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“Turn around, Sara,” Major Harrow said. “Show your neighbors your bottom.”
I bit my lip to keep down the next sob, theOh, nothat threatened to rise to my lips. I heard the blushing girl say it, though, on my behalf: “Oh, no,” in a tiny whisper that suggested, to my confusion, that she too hadcomplications.
“You’ve all seen the news, I’m sure,” said Major Harrow as he forced me to obey his latest order.
If I had felt detached from my body when the lieutenant had bent me over the arm of my couch and the major had pulled down my sweats and panties to spank me, I seemed now to have departed from it entirely—not just my body, but my whole self. A dim awareness of the raging heat of shame that licked from my chest to my face told me that I still had some connection to the girl the Magisterian’s strong hands turned to face the door out of which he had walked her.
He put his hands on her waist, and he exerted firm pressure, to make her move her feet. She moved awkwardly because he had made her put her hands on her head. Her fingers twined in her golden hair, even more disheveled now than it had been when she had opened the door to the Magisterian special police.
That girl had Major Harrow’s hands on her sensitive bare skin. The warmth of her treasonous pussy, the humiliated sob brought to her lips by that warmth, the knowledge that my neighbors now beheld the terrible evidence of her punishment… that all definitely seemed to be happening to someone else.
He turned me around, though, and it was me despite my mind’s attempts to flee into the stratosphere. He did it to the gasps of at least two of the other women forced to watch this degrading spectacle. Again I understood that those gasps represented sympathy and compassion, but again they only made me furrow my brow harder as the hot blush deepened. They had seen my red bottom, and they knew what had occurred inside my apartment when the Magisterians had come for me.
“Sara here,” the major continued at last, now that he had his audience’s attention fully and had displayed his exhibit, “has been assigned for reformation under the treaty your previous government signed with the Magisterian Federation this morning. She saw fit to disobey me when I asked her to undress and so I was forced to punish her, as you can see. I want to make two things very clear to you, my Artemisian friends. First, I had the authority to spank Sara only because she had received an assignment for reformation. Second, I disciplined her only because she disobeyed my request.”
Floating somewhere above my body, I found myself appreciating the skill that had gone into crafting this speech. As a public relations professional, I knew very well indeed the importance of word choice in mission-critical messaging.
Major Harrow had just given my neighbors—all of them extremely high status and potentially very influential in public opinion—every reason to fall in line with whatever ridiculous changes the federation would make in Artemisian life. I had had cordial, even friendly relationships with them, but of course they didn’t know me—only that I had a post in the planetary government.
Although our administration had won the election specifically as a radical change from the disastrous previous one, I knew better than anyone on my world—since I handled the polling—just how general the citizenry’s dissatisfaction with government on Artemisia had become. I had had the unpleasant duty, day after day, of disillusioning my colleagues about the people’s affection—that is, theirlackof affection—for their new president.
My neighbors might have some compassion for my nakedness and my spanked bottom, from sheer solidarity as Artemisians and as human beings. They mistrusted the government, though.
They had undoubtedly concluded I must have had a role in the humiliating surrender they had just learned of from the news. I heard a little whimper emerge from my lips as I realized they probably saw my thoroughly punished backside as evidence of my deserving thisreformation assignment.
Seemingly encouraged by the major’s friendly tone, one of the women—I thought it must be the one whose ‘complications’ I had seemed to detect—spoke up.
“What’s areformation assignment?” she asked.
I bit my lip hard to keep from making some utterly humiliating noise at the surge of heat that went through me. I wanted to stop the major from answering, and I wanted to hear the answer to that exact question more than anything in the world, and the two desires reinforced each other terribly inside me until I felt like I might swoon.
The major’s answer came in a tone a great deal more serious than his previous speech had employed.
“You should hope you don’t find out, Miss Yureby.”
I heard Greta Yureby—her first name came back now that Major Harrow had spoken her last name—take in a sharp breath. I wondered how much attention the major had had to give to the names of my neighbors to be able to produce one just like that. Maybe he had someone feeding him information over a comm implant?
However he did it, the result was silence. Major Harrow let the quiet remain for a few seconds, and then he said, his familiar manner returning, “There will be changes here on Artemisia, as there are on all the worlds the federation takes under its wing. Your culture will gradually become more disciplined and productive as those who follow traditional social norms like marriage become more numerous thanks to the incentives offered in the new laws you’ll hear announced later today. That will assist Artemisia in paying your share of the reparations for this very costly war, while a few particular citizens, like Sara here, will represent those reparations in a special way. We brought you out to witness her being taken into custody to help both her and you come to terms with the way things will be from now on. You may go back inside now.”
So succinct. So well articulated and so reasonable-sounding.I chewed on my lower lip, trying desperately to suppress the idiotic admiration that had risen in my mind.
“Wh-what’s going to happen to… her?” Greta asked quietly. I could hear the mixture of fear and… ‘complications’ in her voice.
“She’s going to learn what she really needs, Miss Yureby. Tune in on the government affairs channel this evening and you’ll get to see for yourself.”
My jaw dropped. The government affairs channel.Mychannel?
I barely noticed Major Harrow turning me around, or my neighbors going back into their apartments, or the hallway, or the elevator.
What did it mean? What would they see for themselves, about me?
CHAPTER6
Sara
They took me in a windowless van to the place I would probably have been least likely to guess they might turn into a reformation center. When I stepped out onto the gravel drive, which I happened to know the first post-terraform settlers of Artemisia had paved with crushed marble imported from old Earth, and looked up to see the president’s mansion, I understood. The Magisterians couldn’t, I thought, have chosen a more appropriate place to demonstrate the utter humiliation of my subjugated world.
The marble, I knew—and had the sudden urge to tell Major Harrow despite how absurd it would have sounded—had originally constituted part of the most important courthouse in the most important country on Earth, for a hundred years or so. The colonization of Artemisia had occurred during the Draconian Renaissance of the early thirty-first century, common reckoning. At the time, archeologists were creating a good deal of excitement—so said the history texts, anyway—around their discoveries amid the ruins of old cities of the second millennium.
