Chapter 6
Bric-a-brac
Crawling, Bren explored his knew world.
His mistress was a collector. Bundles, crates and pyramid piles filled the room. Pre-Correction items, judging by their age and the unprogrammed nature of the materials used. Those artifacts had not grown into their final forms. They had been crafted by folk of the original human template. Women, presumably. Bren struggled to imagine even primitive men with the creativity to make tools, toys and art from the world around them. Malekind had been a pestilence, capable only of carnage and destruction. So great were their sins that, millennia later, Bren and all other masculoids still suffered as penance.
It did not surprise Bren that the Vixen gathered antiques. The woman was a hunter by design. Spawned to seek and capture. She had redirected her predatory nature toward her interest in the ancient world. Now she hunted history. A prey so elusive it no longer existed.
As a high-claim inheritrix, she had the ability to steer and amend her programmed instincts. She could unravel the codes her gene mothers had locked. Bren, like all men, like most women, lacked the capacity to defy his template. But for elite females, organic impulses were mere guidelines. Bren's mistress possessed such willpower that she could not only override her own modifications, but those of people around her. Bren had seen it happen. He had felt it happen. She had toyed without effort with the ruleset that defined his body and mind. She was not just his sexual superior. Not only stronger, smarter and worthier than him. She was a god above him.
Bren worked with care. He dusted her hoard, treasure by treasure. Kneeling, arms bound tight behind his back, Bren used the muscles in his neck, straining against the tight collar as he wiped each item clean with the feathers of his gag. The work required delicacy and respect. His owner had chosen and rescued each individual relic, just as she had done with him. He was neither higher nor lower than those other possessions.
Previously unlit corners of Bren's shuttered basal ganglia activated for the first time in his life, rewarding him for finally locating his proper place in the world. The uncommon taste of dopamine turned the work sensual. Bren's cock would have tensed and grown were it not consumed by the synthskin parasite.
The nature of the treasures added to the eroticism of Bren's duties. Anything of hers was sacred. Any castoff was a prize. Any crumb a delicacy. Slithering among artifacts the Vixen valued enough to preserve was another level entirely for Bren. It elevated his kneecap quest from sexual to spiritual. He was the first Easter Lily in fourteen generations to find a purpose in life. He felt like a prophet.
Bren imagined he could taste the personality of his goddess as he worked his gagged mouth against her belongings. The Vixen expressed her preferences in the items she gathered. As if Bren did not already know, his mistress had a taste for torture.
Ancient weapons filled the room. Whips, crops, paddles and flails sprouted like weeds from brazier barrels and wicker guillotine baskets. Bren chased soot from clamps designed for every morsel of the body. Shackles and chains hung in garlands from the ceiling, shattering light from the foxfire lanterns into a starfield that covered every surface of the dusty old room.
Larger items defined their purpose by the man-shaped negative space around and within them. Bren cleaned racks, stockades, crosses and frames. Without permission to stand, he could only rub his muzzle against the lower portions of the restraint machines, usually brushing the dangling straps and manacles before he shuffled on.
Much of the equipment had begun life in the noble institutions of the old world. Schoolroom canes. Military zip cuffs. Prison spit hoods and belly chains. Straps and straightjackets in clinical shades of white and sky blue. Bren found cuffs, batons, blinding aerosols and electroshock weapons still holstered in police duty belts.
Other parts of the collection seemed cultural in nature. Bren passed a series of paintings, their faces cryptic with dust. Every time he wiped a canvas clean, Bren saw the same early man undergoing a series of bizarre iron-age torments. Bren dug through dirt as the slim, hairy figure was whipped, capped with brambles, hung from a wooden frame and then stabbed in the flank. Judging by the orgasmic look on the man's face in every image, Bren assumed he was some forefather of the modern masochist templates.
Viewed as a whole, the entire stockpile was a single artwork. An installation superior to the sculptures Bren had seen in his journey through the Muse part of town. Superior in composition, superior in medium and superior in message.
Superior in composition. The street sculptures had used male agony as their subject. Bren's high-born mistress knew that no man deserved such focus. Bren crawled through the collection as a footnote. A component. The dangerous toys towered over him, the chaos of their placement emphasising the unpredictable beauty of violence.
Superior in medium. The local artists had carved their figurines from male flesh. Masculoids were cheap, plentiful and, by definition, inferior. In contrast, the Vixen had scoured the ruins beyond Emancipol for her materials. Some of those objects must have been the last of their kind. Over sixty centuries old if they predated the Corrections. Preserved only by the great microbial reshuffles of the postwar era, when inheritrices had emasculated even entropy, that most male of mechanisms. But six thousand years was still a long time, and the planet had long since been picked clean. Bren hailed from a pack of scavengers. He knew how difficult it was to find anything of value among the ashes of the old world. He could not fathom how far and how deep his mistress must have searched to furnish her museum of pain.
Superior also in message. The Muse works were mere spectacle. Tortures of competing cruelty and complexity. Notable only for the novelty of their abuse. They shocked but did not challenge their audience. The boys in those sculptures suffered, but all modern men were bred to suffer. The Vixen's work said something more. Something profound.
It built upon an old argument, forgotten to most. Bren recalled it from his clan's oral history. The Principle of Axiomatic Dimorphism. The Correctors, when first improving on evolution, had claimed to refine but not subvert natural law. Men, even in their primal form, were built for punishment. Thicker skulls. Higher bone density. Defenceless genitalia. Nervous systems generous with painkilling beta-endorphins. Females, by contrast, possessed the only human organ with pleasure as its sole function. The natural roles of men and women were self-evident. Women were meant to bask, men to toil and suffer. In any other species with such strong sexual disparity, the female would eat her mate.
The Vixen expanded the genetic destiny of the sexes to include the societies of the old world. By gathering all that ancient technology of subjection, she showed that widespread punishment of men predated the Corrections. She proved that the idea of civilisation had always been a love affair between tyrant and victim. The world had always run on the Economy of Torment.
