Chapter 1

 

My name is Zara Holt and no, I am no relation to the Dame and wife of a former prime minister of Australia of that name who was a Victorian, while I am a Queenslander born and bred. I was lucky enough however to be born to wealthy parents and was thus able to study my chosen profession, physics, at university and then pursue my lifelong goal in that field: to investigate the existence or not of alternate Earths, existing in a fifth dimension.

Most of us will remember the TV series Sliders wherein the stars 'slid' down a sort of vortex between identical planets by means of a device that opened the vortex. It was fictional but it caught my imagination and it was after watching it for a few episodes that I decided to study physics and in particular whether there really did exist a Fifth Dimension in which these other planets (and universes of course) could exist, side by side with our own.

We all know and understand the dimensions of length, breadth and depth, as well as time, being the four well-understood existing dimensions; but the existence of a fifth, so far unnamed one has been no more than speculation.

My fellow students, and the faculty teaching staff, were amused at my single-minded preoccupation with the concept. But they tolerated me because I happen to have inherited an athlete's body and competed in university swimming, tennis, athletics and gymnastics events and was quite often successful.

I am not beautiful, being your typical girl-next-door type but I suppose I am attractive although I have never dwelt on my looks, good or bad. My body tends to the muscular rather than curvy: my shoulders are broad and my breasts on the smallish side although they are firm. My belly muscles are rather apparent; my buttocks boyish and muscular as are my thighs and calves.

I give this description because it is relevant to my story, which is the fact that I did indeed discover the existence of the Fifth Dimension and the means to slide between planets.

This concept is difficult for us to comprehend. How can anything exist in the same space and time as another? It makes the mind spin, doesn't it? Believe me, it can and it does. I won't go into the physics involved. Unless you are or have been a student of the subject, it would be difficult to understand.

The means of movement from one to another is simplicity itself. There is no vortex as in the TV show. Once you have opened the 'door' you merely step through. What is difficult, though, is determining exactly which of the hundreds (or maybe thousands) of alternative universes you are actually visiting.

And my first foray was nearly a disaster of the first magnitude!

 

I stepped through the shimmering circle in the wall of my laboratory, and was immediately surrounded by three uniformed men in black and silver uniforms reminiscent of those worn by the Gestapo in World War II Germany. Their faces were stony as they watched me arrive. Clearly they knew of me and my researches and had been waiting for me.

I had been able to ascertain that the system I had discovered automatically searched for a free space in the geographical location identical to my own planet, thus, as I lived on the Gold Coast of Queensland, that was where I ended up on this other planet although the room was not a laboratory.

I should perhaps intervene here and explain that both my parents had died while I was at university, my father contracting a horrible form of cancer that killed him within six months, and my mother pined away to follow him a few months later. I was an only child and had kept on in the lovely old house on a hill in the hinterland of the Gold Coast not far from Nerang, if you happen to know this area.

They had had a live-in housekeeper/cook and gardener (John and Martha Goodwin) and of course I had kept them on. They were well aware of my investigations and experiments and I had warned them that I might disappear for a time but if that happened, they were merely to go on as if I was there. Fortunately, they were paid automatically by the bank and they also had access to the estate operating account so were able to keep things going after my sudden disappearance and during my absence.

Anyway, my laboratory on this world was a storeroom of some sort. The leader of these three men then informed me I was an enemy alien since 'sliding' was illegal on their planet and that I was now under arrest.

"How did you know I was coming?" I asked politely - and received a violent slap to my face, back and forth and told to keep my mouth shut!

I did and then they cuffed me and dragged me upstairs and out to their vehicle. I stared at it in awe - and horror. It was one of those half-cab, half-utility trucks that had room for four in the cab but the tray-top had a sort-of gantry erected on it. This was comprised of two, three-metre-high poles bolted and braced to the floor of the tray at the front, just behind the cab and at the rear. These were surmounted by a pole from which dangled five chains, each ending in a metre-long bar with Velcro-type manacles on the ends.

"Strip her!" ordered the leader and his two subordinates turned on me, unlocking the cuffs and then tearing off my coat, shirt, jeans, shoes and underwear while I fought them (or tried to). They just laughed at me and continued on until I was stark naked before them.

Then, while the two men held me by my arms, the leader stepped up and eyeing me lecherously and licking his lips as his eyes moved up and down my rather muscular body, now proceeded to feel and fondle my whole body.

Of course I screamed at him to stop and kicked out at him with my feet but then his lascivious grin was replaced with an expression of outrage and anger and he produced a weapon that looked a little like a revolver but was actually an electronic gizmo that delivered a series of excruciating shocks, especially as he shoved the business end of it straight into my now so naked vagina and held it there while the vicious shocks turned my whole body to jelly.

I came to fear this weapon with the two tiny but very sharp prongs that poked out of the shiny rod but later I found they had even worse instruments to induce even more horrible pain in our bodies.

Once I was 'tamed' he resumed his so indecent fondling of my so naked body, mauling my breasts and gigging his fingers into my vagina and even my anus (and then wiping my slime onto my face). This went on for God knows how long but it seemed like hours before he desisted and pulled out a retractable set of steps from under the tray and the other two forced me up it to stand on a sliding step (that ran in a groove under the rail) and then raised my arms to have my wrists locked into the Velcro manacles. They then slid the step up to the front and locked it in place. I now dangled from the rail with my feet a good half metre up from the bed of the tray.

I stared down at them as they moved to the cab. Oh and in case you're wondering about the Goodmans, I have no idea. If I existed at all on that planet, I clearly wasn't a scientist working at home and really don't know if I even owned that lovely old house there.

The mystery was, how did those men know I was coming and be there in time to catch me? I wasn't to find that out for some time so will leave it until I did.

The vehicle took off, with me now stark naked and dangling from that pole, my body swaying back and forth and from side to side as the vehicle accelerated or slowed down, went up hill and down dale and round corners but as it progressed I began to see that I had landed on a planet that treated women as very much second class citizens - and later discovered they weren't ... citizens, that is.

It seems all female children born to a man, were his property, not his offspring. His sons were treated with love and respect, educated and introduced to society. Females were virtually slaves although they didn't use that term.

They could be dressed - or not. Many men kept their females totally naked at all times. Some gave them a rag to wear around their loins. They were not educated except as menials and were put to work from their earliest days. The only things not permitted was abuse, physical or sexual until they were eighteen years old - at which age he usually sold them anyway.

I must say I wondered at this, but then realised their lawmakers must have had some scruples about how women and girls were treated.

Of course I didn't realise all this until some weeks after my arrival there but the evidence was there before me on that journey to Southport where the police had their headquarters and where I was destined for. On the road I saw women, clean and obviously adequately fed, but whose clothes (if they had them at all) were of the most basic: just a short skirt of plain cotton held up by a piece of string and usually nothing else. Their breasts were bare as were their feet.

They were engaged in labour: sweeping the streets or carrying heavy loads for their male supervisors. That was the term used for a man in charge of women. They were not 'owned' in the sense we think of a slave; but when she came of age, she could most certainly be sold so I am still confused at the nuances of their concept of females and how they fitted in to society.

I saw hundreds of them on that journey to Southport and every single one of them was a drudge of some sort. Some very pretty, with beautiful figures and fine skin and I wondered how a man differentiated between his base labourers and these pretty girls.

Again, I wasn't to find out until I ended up in the 'ownership' (let's be realistic about it, even if my 'owner' called himself my supervisor) of a man.

I wasn't charged with an offence. I didn't even appear in a court. Women were not citizens and had no recourse to the courts. I was therefore merely processed before a clerk and then taken straight to the Female Exchange, a sort of marketplace where women could be bought and sold day in and day out.

There I was allocated to a room wherein were ranged dozens of other females of my age and physique. They made no attempt to investigate my mind. Women didn't have minds on that world. They were just bodies. Bodies that could be useful for labour and for bearing their male offspring - as well as females to feed, train, use until they were eighteen (as labour, not for sex) and then sell here at this market.

The Female Exchange is a huge building with many rooms for different classes. The females were classed by age and physique as I have already said. No attempt was made to otherwise classify them, say by beauty or lack of it.

They were stood on short (half-metre high) columns that showed them off nicely to the hundreds of men who thronged through the various rooms looking for something to suit his need. Of course, at that time, all this was new and absolutely horrifying to me. I was still reeling from the fact that women could be treated so low. Nowhere in my Earth's history could I remember anything as bad as this. Yes, women had been denied the vote, much say in affairs, or even the right to their own bank accounts in many countries but not even the most strict of Moslem men treated his womenfolk like this.

I stood there, forced to pose in the same manner as the other women there, on pain of being prodded with one of those horrible electronic guns, swaying my hips, flexing my muscles and generally attempting to attract a buyer for I quickly learned any female trying to hide her lights under a bushel would soon attract one of the guards with his horrible gun to liven her up.

I have no idea how long women took to be sold in that place. I know there was a lively interest in us by the hundreds of men coming and going in our room and presumably in all the others, too.

I was sold on my second day there and spent the night snuggled up to the other women in our room, all still naked of course and with only the hard floor to sleep on. They gave us a handful of dried food pellets to eat once the place closed for the night (at 9:00 p.m.), allowed us to pass our wastes over a communal trough in front of each other and then hosed us down under a fire-hose to clean our bodies and backsides. There were rags to dry us with and then we were told to lie down and sleep.

There was no hanky-panky among the hundred-odd women in our room and I was told if any was detected, the guilty pair would be strung up by their heels with their feet wide apart and their sexual organs flogged with a cat-o-nine-tails. I shuddered as I tried to imagine this and made sure that while I did indeed snuggle up to the naked body of my neighbours for warmth (and a tiny smidgen of comfort), there was nothing sexual about it.

Not that I was that way inclined anyway. By that time, I was twenty-five years old and at school and university, had had my share of boyfriends and I had even invited one or two of the really special ones into my bed but none of them had developed into anything serious and in any case, as a rather substantial heiress, I had been ultra-careful of gold-diggers.

The next morning, we were again fed, allowed to pass our wastes, cleaned and dried and then ordered up onto our plinths prior to the doors opening at nine.

And then I saw him. He had been here yesterday and had spent long minutes standing and staring up and down my naked body and even reaching up to feel my thighs, sex, buttocks and belly. He would then step back and stare up and down me again.

Now he was back and I wondered who he was. He was a very handsome man: tall, clearly muscular, blond and with a beautiful skin and was therefore physically attractive. But what sort of man was he?

What would he want of me? Sex? Probably. Labour? More than likely. From what I had gleaned so far about that horrible world, all women were worked to the limits of their strength and stamina, no matter what else might be required of them. Would he want to use me as a breeding sow?

This was something I had pondered when I had had worked out that men didn't marry a woman. He bought them and enjoyed them sexually. I later discovered that when he decided on the mother of his heirs, that is his male offspring, he took her to a specialist clinical geneticist who would engineer the whole process, starting with her impregnation by him, right there in the clinic, after which he would keep her for a few days while he undertook an examination and possible modification of the foetus. This specialty was a part of the extra training a doctor who had elected to train as a slave veterinary undertook as part of his secondary degree and so in Mr Smart's case, Dr Smithers would be involved.

My understanding of such techniques on my own world is that they are very much in their infancy, but here, apparently, it is well advanced and once a man has decided who is to be mother of his son or sons, even the sex of the tiny embryo may be changed.

Of course I didn't know that then. My future use by this man, if he was indeed my new owner (that's the only term I can think of these men by) was very much up in the air.

He left then but within a few minutes, one of the clerks arrived and advised the supervisor there that I had been bought and was to accompany him for delivery.

You see, they all thought of us as objects. We weren't human beings to them. Even as sexual items, we were just bodies to bear their female slaves (I don't care what they called us or thought of us - we were slaves - and that's how I thought of us), to provide them with labour and sexual pleasure.

I was handed over to the man whom I was now informed was one Harold Smart, a wealthy landowner and investor but of course whom I must address as Master, no matter what.

He immediately took me to a female clinic where women were treated medically (more like cows or pigs than people, though) and also where various modifications could be carried out on them. Master as I now had to think of him, wanted my body permanently shorn of all facial and body hair. As a modern woman, I had always had the hairy parts of me treated but not permanently. I'm not sure why for such treatments were available.