly, totally and helplessly to another. But her world had denied that freedom to her. It had denied the cry of her deepest heart. It had told her, rather, not to listen to her heart, but to deny it, told her, rather, to be different, and mannish. One freedom had been denied to her, the freedom not to be free. That freedom had been denied to her. Freedom had been imposed upon her, socially, legally. She could not have given up her freedom even if she had wished to do so. Freedom was doubtless precious. But, so, too, she thought, was love. And she did not desire the tepidities which might exist between contractual partners. The notion of a democracy of two was absurd. One might pretend that absolute equality could be imposed upon absolute unequals, but it could never be more than a pretense. That myth would have to be hedged about with so many conventions, sanctions, rules and laws as to be a biological joke. It is a farce to claim that absolute sameness, for that is what equality means, could be imposed rationally on creatures as unlike as a man and a woman. To speak as though absolute equality, save doubtless in merit, or value, each marvelous in their own very different way, could exist between absolute unequals, things as diverse as a male and a female, was at best an idle social ritual, and, at worst, a pathological lie which, if taken seriously, if acted upon, would have, by its deleterious effects on the gene pool, wide-spread, devastating consequences for the inclusive fitness of a species. But such far-flung considerations were far from Ellen’s thoughts at the time. She did know enough sociology, and enough history, to know, though she would not have dared to mention it in her classes, that human happiness, statistically, bears no essential relationship to freedom whatsoever, but is rather a function of doing what one feels like doing, with the reinforcement and support of social expectations. Ellen wondered if she were a terrible woman, because she wanted love, because she wanted to serve, wholly and helplessly, because she was eager to be devoted and dutiful, because she wanted to make a man happy, to please a master, because she wanted to literally be his, to be owned by him, to be his complete property, to belong to him, in every way. She wondered if it were such a terrible thing, to desire to surrender herself inextricably, wholly to love. In her heart, it seemed, there had begun to burn, even then, in a small way, small at first, like a tiny glowing flame, not fully understood, the longing to know the deepest and most profound of loves, the most complete of loves, the most helpless and self-surrendering of all loves, a slave’s love.