After the Bighorn Chapter Twenty-three

Dancers and other Matters

“Oh, my God. It finally all fits together!” Zach Frick was very excited. “But what do we do now? Can we even use any of this?”

“All this information was turned over to us, but they never thought we could put it all together, especially with the other information we gathered. It was a huge jigsaw puzzle and we didn’t even know what the picture was supposed to look like, er even how many pieces there were. We can use it, all of it. VanRijn will not even see it coming. His lawyer Vansittart didn’t look at half of this stuff before turning it over, I am sure.” I was as happy as young Zach Frick, but I don’t think even he realized yet what we had.

What we had was the whole key to stopping Vincent VanRijn’s legal case against Frick Steel to try and improperly steal its patents of specialty steels. Enough to tie VanRijn up in court for the rest of his life. We needed to tell Wyandotte Frick and J Augustus Frick, the family lawyer.ick and J Augustus Frick, the family lawyer

The dancer had finished her routine. She was glistening with sweat from her exertions. She was also trembling with fear. Her owner looked greedily at Wyandotte Frick. The man was a minor member of the Emery Family, one of the Gorean Families of North America. He had shown up at the Frick mansion, a kajira in tow, a skinny girl that it appeared he was underfeeding. He wanted to sell the girl as a dancer to Wyandotte on the strength of the upcoming Companionship Ceremony of a senior Emery to Chelsea Frick in a diplomatic coupling to strengthen the Frick position since the murder in London of its Patriarch, Willard.

The man was sure that he could sell the girl for the festivities and make a profit on Frick need for the Emery alliance.

“You see, Ubar Wyandotte,” he wheedled, “You saw the perfection of her movement, the delicacy of her movements? Easily worth every cent of what I am asking?”

I wondered what Wyandotte would say.  The man was just a shirt-tail cousin of the Emerys, not a person of importance. But a kajira is a a kajira, and one that can dance has some value when one is planning a big party of all of the Families.

The girl’s movements had been perfection, Every movement, a thing of concentrated beauty. Her dance had been perfect.

Yet on Gor she would have been beaten.

She had not been pleasing.

It was not her fault; she had done exactly as she had been told to do.

Yet on Gor she would have been beaten.

Because she had not been pleasing.

A slave must be perfectly pleasing. She had been perfect; but she had not been pleasing.

Every movement had been fluid. She had displayed herself completely and openly. Every position of hand and angle of her body and limbs had been perfect; a symphony of beauty and movement. But she had not been pleasing.

If she was commanded to do the dance again, she would do it exactly the same as she had  now just danced it in front of us. Her dance would have been perfect. Yet to any Gorean it would not have been pleasing.

The girl danced as a ballerina would dance: with discipline, with strict attention to the beat and flow, every movement considered and carried out according to a strict script.

But if my Juli had danced before us, only partly trained as she was, her dance would have been accorded more accolades by men of Gor.

Whoever had trained this young woman, I assumed the man who was trying to sell her now, had trained her as a ballerina would have been trained. Yet any stripper would have been more pleasing.

Because the girl in front of us danced as if there was no one watching, or if two thousand eyes were on her in a large hall. There had been no interaction with the men watching. A slave dances to please, to excite, to express her inner yearnings and needs. A slave dances to express her femineity. This girl danced coldly, with discipline and no eye contact. She danced as a cold woman of earth, not a needy slave.

It was not her fault. She danced as she had been taught, and how she had been raised in the structures and beliefs of earth. I suspected her owner, had found, or had been given, a description or a video of a real Gorean dancer and had tried his best to train her to dance as a kajira.

But he had failed. She had failed. On Gor she would have been beaten.

The man who was trying to sell her was her owner; but he had never become her Master. He had not excited her slave fires. In accordance with Earth ideologies, he had not tried to make her burn with slave fires, but had tamped them down.

How frustrated the poor girl must be, collared and yet not a burning passionate slave.

A kajira dancing before men, tries to excite them, to engage them, to inflame their passions. She dances her own needs, expresses her yearning to be seized and raped. It is primal and alive. This dance had been as passionless as a performance at the ballet. A thing of cold beauty, of precise constrained movements, it could be compared to the admiration of a statue. There was no flesh and blood in it.

Her dance was perfect; it needed to be pleasing.

I suspected the girl had been a ballerina before being seized and acquired. With an owner, rather than a master, and working from descriptions of  the exciting dances of a collared kajira, she had done her best. If she knew other dances, she would have done her best with them as well. She was a woman in a collar, she would try to learn all she could. She would fear the whip of course, but a woman in a collar knows that she is where she belongs and that thousands of generations of evolution have brought her to where she kneels. She would try to fit into the natural world, but a lifetime of cultural messaging stood in her way.

Her owner, but that same cultural messaging was reluctant to be fully a master, a lifetime of training in the ballet had prevented her from blatantly expressing her sexual need. For too many of the men in ballet, too many of the men who choreographed the dances were not sexually interested in women. They were interested in the male dancers, or in cold academic theories of movement.

For this girl to now dance as a slave, she must forget all that. She must dance as a woman consumed by her fires and her needs. She must express the burning fires in her slave belly. She must engage the men watching, respond to each man, make each man want her. She must bare her soul and her needs as well as her body.

This girl’s dance had been technically perfect; it had not been pleasing. How sad to put in so much effort and to have as little result.

Wyandotte spoke. “Your girl dances with no fire, she has the steps, but not the fire; the words but not the music. Stay and have some food. I will decide in a little while.”

The man was disappointed; he tried to expostulate with the Ubar of the Fricks. Wyandotte cut him off, and rose from his chair, shaking his head.

“You and your girl stay here. I will have some food sent. She looks half starved.”

“But she had to make her dancing weight!”

“She needs more curves, I could count her ribs. I will return at some time.”

Wyandotte Frick left the ballroom where the dancing had occurred I followed with Augustus Frick and young Zack Frick. We had serious matters to discuss.

A girl was kneeling in Wyandotte Frick’s office. She served us coffee, then left. Her body was nicely curved, her ribs did not protrude. Augustus Frick slapped her ass as she left the room. She squealed with delight.

Augustus Frick spoke. “Vincent VanRijn brought this patent case as a matter of business, it is what he does. Buy up patents with a surface similarity to legitimate ones, then bring cases to extort settlements; to get paid to go away. He has made a lot of money doing this. We can defeat him, by spending a lot of money and time, or a lesser amount to pay him to go away.”

Wyandotte interrupted. “We know all that, you are not addressing a court. We decided not to pay the Dane-geld, now we have to get rid of the Dane. Do you have a way to do that?”

I spoke up. “Yes. He decided to bury Frick Steel in paper and motions, to waste our time and spend a lot of money. But we have lots of data and exhibit clerks, and a clever IT person in Lynn Kessel. VanRijn’s lawyer, Vansittart, did not vet all the documents he sent us, or remove documents that might lead us to damaging disclosures. We have found a huge lever against. VanRijn”

“A few years ago, according to hints in his social media he became obsessed with becoming a big landowner, like Ted Turner or Bill Gates. The own thousands of acres of mid-western and western land, and he wanted some. But land-ownership has slow appreciation and steady but not spectacular returns. Unless that is, you buy below market value. So first we figured out what land he owned, then we found out how much he paid. Tedious, but it is public records if you know where to look. The documents we have contain those clues. They are hard to find, but given clues, we found them. We tracked how much and how little he paid, and were able to track his payments to his goons who forced families off their land. It took the Kessel girl many data runs, but she accomplished the task.”

“All that is a huge lever to get him to drop this case, and could tie him up in civil and criminal courts in several states for years. But that is not all, he got greedy for a big spread. He was behind the attack on the Lazy F. His chief enforcer, the man who infiltrated the Lazy F was a man we know only as Fred. With this, you can get VanRijn of your back for good.”

The family lawyer, Augustus Frick, interjected. “I can set up a meeting with Vansittart and get this ridiculous case dismissed.”

Wyandotte shook his head. “No. Tell him that I want a private meeting with VanRijn. Just the two of us. He still owes us for the lives lost and damage done on the Lazy F. I won’t kill him. At this time and because he is suing us, it would attract unwelcome attention. For the same reason we will not collar his local lawyer, the Quigley woman and her associates. For a year at least anyway. We have time for our revenges.”

He stood. “I will extract a large sum from Mr VanRijn. A very large sum. It will cover our costs, our compensation to the families of the men we have lost. A sum so large VanRijn will squeal. But we will not kill him. Not yet anyway. Not until memories fade, and our position improves. We won’t forget though. In time we will settle all our scores. But we can carry that out later.”

Wyandotte turned to Zach. “I have decided to purchase that skinny girl. Something may be made of her. If we can improve her dancing so she is pleasing, she can be part of the entertainment at the Companionship of Chelsea, then we can ship her to Gor. Good dancers bring good prices.”

*

After dinner, Zack and I, with Augustus Frick had returned to the Ballroom. We paid the owner of the skinny girl a fair price for her. Then the three of us treated her, not with respect and consideration as had her previous owner, but as Masters with a slave girl. We extracted from her submission and made her serve with exactness and perfection. In time, she will make a good dancer. Just another earth slut dancing on a sand floor in a Paga Tavern by the wharves of Cos or Port Kar. A far cry from her dreams of the Metropolitan Ballet, but so much more satisfying.