Ghulam (far future)

by C.C. Brandi

“Hello, Candi,” the tall woman said.

He looked up from his papers, surprised. No one usually spoke to him here, at the cafe, and particularly not attractive women. Pity I’m not who she thinks I am, he thought. It would be nice to be the subject of her attentions. But, as usual when it came to women, he was the wrong person at the wrong time.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “I think you’re mistaken. My name’s Candon.”

She rewarded him with a quick smile. “I know. Candon Phillips Smith. Ph.D. in World Literature. That’s your name. At least now it is. Candi doesn’t come until much later.”

What? He stared at her for a moment. “Do I, uh, know you?”

“Not yet. You will. I predict we will have a close business relationship.”

Dear God, he thought. She’s nuts. Then he almost laughed. All this time, I’ve been waiting for a woman who’d actually come on to me, rather than the other way around. And when it finally happens, she’s crazy.

Still...he looked at her again. She was, indeed, comely in her way. She was tall, taller than he was by quite a bit, and clearly athletic. And she was cheerful and had an open smile.

Yet, by like token, she unsettled him a little. There was something a bit predatory about her. Or, maybe, she seemed a little too entrepreneurial. He had the feeling she was about to sell him something. In a weird way, she reminded him of a boy he’d known in high school who had been the class connection for weed, back in the bad old days when marijuana had been so very, very illegal. The boy had later gone on, he knew, to become a real estate titan and vastly wealthy.

The woman in front of him had the same vibe. But what could she possibly want from me? he wondered. And how does she know my name?

"How does she know my name?"

She slid into the chair across the table from his. “Mind if I join you?” she asked, after it was too late to refuse.

“I, that is...”

“What are you doing?”

He collected himself. “I’m reading a poem at the moment.”

“A poem?”

“Yes, part of my work. I study...”

“Arabo-Persian literature,” she said suddenly. “Particularly during the middle to late Abbasid period.”

Oh, my! “That’s right. How did you …?”

“Tell me about the poem you’re reading.”

He hesitated for a moment. Then, giving into the inevitable, he extracted his notebook from under his papers. “Here,” he said. “This is a translation of it. The original came into me from a friend of mine who found it on a scrap of paper that somehow turned up in a private collection in New York. We think it may have come out of Iraq or Syria after ISIS. They were selling all sorts of antiquities there. The bastards.”

She looked at the notebook, then handed it back. “And it’s important?”

“We think so. You see, it was marked as being the work of Ibn al-Shah al-Tahiri, who was a famous writer of, well, slightly scandalous works. Sometimes more than scandalous. None of his books have survived, though we have their titles. Like, Adultery and its Enjoyment and Stories about Slave-boys.”

“Stories of sexy Slave-boys. That sounds appealing. But this is a poem, you said.”

“Yes, if it is by Ibn al-Shah al-Tahiri, then it would be a first. We didn’t know he wrote poetry, much less romantic poetry, which is what this is.”

“Read it to me,” she commanded.

He shrugged. “All right” He picked up the paper and read:

Oh, my ghulam,

Sweet Turk, lovely and cruel

My heart is aflame for you

You, whose lips are like the bow,

Curved, graceful, elegant, yet fierce,

Whose darting eyes are like the arrow

Of the Steppes-hunter, of the Scythian Boy,

Whose body is that of the Greek princess

Sold into the Sultan’s Harem

Come to me!

That I may know the peace

Of your oblivion.

He looked up at her. Her eyes were closed and she seemed to be breathing deeply. Finally, with one last sigh, she opened her eyes again. “Wow,” she said simply.

He nodded and stowed the notebook back into his battered briefcase. “Yes. It is amazing, isn’t it? Which, I guess, is why I suspect it isn’t really from Ibn al-Shah al-Tahiri. Doesn’t seem his style, somehow. And, frankly, it seems later to me than his period. I mean, it seems like it should date from some point when Turks were more thoroughly integrated into the society.

“Which reminds me, why does the lover call the beloved a ‘Turk?’”

“It was a poetic convention. At the time, Turks were regarded as being both uniquely beautiful and uniquely cruel. So, poets described their beloved as being beautiful, like a Turk. But, if the object of their affection didn’t return their love, then he was ...”

“Cruel like a Turk,” she said, with a delighted laugh. “The poet is saying her slave-boy is a little tease and a heart-breaker.”

“Ah, yes, but not her, that is...”

“And what is a ghulam?”

“Ah, it means, roughly, servant or boy. But, in the period I’m interested in, a ghulam was usually a slave of Central Asian origin. Turkic if not exactly Turkish. Often they were slave soldiers. Sometimes, though, they were lovers. Young ghulams frequently shared their master’s beds. We’ve got a lot of love poetry about them.” He laughed. “It’s funny, when the Victorians and Edwardians started translating Persian and Arabic poetry into English, they were aghast that there was so much homosexual imagery in it. So, they convinced themselves that they were actually mis-understanding the pronouns, and that it was all really heterosexual, and that the ghulams were girls, you see.”

She nodded. “Not a bad strategy. Maybe we can do something similar. Only we will do it in reverse. We’ll admit the ghulams were boys, but we’ll make the poets into women.”

“Pardon me?”

“Never mind,” she smiled at him again. “I’ll explain later.”

“It’s a pity, though,” she said, for once not smiling.

“What is?”

“That you aren’t being rewarded for your efforts.” She gestured at the pile of papers on the table beside him, and the ancient laptop he used.

“Ah...”

The thing was, she was right. He wasn’t rewarded. In fact, he was damn near broke. He’d gotten into the academy because he loved it, and because he thought that eventually he would be able to land a full-time tenured position at some university.

In fact, nothing of the sort had happened. He discovered, far too late, that the University had changed. Starting in the 1970s, universities had been gradually “professionalized.” Where once the people who ran the university were themselves academics, now it was mostly hired managers, people who had business degrees and a view of the world that had come out of the corporations.

Then, sometime in the 1980s, or maybe before, those same managers realized that full-time, tenured professors were expensive. So, instead, they hired lots and lots of part-timers and paid them very little. That meant that many Ph.D.s like himself spent their lives teaching a class at one college, then teaching another class at another, and never, ever quite earning a living.

It was one of the scandals of the age, and there were real cases where part-time academics had died of want, or despair, while desperately trying to get enough classes, at enough schools, just to make ends meet.

And he...well, he was pretty close to penniless. He just managed to pay his rent, but he didn’t always eat as he should. There were whole weeks when he had instant Ramen noodles three times a day, or when he skipped meals entirely. As for medical insurance, well, he was sort of able to manage that through the Affordable Health Care Act, but the AHCA might be phased out, and he had no idea what he’d do after that.

Truth be told, his poverty was why he was here, working in the cafe. It was cheap to buy a cup of coffee, and then he could sit where it was warm, and use the cafe’s WiFi. It was certainly more comfortable than the bug infested one-room apartment he called home.

He looked at her. “Well,” he said, “I guess I just wasn’t lucky.”

“It is awful,” she corrected him. “It is dreadful. Society ought to value you. Hell! You should be pampered.”

He shrugged. “Not likely, I’m afraid.”

“Certainly not in this life. And not in that body,” she admitted. “But...I’m going to tell you a story now. Are you ready?”

“I...I guess.”

“Excellent, here’s the story. Or, maybe not a story. Just a concept. There is a future, far away in time, where all civilization’s problems have been solved. There is no hunger or war. And the planets of the inner solar system have been terraformed, so that they can support human life. Venus, for instance, is a green and verdant world. It’s also a planet where women are the dominant sex. In fact, women are big and masterful. Meanwhile men are small and delicate, and they’re loved and cherished by their mistresses.”

He resisted the urge to laugh. “Doesn’t sound like much fun. At least for us males. Being ruled by women.”

She fixed him with a questioning stare. “Can you tell me that you’ve really benefitted from the patriarchy?”

“Hmmm,” he admitted. Frankly, he hadn’t. But, on the other hand, he didn’t think a female dominated world would be any better for him.

She seemed to read his mind. “Oh, it would be. Believe me. You would be loved and adored. You’d be pampered and cared for. You’d be a beloved slave-boy...like a ghulam.”

At that, he flat out laughed. He couldn’t help himself. It was too ridiculous. Him being loved and pampered…? Just unimaginable. He had spent most of his life being decidedly unloved and unpampered. The idea of things being otherwise was absurd.

“I know,” she said. “It sounds odd. But, if you had the choice...if you could...would you be willing to accept such a life?”

He thought. Well, it was hardly likely. Basically, it was impossible, but, if he had the option, and everything was as delightful as she made it sound. “I suppose...”

“You suppose…?

“I suppose. I mean, yes. I suppose I would.”

She appeared to be quite pleased. “Excellent. Fine. Just fine.”

She reached into her purse and seemed to be looking for something. “Excellent,” she said again. “Now we’ll just move on.”

“Move on to what?”

“To this,” she produced from her purse an odd device. It seemed to be partly crystalline, but also partly mechanical, and it seemed to be moving in her hand.

“What...what is that?”

“Oh, nothing special. Just the device with which I will extract your essence and prepare it for transshipment.”

“What?!”

She pointed the thing at him. “You have to understand,” she said. “Your body isn’t much to look at right now. But your mentality, that’s truly adorable.”

There was a bright flash of light.

And then he knew nothing.

He awoke. Where am I?

He was in a bed of some sort. It was a comfortable bed, and over his naked body there was a pink sheet of some sort of silky material.

For a moment, he was too stunned to move. But, then, with an effort, he pulled himself together. He sat up and swung his legs over the side of the bed. What…?

He was in a large, luxurious room. There were paintings on the walls, a heavy rug covered the floor, and there were huge glass plate windows along one wall.

Curious, he stood and padded over to the windows and looked. For a moment, he couldn’t understand what he saw. Then, he gasped, and everything came into focus. He was in a skyscraper, and all around him were other skyscrapers, huge towers that went up and up and up! And between them flashed small aircraft. Flying cars?

Just below him was a covered walkway of some sort. It appeared to link the building he was in to the next one. A skywalk, he thought. Through the glass in front of him, and through the windows of the skywalk, he could see pedestrians. There were small ones dressed in colorful fabrics. Men! And then there were huge ones, walking purposefully, dressed in black. Women.

And then he saw his own reflection in the glass. My God!

He was different. Where he had before been heavy and sick, he was now slim, trim, and pretty rather than handsome. He had what could have been a young woman’s body, and a sweet face, but down between his legs he saw proof positive that he was undoubtably male.

What on earth?

“Off it, actually,” he heard. He spun around. Standing behind him, unnoticed in the shadows, was the woman he’d met in the cafe.

“Pardon?”

“That’s what you were wondering. Where on earth? Well, you’re not on earth. You’re on Venus. A terraformed Venus. And you’re about five hundred years into what is, for you, the future.”

He stared at her, not understanding.

“By the way,” she continued, “your name is Candi, now. And you’re property. Mine at the moment, but not for much longer. In a very short time, I’m sure, you’ll be sold to some nice young mistress with at taste for the very best in males.”

“What?”

“I am a dealer. I find mentalities in the past and the present that can be given new bodies and sold here. You’ll fit right in.”

“I will?”

“Oh, yes. Look out there. Look at the women in the skywalk.”

He did. They were massive, powerful, masterful...and beautiful, he realized. He could love one, he knew. It was terrifying.

He turned back to her.

“Don’t worry,” she reassured him. “They will adore you. They’ll find you fascinating and sexy. They’ll be excited by your knowledge of past ages and exotic poetry. And you, in turn, you will be happy. You’ll love being a pampered pet.”

He gulped. But he also looked down at his own body. His penis was already erect, hard and eager.

Yes, he thought, sadly, but also with a curious delight. He would love it. He would love being a slave.

Or rather, a slave-boy…

A ghulam...

“With,” she said, smiling at him again, “lips like the bow, and eyes like darting arrows...you beautiful little heart breaker.”

---

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