“I may be your prisoner, but I haven’t been a child in quite a few years,” I said, looking directly at the woman who continued to stare at me. “You will at the very least do me the courtesy of treating me as something other than a mental deficient, or this whole thing will be a lot more unpleasant than it’s naturally destined to be. You have my word on that.”
“Do I indeed?” she said, the smile and the patience still completely untroubled. “So you mean to persist in seeing us all as your enemies, at least for a short while. If you feel that clinging to such an outlook will help you in your adjustment, dear, by all means continue to cling to it. What helps you helps us-as long as you remember the lessons you were taught in childhood. You’re free to rebel as much as you like, as long as you obey all of the really important rules. We don’t want to punish you, but if you give us no choice in the matter we won’t hesitate. Take the broth and drink it.”
Still that same patience and calm, only now I remembered why I disliked them so. Those were the primary emotions I’d been accorded as a child by those in authority around me, the two emotions I’d never quite been able to master and accomplish for myself. I’d been able to force a sort of calm and pretend to patience, but had never really reached through to the real thing. Now that I looked back on it, it almost seemed that I was supposed to fail where those emotions were concerned, to fall short of the place others, better than myself, had reached with ease. I could see the conditioning went back a lot farther than I’d first thought it did, but these—better people-were in for a surprise.
“I’m really not much in the mood to play the game of rebellion,” I said, leaning back in my chair as I regarded the older woman with the true calm I’d learned-some where. “As far as your rules go, you can take them and cut paper dolls out of them if you like. No matter how unreasonable you try to make me believe I’m being, I will not cooperate with my own officially proclaimed ravishment. If you need any other point-blank statements, feel free to ask me for them.”
“I think I’ve had quite enough for now, thank you,” she responded, the new smile measurably cooler but no less sure of itself. “It seems you have forgotten a good deal of your childhood, but the memories are certain to come back rather quickly. Right now you’ll be shown where your place is, and you and I will speak again later. ”
Of all the dismissals I’d had that morning, hers was the most unimpressive—if you discounted the look in her dark eyes. The meeting shed promised for later. was one she was looking forward to, and that fact was supposed to make me uneasy. That I refused to let it make me uneasy was not quite the same as being unaffected, and I didn’t really mind when the woman in the white uniform tapped me on the shoulder. The thought of being elsewhere was an attractive one, if any place on that planet could be thought of as attractive.
Once out of the office we continued on up the corridor to its end, no more than ten feet away from the desk area. My guide pushed through a swinging door and held it for me, then led the way left along a circular balcony area that surrounded a very large, round room. At intervals along the four-foot-high balcony were white-uniformed guards, all keeping a casual eye on the very large room, and the same on the people it contained. More than twenty feet of tall windows let in bright sunshine from behind one section of the balcony, the only illumination the women in the room had. The women were seated on plain, narrow beds, little more than cots, and the cots were arranged so that they covered the entire floor, one practically on top of the next. Even the cots at the outer edge of the big room were standing away from any wall, which meant not one of those women had the least feeling of privacy. I stopped with my hand on the railing to look down at them, wondering where they all could have come from. If they were all Primes there were a lot more than fifty of them, and that was a number out of all proportion to everything I thought I knew.
“Come on, girly, let’s wake up here,” a voice said from behind me arid to my left, a female voice despite its being on the gruff and gravelly side. “You can do all the sightseeing you like later, once I have you where you’re supposed to be.”
I turned to look at the speaker over my shoulder, and found I’d been given away again to someone new. My original guide was gone, and in her place was a tall, burly woman in white, her uniform doing nothing to hide the bulge in her middle. Her hair was a dark, dirty blond and her eyes a very light gray, and her face was somehow more open than the faces of others in the same uniform. She stood beside a small desk that wasn’t far from a ramp leading downward, and in her hand she held a thin rectangle of wood. When she gestured to me I walked over to where she waited, and as a reward had the wooden rectangle pressed to my thin smock on the left side of my chest. There were letters left behind when the rectangle was taken away, but I didn’t have to bother trying to read them upside down.
“Now you’re officially Terry, and your bed number is sixty-five,” the woman said with a grin, obviously amused by my- expression. “Stop looking so sour, it’s better than having it branded on your backside. We haven’t had one starting out wide awake for years now, but I can still remember the trouble she tried giving us. Take my advice and behave yourself, or you won’t find anything but the grief she did. She yelled and screamed and cried and threw tantrums until they finally had to punish her, and then she tried so hard to be good that she looked like a fool. You don’t strike me as someone who wants to look like a fool. Am I wrong?”
“About the fool part, no,” I answered, wondering why this woman, out of all the others, was bothering. “As far as the rest of it goes, I’ve already told everyone in sight, so I might as well let you in on it. I won’t cooperate with the sickness that goes on here, and nothing they can do will change my mind. No screaming and no tantrumsbut no cooperation either.”
“Girly, I admire your guts,” the woman said quietly, sitting down on the edge of her desk to look straight at me. “I don’t think much of your intelligence, but I do admire your guts. Look, I know how you feel about this, because I know how I’d feel if it was me they were trying to turn into a dolly-sow. I’d hate everything and everyone around here, and I’d swear to fight them with the last ounce of strength I had. Since it wouldn’t take me long to find out that they never use drugs on their sows, Iii start to believe I really had a chance of doing it my way. The only thing is-I’d be wrong.”
She was keeping her voice down and the sober tone shed adopted was very impressive, but after hearing the same thing so many times I wasn’t feeling particularly impressed. Shed been searching my face to see how I was taking her advice, but didn’t have to look hard or far for the answer.
“You’re hearing me, but you aren’t listening or believing,” she said, without any anger behind the observation. “They bring you here and tell you you’ll be opening your legs for a bunch of strangers so they can knock you up for the good of the Amalgamation, and that gets you so mad you tell them to try it first on themselves. You might be feeling a little nervous about saying it, but you say it anyway and to hell with them all. You say it and say it to everyone you meet, but maybe you don’t notice that no one gets mad or bothered or starts throwing threats at you. If you do notice you don’t let yourself pay attention, because that’s enough to make you start worrying. If they aren’t worried, it’s a good enough reason for you to be.”
“I don’t happen to see it that way,” I said, finding that her conversation was beginning to make me uncomfortable. “If they haven’t failed yet to get their way, that doesn’t mean they’re invincible, only that no one has discovered the right way to fight them. Since I have nothing more important on my calendar right now, I’ve decided to try my hand at it.”