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 Exotic & Bred SlavesThis is a short narrative and relevant references from the Books where Exotic & Bred Slaves are mentioned. I make no pronouncements on these matters, but report them as I find them. Arrive at your own conclusions. I wish you well, Fogaban There is not a lot written about exotic slaves. What we do know is that exotics may be bred or trained for almost any unusual purpose, and some of these purposes, unfortunately, seem to be little more than to produce quaint or unusual specimens. These are the exotics mentioned in the books: Ho-Hak, from the marshes. She was fairly complected but had extremely dark hair and dark eyes, very red lips; the movement of her exquisite body was a torment to observe; she looked at me with a slight smile, regarding the black of the tunic, the mark of the dagger; her lips were full and magnificently turned, probably a characteristic bred into her; I had no doubt this black-haired, cruelly beautiful woman was a bred Passion Slave. She was one of the most rawly sensuous creatures on which I had ever looked. Over months or years she is rendered immune to a poison, whose bite is lethal. Racing slaves, some are superior at short distances, others at longer distances. They are raised from the time they are infants never looking on a man. They do not know they exist. Normally a Ubar who has been victorious in battle will purchase one, for his high officers, to be brought to the victory feast. When the girl is purchased she is drugged and kept unconscious until the height of the feast commonly to find herself unclothed in a cage of male slaves. Not infrequently, the girl goes mad and is slain the following morning. Evidently, just that, striped skin. Lara's lips had been rich and fine, sensitive and curious, tender, eager, hungry; the lips of Vika were maddening; I recalled those lips, full and red, pouting, defiant, scornful, scarlet with a slave girl's challenge to my blood; I wondered if Vika might be a bred slave, a Passion Slave, one of those girls bred for beauty and passion over generations by the zealous owners of the great Slave Houses of Ar, for lips such as Vika's were a feature often bred into Passion Slaves; they were lips formed for the kiss of a master. "You thought I was a Passion Slave," she chided. I shrugged. She looked away from me, toward the wall. "You were right in a way, Tarl Cabot." "How is that?" I asked. She looked at me directly. "My mother," she said bitterly, "- was a Passion Slave - bred in the pens of Ar." "Yes," I said, "you are that beautiful." She looked at me mockingly. "Do you know what a Passion Slave is?" she asked. "Yes," I said. "It is a female of the human kind," she said, "but bred like a beast for its beauty and its passion." "I know," I said. "It is an animal," she said, "bred for the pleasure of men, bred for the pleasure of a master." I said nothing. "In my veins," she said, "flows the blood of such an animal. In my veins flows the blood of a Passion Slave." The women I had owned, Sana, Talena, Lara, and others of whom I have not written, Passion Slaves rented for the hour in the Paga Taverns of Ko-ro-ba and Ar, Pleasure Slaves bestowed on me in token of hospitality for a night spent in a friend's compartments, had known that I was master and that had been sufficient. Then I stepped back for I noted, coming along one of the curving walks, two lovely girls, clad in white, their hair bound back with white silk; they were quite young; perhaps less than eighteen. "Do not fear," said Ho-Tu. "They cannot see you." I studied the glass that separated us. The two girls strolled near the glass and one of them, lifting her hands behind her head, studied her reflection gravely in the mirror, retying the band of silk which confined her hair. "On their side of the glass," said Ho-Tu, "it seems a mirror." I looked suitably impressed, though of course, from Earth, I was familiar with the principles of such things. "It is an invention of the Builders," said Ho-Tu. "It is common in slave houses, where one may wish to observe without being observed." "Can they hear us?" I whispered. "No," said Ho-Tu. Now one of the girls laughed and pushed the other and then turned and fled, pursued by the other, also laughing. I looked at Ho-Tu sharply. "There is a system of sound baffles," said he. "We can hear them but they cannot hear us." I regarded the two girls running off. Beyond them I could see some others. Two of them were playing catch with a red ball. There seemed to me something strange about these girls, though they were beautiful. They seemed, in a way, simple, very childlike. "Are they slaves?" I asked Ho-Tu. "Of course," said Ho-Tu, adding, "but they do not know it." "I do not understand," I said. I could now see the girl playing the lute. She was lovely, as were the others. She was strolling about one of the pools. Two other girls, I now saw, were lying by the pool, putting their fingers in the water, making circles in the water. "These are exotics," said Ho-Tu. That expression is used for any unusual variety of slave. Exotics are generally quite rare. "In what way?" I asked. I myself had never cared much for exotics, any more than I cared much for some of the species of dogs and goldfish which some breeders of Earth regarded as such triumphs. Exotics are normally bred for some deformity which is thought to be appealing. On the other hand, sometimes the matter is much more subtle and sinister. For example it is possible to breed a girl whose saliva will be poisonous; such a woman, placed in the Pleasure Gardens of an enemy, can be more dangerous than the knife of an Assassin. Perhaps Ho-Tu guessed my line of thought, for he laughed. "No, No!" he said. "These are common wenches, though more beautiful than most." "Then in what way are they exotic?" I asked. Ho-Tu looked at me and grinned. "They know nothing of men," said he. "You mean they are White Silk?" I asked. He laughed. "I mean they have been raised from the time they were infants in these gardens. They have never looked on a man. They do not know they exist." I then understood why only women had been seen in these rooms. I looked again through the glass, at the gentle girls, sporting and playing together by the pool. "They are raised in complete ignorance," said Ho-Tu. "They do not even know they are women." I listened to the music of the lute, and was disturbed. "Their life is very pleasant, and very easy," said Ho-Tu. "They have no duties other than to seek their own pleasure." "And then?" I asked. "They are very expensive," said Ho-Tu. "Normally the agent of a Ubar who has been victorious in battle will purchase one, for his high officers, to be brought to the victory feast." Ho-Tu looked at me. "The attendants, when the girl is purchased, give her a drug in her food that night, and remove her from the gardens. She is kept unconscious. She will be revived at the height of the Ubar's victory feast, commonly to find herself unclothed in a cage of male slaves set up among the tables." I looked back at the girls through the glass. "Not infrequently," said Ho-Tu, "they go mad, and are slain the following morning." "And if not?" I asked. "Commonly," Said Ho-Tu, "they will seek out a female slave, one who reminds them of the attendants in the garden, and this woman will comfort them, and explain to them what they are, that they are women, that they are slaves, that they must wear a collar and that they must serve men. I looked to one side and was startled. Watching us was a woman in Pleasure Silk, of remarkable beauty, yet with a certain subtle hardness and contempt about her. She wore a yellow collar, that of the House of Cernus, and yellow Pleasure Silk. The slave bells, a double row, were locked on her left ankle. About her throat there hung a slave whistle. From her right hand, looped about the wrist, there dangled a slave goad. She was fairly complected but had extremely dark hair and dark eyes, very red lips; the movement of her exquisite body was a torment to observe; she looked at me with a slight smile, regarding the black of the tunic, the mark of the dagger; her lips were full and magnificently turned, probably a characteristic bred into her; I had no doubt this black-haired, cruelly beautiful woman was a bred Passion Slave. She was one of the most rawly sensuous creatures on which I had ever looked. the House of Cernus now, altogether, had better than one hundred and fifty barbarians in training, under the tutelage of various Passion Slaves; One was slender, a fragile girl, with deep gray eyes; the other had dark eyes and hair, a body that might have been that of a bred passion slave. Ho-Hak's right ear twitched. His ears were unusual, very large, and with extremely long lower lobes, drawn lower still by small, heavy pendants set in them. He had been a slave, doubtless, and, doubtless, judging by the collar, and the large hands and broad back, had served on the galleys, but he had been an unusual slave, a bred exotic, doubtless originally intended by the slave maters for a destiny higher than that of galley bench. There are various types of "exotics" bred by Gorean slavers, all of whom are to be distinguished from more normal varieties of bred slaves, such as Passion Slaves and Draft Slaves. Exotics may be bred for almost any purpose, and some of these purposes, unfortunately, seem to be little more than to produce quaint or unusual specimens. Ho-Hak may well have been one so bred. "You are an exotic," I said to him. Ho-Hak's ears leaned forward toward me, but he did not seem angry. He had brown hair, and brown eyes; the hair, long, was tied behind his head with a string of rence cloth. He wore a sleeveless tunic of rence cloth, like most of the rence growers. "Yes," said Ho-Hak. "I was bred for a collector." "I see," I said. "I broke his neck and escaped," said Ho-Hak. "Later I was recaptured and sent to the galleys." "And you again escaped," I said. "In doing so," said Ho-Hak, looking at his large hands, heavy and powerful, "I killed six men." Then one other stepped forward. It was Ho-Hak, from the marshes, the rencer. His face was white. No longer about his throat was clasped the collar of the galley slave, with short dangling chain. He had been a bred slave, an exotic. His ears were large, bred so as a collector's fancy. Commonly they are highly trained. Sometimes they are even passion slaves, girls literary bred for the pleasure of men. The prizes purchased by Ubars and rich men for their pleasure gardens usually belong to the types of girls included in this general category. I have not mentioned exotics, incidentally, slaves bred or trained for unusual purposes. "How pretty he is at your stirrup, Lady Florence," said the veiled woman, reclining in the palanquin, its draft slaves now halted. The first of the two draft slaves again approached me, his great fists balled into hammerlike weapons. "When I strike you again," he said, "do not get up. It will be enough for the masters." "She is a bred passion slave," I said, "with papers and a lineage going back a thousand years." Another slave, an exotic, bred for stripes, put more laundry beside her. Such papers assume greater importance, of course, in the case of pedigree slaves or exotics. The bloodlines of some pedigree slaves go back several generations. Collectors, too, tend to be interested in the background of exotics, for example, who bred them, and where they were bred, and such. Tarl Cabot supposed that the blonde might be an exotic, in this case a slave raised without a language. That is why she cannot speak, thought Cabot. She is not an exotic, denied speech. She has never learned to speak. She is not of Gor. She is of the Steel Worlds! Slaves are commonly used for work and pleasure. They may be bred, of course, as the livestock they are, at their master's will. There are slave farms here and there, but they are rare, and often specialize in exotics of various sorts. It is expensive and time consuming to raise female slaves from infancy. It is easier and less expensive to allow others to raise them, so to speak, and then, when convenient, attend to their harvesting and collaring. There are many female slaves on Gor and it is often, to the irritation of venders, and the mortification and chagrin of the slaves, a buyers' market. Almost all Gorean slaves are captures, having once been free women. The bred slave, other than in the sense that all women are bred slaves, is rare. I thought it germane to the narrative, however, to refer to the stabilization serums, because of the reference to the rare "bred slave." Two characteristics of the economic condition, as is well known, are the scarcity of resources and the disutility of labor. Both of these conditions militate against the breeding of slaves, except in special cases, usually exotics, where the rarity is thought to justify the attendant expenditures. It is expensive and troublesome to raise a slave from infancy at one's own expense and that is why slaves are seldom bred, at least on a wide scale. It is much more convenient to acquire them when they are ready for plucking, so to speak. Why raise the grapes when they are about, and one may pick them, as one sees fit, when they are nicely ready and ripe? To be sure, there are some slave farms which, after a few years, produce their annual crop, so to speak. On the other hand, these enterprises usually require a large initial investment, say, large physical facilities, and hundreds of breeding slaves, male and female, to be carefully matched and crossed, and it normally takes years for the first crop to be readied for market. And such farms, too, commonly deal in exotics. The most common exotic is the virgin slave who has been raised without the knowledge that men exist. Slaves, too, of course, may be bred for a diversity of colors, peltings, facial features, and such. There is a technique, incidentally, based on a variation of the stabilization serums, for hastening physical maturation, but this is little used because one has then to show for one's pains only an unusual child. Much can be done with the body, it seems, but little with the mind, saving, perhaps, by Priest-Kings in the recesses of the Sardar. Gorean men are not interested in children, even if they have the bodies of women. They find them uninteresting. Nor will they be of interest until several years have passed. Then they may be interesting, perhaps quite interesting. Humanity, one notes, exceeds physiology. Unfortunately, too, several of these children will suffer confusing stress, as they lack the emotional maturation to relate comprehensibly to the needs and demands of their grown bodies, bodies hastened beyond the horizons of a child's understanding. Accordingly, this application of the stabilization serums is frowned upon in Gorean society, and in many cities is illegal. For example, a girl who might go for less than a silver tarsk in Brundisium might, presumably as something rather in the nature of an exotic slave, certainly a rare one, bring the equivalent in local currency of two or three such tarsks in the islands. There are, of course, races of different length, and some beasts are favored in shorter races, and some in longer races, depending on differences in speed and stamina. It is similar with racing slaves, bred or otherwise, and kaiila. Some are superior at short distances, others at longer distances. "She will be a delight on the continent," said Pertinax. "She will be exotic, and special. There are few Pani slaves there." Another form of draft beast is the draft slave, male or female. Several males may draw a rubble wagon or a wagon of cut stones in the quarries, or an ore wagon in a mining district, such things. Lighter labors might be assigned to females used as draft slaves. They are often used, for example, to draw the cart of a peddler. Some free women enjoy using harnessed female slaves to draw their carriages, or, chained to their poles, to carry their palanquins. Slaves are denied access to poisons, as to more common weapons. But an enemy may plant a girl in an enemy household, supply the poison, and so on. The most exotic form of this sort of thing is the poison girl who, over months or years, is rendered immune to a poison, but whose bite is lethal. |       
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