That went along with what he had told her about the pleasure laws, though, didn’t it? Just as having to suck his hard penis went along with those laws.

  “Men call them the pleasure laws, Priscilla,” William had murmured in a slightly thick voice as he guided her face up and down on the rigid shaft, “because they provide men with pleasure through the regulation of women’s pleasure.”

  Something about the very act that it seemed clear now William would require of her with great frequency, this act of submitting her mouth completely to the shameful task of pleasing her husband’s bodily lust, no matter how she gagged, no matter how her jaw ached, no matter how bitter his seed tasted when he spurted it into her mouth, seemed a compelling example of just what he said. His command to touch herself inside her underwear while she pleased him with her mouth made that example very complex, but also perhaps more complete.

  It seemed to her now that to be made to give her husband pleasure while, at his command, also wickedly giving it to herself should tell Priscilla something very important both about the law and about the life she must expect as a Prosperian wife. As she watched the fields out the window of the carriage, and remembered the way she had come with William’s hard penis in her mouth, at the lewd motion of her own fingers down there where his governor made her most private places no longer private but his—her husband’s property—she shuddered in his arms.

  “What is it, darling?” William asked. “Are you cold?”

  “No, sir,” she said, snuggling closer into his chest. She thought William must be very warm in his clothes, for he had turned the temperature up high enough for his bride to feel comfortable in her scanty, wicked underthings. “I was thinking about the laws.”

  William stroked her shoulder gently. “Did you like your lesson?” he asked with a rather mischievous note in his voice.

  An important question occurred to Priscilla then, in just that regard. “Should I have liked it, sir?” she asked him in all sincerity.

  “That, darling, is a very interesting question,” he replied, “and I don’t think it has an especially simple answer.”

  Priscilla felt a little smile creep onto her lips. “I certainly don’t have a simple answer to it,” she said. Then, trying to find the answer that would somehow represent both the complexity of the question and the truth of her feelings, she said, “I like to be your good girl, even when you make me do wicked things.”

  That earned her a lovely, squeezing embrace from her husband, and a kiss on the top of her head. The carriage had almost passed into the forest that seemed to march down from the northern highlands like a dark army. Up ahead the road, which had run flat for the many miles of the fields cleared by the farming companies three hundred years ago in the early days of the colony, began to rise, and the trees loomed to either side.

  Priscilla felt like she stood on the threshold of an adventure like the ones in the stories the Prosperian board of education had revived from the ancient Victorian days: moral tales of young women who had accompanied their husbands into the wild, faithfully mending their stockings on the frontier of America while their strong men had hunted game and made friends with the kind native people. When the unkind native people took exception, the strong men, with the help of the kind natives, fought to protect their young, submissive wives, and everyone lived happily ever after.

  She saw a person in the trees at the side of the road, striding alongside it. The person wore a sort of clothing she had never seen before, so that Priscilla could not at first even decide whether it was a man or a woman, because the figure did not stride purposefully the way Prosperian men seemed to do, but rather moved gracefully among the trees. He or she had on a sort of long shirt, almost like a shift, but made of some stiffer stuff, and under it, as far as Priscilla could tell, some sort of trousers of the same material.

  “William?” she asked. “Who is that? Is it a forest worker?” She thought she had heard that Verner Global Supply employed practicals as workers.

  He had been looking out the other side of the carriage, but now he turned his head and said in a surprised tone, “That’s a renegade.”

  “A what?”

  “A renegade. Do you see what he’s wearing?”

  “Yes,” she replied. “It’s a he? A man, I mean?”

  “Yes. Their women don’t wear gowns the way subjects do, but they do wear dresses, made out of the same stuff.”

  “What is it?” Priscilla asked in wonder, for some reason more interested at least for the moment in the strange garments than in the strange person himself. A renegade must be a kind of farmworker?

  “It’s buckskin that they take from the animals they eat.”

  Priscilla felt her eyes go wide. Renegades must not be farmworkers after all. “Like the American Indians?” she asked in wonder.

  “And like almost everyone on Earth after the collapse.”

  “The collapse?” Priscilla had known that boys’ educations differed greatly from girls’, but she had thought the differences concerned things like mathematics and economics. What William had said must mean, though, that whole swaths of history must have been withheld as well.

  The carriage had passed the renegade man now, and left him far behind making his way among the tree trunks, but the image of him stalking in that lithe way through the forest remained very strongly in Priscilla’s mind.

  William chuckled. “Would you like to hear first about the collapse or about the renegades, dearest? I have the duty to educate you, now, as I see fit, and I see fit to tell you practically anything you wish to know.”

  “Is that part of the pleasure laws, too?” Priscilla asked, suddenly very curious especially about what practically might mean.

  “Yes, dearest,” William replied, giving her another kiss atop her head. “Husbands are put in charge of their wives’ learning past the most basic skills of reading, writing, and arithmetic, along of course with the moral education that will keep a girl pure until a man chooses her for his bride. So there are a great many things you do not know about the world, and I have the responsibility of deciding how many of them you may learn.”

  Priscilla felt very small, then, in her husband’s arms, wearing the naughty underwear in which he had dressed her, her tummy full of his seed. Part of her felt that she shouldn’t like it so much, to be weak and dependent on him not just for her home but even for her knowledge that way, but the idea also seemed to make her glow again down between her legs, and again she felt that she wanted to be William’s good girl.

  “Tell me about the renegades, please, sir?” she said, calling him sir without a second thought, as if the realization that she must now seek knowledge from her husband cast her into that submissive mindset.

  “Very well, darling. About a hundred years ago, a group of men and women—practicals, mostly, though there were a few of the merchant class as well, and even one or two administrators—decided that they wanted to live outside the laws of Prosperia colony, and in particular outside the pleasure laws.”

  Priscilla thought she could hear satisfaction and even pleasure in William’s tone as he began the story: the little glow flared again, and became again her submission to him as she sensed his happiness and his enjoyment in gratifying the curiosity of his still-very-innocent bride.

  “Could they do that?” she asked, hoping he would look favorably on asking questions, the way her favorite teachers at the girls’ school had done.

  The warmth in his tone seemed to say that he did hope to hear that she was eager to learn. “Actually, no, they couldn’t. According to the colony’s charter, those who decide they don’t want to obey the laws enacted by parliament must leave the planet voluntarily or be exiled. So from the very beginning, the renegades really were renegades—people who have refused to follow the law.”

  “But the government didn’t stop them?” Priscilla asked, feeling her brow furrow in puzzlement. She supposed she had never even imagined that you could break a law, let alone get away with breaking one.

  “Well, at first no one knew. Prosperian society is very tightly controlled in some ways, but very open in many others. Our social fabric depends on subjects acting in a certain sense as police, with regard to what their neighbors do. Because our culture and our community are so stable and well-founded, we all have an interest in helping those who stray from our customs to see that they shouldn’t do so, and for nearly three centuries—before the renegades left—that was enough. So while our traditional social values keep families and community organizations tightly knit together, the government doesn’t monitor subjects’ daily lives, the way governments have done and still do in other places.”

  His voice had grown very thoughtful as he gave this little lesson, as if the mental processes required to express these things to his new wife had made him see them in a slightly different light than he had before. Despite these efforts, however, Priscilla found herself struggling with the information William conveyed. She felt she could follow almost everything he said, despite his tendency—which she loved, she had to admit—to use big words and complicated phrases, as if she were a worthy conversational partner for a man of the world. But it seemed as if a great deal of what her husband said depended on having information she didn’t yet have.

  “Other places?” she tried.

  “Oh, goodness,” William said, and now his voice seemed to have a little bit of embarrassment in it. “I’ve forgotten that they don’t even teach girls about the galactic federation.” He paused, as if trying to figure out where he could begin. “When you learned about exile, where did they tell you people who were exiled went?”

  Priscilla thought for a moment. “Back to Earth? I don’t think Miss Jewel even ever said.”

  William held her a little more tightly at that, and a shiver went through her. “I love to think of you as a pupil,” he said. “Being a good girl for teacher.”

  She giggled. “I loved school,” she confessed. “Now I suppose I get be your pupil, William.”

  “You do,” he said with satisfaction. “And what do you think will happen if you do not learn your lessons thoroughly?”

  Now she shivered and giggled at the same time. “You will spank me, I suppose.”

  “I will indeed,” William said, and now he had turned her face up and was kissing her again. “Would you mind very much if I taught you about the renegades later?”

  “No, sir,” Priscilla whispered, the glow and the good girl feeling taking hold of her so strongly she thought she couldn’t bear it if William didn’t let her please the hard manhood she felt rising under her bottom.

  He reached out and pressed a button. To her surprise, the bench upon which they sat began to recline. “What are you doing, sir?” she asked softly.

  “I’m going to fuck you now, dearest,” he said in the thick voice that meant the time had come to please her bridegroom. “Lie on your back and raise your knees very high for me. We will fuck face to face. I will keep your governor at level two, to make you feel more submissive.”

  Priscilla didn’t think she could feel any more submissive than she did that instant. “Shouldn’t I take my underwear off, sir?” she asked.

  “No, darling. Leave it on. I will pull it aside to get into your cunt. A man likes to do it that way, when a girl is wearing something pretty. After I’ve taken away your hair down there, it will be an even prettier sight.”

  She looked up into her husband’s face as he fucked her, watching his own eyes go from the place where he had indeed pulled aside the front of the lacy garment to enter her vagina and now surged masterfully in and out at an easy, unhurried pace, holding her knees open with his strong hands, to her face where she knew he must see that submission he desired.

  “You’ll have my seed in your cunt for the first time, now, Priscilla,” he said, his breath coming now in pants.

  “Yes, sir,” she sighed, almost in a whimper. “Thank you, sir.”

  “Good girl. Good girl,” he said as she felt his penis throbbing with his climax. She thought perhaps she could even feel the warmth of his seed up inside her. She smiled up at him, loving the stern look upon his face as he gave himself over to pleasure.

  “Did you like being fucked at level two?” he asked, then, stroking her cheek.

  “Yes, sir,” she said, a little surprised to feel the truth of the answer. Shouldn’t she want, rather, to have him inside her at level seven, or even at level ten? Of course, she did like that—a very great deal. But she also liked feeling that with her governor William could ensure that fucking would concern his pleasure, and not hers.

  “Good girl,” he said again softly, and kissed her.

  Chapter Fourteen

  William got to continue the lesson about the renegades when they reached Vernerwood at last, late that evening. The servants—a butler, a housekeeper, a cook, two maids, and two footmen, along with the family’s forester and the old gamekeeper—lined up in front of the door to greet them despite the lateness of the hour. Priscilla behaved very graciously despite never having visited a great house before, and received their compliments without a deeper blush than would prettily stain her cheeks.

  William hoped his bride would never gain the haughty manner of the upper echelon of administrators’ wives, his own mother representing a very good example. “They’re practicals, William,” Cecilia Verner would say, “and there’s no use pretending differently.”

  But as Priscilla smiled and nodded even to the junior parlor maid, William could see that she thought of these people who would make her comfortable in her new homes not as practicals but as people. It made him think of her curiosity in the carriage about the renegades. His mother, along with most of administrative society, would surely say that the talk that led to the departure of the renegades from the Prosperian community began with the idea that practicals, merchants, and administrators were all people of the same sort.

  Prosperian law handled this issue with what William had been taught in school to regard as great adroitness, though now that he had lived in the real world of the colony for seven years he wondered whether his teachers had stretched the truth. Each sex and class shall retain their fundamental human rights, but all who enter into the life of the colony and swear the oath of loyalty agree to have only the rights and privileges appertaining to their individual sexes and classes. Every Prosperian man and woman, whether practical, merchant, or administrator, was a person, but thousands of years of earthly and galactic civilization had taught the Prosperian framers that to deny differences among people led to disaster just as surely as did taking such differentiation to harmful extremes.

  “Mr. Verner?” the housekeeper asked once the ceremony of greeting the household had ended and the other servants had dispersed from the wide drive in front of the grand steps up to the door of Vernerwood.

  “Yes, Mrs. Barnes?”

  “Shall I tell cook that you and Mrs. Verner will dine in an hour?”

  “Yes, thank you, Mrs. Barnes. We won’t need much to eat, or much service; if Renton might just lay things out in the small dining room, Mrs. Verner and I can help ourselves.”

  “Very good, sir,” said Mrs. Barnes. “And…” The sweet, middle-aged woman dropped her voice so that Priscilla, who was supervising the removal of their baggage by the footmen, could not hear. “Have you any directions about Mrs. Verner, in particular?”

  William smiled. Housekeepers in the great houses received special training in assisting their employers with the management of the erotic side of household life. Should William decide it must be so, he would feel very comfortable giving Mrs. Barnes the authority to spank Priscilla; the housekeeper received frequent praise from Lord Verner on her ability to keep the maids in line, and the look upon his wife’s face when his lordship spoke of it sometimes made William wonder whether Lady Verner had on occasion herself been over Mrs. Barnes’ knee.

  “Why don’t you have Jenny give her a wax in the morning?”

  Mrs. Barnes nodded. “Very good, sir. I trust there are no disciplinary problems?” William thought he could see the slightest twinkle in the housekeeper’s eye. He had always suspected that Mrs. Barnes took rather a delight in feeling that she had, from time to time, a sort of delegated authority over her masters’ elegant administrative-class wives.

  He chuckled. “Nothing I can’t handle myself, Mrs. Barnes.”

  “And if Mrs. Verner is reluctant about the wax?”

  “I’ll take care of it, over the punishment horse. You may tell Jenny to come to me and let me know.”

  “Certainly, sir.”

  The footmen had departed for the servants’ entrance with the luggage, and Renton the butler followed them to give directions on where various things must be put. Now Mrs. Barnes also went, to tell cook William’s pleasure with regard to dinner. He heard the autocarriage roll along the gravel of the drive, beginning its journey to its garage, which the Verners always called the stables just for the pleasure of the ancient echo. Turning, he saw Priscilla standing there in her blue going-away gown, looking at him so sweetly and shyly that it nearly took his breath away even to behold her.

  Above them the trees, never disturbed since the day William’s great-great-grandfather had chosen this spot for his country home, with the crystal lake on the other side and his lumber mill three miles up the road, loomed dark in the fading golden light. What could be more perfect than the life of a Prosperian administrator, just married to a wonderful girl and in possession, in his breast pocket, of the control card, turned now to zero, that rendered her his own greatest treasure?

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17