"You've taught me well, Piri. And we cannot be other than we are." And that includes Trella, I thought. "Siksie also said..." I hesitated because I wasn't sure if what I was about to say would anger him. "I am like water where you are like stone."

  "You kneel easily enough," he said with ice in his voice.

  "What is that supposed to mean?" I felt my anger trying to flare up to match his. Wasn't I expecting him to be proud of me? What was I missing this time?

  "She broke you, and she sent you to me to do her bidding, the snake." He was looking at me suddenly as if I were not even his son. He stepped down from the dais and gripped me by the chin, turning my head aside. He fingered the suture and the lump underneath it and I sagged. The full explanation was a long way from complete.

  Now I had two choices, be like water and let his anger pass right through me like a stone sinking in a pond, staying on my knees, or I could be like him, like the stone mountain rising up from the ground. I froze. I had always had a sense of which way to go with these things before. I had been fostered at age seven in another noble's home for a year, before being sent off to Helleron, and another one at age fourteen, and each time I had always known when to yield and when to push back. Now I was caught between the two, needing his respect and unsure which would be the path to earn it. Should I stand up and fight him? Or cower down as he was clearly about to explode with rage?

  Then I blinked, and it was almost like my mother's voice in my head telling me there must be a third way. "Test me," I said.

  "What?" He acted like I couldn't have said what I just did.

  "Test me," I repeated. Now I stood. "I can bend any female to my will, and most males, too. And I am not broken."

  He grunted.

  "Come on, Piri. You have the most advanced testing facility in the entire system right here on this platform. Haven't you ever wondered what the scan would show on me?" I had wondered about that myself, but the psych scanning tests were considered nearly taboo for native Kylar. Thinking about Trella, hiding her urge to submit for her entire life, it was obvious to me why. No one wanted to suddenly find out their place in the power structure should be at the bottom according to some measure of their innate tendencies. That was fine for slave stock brought from other planets, but not for our kind.

  "The scans are unworthy," he said then. "The old ways are best."

  Once upon a time, before he met my mother and the priesthood was disbanded, before I was born and politics drove him into the offworld slave trade, my father had a reputation for being one of the best at the "old way" of telling whether someone was inherently a master or a slave. The old way was through interaction, observation, and intuition.

  Then again, the "old ways" also said each master should have only one slave, as Kyl was bound to Zal, and that slaves be valued and treasured as equals to keep the universe in balance. But Kylar had not been in balance since a long time before I was born. We had an Emperor who was far from the first who would murder his own child for being submissive. Audan hated how far we had come from the old teachings, but at the same time, he was ready to disown me, or worse, if it seemed I had broken.

  "Test me," I said again.

  He turned on me in an instant, his arms pinning mine back, forcing me to the floor. I had forgotten he could move so fast. I was thin and whipcord, while he was stockier, but not slow. Never slow. "You mock me," he growled in my ear.

  "No, Piri," I said as he almost choked me. "We both have to know."

  He threw me down then, and stood over me. "I wanted to raise an equal. I wanted you to grow up someone your mother would have respected." His voice softened. "But there's too much of the Kylaran parent-child bond between us, Arshan."

  "What do you mean?"

  "Deep down, a father owns his son the way a master owns his slave. I could break you, Arshan." He looked at his hands. "I could break you even if no one else in the universe could break you."

  He was right, and it was chilling to hear him say it that way, when I didn't know where that line of thought was going.

  "I could break you, and find out beyond any doubt, what Siksie did to you and what she told you to say to me."

  My voice was shaking as I replied from the floor. "What would break me is to discover that your paranoia was greater than your love for me."

  To my utter shock, my father fell to his knees beside me, weeping in his hands.

  All I could do was stare. I was afraid to touch him, thinking he might not find it comforting, but humiliating. I had no idea why what I had said had caused this reaction.

  Finally he spoke, as if a great pain had been rising up inside him and burst free when it reached his mouth. "How did you know?" he cried. "How did you know that was what she said to me?"

  I was about to ask "what who said?" when I realized who he meant. My mother. My mother who, he sometimes told me, could read his mind. I blinked. Was I reading his mind now? I didn't think so. I had merely spoken the bald truth.

  Now I did put a hand on his shoulder. "Piri..."

  He pulled himself together faster than I expected. It was only a few seconds before he said, in a tired voice, "My paranoia was greater than my love for her. And it broke her. I'm sorry."

  Today was just one shock after another. "Then I, too, know how to break you, Piri."

  He nodded. "As did she."

  We stared at each other for a few moments, and then he stood and helped me to my feet. "If I ever had any doubts about you being your mother's child, about inheriting her gifts as well as mine, they are gone."

  I waited a few more seconds, to make sure clarity had really returned to him before I said "I need to have this removed." I touched the spot where the implant was.

  "We have the facilities here, of course," he said, leading me out of the room. "I am not sure I am ready to hear the story of how it got there in the first place, though."

  "It's a good story, Piri. You'll enjoy most of it." Except the part about me and Siksie becoming allies. He was never going to see her he way I now did. I realized I regretted not being able to say goodbye to her and wondered whether I would ever see her again. For some reason the thing I remembered most was how she had caressed my forehead after releasing me from Belse and Vorna. Like she had cared.

  He took me into the medical wing and ordered everyone else out. He settled me into onto a suspension chair, my face in a cradle and my limbs hanging. "You won't feel this," he said as he activated the anesthetic.

  He was right. I woke up what seemed like seconds later but was probably hours, in a different room, sitting up in a reclining chair. He was sitting there and his face looked haggard. He held up a clear container with a small metallic thing clinking inside it. "Very state of the art," he said. "Not only a top of the line monitor of your physiology, sleep controller and transmitter," he tossed the jar to me, "but also a recorder."

  "Recorder?"

  "It has stored about six days worth of logs." He grimaced. "Not quite what you are imagining. It's not like a film. But it does have a record of everything you said, as well as all your physiological responses, with occasional snapshots from your visual cortex."

  I looked at the device. "Have you played the recording?"

  He nodded and I blushed without meaning to.

  "I'll tell you everything."

  He shook his head. "You don't need to." Now I saw the glint of pride in his eye. "I knew you were strong, Arshan, but..." He shook his head again. "You went through them ..."

  "Like the cat through the bird house. I know."

  "They never would have invited you there if they thought you were going to wreak such havoc." He chuckled a little. "They thought they could handle you. It's a pity the princess is as irrational as her father or you might have really had a life at court."

  "Why would I want a life at court?" I asked.

  He pulled a chair up next to mine. "What kind of life do you want, kiri?" he asked, using, for the first time, the Kylish title for one's son.

  I thought about something Trella had said. But who will be yours? I had not often thought about it, but it seemed obvious to me that I would not be complete until I owned someone, body and soul. But that was for Fate to decide, not me. "It would appear I am a child of Zal and Kyl," I said, "No matter what aspirations mother might have had."

  He nodded. "Until now, you've always gone where I told you. But that time is over."

  "I think I should get away from politics for a while," I pointed out. We still didn't know what story was going to surface or what retribution the emperor might exact, if any, based on recent events. "Maybe it's time I finally visited where mother was from."

  "Yes." He swallowed a lump in his throat. "It is time you knew her people, at least. Lhysa is a good destination for you for now. The Emperor's hand won't reach easily there."

  "Ironic, though, isn't it?"

  "What?"

  "That I've finally proven beyond any doubt that I am your son and I belong among the Kylar, and here I am going as far away as possible."

  "That might not be such a bad thing right now." He sounded sad and tired as he said it. "This empire is not what it once was."

  I thought about the questions I had, about his conscience, about how he could support a morally corrupt slave trade that went against everything he once believed. But I could not bring myself to confront him with them now. "Chosay can get me to the next hub," I said. "I'll find my way to Ardria from there."

  "You'll be back," Audan said. As usual, he would turn out right.

  About the Author

  Cecilia Tan is "simply one of the most important writers, editors, and innovators in contemporary American erotic literature," according to Susie Bright. Tan is the author of many books, including the ground-breaking erotic short story collections Black Feathers (HarperCollins), White Flames (Running Press), and Edge Plays (Circlet Press), and the erotica romances Mind Games, The Prince's Boy, The Hot Streak, and the Magic University series. Forthcoming she has a three-book BDSM erotic romance series from Grand Central Publishing entitled Slow Surrender.

  Her short stories have appeared in Ms. Magazine, Nerve, Best American Erotica, Asimov's Science Fiction, and tons of other places. She was inducted into the Saints & Sinners Hall of Fame for GLBT writers in 2010, was a recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Leather Association in 2001, and won the inaugural Rose & Bay Awards for crowdfunded fiction in 2010 for Daron's Guitar Chronicles. The Prince's Boy won honorable mention in both the NLA Writing Awards and the Rainbow Awards. She lives in the Boston area with her lifelong partner corwin and three cats.

  Try out a chapter of Cecilia Tan's The Velderet...

  Kobi tried not to hurry. He was vain, he knew it, and he knew how silly he looked when he tried to walk too fast, but the scrap of paper in his pocket felt like a white hot star; surely everyone could see it. In reality, it was Kobi’s curiosity that was burning. He gave up trying to look graceful and broke into a jog.

  The street was nearly deserted at this hour, anyway. The red moon had set and the white moon was rising behind him. He had spent a long time at the Velderet after his cybersex session, thinking and drinking. Most of the windows were dark in the clean, white domiciles he passed; even the buildings seemed like they were asleep. For Kobi, it only reinforced the feeling that he was no longer a part of the Bellonian mainstream. By his own admission he was different, a kind of sexual outlaw. He had desires and dreams and fantasies that were inadmissible to others; he was now an outsider. He decided he liked this feeling.

  Besides, he wasn’t alone. He wondered if Merin would be asleep when he came home, or if she would be waiting up with eager questions about his cybersex experiment. He almost jogged past their building. The door recognized him and opened onto the dimmed hallway. Lights flickered up to show him the way to his door, but he ran ahead of them and burst in.

  “Merin?” He saw her jacket hanging by the door, and her shoes, but there was no answer.

  She was asleep in front of the media wall, a stylus still in her hand. Kobi looked at the figure rotating slowly on the screen. It was of indeterminate gender and was wearing some kind of well-fitted clothing, something tailored to sit close to the body, angular and severe. “What’s this?”

  Merin lifted her head and blinked at him. “Something I was working on. Does it remind you of something?”

  He pursed his lips. “Yes, but I can’t decide what. It sure doesn’t look like anything you can get off the rack at the Garment Center.” He shook the lapels of the loose, robelike jacket he was wearing, and then froze. His hand slipped in to the pocket and he brought out the scrap Mica had given him.

  Merin looked disappointed. “It doesn’t remind you of anything?”

  Kobi sat down next to her on the couch and handed her the piece of paper. “Maybe I’m too tired...”

  Her fingers flew over the control pad. On the screen a second figure appeared, kneeling in front of the first one.

  “Oh,” Kobi said. “Of course.” Now that he looked at it again, the outfit was very suggestive of some kind of archaic military uniform, without being too obvious. These days, ever since the Age of Equality was declared, there was no military hierarchy, and no law enforcement other than the consensus crews and the Evaluators. Uniforms were something they only saw in history class. “Very subtle.”

  “Not too subtle, I hope,” she said. But her fingers were already entering the code from the paper. There was a pause while their home system accessed whatever data it was. Merin’s mannequin figures disappeared as a new clip began, with bold letters fading into view on the media wall.

  THE GREAT CRIME

  The Story of the Gerrish

  Part Three

  “It’s an educational drama,” Kobi whispered. “I remember seeing this when I was a kid.”

  Merin shushed him. She had seen it, too. They were starting in the middle, though, skipping over the dry, historical parts about how the Gerrish were enslaved and what important figures in the government had done which thing. It began right from the segment depicting how terrible life was for a Gerrish slave.

  All the Gerrish in the clip were sleeping in a ramshackle hut with no windows when an overseer of some kind came to wake them for the work day. He wore a uniform that looked a little like what Merin had sketched and Kobi pointed in excitement. The slaves who were slow to move from their sleeping pallets were slapped or prodded with a long, thin rod the overseer carried. The camera followed them as they scattered to different tasks.

  Merin whispered. “There’s something weird about this.”

  Kobi kept his eyes on the screen, where a Gerrish woman who had made an error in her weaving was being beaten. Of course, what the screen showed was the rod being lifted high, then the empty air, while a sound effect of it swishing through the air and a woman screaming in pain came from off-camera. This was, after all, meant to be watched by young people in school. “What?”

  “I’ll tell you after it’s done.”

  The scene had already jumped to another example of how mistreated the Gerrish were. It was a catalog of the horrors visited upon them, with a lot of beatings and confinements for misbehavior. The clip ended before the chapter about how the gene plague that killed off the remaining Gerrish might have been prevented.

  Kobi was ashiver, thinking about that rod whistling through the air.

  Merin touched him on the shoulder. “The weird thing about this is, we’ve seen this before.”

  He nodded. “But?”

  “But when you’re a kid you don’t realize things like, for example, all this film footage wasn’t actual real footage. The camera hadn’t been invented yet during the Gerrish enslavement. It was a dramatization made with modern actors.” She tapped the control pad. “These people played out these roles, just like we do, only they did it as part of their job.”

  “I never thought of that before.”

  “Do you think any of them were really eager to play the parts?”

  “Are you saying you want to become a dramat?”

  Merin sighed. “No. But it makes me wonder if maybe there aren’t plenty of Bellonians who are... like us, but who just find other ways, allowable ways, to get what they want.” She twisted one of her curls around a finger. “Think about this. It was supposed to be a documentary aimed at convincing kids that what we did to the Gerrish was the most awful, horrible thing, right? Is that why they harp on the beatings and bondage so much? Or was somebody in charge of this production really having a good time with it?”

  Kobi rubbed his eyes. “This is too deep for me. And now I’m all horny again, after I used up my sexual satisfaction quota at the Velderet, already, too.”

  Merin poked him in the ribs. “You really would happily have sex all day every day, wouldn’t you.”

  “Of course! That’s why I’m perfect for the job of Kylaran love slave.” Kobi was already slipping out of his clothes.

  “Of course you are.” Merin pushed a button on the control pad and the time appeared on the screen. “You know, I have to be at the legislature in four hours.”

  Kobi thought about the ways he could handle this. He could get on his knees and beg like the slave he wanted to be. But then she could always pretend to order him to wait until the morning or something. He could try telling her how unsatisfying the trip to the Velderet had actually been. But Merin wasn’t the kind who would fuck just because she felt sorry for him. She’s probably horny, too, he thought. After seeing that drama, she probably wants to do it, it’s just she’s thinking about her responsibilities.

  Merin started to get up.

  “Stay where you are.”

  She turned away from him, toward her bedroom. “I have to get up in the morning.”

  “No, you don’t,” he said, trying to put a bark into his voice like the overseer in the drama. “Your only responsibility is to serve me.” He held her fast by the arm and pulled her back toward him.

  She struggled just a little, like the woman trying to escape her punishment had done.

 

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