Prize of Gor Read Free

realities, realities not only independently legal, and fully sufficient in their own right, but realities acknowledged, recognized and celebrated, realities understood, and enforced, with all the power, unquestioned commitment and venerated tradition of an entire world, that on which she had found herself.
    That world did not long leave her in doubt as to what she was.
     
     

Chapter 2
    SHE BEGINS HER STORY
     
    She was not a particularly bad person, nor, one supposes, a particularly good person. She was perhaps rather like you, though perhaps not so good. Have we not all been upon occasion petulant, selfish, careless, arrogant, sometimes cruel? Have we not all upon occasion behaved disgracefully, unworthily? Have we not ignored others? Have we not, in lesser or larger ways, injured them, and enjoyed, if only briefly, the smug gratifications of doing so? What happened to her might happen to anyone, one supposes, to those gentler, kinder and deeper than she, and to those more shallow, more petty, nastier than she. It is true however that such as she, and her sisters, so to speak, under discipline, are quickly brought into line, the gentlest and the sweetest, and those who hitherto, perhaps in their unhappiness and lack of fulfillment, in their vanities and impatience, and haughtiness, were not only permitted but encouraged by an androgynous society to abuse their liberties. We are brought into line. Our lives are changed, profoundly. We are taught many things, all of us, including ourselves.
    We do not know, in full, what their criteria are, for such as she, and others, not at all why such as she, and others, are selected.
    It does seem clear that their criteria include high intelligence. If one’s intelligence is high, they seem to find that arousing, literally arousing, perhaps unaccountably to one accustomed to the criteria prized on my first world. It seems to considerably increase our value. In virtue of it they seem to relish us all the more, and then dominate us all the more imperiously and ruthlessly, making us all the more helpless and at their mercy. Perhaps, too, they are pleased to know that we understand clearly, and in the depths of our very being, more than might some others, what is being done to us, what we have been made, what we now are, helplessly, fully, incontrovertibly. Our intelligence then, like certain other properties, is sought; it is a desideratum. It gives them pleasure, and, of course, in virtue of it, as perhaps a not negligible pragmatic consequence, we train more swiftly and surely. They tend to be demanding and impatient. Little time is wasted on us. Too, if we are selected, or often are, at least in part, on the basis of our intelligence, one supposes that we would be more likely to be more alert, more sensitive, more inventive, more attentive than might otherwise be the case; we would be likely to be better, for example, one supposes, at reading the subtlest of expressions, the brief, shadowed flicker of a mood, perhaps a sign of danger. One quickly learns to apply one’s intelligence, per force , to new ends, in new spheres. No choice is given us. Their intelligence, incidentally, seems to us to be dimensions beyond ours. Intelligent as we are, our intelligence does not begin to compare with theirs. I do not know why this is. Perhaps it is a matter of genetic selections, or a simple result of an honest, freer, less debilitating acculturation. I do not know. Forgive this lapse into personal discourse.
    It came as a great shock to her, after the performance, following the curtain calls, the lofting of roses, of bouquets, of so many flowers to the stage, to see the male in the audience.
    The house lights were on now.
    Others about her were discussing the performance.
    He looked the same, absolutely the same. But surely thirty, or better, years had passed.
    She rose from her seat; she stood still, almost unable to move, her eyes on him. Others desired to press past her. “Please,”