Sadly, this had not been the case. Charlemagne Hua was a boisterous drunkard, a tall, lean, flamboyantly but messily dressed man with a pencil-sketch mustache and long black hair in a ponytail that appeared perpetually on the verge of coming undone. He seemed cheerful and gregarious, but in an aggressive, imperious way that told Devna he would have little tolerance for any who defied his will. Apparently he had a fondness for young females, which was why the pale-skinned, daintily built Devna was assigned to him rather than one of her more curvaceous slave-sisters. He had pulled her onto his lap with pleasure and wasted no time tearing off her minimal adornments and pawing at her while he sat and drank with Parrec-Sut, Jofirek, and the Mazarite syndicate head Eldi Zankor.
“This,” Hua said, laughing and hugging her painfully tight, “this is the stuff, my friends.”
Jofirek laughed. “Didn’t I tell you?” he wheezed. “We could make a fortune if we got in on the slave franchising.”
“Alas, most humans don’t look kindly on slavery. There are a few who would appreciate such an . . . exotic luxury item to possess for their very own, but keeping one would require a degree of, um, privacy that can be hard to achieve in a small colonial community. And really, what’s the point of owning one of these verdant vixens if you can’t parade her around, am I right?” The men laughed, and even Zankor joined in, for the Mazarite had two male slaves in attendance on her.
“But consider this,” Hua went on. He grabbed Devna’s shoulders and turned her around on his lap, putting her on display. “Look at this. Feel this.” Jofirek took him up on his invitation, his gnarled hand reaching out to grope her leg. “No, that’s not what I mean—though you’re welcome.” Hua laughed. “Feel the aura she gives off. The overwhelming allure. The irres-irresistible heat. That’s power. We want to own Orions so we can tame that power, harness it to our will.” He smacked Devna’s rump. “But what would people want even more? What would get them to pay through the nose?”
“Just tell us, you bag of wind,” Zankor said.
“No, you tell me, my dear. I see the envy in your eyes when you look at creatures like this. You don’t just want to own this. You want to be this. The Orion physique is a fantasy made real. We purchase it because we want to be close to it, but what we really want is to have it for ourselves!”
Devna braced herself. She could guess where this was going, and it probably wouldn’t go well.
Indeed, Parrec-Sut rose from his seat, displacing two of Devna’s slave-sisters to do so, and took a step toward Hua. Sut was less burly than a lot of Orion males, tall but comparatively lean, and with a face that Devna found boyishly handsome. But she knew from long experience how intimidating he could be when he so chose. “What are you suggesting, human?” he asked, an ominous undertone in his smooth baritone.
“Well, think about it,” Hua went on, oblivious to the raised tension. “Sex is all about hormones. Hormones give us our male and female traits. They regulate our sex drives and mediate our sexual intra—interactions. As pheromones, they promote attraction and arousal.” He laughed. “Come on, if there’s one thing Orions know about, it’s pheromones.
“So this, this irresistible magic you have—at the risk of taking the poetry out of it—it’s all chemicals. Hormones can be replicated, synthesized. And most humanoids have basically the same bio, um, biochem-emistry—the same drugs and medicines affect them the same way.” The Saurian brandy he’d been guzzling was certainly starting to affect him more now. “Your hormones aren’t so different from human hormones or Vulcan hormones or horse hormones—horsemones—hah!—just . . . with a little something extra in the mix. They’re written in the same chemical language, and another humanoid body could process them just as well as yours could—otherwise they’d have no effect on other humanoids in the first place.
“Really, Sut, I can’t believe this has never occurred to you Orions. You could package your sex hormones, market them as, as a drug. Imagine what people would pay for the chance to make themselves as manly as your men, as wom—well, feminine as your women. To be irresistible to the opposite sex, just by taking a pill!” He spread his arms and laughed, failing to recognize how much deeper a hole he was digging for himself.
But Zankor took pity on him. “Stop, Hua, just stop. Don’t you see? That’s the last thing the Orions would want. If everyone could be that irresistible, their slaves would lose their unique value, and then where would their business be?”