It can be great fun to prepare a bill of sale and registration papers on your wife. Such papers might include biographical data, including capture report, date of branding, processing, training, etc., with appropriate stamps and signatures. Her medical condition, similarly, certified, should appear in these papers, with perhaps a categorization of her sexual responsiveness, for example, is she an “A” female, a “B,” or a “C,” etc.? (As she learns sex, of course, these ratings might be updated; if she should become complacent, they might be reduced. A high sex rating is much in a girl’s interest, incidentally; it raises her price and tends to assure her a richer master, and a comparatively easier life). These papers should include, too, measurements, for example, height, weight, hips, waist and bust; and, perhaps, left ankle and throat, the former for slave-anklet size, if wished, the latter, of course, for steel-collar size (it can be a delight to measure the body of a naked woman; and there is no reason that alien cultures might not be interested in measurements that we do not customarily make; for example, what does she measure from the right armpit to the right hip, from the back of the knee to the back of the ankle, etc.; perhaps there are blanks on the forms for these measurements to be entered, and others; in measuring her, of course, treat her roughly; she is only an animal, a slave; the measurements, too, should perhaps not be in inches but in a similar, small unit, on a suitably marked tape, appropriate to another culture; for example, how many Telnarian slave increments gives your wife’s waist size, her bust size? It seems appropriate that slaves, animals, would not be measured as human beings, or high-order rational creatures. They would have their own measures; this distinguishes them from free persons and confirms, in their own mind and that of others, their essential differences from free individuals; a girl, for example, might only know her weight and sizes in slave measures; she could not even give her bust size, except in slave increments, as the bust of a slave; the sex ratings mentioned previously, as well as other measures and categories, might be “alienized”; this helps the female to think of herself as a slave and gives an exciting “alien reality” to the fantasy; for example, sex ratings in Telnarian might be based not on “A’s” and “B’s,” etc., but on a popular analog to, say, a Telnarian 100-point temperature scale; the sex rating would be a function perhaps of the rapidity with which the slave can be brought to orgasm, combined with the frequency of the orgasms and their intensity; any girl who has a rating of over, say, ninety degrees, might be quite good; she might be the sort of woman who, under a man’s touch, in spite of herself, is spontaneously and helplessly responsive, a “hot” girl. This is not entirely genetic, incidentally, though the capacity would be. Apparently almost any woman, under proper slave disciplines, can be forced to become a ninety-degree girl. Slavery itself immediately, startlingly, effects a considerable improvement in a female’s sexual performance; it is not unusual for a 20-degree free woman, struck and collared, hurled to her master’s bed, not permitted inhibitions, to give performances in terror in the seventies and eighties, sometimes in the nineties, sometimes, in unusual cases, in the high nineties. These physiological facts have led some physicians, in male-dominated cultures, to hypothesize that the female is a natural slave. Whatever be the likelihood or unlikelihood, the truth or falsity, of this, it is established, clearly, that the female responds sexually to a master far more organically, profoundly and excitingly than to a putative equal. She talks one game; her orgasms, in spite of herself, play another. The female with her mouth tells us one story; her heaving haunches and moans, once she is enslaved, tell us another; perhaps, too, the papers include fingerprints; these are useful, with measurements, in slave identification; the girl kneels, incidentally, while her prints are taken; if the fingerprints should be defaced or altered, the other measurements may serve for identification, they being fed into a computer; certain measurements might change, e.g., waist size, but others, such as height and ankle circumference, would remain relatively stable; each approximate measurement of the identification set fed into the computer would eliminate thousands of possibilities; each set of two would eliminate thousands upon thousands of possibilities; and so on, geometrically; no two human females, for example, are built exactly alike; and the differences are precise and measurable; each measurement, of course, would give a certain range of error, to minimize tiny alterations; further, we might suppose that the slave measurements, by law, are kept reasonably up to date; further, we might suppose that slaves, under discipline, are forced to keep, as well as they can, their original or optimum set of measurements, e.g., the “block” measurements, those imposed on her by steam bath, exercise and diet, before she was certified acceptable merchandise to be sold; consider the case of the girl caught last night by two magistrates in the Salarian Swamps, with net and swamp sled, who claimed to be a free swamp girl; her stripping revealed the brand; she was put in slave steel; she had tried to burn her fingertips; prints were imperfect; her measurements, communicated to a computer station, revealed her, within minutes, to be Sylvia, a slave escaped more than fifty rotations ago from Pron of the city of Prius, more than a thousand laks from the Salarian swamp; she is being returned in chains to her master, a slave whip knotted about her neck; brands, of course, stay on the girl; it is a serious offense to attempt to remove one surgically, punishable by enslaving the physician; furthermore, slave women do not have moneys for the operation; slaves have nothing; they do not even own their own rags, collars or eating utensils; they own nothing; it is they, rather, who are owned; tissue studies can determine whether or not a brand has been removed; girls, under slave interrogation, become swiftly glib; accordingly, no physician who removes a brand is safe; accordingly, few physicians dare to remove brands; the girl, apprehended, is rebranded and returned to slavery, usually gang labor on a remote agricultural planet; even if a woman is freed, incidentally, she retains the brand, which she then wears under the clothing of a free woman; it is thought to be an excellent reminder to her that if she is not pleasing to her lover she may be, at his decision, swiftly and completely re-enslaved, thence to be, should he please, placed on the market, not differently from any other girl; photos, too, of course, might be fed into the computer and scanned electronically; in addition to fingerprints, if one wishes, one might also take a print of, say, the large toe of the right foot; this indignity, for some reason, outrages Earth women of free birth, but it is also thought useful, on certain planets, populated by aggressive, imperialistic peoples, in effecting the organism’s transition to slavery; many animals, of course, have toe prints taken, the Telian lelp, for example; this print is taken, normally, with the slave either on her stomach or back, not kneeling, as when fingerprints are taken; more sophisticated slave identification, and tracing, devices, of course, might be supposed; perhaps, painlessly, through the scalp, a beam inscribes a slave registration number literally on the bones of the skull, which number can then be read by a suitable scanning device; another possibility would be to insert a tiny plate or pellet (perhaps only as wide as a few molecules) in, say, the base of the brain, which, being detected by a given electronic device, will result in a specific number produced on the device’s screen; the papers, too, which one is preparing on one’s wife, might contain pasted-in slave photos; if you do your own developing, these may be as sexy as you wish; if you do not do your own developing, there are various possibilities; she might be stripped, kneeling and chained, and you take pictures, front and sideview, of her head only; when the pictures are developed you know the full story; others do not; it might be assumed that slave females always have head photos taken in this fashion; also, if she wears a brief slave garment, perhaps narrowly parted to the waist, revealing little, and a handful of thongs about her neck, and is photographed at the beach, or in your home, say, against a backdrop (what about a plain, or striped, or animal-patterned sheet or bedspread?), carrying a vase, reclining, watching you; kneeling, head to one side, etc., no one but you and she need know she is a slave; the fellow developing the pictures will only see a briefly clad, exciting female, with an unusual neck adornment; he will want to fuck her, but then, one supposes, so would anyone who sees her so clad; if he knows anything about imaginative sex, of course, and many people will, some months after this book is published, he may understand the picture very well; in such a case he might, regarding the picture, turn bright green; he might well envy the master of such a wench; but then, if he really knows anything about imaginative sex, he will doubtless have one of his own at home, similarly startling and desirable; if anything, ignorant or not, the picture should make him happy; it is hard to look at a good-looking woman without having one’s pupils dilate; indeed, the entire chemistry is cheered up by such an event; the reason so many men look at women is that it gives them great pleasure to do so; pleasure is morally permissible; girl getting, of course, is better than girl watching; but then, it is included in girl getting; it is difficult to get a girl without seeing what you are doing; one of the great advantages of imaginative sex, incidently, is that turns men toward their own wives; they tend, hopefully, to be the girl one gets; imaginative sex, as a supplement to the sexual diet, is excellent at revitalizing tired marriages; no longer is your wife familier, routinized meat; she now becomes a partner in joint, mutually planned, delicious adventures; she now becomes, imaginative sex, a succession of desirable and lovely creatures, yours, and yet, beneath it all, as you and she well know, happily remains the girl, now the woman, you loved and married. She is now many woman to you, and yet, always, herself, whom you love. And that one wench, to whom you always return, in imaginative sex is now revealed as having new and exciting dimensions; she is now something it is a pleasure, in her thousand countries, to discover. You will never grow tired of her. No one yet has succeeded in mapping the continents of the imagination.