Chapter 37
We Have Left The Complex; We Will Make Our Way Toward The Permanent Camp

“Look!” cried Imnak.

I turned the sled about Others, too, turned about, the long sleds, like clouds, on the bleak ice.

Many of those with us cried out in wonder and alarm.

Behind us, in the winter sky, looming, streaming hundreds of pasangs upward into the sky, shimmering and flickering, extended vast, subtle curtains of chromatic lights, yellows, and pinks and reds.

“It is not the season,” said a hunter.

Then men cried out with awe. Some women screamed. Children hid their faces.

For an instant, in that lofty, panoramic display, there had appeared, only for an instant, etched in light, the gigantic head of a Kur. One ear, the left, had been half torn from its head. The lips drew back, exhibiting the Kur’s fearful sign of pleasure. Then the fearsome head was gone.

We then saw, I, and the others, and the People, on the pack ice more than an Ahn’s trek from the complex, a blast of light which, in the darkness of the polar night, made us cry out with pain, half blinded.

For a terrible instant it had seemed as bright as day, with a brightness that most of the People, in their northern regions, had never known, a brightness that might have struck the white sands of the blazing Tahari or the green jungles of the rain forests of the eastern Cartius.

Then the lights in the sky were gone and the polar night had returned, save for a long, shimmering volume of yellowish smoke that reared from the distant ice.

“Lie down!” I cried to those standing about me. “Behind the sleds!”

The shock wave of the blast, in some seconds, struck us. It drove ice and pelting, granular snow before it. It tore at our furs. I held the sled, bracing it against the blast. Arlene cried out with terror as the sled twisted and half-tipped. She, like others of her kind, women, slaves, and slaves to be, was absolutely helpless. She was confined in two fur sacks, one placed within the other, the layer of warm air between them acting as insulation. She could not escape from the two sacks, and they were tied on the sled. Within the sacks she was naked, and in sirik. There was no danger that women such as she would escape on the ice. The sleen harnessed to the sled squealed with fury, scratching, thrown from its feet, twisted and tangled in the traces. We were in the blast of air for only some seven seconds. And then it passed as quickly as it had come.

I cuffed the sleen on its snout and, holding it by the hamess, jerked it up, disentangling it from the traces. A single sleen is kept in two traces, or a double trace. When more than one sleen, or girl, pulls the sled, they are commonly kept on a single trace. This conserves leather and diminishes the amount of tangling that might otherwise occur.

I turned the sled back to face where the complex had been. I stood on the rear runners, lifting myself for a better look. Arlene struggled, as she could, to see. My other girls. Audrey, Barbara, Constance, Belinda, and the girl who had once been the Lady Rosa, were tied on the sleds of other hunters. Arlene had been quite proud that she had been the one I had chosen to bind on my own sled. Too, she was the first one, of all the loot girls, on whom I had locked my chains. After the first camp we would remove the girls from sirik and use them; when we set out again they would be furred, and in neck coffle. Sometimes I thought I might let Audrey lead the coffle, and sometimes Arlene. I would enjoy playing the two Earth girls off against one another, each one striving more desperately, more helplessly, to please me than the others.

I smiled.

Women with deep feminine needs are mercilessly exploited by Gorean men.

It was a pleasant game. They are so helpless.

And yet how lovely they are. One must strive to remain strong with them.

I touched the side of Arlene’s head with my mitten. Her head was within two hoods, parts of the fur sacks, tied on the sled, within which she lay chained.

She turned her head to look up at me, and smiled.

“Do you want to be respected?” I asked.

“You will never respect me,” she laughed. “I am a slave.”

“Do you want to be respected?” I asked.

“No man respects a woman who knows what else to do with her,” she said.

“It is a Gorean saying,” I said.

“I know,” she said.

“You are an insolent wench,” I said. “Perhaps I should whip you.”

“I know that you will whip me, if you wish to do so,” she said. “And that thrills me. Also, it makes me determined to try to please you, completely, and totally, so that you will not wish to do so.”

“Good,” I said. I looked at her. “Would you like to be returned to Earth?” I asked.

“Master jests, I trust,” she said.

“Of course,” I said, “for you are a luscious slave, fit for chains and markets.”

“No,” she said, “I would not like to he returned to Earth. I have never been so sensuously alive as here, at the mercy of men. I pity even the free women of this world, who cannot know the joys and loves of the female slave. I do not wish to return to Earth, to adopt again the role of pretending to be a man. What has Earth to offer that is worth more than joy and happiness?”

“I may sell you,” I said.

“You may do so if you wish, Master,” she said, “for I am only a slave, If you do sell me, I shall hope that I will please another.”

“You speak scarcely like an Earth girl,” I said.

“I am no longer an Earth girl,” she said, “I am a Gorean slave girl.”

“True,” I said.

She snuggled down in the furs. I saw the furred sacks, in which she was confined, move under the ropes which bound them on the sled. I heard the small sound of the chain from within the furred sacks.

“You have not answered my question,” I said.

“What question?” she asked.

“Do you want to be respected?” I asked.

“No,” she said. She smiled up at me. “I want to be loved, and treasured. I want to be mastered.”

I laughed.

“I want to be a woman,” she said.

“Do not fear, lovely slave girl,” I said. “This is not Earth. This is Gor. On Gor you, in bondage, will be given no alternative other than to fulfill the deepest and most profound needs of your sex.”

“Yes, Master. Yes, Master,” she said.

Red hunters were turning their sleds about. “Look!” said Imnak. I saw that the sleen was lifting its paws, water dripping from them.

“It is only hot air,” I said, “hugging the ice, low, from the destruction of the complex.”

“No,” said Imnak, “there!”

He pointed far off. There, steam rolled upward from the water.

I saw piles of layered pack ice slipping into the water.

“See the ice,” he said. “The water is boiling!”

Suddenly, near us, a lead, a great crack in the ice, broke open.

I looked back to the complex. Smoke billowed upward. In the upper atmosphere, it had now spread out, broadly, like an umbrella opened in the thin air. The mushroom-shaped cloud was disconcertingly familiar. A nuclear device, or a nuclear-type device, it seemed, had been involved in the destruction of the complex.

I watched the great mountain of ice, which had been the sheathing of the complex, slip downward into the sea.

“The water there is boiling!” cried Imnak. “Nothing could live in it,” I said.

“The beast is dead,” he said.

“Perhaps,” I said.

“You saw the face in the sky,” he said.

“The mechanism to project that image,” I said, “could have been preset.”

“The beast is dead,” said Imnak. “If it did not die in the rooms and halls, surely it died, scalded or drowned, in the surrounding waters.”

“Nothing could live there,” said a hunter.

“The beast is dead,” said Imnak.

“Perhaps,” I said. “I do not know.”

The ice beneath our feet began to buckle and groan.

“Hurry!” cried Imnak.

I took one last look at the distant, churning, steaming waters, erupting and boiling, where the polar sea, as though offended and startled, hissing in indignation, recoiled from the fiery touch of a mechanism contrived paradoxically by the wit of rational creatures.

The Priest-Kings have set limits to the devices of men upon this world. They favor the spear and the bow, the sword and the steel of the knife. But Kurii lived not under their ordinances. I wondered from what shaggy Prometheus, long ago, Kurii had accepted fire. I wondered at what it might mean, fire kindled in the paw of a beast.

“Hurry!” cried Imnak. “Hurry!”

Nature transcended is perhaps nature outraged.

“Hurry!” cried Imnak. He shook my shoulder. “The beast is dead!” he cried. “Hurry!”

I recalled the chamber of Zarendargar, and two glasses, drained of paga. dashed against a wall of steel.

I lifted my hand to the rolling, steaming waters in the distance, beneath the high, spreading cloud.

“Hurry!” cried Imnak.

I turned the sled about, and cracked the whip over the head of the sleen. “On!” I cried. “On!”

The sleen, clawing and scratching at the ice, threw its weight against the harness.

The ice split behind me, and my foot, protected in Its sleenskin boot, splashed in water, and I thrust the sled up and onto solid ice, and, crying out at the sleen, cracking the whip, sped away.