The blondish girl put down her head. I gestured to the guard behind her. He thrust his hand in her hair. She cried out. Her head was rudely jerked up and back. She looked at me.

I pointed to the dancer.

The girl looked at her horrified, offended, scandalized. She shuddered, and squirmed in the straps. Her fists were clenched at her thighs, beside which they were held in the cuff straps of her harness.

“Watch, Slave,” I told her, in English, “a true woman.” The girl’s title and name had been Miss Priscilla Blake-Allen. Her nationality had been American.

Then she had been branded.

She was now only nameless property in a slaver’s house, no different from hundreds of other girls in the pens below.

The dancer was now moving slowly to the music.

“She is so sensual,” whispered the blondish girl, in horror.

I turned to watch the dancer. She danced well. At the moment she writhed upon the “slave pole,” it fixing her in place. There is no actual pole, of course, but sometimes it is difficult to believe there is not. The girl imagines that a pole, slender, supple, swaying, transfixes her body, holding her helplessly.

About this imaginary pole, it constituting a hypothetical center of gravity, she moves, undulating, swaying, sometimes yielding to it in ecstasy, sometimes fighting it, it always holding her in perfect place, its captive. The control achieved by the use of the “slave pole” is remarkable. An incredible, voluptuous tension is almost immediately generated, visible in the dancer’s body, and kinetically felt by those who watch. I heard men at the table cry out with pleasure. The dancer’s hands were at her thighs. She regarded them, angrily, and still she moved. Her shoulders lifted and fell; her hands touched her breasts and shoulders; her head was back, and then again she glared at the men, angrily.

Her arms were high, very high. Her hips moved, swaying. Then, the music suddenly silent, she was absolutely still. Her left hand was at her thigh; her right high above her head; her eyes were on her hip; frozen into a hip sway; then there was again a bright, clear flash of the finger cymbals, and the music began again, and again she moved, helpless on the pole. Men threw coins at her feet.

I looked to the blondish girl. “Learn to be a female,” I told her.

“Never!” she hissed, in her harness.

“You are no longer on Earth,” I told her. “You will be taught. The lessons may be painful or pleasant, but you will learn.”

“I do not wish to do so,” she said.

“Your will, your wishes, mean nothing,” I told her. “You will learn.”

“It is degrading,” she said.

“You will learn,” I told her.

“She is so sensual,” said the girl, angrily. “How can men think of her as anything but a woman!”

“You will learn,” I told her.

“I do not want to be a woman!” she cried out. “I want to be a man! I always wanted to be a man!”

She squirmed in the harness, fighting its restraints. The straps, the rings, held her, of course, perfectly.

“On Gor,” I told her, “it is the men who will be men; and the here, on this world, it is the women who will be women.”

“I do not wish to move like that,” she wept.

“You will learn to move as a woman,” I told her. I looked down at her. “You, too, will learn to be sensual.”

“Never,” she wept, fighting the straps.

“Look at me, Slave,” I said.

She looked up, tears in her eyes. “I will speak to you kindly for a moment,” I said. “Listen carefully, for they may be the last kind words you will hear for a long time.”

She regarded me, the guard’s hand in her hair.

“You are a slave,” I said. “You are owned. You are a female. You will be forced to be a woman. If you were free, and Gorean, you might be permitted by men to remain as you are, but you are neither Gorean nor free. The Gorean man will accept no compromise on your femininity, not from a slave. She will be what he wishes, and that is a woman, fully, and his. If necessary you will be whipped or starved. You may fight your master. He will, if he wishes, permit this, to prolong the sport of your conquest, but in the end, it is you who are the slave; it is you who will lose. On Earth you had the society at your back, the result of centuries of feminization; be could not so much as speak harshly to you but you could rush away or summon magistrates; here, however, society is not at your back, but at his; it will abet him in his wishes, for you are only a slave; you will have no one to call, nowhere to run; you will be alone with him, and at his mercy. Further, he has not been conditioned with counterinstinctual value sets, programmed with guilt, taught self-hatred; he has been taught pride and has, in the very air he breathes, imbibed the mastery of females. These are different men. They are not Earthlings. They are Goreans. They, are strong, and they are hard, and they will conquer you. For a man of Earth, you might never be a woman.

For a man of Gor, I assure you, my dear, sooner or later you will be.”

She looked at me with misery.

The dancer moaned, crying out, as though in agony. Still she remained impaled upon the slave pole, its prisoner.

“The Gorean master,” I told the blondish girl, “commands sensuality in his female slaves.”

She stared at the dancer, her eyes wide with misery. The hips of the dancer now moved; seemingly in isolation from the rest of her body, though her wrists and hands, ever so slightly, moved to the music.

“You cannot even move like that now,” I told the blondish girl. “Yet muscles can be trained. You will be taught to move like a woman, not a puppet of wood.” I grinned down at her. “You will be taught to be sensual.”

Samos, with a snap of his fingers, freed the dancer from the slave pole. She moved turning, toward us. Before us loosening her veil at the right hip, she danced. Then she took it from her left shoulder, where it had been tucked beneath the strap of her halter. With the veil loose, covering her, holding it in her hands, she danced before us. Then she regarded us, dark-eyed, over the veil; it turned about her body; then, to the misery of the blondish girl, she wafted the silk about her, immeshing her in its gossamer softness. I saw the parted lip, the eyes wide with horror, of the kneeling, harnessed girl through the light, yellow veil; then the dancer had drawn it away from her, and, turning, was again in the center of the floor.

“You will learn your womanhood,” I told the blondish girl. “And I will tell you where you will learn it”

She looked up at me.

“At the feet of a master.” I told her.

I turned away from her and, following Samos, left the chamber. “She will have to learn Gorean, and quickly,” said Samos, referring to the blondish girl.

“Let slaves, with switches, teach her,” I said.

“I will,” said Samos. There was no swifter way for an Earth girl to learn Gorean, providing that candies and pastries, and little favors, like a blanket in the pen, were mixed in. Learning was closely associated, even immediately, with reward and, punishment. Sometimes, months later, even when not under the switch, a girl would, upon a mistake in grammar or vocabulary, wince, as though expecting a fresh sting of the switch. Goreans do not coddle their slave girls.

This is one of the first lessons a girl learns.

“You learned little from her?” asked Samos.

I had interrogated the girl when she had first came to the house of Samos.

“Her story,” I said, “is similar to those of many others. Abduction, transportation to Gor, slavery. She knows nothing. She scarcely understands, now, the meaning of her collar.

Samos laughed unpleasantly, the laugh of a slaver.

“Yet one thing you had from her seems of interest,” said Samos, preceding me down a deep corridor. In the corridor we passed female slave. She dropped to her knees and put her head down, her hair upon the tiles, as we passed.