“Please… sir,” I sobbed, using the word he had commanded I call him without thinking about it. I heard it emerge from my mouth and to my dismay I grasped at my mind’s instinctive subservience. “Sir,” I repeated. “Please… don’t… don’t…”
I couldn’t say it. Something about actually uttering the words,Please don’t punish me, seemed like it would confirm his right—hisdutyeven—to discipline me.
It wouldn’t have helped in the slightest, either. He looked back at me with those same patient eyes.
“I have to punish you, Sara,” he said, so gently it drew another sob from my chest. “You need to learn.”
Lieutenant Withers took advantage of the slackness of my muscles to lift me onto the exam chair.
“You’ll want the paddle, I think, Major,” said Doctor Greenway.
“The what?” I yelled, twisting my head to try to get a look at him. I couldn’t see the doctor’s face, but I could just make out that he had something in his hands—something that bore much too close a resemblance to pictures from ancient Earth.
Then Major Harrow had come between me and the doctor, on the left side of the chair, and Lieutenant Withers had put his hand underneath my knees and begun to sweep them upward. Again I tried, wildly, to find enough traction to twist out of the lieutenant’s grasp, but again he made it completely clear that he literally had the upper hand.
As I moved my head side to side I saw Major Harrow, to my horror, take the thing the doctor had offered, and I gave a cry of fear as I got my first real look at it.
A wooden paddle, with a narrow blade. Three holes in the surface, to allow its wielder to bring it as quickly as he might want against the bare bottom of a miscreant. My limbs, stimulated by the fright the simple appearance of the dreadful thing sent thrilling through me, made another effort to escape. I pressed my arms against the upholstered surface of the chair to either side of my hips, seeking purchase and I tried to raise my torso and somehow writhe out of Lieutenant Withers’ grasp, but my strength had by that time nearly completely departed.
“Doctor,” I heard Major Harrow say though I couldn’t bring myself to look him in the face, my eyes having fixed themselves on the horrid implement in his hand, “would you be so good as to get the cane from Sara’s dresser as well? I think we should show her that, too.”
My mouth opened, but all that emerged was the sound of my ragged panting. This terrible request by Major Harrow, which he had delivered in the most offhanded way, had freed me from my being mesmerized by the wooden paddle. I looked at the doctor, who had moved to stand beside Major Harrow, in hope of seeing that he found the idea monstrous.
He did not: he nodded, and turned to move toward the far side of the room.
Sara’s dresser. From Sara’s dresser.I had a dresser, in this room—the presidential state bedroom. What Major Harrow had told me began to sink in: the Magisterians really did intend to install me as a kind of figurehead, so that they could degrade and debase that symbol—me—to deliver their message of dominance.
And on that dresser…
I looked at the major himself, who gazed back at me steadily, neutrally, as if assessing my reaction to the furthest possible degree of precision.
“Since you failed to learn much about Magisterian culture, Sara,” he said, surprising me since I had supposed he wouldn’t speak until he had in hand the exhibit he wished to show me, “I’m sure you know nothing at all about Magisteria’s most important colony, Prosperia.”
I blinked at him. My heart rate got even faster, my breathing even more ragged. My eyes went wide. In fact, I did know about Prosperia: their system had at first seemed to me a more palatable version of the patriarchal archetype adopted on Draco and especially on Magisteria. I had had the impression—which later proved, on research, to be false—that the Prosperians treated women with more respect than the Magisterians. Their neo-Victorian culture seemed to promise that, since though the Victorian era hadn’t represented a time of anything like egalitarian society it had nevertheless given women enough freedom to dream of the more just world to come, and it had elevated the idea of maternal femininity on such a high pedestal.
The Prosperians did, it turned out, elevate their women that way, but only in service of subjugating them further. I had come away from my research disillusioned both with the true, historic Victorians and—to an even greater extent—with the hypocritical Prosperians. I felt my face turning red as I thought about the worst parts of what I had learned, the parts I imagined to my dismay the major meant to tell me of as he revealed new portions of the ordeal his government had planned for me.
His eyes narrowed.
“Hmm,” he said musingly, “your blush seems to indicate that perhaps youdoknow something of Prosperian ways.”
At that moment the doctor came back into my field of vision; his movements on the thick carpet of the sumptuous state bedroom hadn’t come to my ears. His sudden appearance with the awful thing he had fetched for the major made me start with terror. Major Harrow’s gaze had wrapped me yet again into that strange, ambiguous feeling of unwelcome but inescapable connection to him, but my body awareness came rushing back at the sight of the thin length of bamboo in Doctor Greenway’s hands. I shuddered at my humiliating posture, naked and nearly doubled up under the lieutenant’s arm, my bottom and my pussy completely exposed.
“This paddle and this cane,” Major Harrow said, pulling my eyes back to his face, “come from Prosperia, where they are generally used in the correction of older girls and married women respectively—though more serious offenses even by unmarried girls sometimes merit the cane as well, and a husband always has the prerogative of paddling his wife if he thinks it more appropriate for her misbehavior.”
My bare chest, my little breasts with their distressingly stiff nipples, heaved up and down as I gazed into his dark eyes.
“Look at them, Sara,” he commanded.
I didn’t want to look at them—still less did I want to show him that I would obey him. His stern expression sent a thrill of fear down my spine, though: his eyes promised that if I didn’t do as he said, he would decide to use the cane instead of the paddle.
I looked: I saw the things I had read about. The Prosperians used the cane, long and thin and vicious, on wives’ bare bottoms, for gossiping, or for neglecting household duties. Disrespectful girls—ones who saidfuck, the way I had—got the paddle. And girls, when they became wives, received that terrible device between their legs. My mind shrank from saying it even inside my head.
“We use the cane on Magisteria, too, but we brought Prosperian ones here, for you, because the federation decided you would be trained not only as a Magisterian concubine but also as a Prosperian bride.”
I let out an involuntary whimper, as the doctor’s greeting, with his mention of an unpleasant procedure, suddenly made terrible sense. I looked into the major’s eyes, my chest filling with dread.
“Yes,” he said, “you do know, don’t you, Sara? You’re going to have your governor installed in a little while.”