By Christopher Leeson
"That's the one!" the plain woman said to her blonde companion. The latter, Mara, was already looking where the other was nodding, at a twenty-something, fair-haired male lounging on a bar stool.
She frowned thoughtfully. "If you say so, Clara."
Clara smiled. Mara Carnovon, as her colleague called herself on this world, never could see what was always so obvious to her.
Mara, though she didn't have the same talent, admired Clara's expertise. As chief Hunter for the Ludnican mission, Carnovon appreciated talent, and Clara was the best seeker she had on call. But her subordinate was an insecure type that had to be handled carefully.
On Vedar, most slavers were male; women mainly served the Guild as support staff -- as clerks and office managers, and, of course, whip-trainers. That was still mostly true of the work on Earth, but here the basic idea of male and female was all mixed up. The reality-shift between Vedar and Earth had turned everything on its head.
Mara had been born male -- Marar C'jarnovaun, scion of a traditional slaving clan. In such a household, a young person couldn't help but develop an admiration for the slavers' calling. Young C'jarnovaun could barely have conceived of working at any other trade. Right after completing basic education, Marar had been taken on by a prestige House, the Ludnican.
Early on, he had excelled as a hunter. Always on the lookout for slave catchers who could work effectively on Terra, the House saw to it that all their most promising people were checked out. This was done by skilled seekers that periodically reviewed the newer staff members to discover those suitable for assignment to Earth.
A seeker had a talent for envisioning what a man of Vedar would look like as a woman on Earth (and vice versa). Few men welcomed the prospect of living and working as a woman on an alien planet, but such an appointment would qualify a slaving agent for large and frequent bonuses. Accelerated income would allow a slaver's early retirement in comfort, a prospect that appealed to a great many. It was mostly the ambitious who went to Earth.
On Terra, the hunter and seeker roles were pivotal. They were the specialists who found and brought in the prey. The seekers' talent was so rare that most of those serving the Guild had to be recruited from outside the members of the traditional slaving clans. But not every good hunter on Vedar made a good hunter on Terra. Violent abduction was to be avoided; it was a messy business that attracted official attention from Terran authorities. Sexual allure was a better way to entice and capture a potential victim.
For the Guild houses, this meant finding hunters who would translate into attractive women one Earth, and training them to perform seductively. Their aim was to meet and fascinate Terran males, with the intention of leading them into easy and safe captures. The prey was almost always Earth males, since there was very little market for captured women who would become men on Vedar. Slave males were largely used for manual labor, and modern engineering had made unskilled labor secondary in the economy. The small market that existed for erotic male slaves could be satisfied with local men, mostly those taken in war or born as the children of slaves.
Vedaran males lived for status, and they gained it in many ways, including through sexual conquest, and though monogamy was widespread, the institution of pillow-slavery got around it. The more supernally beautiful women that could be brought into the market, the better for business. But stealing other city-states' women, either slave or free, could lead to war. It was better to acquire stock from Terra. Mara's team was one of many posted across the face of the Earth to supply that luxury market.
While the feminine face looking back at Mara from the mirror no longer awed her, contemplating the mysteries of multiplanar existence always did. Ordinary biology or physics couldn't explain the results observed when the dimensional barrier between Earth and Vedar was pierced.
