"Penny's Cage."

 

 In the warm, stuffy darkness of the Shed, Penny stirred on her bed of straw, drowsily feeling its familiar prickly scratchiness against her bare skin. She reluctantly opened her eyes to see the first, faint hints of dawn turn the skylights far above her a dim grey. She had enjoyed another of the occasional long and death-like sleeps which came upon her at regular intervals. Sitting up, she raised a front paw and swept back from her face the curtain of tangled, matted hair which had fallen over her eyes. For a moment she wondered when one of her 'Keepers', as she now mentally referred to them, would notice the length of her hair and cut it short as they had once before; or at least tie it back in a pony-tail for her.

 

 By now there was enough light for her to make her way on all-fours to the corner where her shallow litter-box lay to squat and empty her bladder, and, after relieving herself, she walked, still on all-fours, the tiny distance over to the curved steel trough in which lay the usual inch of murky water.

 

 Penny lowered her head and drank neatly and efficiently, remembering as she did so her first days in this place. Then she had quenched her thirst by dipping one of her maimed and shapeless hands into the water and licking it off. Since then she had learnt to lap like a dog, aided by a tongue which seemed somehow to be longer and thinner than it had been before she was Taken. She frowned at the thought; she couldn't remember, but surely she hadn't always been able to lick out her nostrils with her tongue? Raising her head, she shook the water from the long hair which had fallen into the trough as she drank.

 

 Slaking her thirst had its usual effect of increasing her hunger. She glanced up at the nearest skylight and saw that it would be several hours before she was fed her only meal of the day. But Penny was by now used to the hunger which crept upon her only two hours after she'd eaten and which increased steadily until she was fed again. Anyway, she thought hopefully, the Keepers would be passing in and out of the Shed shortly, and some of them might bring her scraps from their morning meals.

 

 Penny rose to her feet and stood upright for the first time that morning to walk the few feet to the bars of her cage. Pressing her body against the hard, cool steel, she stared out into the dim interior of the Shed as the light steadily grew, her mind going over yet again the circumstances of her Taking, and their subsequence.

 

 Her abduction had been simple, swift and unnoticed. Penny had been walking down a familiar deserted suburban street in her native town when the car had pulled up silently and smoothly alongside her. Glancing down, Penny saw the worried, smiling face of a motherly-looking middle-aged woman looking up at her, a street-map in her hand. Penny remembered stooping to examine the proffered map, then she'd heard a faint hiss as if of escaping gas, and then nothing until she'd woken up in the cage where she'd been kept ever since. Absently she wondered how long she had been here. With no way of recording the passage of each day, Penny had no knowledge how much time had passed. But her hair, which had been fashionably short when she was Taken, had once grown so long that one of the Keepers had shorn it, and now it was as long again.

 

 Penny thought back to her awakening on that first day, of her surprise and outrage at finding herself naked in a cage, then of her horror and despair on seeing her maimed hands. People, both male and female, some in farm-workers' clothing and some in the white coats of scientists and technicians, were walking past her cage on all sides. The cage stood in the centre of the floor of a large building, and Penny had crouched sobbing in the middle of the cage as the men and woman passed by on either side at random, occasionally sparing her an indifferent glance as if she was a caged animal.

 

 It took only a few days for Penny to realise dully that a caged animal was exactly what the people of this place thought of her as; she even discovered that they'd put a collar around her neck. Exploring it as best she could with her now useless hands, she'd decided that she wore an ordinary leather dog-collar – it even had a name-disc dangling from its 'D' ring – and it was fastened by a simple buckle and tongue in the traditional manner; a simple method of securing it that she was no more able to circumvent than could the dog it was meant for. She had never seen her collar, of course, but she'd become so used it that she was able to forget she was wearing for long periods.

 

 Even the door of her cage – a door which was usually only opened when her litter-box was emptied and refilled – was fastened by a simple arrangement of sliding bolts. In the early days Penny had spent long hours fumbling with them, sobbing with frustration at the sheer uselessness of the blunt, thick-skinned, insensitive clubs of flesh that the Keepers had made of her hands.

 

 In those early days she'd tried to plead with her captors, discovering in the process that the only sounds she could now make were soft and breathy whines and whimpers. But the people outside would either ignore her anguish, or, worse, they would stop and stare at her with indifference. But now Penny no longer tried to open the door of her cage, nor to make hopeless appeals for release. It had become only too apparent that the people outside really did consider her a caged animal. They certainly treated her like an animal in a Zoo, caring for her simple needs with an insultingly casual indifference. There was no need to give her water – somehow they'd arranged that her trough held a constant and unvarying inch of lukewarm liquid – but they fed her from a bucket on scraps and leftovers, tipping them into her trough and walking away. And what food! At first she'd had to force herself to eat the mess jumbled together in her trough; the remains of apple pies mixed with baked beans and bacon rinds, gritty potato peelings and carrot scrapings, stale bread crusts and soured milk, so much resembling the pig-swill to which she'd contributed the remains of her own meals at school. But now Penny gobbled it down eagerly to  satisfy the aching void in her stomach.

 

 And yet they weren't cruel to her, they didn't mock her helplessness or stare at her nakedness; in fact, Penny could find no reason whatever why she been abducted and kept here. She had come to believe that this place was some sort of farm where scientific work of some kind was carried out, but, as far as she knew, no experiments of any kind had been carried out on her, and although sometimes she was aware upon waking that she'd enjoyed a sleep of infinite deepness –like the one she'd just woken from --  she could have no way of knowing whether or not she'd been removed from her cage, experimented upon, and returned.  She remained healthy, her shapely young body, with its firm little breasts and taut buttocks, retained its tone, and her periods came and went with undiminished regularity; the skin of her face and body, despite being unwashed and unbathed since she'd been caged, was soft and smooth under its eternal coating of dirt and by now she'd become accustomed to the sour, pungent reek of her body, even when she sweated during her endless pacing back and forth behind the bars.

 

 Penny turned her thoughts to the people who visited the Shed, some to fetch and replace various items of agricultural and scientific purpose, and some to work at the keyboards and monitors scattered about on various work-benches along the walls. She had come to know many of them by sight, and she had her favourites amongst them, those who brought her scraps or stayed for a moment to talk softly to her in their incomprehensible language. One of these people was a young woman of Penny's own age to whom Penny had, for some obscure reason, allotted the name 'Lorna'. She would nearly always bring Penny scraps from her breakfast; toast crusts,  fruit peel and cores, and the like, and she always took a mid-morning snack of a sandwich and an apple and throw the apple core to Penny and feed her the tattered crusts of the sandwich on the palm of her hand.

 

 At first Penny had been deeply embarrassed, and she had writhed inwardly at the humiliating spectacle she presented vis-a-vis the other young woman, the one upright and clothed, her scented skin gleaming with cleanliness, on one side of the bars, and Penny herself, naked and dirty, with a dog-collar around her neck, eating from the clean outstretched palm on all-fours like a dog. But Penny's hunger could never be denied,and she even went so far, in a mood of defiance, to adopt the stance of a begging dog, balancing on the balls of her feet with her legs folded beneath her and her upper body and head raised with her mutilated hands dangling down from her wrists held at the height of her breasts. In this manner she obtained the attention of the passers-by, although it came to possess the drawback that many of them wouldn't feed her at all unless she begged them first.

 

 Penny turned around and rested her back on the bars to look around at her familiar surroundings. Her cage was quite large (she was not to know that it was the minimum area for an animal of her size, although it totally lacked any area providing the privacy Zoo-keepers now deem necessary for a higher primate like herself) at seven feet wide and high, and eleven feet long. Its stained concrete floor was covered with an inch of chaff, and the heap of straw which was her bed was piled in one corner. Diagonally opposite was her four feet long, two feet wide litter tray, unfortunately sited on the same side as her trough and only three feet from where she must eat and drink. At the far end of the cage, in the corner not occupied by her bed, a chain about a foot long had been welded to the thick corner post some six inches from the floor. The free end of the chain held a simple spring securing clip, of the type used to attach the leashes of dogs to their collars, and it by this that Penny was tethered, as helpless as any chained dog, before her cage door was opened. And she hated the experience. In training her to come and be tethered, the first and only pain had been inflicted upon her and now she obeyed the curt gesture to come to the person standing outside her cage at that corner instantly, dropping to all-fours and holding up her chin at the bars for the chain to be clipped to her collar. That pain, at her first and only refusal, had been the most agonising and intense that she'd ever known, and Penny no longer dared to entertain the least notion of disobedience. Unfortunately for Penny, once she was safely secured and the door opened for her litter-box to cleaned, she was often forgotten by the person who'd tethered her, and she could spend hours on that cruelly short chain until her frantic whimpers attracted someone's attention. But far worse was that her Keepers took this opportunity to examine her skin, possibly for signs of disease owing to her unwashed condition. Then they would run their hands over her body with such an insulting indifference to her sex and nakedness – as if she was a 'real' animal – that would make Penny sob with humiliation and rage.

 

 Penny's attention was caught by the sound of a tractor engine starting in the yard beyond the shed, then by the sounds of approaching footsteps. Eagerly she turned and hugged the bars, staring at the outline of the enormous sliding doors of the Shed, now about to open.

 

 A flood of sunlight and an inrush of pure, clean air accompanied the opening of the doors and the lights of the shed came on, dazzlingly bright to Penny's eyes. Some forty people of varying sex and ages entered to go about their errands, passing on either side of Penny's cage, mostly ignoring her as she clung to the bars. Some of them were still chewing on fruit, and bread rolls with various fillings, and Penny looked at them in supplication. Two elderly men in white coats stopped by the bars and regarded her with detachment. Penny dropped into a begging position and one of the men, after addressing a brief phrase to his companion, tossed the end of his roll to her. As usual, Penny tried to catch it in her mouth like a dog; as usual, she failed dismally and the thrown morsel struck her upon her left shoulder and fell to the floor. Instantly she went down on her elbows and grubbed about in the straw with her mouth to pick up the scrap of bread and swallow it in a single gulp. The core of the apple the other man had been eating followed, and the two men walked away together.

 

 People were coming and going all the time now, and Penny stood up and hooked her forearms through the bars to help her step up on to the the lower of the two flat horizontal bars which linked the vertical ones of the cage eighteen inches from the floor and the same distance from the roof. There she looked out into what she could see of the wide yard outside in search of Lorna, completely regardless of the spectacle she presented to the mildly curious gazes of the people walking by her cage.

 

 Lorna came hurrying across the yard. She was a little late this morning, and the fingers of one hand were fumbling with the buttons of the clean white coat she wore over her short, summery dress while she took huge bites out of the thick sandwich she held in her other hand. A man, evidently superior to her in position, spoke to Lorna irritably as they crossed paths in the wide doorway, and she made some sort of conciliatory reply. Then she was striding past Penny's cage while Penny made little mewing noises to attract her attention and kept pace with her to the end of the cage. At the last moment, Lorna turned and threw the remains of her sandwich into the cage. It separated into two pieces, both of which landed on the dirty floor. Penny pounced on them at once, gobbling them down one after the other and spitting out the tiny pieces of chaff which had stuck to them.

 

 After swallowing the last fragments, Penny sat up on her haunches like a dog, a position she could now keep for hours without discomfort, and looked about her, licking her nose and chin with her long, sinuous tongue. Though people continued to pass her cage on all sides, as they would do all day long, none of them was eating. With no prospect of begging a further snack, Penny came to all-fours and went to her trough to drink, fully aware of the casual glances being cast on her and ignoring them as she'd trained herself to do. Then she walked, still on all-fours, to the middle of the cage and lay down full-length on her stomach on the prickly chaff. Propping her head on her ruined hands, she stared out into the sunlit yard and waited patiently to be fed.

 

 Penny's mind went back in time to the early days of her imprisonment. Then she'd spent most of her time curled into a defensive ball on the floor of her cage, and when she was forced to move she did so on all-fours, instinctively seeking to protect the most intimate parts of her naked body from the eyes on any onlookers. Whether knowingly or not, her captors had struck a deep and continuing blow against her morale as a woman by not permitting her the least privacy. Isolated in her cage in the centre of the huge Shed, Penny could never be sure that some of the many people present weren't watching her. The function of the litter-tray was obvious, but using it in the full view of the outsiders had been torture. But she had to use it, and she would squat over it wretchedly, her whole body flushed with shame and embarrassment. But now, after so many days in her cage, Penny emptied her bowels and bladder in their view without the slightest hesitation, even with a certain defiance as though she really was the animal they took her for. She was spared embarrassment to some extent by the obvious lack of sexual interest in her displayed by the men who stared at her, and she even found herself harbouring a slight resentment at their indifference to her as a woman. Sometimes she even wondered if her body had been altered in some grotesque way without her knowledge, but a brief examination would always confirm that she still possessed the same trim and attractive figure she'd attained in her late 'teens, some four years ago. And then there was the expression in their eyes when they looked at her. She had seen it before, this expression, and she'd even worn it herself, and she knew where she'd noticed it for the first time. Her thoughts went back to that day at the Zoo when she'd been standing amongst a small crowd of people staring at some animal in its cage. She'd raised her eyes for some reason, and she'd seen in the eyes of the other human beings that same expression with which she was now regarded, a mixture of mild curiosity and the unconscious superiority of human beings towards a caged beast.

 

 Penny stirred restlessly. Coming to a sudden decision, she stood up and walked to the bars nearest her where she climbed on to the lower transverse bar and began to walk upon it, moving each hooked fore-arm around the bars in turnas she made her way around her cage.

 

 Exercising her body, either by this method or by pacing back and forth, was now for Penny, just as for any other caged animal, virtually her sole diversion. (Although she did have a soft toy, a stuffed rabbit someone had given her, and which she kept hidden under the straw of her bed. Occasionally she would disinter it and play with it, batting it from one front 'paw' to the other, or taking it in her teeth and throwing it up in the air with a practiced flick of her head and neck.)

 

 Clambering around her cage in this fashion attracted much more attention to her; people would watch her for minutes at a time, smiling almost tenderly, pleased that their captive animal was enjoying itself, as Penny often thought with a certain bitterness.

 

 Finally, the muscles of her arms and thighs aching with exhaustion, Penny stepped down onto the floor where she found she had ended her exercise at the same time as the mid-morning break.

 

 All around her cage, the denizens of the Shed were leaving their keyboards and workbenches and streaming past her to stand in the sunlight outside in the yard where a large tea-urn on wheels had appeared. Penny watched them enviously; she hadn't felt sunlight on her face all the time she'd been kept here, and she was given nothing but water to drink. Lorna came by; she had her little snack with her, and she fetched a mug of tea and pulled up a stool to eat and drink by Penny's cage.

 

 Two feet away on the other side of the bars, Penny sat like a dog in the straw and watched the other young woman at her meal. First, after a gulp of tea, Lorna took a small pocket-knife and pared her apple neatly, succeeding in detaching the peel in one long spiral. She smiled in self-congratulation, and Penny shifted eagerly. Lorna tossed the apple peel through the bars, and Penny fell on it.

 

 The core of the apple followed in due course, and Penny took it from the floor in her mouth and crunched it down before taking up her sitting position and watching Lorna eat her sandwich.

 

 Lorna smiled into the wistfully pleading eyes of the caged woman. Tearing a scrap from her sandwich, she leaned forward and proffered it on the palm of her hand. The caged woman came to all-fours and lowered her head to take the morsel in her mouth neatly and without touching the clean, pink flesh with her lips.

 

 The process was repeated until the sandwich was eaten. Lorna stood and showed the other woman her empty hands before extending a hand through the bars and patting her on the crown of her head. Taking her stool she walked off to her work-station, followed by the creature on the far side of the bars until she was prevented from going any further.

 

 Penny sat again and licked her lips, still enjoying the taste of the sandwich filling. Then she sent to squat over her litter-box, ignoring the glances of the people now streaming back into the Shed to resume their work.

 

 Afterwards she lapped some water, than went to sit in the corner of her cage nearest the door. There she gazed across the yard at the far wall where the big waste food bins stood, willing the appearance of the farm-workers who would take them away and return later to feed her.

 

 Penny had not long to wait before a tractor and trailer pulled up by the bins, and the two men riding upon the trailer jumped down and wrestled the swill-bins up on to the load bed. They re-mounted the trailer, the young girl driver revved the engine, and the combination rumbled away out of Penny's sight.

 

 It wouldn't be long before she was fed now, and hunger raged in her stomach. The few scraps she'd begged or been given had done nothing to assuage it; on the contrary, they'd tended to increase it. She found her mouth watering, saliva drooling from her slightly-parted lips.

 

 Penny waited patiently, picturing in her mind the pig-sties where the tractor now stood, the bins on its trailer being emptied into their troughs. She had no idea if this was indeed the case, or if the pigs really existed. But this place was, after all, a farm, and she fancied she'd heard the sounds of squealing pigs and lowing cattle in the past, even though the only animals she'd yet seen were dogs and the occasional cat.

Her food would be brought to her in a bucket when the imaginary pigs had been fed, and she thought that it would be composed of the scraps remaining the bins, judging by its usual variety. But Penny didn't care about that; she would eat the mixture, whatever it was. She continued to sit, her eyes fixed on the yard, until a figure carrying a bucket came into view.

 

 Penny came to all-fours in anticipation. The slight figure of the young girl-driver walked briskly around the cage, the bucket dangling from her hand, and Penny followed on the other side of the bars to her trough where she sat and looked down at it, licking the saliva from her lips and chin.

 

 The bucket clanged against the bars, and the mess inside it slithered between them into the trough. Penny's head was already lowered even as the last scraps fell into the trough, and she gobbled down the food hastily, ignoring the long, heavy curtain of her hair which fell from either side of her head and draped itself over the contents of her trough.

 

 She ignored, too, the glances of the people around her cage, whose attention had been caught by the clang on the bucket on the bars, and even the stares of the three people – two men and a woman, for she could see their feet just beyond the bars whenever she lifted her head to choke down another mouthful of food – who had stopped to watch her eat.

 

 Penny, once the edge of her appetite had been blunted, ate more slowly. Now she had the time and the inclination to see what she'd been fed, though it would make little difference. The people had eaten a salad last night, she thought, for there was lettuce dressed with vinegar and oil, and cucumber, and sliced tomatoes. There had chocolate cake too, and the rinds of cheese; and then some of the remains of their breakfast, for there were bacon rinds and half-eaten sausage, and sticky baked beans, and segments of fried tomato, soft and greasy. Porridge had been served too, she noted, as it usually was, and there was milk-sodden breakfast cereal mixed in. She ate everything, irrespective of what it was, as she'd learned to do, and when she raised her head for the last time she belched noisily, walked off to her bed and snuggled down into the straw.

 

 This had become a familiar routine; after eating, she would take a brief nap to help digest her heavy meal. And then, when she woke, she would empty her bowels in her litter-box.

 

 All around her the work of the establishment went on; people passed her cage on all sides, many glancing down at Penny where she sprawled in her straw, but she slept on regardless.

 

 Lunchtime came, and most people left the Shed for the refectory, but a group of Bridge addicts, disdaining mere food, dragged up chairs and a table to the doorway and began a rubber.

 

 Penny stirred on her bed. She rose to all-fours, took a few paces towards the middle of her cage, then stretched and yawned. She shook her head violently, send her long, tangled, matted hair swirling about her shoulders and feeling her collar sliding around her throat. The increasing pressure in her colon sent her to the litter-box where she squatted and relieved herself noisily. She took a drink from the trough, then walked on all-fours over to the bars to sit and watch the card-players.

 

 Time passed; the work resumed, and Penny watched absently. She was about to get to her feet and take some exercise when there came a diversion, followed quickly by another.

 

 Penny didn't notice the arrival of the dog, a large and handsome Red Setter, until it sat down next to the bars and looked at her with mild interest. She had seen it often before, and she came to all-fours and walked over to it, hoping to be able to stretch an arm through the bars and pet it. But it was just out of her reach, and she sat and looked at it, staring into its deep brown eyes with her own blue ones.

 

 It was at these times that Penny would make depressing comparisons between her own condition and that of the dogs. Like them she wore nothing but a collar around her neck; unlike them she was penned in the few square feet of her cage. She envied them their freedom; limited as it undoubtedly was, to move around the place at will. She wondered where they were kept, imagining the row of kennels to which hey were chained at nights, and she envied that too. The dog grew bored, and walked slowly away, out of the shed and into the yard, followed by Penny's wistful gaze.

 

 Hearing a sharp, short phrase of command, Penny turned her head to see the girl who had fed her standing by the corner bar to which the short tether chain was attached. Resignedly, Penny trotted over to the corner and lifted her head. The girl stooped, picked up the free end of the chain, and clipped it to her collar before moving away.

 

 Penny stood patiently in her cramped position, her head almost wedged into the corner making it impossible for her to turn it more than a few inches to either side. Behind her she heard the click of bolts on the cage door being slid back, and then the slither of leather boots through straw. Penny's collar was grasped firmly at the nape of her neck, and she saw the girl's check-shirted fore-arm and the large pair of scissors in her hand. Then her hair was cut short, raggedly and unevenly, the dirty tresses falling to the floor about her hands, Finally she felt the girl stroke her back reassuringly and then heard her departure. But she didn't hear the cage door being closed, and she continued to stand where she was tethered, waiting for whatever came next.

 

 The brief but thorough examination of her skin began. Although she'd often endured it, she could never bring herself to get used to the impersonal way she was handled, at best like an animal, at worst like some inanimate object. The capable male fingers, sheathed in thin plastic gloves, roamed over her body, concentrating on her back and buttocks, and the backs of her thighs. Penny concealed her anger and revulsion as her thighs were gently parted and the fingers probed the tender flesh just below her vagina, searching for signs of irritation of her skin. This was of the very few remaining occasions in which she was still capable of feeling humiliated, a humiliation made deeper by the insulting lack of sexual interest in her body shown by her young male examiner. Finally the inspection ended, and Penny was left to herself. But the door remained open, and she wondered dully if some new humiliation was about to be inflicted upon her.

 

 Still she stood there, hopelessly trapped by her short chain, until her attention was diverted by the appearance of a dog, a different dog from the previous one, but a dog she'd seen often before.

 

 The big black Labrador looked at her for a few moments, then extended its narrow muzzle through the bars and licked her face. Then it trotted out of her sight. And then, to Penny's horrified disbelief, she heard the quick scuffle of its feet crossing her cage towards her.

 

 The dog, obviously intrigued by the rich smell of her unwashed body, probed her armpit with its cool, damp nose. It licked her right breast, then turned its attention to the cleft of her buttocks. Penny could feel the dog's hot breath on her skin, but she was too afraid of its sharp teeth to lash out with her legs and feet to try to shoo it away. Its nose probed between her thighs, high up where they joined her body, and Penny groaned softly with disgust and humiliation.

 

 Then, to her immense relief, she heard quick footsteps from behind and a curt command. The dog withdrew; seconds later she saw it run past her and out into the yard. Then the unseen person behind her slapped her painfully hard on the rump, partially disguising the sharp sting of the needle entering her flesh.

 

 A few moments passed, and Penny became aware of a growing lassitude and euphoria. She hardly felt the coldness of the antiseptic being rubbed on the skin at the rear of her left thigh, nor the prick of the needle inserted into a vein. A few minutes later the needle was withdrawn, the person left the cage, and the door was bolted shut. Penny's chain was detached; too sleepy to move far away, she lay down and fell into a drugged sleep.

 

 The mid-afternoon tea break was long over when Penny woke. Feeling remarkably alert and full of energy, she took a drink then climbed up on to the transverse bar and began clambering around her cage, ignoring the amused glances from the various people around her.

 

 Even when her arms and thighs were aching under the strain, Penny was not content. The working day was over, and people were streaming out of the Shed when she began to pace restlessly back and forth in her cage.

 

 The Shed gradually entered until only Lorna was left. After an interval, the young woman leaned back in her chair and stretched. Then she checked her monitor before saving her work. Putting her computer on 'Stand By', she rose to her feet and walked towards the wide doors of the Shed, eager for a cup of tea and a shower. The woman in the cage stopped her endless pacing and fell to all fours to butt her newly-shorn head softly against the bars in a bid to attract Lorna's attention.

 

 Lorna stopped by the bars and looked down at the other woman's bare, dirty back, an odd expression of tenderness mixed with pity on her face. Stooping, she began to scratch the other woman behind her ears and at the the hair-line just above her leather collar, wrinkling her nose at the rank smell of her body.

 

    “Poor thing!” she said to the uncomprehending ears. “Perhaps it was a good idea they insisted we trained ourselves to think of you as an animal. We wouldn't have been able to treat you like this, nor to do what we've done to you, if we hadn't. I wonder when you'll find out we made you pregnant a fortnight ago?”

 

 Lorna continued to pet the other woman, now wriggling like a dog in ecstasy under her fingers. With pity in her voice, she went on speaking.

 

     “You'll have the best of medical care, of course; and the labour and delivery will be quick and easy. The heads of the creatures you are carrying will be smaller and more streamlined than the heads of fully human babies; I wonder what you will make of your offspring, half with your own genes, and half with the genes of the male donor of another species?”

 

 She fell silent again, trying to imagine her own reactions on giving birth to two such creatures as she knew were in the early stages of development in the other woman's womb. Lorna shuddered, then continued her soliloquy.

 

    “Your children will be healthy, for you are a young and healthy animal, and they will grow much more quickly than purely human babies. The Prof. is confident that you will suckle them; he relies upon the deep maternal instinct of mammals. And I expect you will, too. He already speaks of breeding from you every eighteen months or so, and expects to be able to do so for another twenty years or more. You will become a very valuable animal to him, and to Medical Research in general. If all goes well, you shall help to save the lives of thousands of people, all over the world.”

 

 Lorna gave a final sigh. She patted the woman's back high up between her shoulder blades and withdrew. Her last sight of the caged woman was of her sitting in the corner of her cage, staring up through the bars at her in entreaty. Then Lorna turned off the lights and slid shut the Shed doors, securing them behind her.

 

 Left alone in her cage in the evening dimness of the great Shed, Penny sat and looked at the closed doors for a long time. She went to urinate, and continued her pacing up and down until it was quite dark.Then she dropped to all-fours and walked to the heap of straw in the corner. She lay down and fell swiftly into a deep sleep.

 

 And so passed another of the long days for Penny in her cage; the cage which had become her whole world, and which her subconscious mind had already concluded that she would never leave.

 

 

       

 

                                                                                                PENNY'S CAGE

                                                                                     TWENTY YEARS LATER

 

 Penny gently disengaged the pup from her right breast and laid it in the straw. The big Spaniel bitch who was suckling the third of Penny's latest litter along with the  sole survivor of her own looked across at her lazily before closing her eyes again. Rising to all-fours, Penny walked the few feet to where her strayed male offspring was standing unsteadily on its tiny legs, mewing plaintively for rescue. Lowering her head, Penny picked it up in her teeth by the flap of loose skin at the back of its neck and carried back to where she'd been lying. The pup she'd been feeding had now joined its sister in suckling from the bitch, and Penny put down the pup she carried and lay down upon her left side. Crooking an arm around the mewing little thing, she dragged it gently to her full left breast. She felt its toothless, slimy, little gums fasten upon her nipple, and she made a soft little sound of pleasure and physical relief as the pressure in her swollen udder was gradually eased.

 

 Finally the gorged pup loosened its grasp on her teat, and Penny pushed it gently away to join its sisters and the bitch's own pup, now curled up asleep together in the protective curve of the Spaniel's furry belly. Penny stretched herself on the straw in sheer animal contentment. She'd been vaguely aware she'd been watched for some time by a man and two woman standing just beyond the bars, and she mewed with pleasure as one of the women crouched and put her hand through the bars to fondle her head. She rolled lazily on to her back, her knees drawn up and her elbows planted on the floor on either side of her chest, her fore-arms upright and her shapeless hands dangling from her wrists. The woman began to scratch Penny's belly with her gentle, slender fingers, and Penny made a repetitive, deep, contented noise in the back of her throat, rather like the purring of a big cat.

 

 But the 'Gods', as Penny increasingly thought of them, finally walked away from her cage as they always did. Penny rolled over and came to all-fours, yawning as she looked down at her pups, now safely corralled by the long fore-leg of the big bitch. She padded over to the litter-box and eased herself before going to the trough and lapping up its water thirstily. Life was much better when her pregnancies were advanced and when she was feeding her pups; then she was fed more often, usually two or three times a day instead of once. And, on this occasion, when she'd given birth to three pups instead of her more usual two, a large lactating dog was put in her cage to help her feed them, sometimes with a pup of its own, sometimes not.

 

 Penny drank all the water in the trough, too fast for its automatic mechanism to replace it. She and the bitch were perpetually thirsty, striving to replace the liquid lost by their bodies to their insatiable offspring. Then she sat in front of the trough, staring absently out into the familiar Shed, always with one eye out for a 'God' who might stop and pet her.

 

 For Penny loved being petted. She loved being scratched behind her ears and at the back of her neck just above her collar through her thick mane of dirty hair, and she loved being stroked by the warm, clean-smelling hands of the 'Gods' and 'Goddesses' outside her cage, knowing they were proud of her, and of the pups she produced so easily and so often.

 

 She thought about her pups for a long time. She couldn't remember bearing her first ever litter of two, nor her own reactions to the unusual shapes of their bodies; shapes which now seemed entirely normal to her. And nor could she remember how many litters she'd borne. It seemed to her sometimes that she'd spent her entire life either pregnant or satifying the needs of an endless sucession of greedy little mouths. But the continual swelling and emptying of her udders, and the feeling of mindless happiness when she was lying on the straw with her pups at her breasts were so enjoyable!

 

 Penny's mind was unusually lively today, and she pondered again for a moment on the antecedents of the male donors of DNA in the genetic make-up of her pups. Sheep, she'd decided long ago, thinking of the short, blunt, muzzles and the mild eyes. Their tiny bodies grew immensely fast; in less than three months time they would be eighteen inches high at the shoulder, and she would have to stand on all-fours to suckle them, and in six they would be fully grown animals, as big and heavy as herself. But Penny had rarely seen one of her adult offspring; taken from her at three months of age, they grew up somewhere else on the premises. She had not the slightest idea of what became of them once they were taken away from her, or for what purpose they'd been bred. Perhaps they were used for Medical Research, she thought hazily, or even sold as unusual pets. They would make good pets, Penny thought; easy-tempered, docile and intelligent, bred without front teeth or claws. She had seen several of them over the years, led past her her cage on leashes. Or, perhaps, it was the same animal each time, for she couldn't tell them apart once they'd passed a certain age. Like her they were hairless of body apart from a thick thatch on their heads and between their hind-legs, though their's were hind-legs were very different from hers; short and muscular, the same length as their fore-legs. She might have been able to identify them by the serial numbers tattooed in blue ink on the rear of their left upper thighs if she saw them often enough, but she seldom had the opportunity.

 

 Thinking of their identification tattoos reminded Penny of the time she'd had her own number imprinted under her skin, a long, long time ago. Two 'Gods' had stood in front of her cage, one carrying a broad wooden cylinder studded with tiny needles and smeared with thick blue ink along with a large, flat box holding a thick, ink-saturated pad. Penny had been called to the corner and tethered by the short chain, then they'd entered her cage. They'd walked straight over to her; one had seized her by her collar and forced down her head while the other, after a few seconds, had struck her violently from behind on the rear of her left thigh. The initial pain of the blow had mostly hidden that of the needles entering her skin, but afterwards she'd itched unbearably, and her flesh where she'd been hit swelled up painfully. The irritation had subsided, and the swelling too, and she might never have known what had been done to her until she saw one of her pups being tattooed in the same crude manner. She no idea of her own number; try as she might she couldn't twist her head and body far enough to see it.

 

 She yawned. The water in the trough had now reached its usual depth of an inch, and Penny bent her head and lapped again. Then she returned to the pups where the bitch was waiting for her, wide-awake and ready for Penny to take over the task of protecting their pups.

 

 Penny lay down on her left side, close to and facing the dog. The bitch rose carefully, and Penny extended both her arms to surround the four little bodies. The dog walked away, and Penny closed her eyes and dozed off only to be woken by the insistent pressure of a tiny muzzle pressing against her left breast, blindly searching for her nipple. She looked down at it. The Spaniel puppy mewed piteously, and Penny gently pushed sidewards an inch or so, guiding it to her breast. The sharp, pointed, little jaws closed over her nipple and it began to suck sleepily. Sighing with contentment, Penny closed her eyes again.

 

The dog woke Penny from her light doze by poking its leng nose into the protective arc from by Penny's left arm and beginning to lick their pups, both the short, downy fur of her own and the little hairless bodies of Penny's. Penny withdrew her arm and rolled onto her back, then upon her right side. She stood, thirsty once more, and walked over to the trough. After drinking, her first thought were, as always, for her pups and she glanced anxiously across the cage. She relaxed, seeing the big dog lying facing her, all four of their pups suckling at its teats.

 

 Penny strolled slowly over the bars nearest the big open doors, walking easily and naturally on all-fours, perfectly used to this means of locomotion by now, so used to it that she never stood upright any more and her calf muscles had grown thin and wasted. She sat in that dog-like stance she now found so comfortable and stared through the bars into the yard.

 

 The sun was out, and an occasional gust of warm air blew upon her. She ondered idly what it felt like to feel the sun on her skin; she couldn't remember ever doing so, but surely she must have done when she'd been as free as the 'Gods', all those years ago. Like them, she'd worn clothing, and she'd walked where she would, as free as the air. Penny could vaguely remember the feeling of silken cloth on her skin, but, try as she might, she couldn't imagine ever seeing the outside world except through the bars of her cage. The thought brought her to speculate idly on just how many years she'd been here, and how old she was now. It was summer outside; how many summers had she seen in this cage? She had no real idea, except that she knew she'd just turned twenty-one when she'd been Taken.

 

She dismissed her thoughts, yawned, and try to estimate from her degree of hunger when she'd be fed. Then, coming to all-fours, she lowered her head a trifle to enjoy the touch of the silky smooth leather of her collar sliding forward on her neck before lifting her head again to make it slide back again to encircle the base of her throat, something she would occasionally spent hours doing. She found herself wondering idly just how many years she'd worn her collar – she didn't even remember it first being put around her neck – and what it looked like. Penny suspected that it was a normal leather dog collar, plain leather, not studded, but whether it was the usual buff colour, or perhaps black, she didn't know. Its colour would almost black by now, anyway, particularly on the inside where it would have collected, over the long years, a fine patina of dirt and the oils from the skin of her neck. Anyway, it was now as much a part of her body as one of her limbs and she no longer resented this indicator of her true status.

 

 So unusually active was her mind that Penny even began to ponder her future, something she rarely did. Sooner or later, she knew, she would become too old to carry further litters of chidren; what would the 'Gods' do with her then? She tried to recall what fate awaited old and useless animals in the world she'd left so long ago, and failed. Probably, she thought hazily, nothing would really change. She would grow old, and, in the usual course of events, she would die, here in the cage where she'd spent nearly all her adult life.

 

 Penny went and squatted over her litter-box, then returned to her pups. Her breasts were beginning to swell with milk again.