Chapter 13 -- Everything is resolved except that nothing ever is.
THREE YEARS LATER - RETURN TO RENO
Charlotte Stein lectured Stephanie, Naomi and Sarah over breakfast at the Spielmann-Stein mountain home. It was slightly over three years after Stephanie and Naomi had become slaves to the Sportman's Club. Sarah had lost at Level 4 a year later.
Charlotte started, "The idea that upper class, educated women should have few children while the lower classes create cannon fodder is very recent and ultimately not sustainable. For example, Eleonora de' Medici, Duchess of Tuscany and a very cultured and intelligent woman of her time, had eleven children over fourteen years. Indeed, it can be said that the main purpose of noblewomen, the women thought to be the leaders and envied of their sex during most of history, was to produce heirs for the throne, duchy or principality.
"On the other hand, the idea of having sex and children in common among the ruling class is nothing new. Certainly, the Sportsman's Club did not invent it. In early modern Europe, noblewomen had more children than peasants who were economically forced in many cases to nurse and take care of the children of the upper classes.
"You may not feel this way, but although the Club calls us 'slaves,' you ought to think of yourselves as members of the privileged ruling class. In Books Four and Five of the Republic, Plato has Socrates propose that there should be no separate families among the members of the guardian class: the guardians should have all the women and children in common. Socrates proceeds to discuss how the guardian men are to have sex with the guardian women to produce offspring of a similar superior nature. In order to guarantee that the best guardian men have sex with the best guardian women, the city will have marriage festivals supported by a rigged lottery system. The best guardian men will also be allowed to have sex with as many women as they desire in order to increase the likelihood of giving birth to children who are intelligent and strong. Once born, the children will be taken away to a rearing pen to be taken care of by nurses and the parents will not be allowed to know who their own children are. This is so that the parents think of all the children as their own. Socrates recognized that this system will result in members of the same family having intercourse with each other, but he apparently did not care about incest too much.
"Some of that sounds awful. Anyway, I can't see where I fit into that," Stephanie said. "Am I one of the Guardian women or one of the outside breeding stock?"
"Of course, you are one of the Guardian women, Steffi. To doubt that, you are indulging in some sort of false modesty or self-pity. You have been through good schools at the top of your class and had nothing but good jobs with authority over important decisions although you choose to make light of the fact that you routinely make decisions over how millions of dollars are directed. The fact that you have a lot of children should be considered a luxury, particularly in the circumstances in which you have them. Unlike Eleonora de' Medici, you have little risk of dying as a result of becoming pregnant, and you have largely pushed the onerous costs of motherhood off to others, although you may not feel good about it.
"Men who use their power to father many children and have other people gestate and take care of them are considered powerful and highly privileged. Woman cannot quite do that yet, although technically it would be possible to pay another woman to be impregnated with your egg, but you have almost come as close as possible. The reduction of risks from pregnancy makes it still more clear that creating the leaders of the future is not something that should be left to those now at the bottom of the social stratum."
"Yes, Martin would say that the professional women who have few or no children are the evolutionary losers while the so-called welfare mothers who have eight children paid for the state are the big Darwinian winners even if society looks down on them," Stephanie said.
"If Professor Charlotte Stein and Professor Martin Walzer agree on something, it must be true," Stephanie added in a tone somewhere between sincerity and jest. "Martin, though, would add that it is unclear why anyone should care if they are evolutionary winners or losers. Our happiness is not tied to Darwinian fitness. He would further muse that our capacity for pleasure is just a side effect of Darwinian forces and joke that one of the hallmarks of humanity is to treasure the side effects while forgetting the basic purpose of sex and many other things."
"You quote Martin often," Naomi said. "Do you listen to all his lectures?"
"I really can't help it. I don't always listen, but, like many professors, he repeats himself so much that one can't help hearing what he has to say at least twice," Stephanie answered. "Und e vould sag dat vinning die survival of the fittes Spiel ist nicht necessarily vat one vould or should pick for one's life," Stephanie added in a mock German accent although, like most over-educated Germans, Professor Walzer's accent is very slight.
There was a reason for Stephanie's feeling that she was on the bottom of life's heap that morning. Although the Club event was over, all four women were wearing their Club "slave" collars and nothing else. If Stephanie was not feeling like a member of the ruling class, it might well have been because Stephanie had spent the last 12 hours or more with no control over her body. Dozens of men had exercised their Club right to fondle, molest and have sex with her, a right limited only by the strict Club rule to do no physical damage and the fact that one woman can only service so many men at a time.
But Charlotte went on, "Steffi, it is not as if you were suffering much from your decision to submit sexually. You are submissive in bed, but you have an order of magnitude more influence in the world than the non-guardian women taken as slaves by Guardians would have had. Those women were to be simply impregnated by the Guardians and have no say over anything. Of course, it is idle to discuss exactly where you would have fit into Plato's utopia, a community that never was to be, unless you count the Sportman's Club. But you live like a queen bee even if you sometimes feel you are a breeding slave. Remember the main role of a queen bee is to breed."
"You made your point Charlotte. To change the subject," Naomi interjected, "I did not have a chance to talk to you last night, Steffi, given how much male attention you got. You've not been back here for years and almost every guy in the Club wanted to stick his putz in you. Steffi, tell us how you have enjoyed living in Baden Baden?"
"Things are going very well in Baden Baden. I love Martin as well as I can love anyone. The position that I have at the bank is not too challenging but is the most I can do given the four children."
"Steffi, quit being silly," Charlotte interrupted. "The Club is taking care of much of the childcare and you are one of the leading investment bankers in Baden Württemberg although your skills in the local languages need work. In a few years, you can move to Frankfurt if you wish and be some sort of executive vice president or whatever they call them there."
"Well okay, my job could be seen as important. More importantly, it gives me an office and an excuse to be away from Martin and nearer to Club facilities where I can be the center of much sex at Club events in Baden Baden once a week or more.
"As you know, I had a second set of twins in May. I am learning German and French and the arrangements in Baden Baden are working well. The nanny the Club hired is excellent. We are not allowed to check using DNA, but I am virtually certain that Walzer is the father of at least the twins this May. We named them Ulrike and Liselotte after the professor's mother and sister."
"Pretty crazy you'd have identical twins after having fraternal twins, Steffi. It appears you really are a fertility goddess," Naomi said. "The Club has been trying with all its might to keep me pregnant but I'm only up to two children, Tawanda and Akira."
"Two children in three years is not a sign of infertility, Naomi, and I bet you're about 5 hours pregnant now, but yes," Charlotte said, "the chances of Steffi having identical twins was even lower than coming up with five numbers below five in the end of the game in which she became a slave to the Club. But I guess unlikely events happen often, particularly when there are forces favoring the improbable. The fraternal twins two years ago were to be expected given Steffi's family history and the fact that she was coming off the pill."
After a sip of tea, Stephanie said, "Martin is doing a good job of being the father when called on to do so. He was in Reno as part of the childcare crew while we were here having our brains fucked out by two dozen men and several women. By the way, I have been meaning to ask you, Charlotte, we never went to the lower basement last night. If the dungeon and all the other heavy BDSM and orgy equipment is on U1, what is below in level U2, the dark basement that has been the subject of so many hints and suggestions?"
"U2 is a joke," Charlotte said, "the only thing down there is a water heater, tool storage, a bunch of wiring, an ancillary furnace, and some other utterly uninteresting things necessary to support the rest of the house."
"Figures," Stephanie said, "sort of like the mystique around Level Four in Mexico. The real danger in Level Four is not some horrible kidnapping but the fully disclosed chance of getting pregnant. The surprise is that there is no surprise.
"By the way, dare I ask how Ashley is doing?"
"I can answer that but, having learned my lesson about disclosing patient confidences, I will only mention public facts," Naomi said. "Once I got my psychiatrist license back, Ashley was one of my first clients. The first thing we did was get her to self-exclude from every casino in Nevada and California.
"She'd made a bunch of porn movies as Jackie Mormon and worked as an escort for two years in L.A. I believe Jake Fugger when he said that he did his best to keep her away from gambling if only because when she was losing money gambling, she wasn't making money for Fugger by fucking at his direction.
"Now she is working in a Nevada brothel which is better than what she was doing in California because the brothels require condoms and health checks.
"Ashley sure isn't going back to Brigham Young and her parents have disowned her. She is taking classes to become a hotel manager. Spielmann says that after she graduates, he will find her a job in a hotel in Utah or Idaho that's nowhere close to a casino."
"Who else do you know about women who played the game when I did?" Stephanie asked.
Charlotte answered, "Distinee, arranged to have a second child with sperm and money from the Club but is now in a normal marriage with a man of modest means of her choosing. They had a child together without drama and find it quite possible to raise three children on what the Club is paying them to support two.
"Catherine has had two children with Marc Spielmann. They are happily married and living a perfectly bourgeois life in Frankfurt except for an occasional party here when she and Marc visit. Then they both fuck up a storm but in a fashion that will not result in any children that do not have Marc's genetic material."
"We don't see them in Baden Baden," Stephanie said.
"That's right," Charlotte said, "part of living a perfectly bourgie life is not being seen at orgies in the country where you live and are raising perfectly normal children in a seemingly monogamous relationship.
