"Yes, Mistress," I said.

"The matter rests with me," she said, "with whether I am pleased or not."

"I will try to please you, Mistress," I said.

"I'm sure you will, pretty Jason," she said. She then stepped back from me. "I am not so terrible," she said. "I can be kind."

I looked at her, startled.

"Oh," she laughed, slapping the whip roughly at her side, "do not think I will not be strict with you. I am strict with all my charges. All, like yourself, must obey perfectly. All must be fully pleasing."

"Yes, Mistress," I said.

"But, too," she said, "I can be kind. There are worse mistresses on Gor than I."

"Yes, Mistress," I said.

"On this world, as on yours," she said, "there can be rewards for pleasing slaves. For example, perhaps in the future, you need not be chained like a raw slave, naked, in a stinking cell. There are better accomodations in the pens."

I put down my head. How conscious I was of the chains I wore.

She went to the heavy door of the cell, which she had left open. There she stopped, and turned to face me. I turned to my left, to see her.

"Rewards, like punishments," she said, "lie within the prerogatives of the mistress, to distribute, both with respect to type and abundance, as she pleases."

"I understand, Mistress," I said.

"You understand, too, do you not," she asked, "that you are in my total power?"

"Yes, Mistress," I said.

"Whether you live or die is up to my whim," she said.

"Yes, Mistress," I said, miserably.

"You are a slave," she said, "fully. Do you understand?"

"Yes, Mistress," I said.

"But I am not cruel," she said. "If you please me, totally, I may even be kind to you."

"I will try to please you, Mistress," I said.

"It is in my power to make your life more pleasant, if I choose," she said. "Rewards can be many and varied, different sorts of chains and cells, clothing, and of various sorts, a lighter collar, different sorts of food. I can even have a woman thrown to you." She smiled. "Or would you, a male of Earth, know what to do with one?"

She turned about then and went through the heavy door of the cell, that door formed, like that wall of the cell itself, of bars and heavy, lateral crosspieces, set some six inches apart. She swung shut the door and it closed, with a heavy metallic ring that reverberated in the cells and corridor. She stood behind it, looking at me.

"Yes," she said, "you are pretty, Jason. I think you will do very nicely."

"Who are you?" I cried.

She looked at me from the other side of the bars. She was a large woman, tall and strong. She stood very straight. Her figure was striking. Her skin was very white. It contrasted vividly with the brief, confining black leather she wore. She wore, too, a headband of leather. At her waist was the heavy belt, from which hung a coiled chain, a ring of keys, a pair of manacles and a whip. "I am the Lady Gina," she said, "your trainer."

"Trainer?" I cried.

"Yes," she said.

"I do not understand," I said. "What is your work?"

"Have you not guessed?" she asked. "I train men to give pleasure to women."

I looked at her with horror.

She then took the ring of keys from her belt and thrust a key into the lock on the cell door, and turned it, locking the heavy door.

"Sleep well, pretty Jason," she said. "Your lessons begin in the morning."

She then replaced the keys on her belt, and left.

"Put your wrists behind you," she said.

I stood in my cell. I had been freed of my chains. I put my wrists behind me, obeying the Lady Gina. She took the manacles from her belt and expertly, almost casually, in one motion, threw them on me, snapping them shut. I gathered she had manacled many men.

She tied a belt of soft, rolled cloth about my waist. She then took a long strip of cloth, some five feet long and eight inches wide, thrust it over the cloth belt in front, took it under and between my legs, passed it under and over the cloth belt in back, and, adjusting it, drew it snugly tight.

"This is not for your modesty, Jason," she said. "It is because your lessons in Gorean will largely be conducted by slave girls."

"Slave girls, Mistress?" I asked.

"Yes," she said. "They are stinking, meaningless, lascivious little sluts who have been as slaves in the arms of Gorean men. It has spoiled them for freedom. They are worthless, sensuous little beasts whose passions Gorean men have seen fit, as cruel masters, to ignite. Their sexuality, their shamelessness, their needs, their helplessness, makes them an insult to free women. I do not want them falling to their knees by you, to seize you, to fawn upon you, to hold you, to lick and kiss you."

"No, Mistress," I said.

She then removed the chain from her belt and snapped it on the metal ring attached to my collar. I had, this morning, when my chains had been removed, felt the attachment. It was as I had conjectured, a ring. It was about a quarter of an inch thick. It was sturdy. It was of iron.

"Come along, Jason," she said. She then led me, manacled and leashed, from the cell.

"This is Lola. This is Tela," said the Lady Gina, pointing, respectively, to the two girls.

I was startled. Never would I, of Earth, have believed such women could exist. I could scarcely breathe. I was stunned. I beheld, for the first time in my life, Gorean slave girls.

I met their eyes. They beheld me with a sullen interest. Both girls were incredibly beautiful, and almost naked, but that tells little about them. I suppose, if you have never looked upon a slave girl, it will be impossible for me to convey to you more than an inkling of what it is to see one, particularly for the first time. Imagine, if you will, the most exciting and desirable woman you have ever seen; then imagine her standing stripped before you in a steel collar, and that the collar is yours, and that you own her, and that she must obey. That will convey to you something of what it is to see a slave girl. I looked on the girls. Surely their bodies were graceful, curvacious and vital; surely they were both unusually, even incredibly, beautiful; surely, too, both had been limited in their raiment to the rags of half-naked slaves; yet it was not these things, strange as it may seem, which so set them apart from other women; it was not these things which made them so different. What set them so apart from other women, what made them so different, what made their beauty ten thousand times more devastating and exciting than that of other women was that they, in full actuality, in full reality, were owned slaves.

Both girls knelt before the Lady Gina. She spoke to them in Gorean. I heard the word `Kajirus', which I would later learn was an expression for a male slave, and I heard the expression `Jason', which was the name I had been given. How I envied the Lady Gina, having two such beauties kneeling before her.

The two slaves looked up at her, deferentially, attending to her every word.

I could not take my eyes from the two slave girls. They were the first slave girls I had ever seen.

The Lady Gina spoke to them rapidly, and in detail.

Slave girls are unlike and beyond all other women. Earth, with its frigid, competitive, frustrated females, trying to be men, has not even prepared one for the understanding that such fantastic, owned beauties could exist. What wonders does the collar work upon a woman! How it transforms herl The Goreans say that no woman is a true woman until she has submitted as a slave, and that no man has experienced his full sexuality until he has thrown her to the foot of his couch. Looking upon the girls I wondered if it were not a madness that any woman is let out of the collar. Are they not all, truly, the property of men? Should they not all, truly, be owned by men?