With no more warning than that his hands came to the front of my smock, and then he pulled it open while his friends roared with laughter. The women were laughing too, even Mera, and I was so furious I couldn’t control myself. Without an instant’s hesitation I slapped that weak-featured, arrogant face with every ounce of strength I had, wishing I could slap it in an entirely other way. He wouldn’t have tried doing that to me if-something-was different, but I still refused to allow it to happen. I was alone—I was alone—but I still wouldn’t let it happen.
It took a moment before I became aware of the dead silence that had fallen at our table, and of the odd pressure that I could feel in what seemed to be the very air around my mind. The man Jer-Mar had jerked back to stare at me with mad-eyed, voiceless fury, his entire body trembling with the rage, and for an instant it seemed as though he were attacking without moving, attacking, attacking . . .
It was ridiculous, of course, because he really hadn’t moved except to pull back, and that’s not the way someone or something attacks. It would have been understandable if I were trembling the way he was, but I found to my surprise that I wasn’t. My hands were steady when I went to reclose my smock, no more than a tingling in the right palm from the slap I’d delivered, and then it came to me that it wasn’t so surprising after all. I hadn’t been threatened by a dangerous man, I’d been pawed by a little boy, and how frightening is that supposed to be? It was closer to being annoying, especially since I was beginning to wish more and more that there were real men around there . . . .
“You have to be out of your mind,” Jer-Mar said at last, bringing my eyes up to see the way he was still breathing hard and glaring hate-daggers into my flesh. “No other female has ever dared touch one of us like that! -How I wish you weren’t protected against me, shut down and safe inside your little shell! I’d show you then what you were stupid enough to challenge, I’d show you.
“Please accept the profuse apologies we offer, Prime Jer-Mar,” a voice said from behind me, and then two security females were to either side of me again, a third woman in a yellow uniform accompanying them. She stopped to my left, near the angry little boy’s chair, and her skin actually seemed pale even in the soft, intimate lighting of the room. “The girl is new and has no idea of your true importance, so we beg you to forgive her. We, ourselves, will punish rather than forgive, and will deliver her back to you later for your pleasure. When you find her sufficiently chastened, we hope you will accept her. ”
I was free of the ankle cuff and chair by then, my arms again in the possession of the two Secs, but I still stood where Jer-Mar could see me. He looked up at my face and then he deliberately smiled, leaning back comfortably in his chair.
“Yes, do return her to me afterward,” he drawled, his narrow chest swelling from all the bowing and scraping he’d been given by the woman in yellow. “I expect to enjoy that quite a lot, possibly even more than the ride I’ll take. Later, sweet thing, definitely later.”
He turned then to talk to one of the other men at the table, and I was taken after the woman in yellow when she gestured to the Sees holding my arms and then hurried off. A last glimpse of the people at the table had shown the men outraged and the women disbelieving, all but Mera. She alone had looked frightened and very upset, but obviously not on her own behalf.
I was taken back to the dormitory room and through it, and from there to the office of the woman Quatry. By then my arms were hurting from the grip the two Sees had on me, but the older woman in the yellow uniform was not in the least concerned with my comfort. She froze me with her stare until I was brought to a stop in front of her desk, and then she folded her hands on top of a neatly placed folder.
“Tell me what she did to the Prime Jer-Mar,” Quatry said to the woman in yellow who had entered with us, talking to her but looking only at me. “I want to hear it all, with her listening.”
“She-she-slapped him,” the woman said after swallowing hard, as though she were reporting a murder and mutilation. “He went so far as to take an interest in her, telling her to eat her food quickly so that she could follow him back to his apartment, and she had the nerve to announce that he couldn’t talk to her like that, that she was a Prime, too! I thought he would be insulted and almost intervened then, but he was gracious enough to laugh off such childish boasting, and tried to show her he still found her attractive. That was when she hit him.”
“I have never in my life heard anything so inexcusable,” Quatry pronounced, her dark eyes glowing with cold fury. “If I hadn’t had you watched closely and carefully, there’s no telling what you might have done next. Is it possible you have anything at all to say for yourself about this insanity, that you can in any way attempt to excuse it?”
“You seem to have chosen the right word when you picked ‘insanity,’” I said, rubbing arms that had been released while trying to adapt to the idea that I was asleep and having a nightmare. “Nothing about this entire situation is sane, not you and not those—those-overgrown children. I am a free woman and a Prime; I will not be spoken to as though I were a bauble of little value, and I certainly won’t be groped and pawed. I was not being done a favor, I was being insulted; and if it ever happens again I’ll do the very same thing. If all of you are crazy here, that doesn’t mean I have to go along with you.”
The woman in yellow had gasped in shock over what I’d said, but Quatry was stronger than that. She simply stared at me for a full frozen minute, then slowly nodded her head.
“I should have seen this sooner, from your earlier behavior,” she said, sounding as though she had found a solution to a puzzling question. “You’re not bright enough to understand the quality of those around you, to see how truly superior to you they are, so you simply reject everything and anything you come across. Those men are trained Primes, trained in a way you could never be and will never be. Through them and the offspring they produce, Central will be made supreme over every other planet in the Amalgamation, not merely the elected leader among equals. Whatever it is they want, that is exactly what you will give them, and that while quietly bearing their children. You, someone who hasn’t even established her percentage level yet, will not even speak to her betters unless spoken to first, and then she will respond properly and politely. Do you understand me, girl? ”
“What I understand is that you would certainly do better in my place than I would,” I said, understanding even more fully the futility of arguing with mindless fanatics. “Why don’t you and I trade places, and then you can kiss the feet of those-marvels-in person?”
“I’ve already had the privilege of being in your place,” she answered, and the ice in her eyes cleared briefly to show pride and pleasure and fierce satisfaction. “I served their sires all the years I was permitted to do so, and some of the present generation have to be my sons. If you weren’t a Prime you would never be allowed near them, and even as a Prime you barely qualify. It’s my job to see to it that you do as you’re told, and believe me, you will do as you’re told. For inexcusable behavior I sentence you to First Punishment, the hardest sentence I’m able to give a first offender. If you should prove to be too thickheaded to learn from that, it will be my pleasure to go on from there. Get her out of my sight.”
The two Sees took my arms again, and I was pulled out after the other woman in yellow who led the way with a grimly satisfied expression on her face. She was younger than the woman Quatry but not what might be considered young, which probably meant she was the same sort of retired servant. I’d had my own ideas as to what was done with female Primes who could no longer give them the babies they wanted, but apparently some were made further use of instead of merely being put quietly to sleep. It took a really sick mind to guard a program with the conditioned aggressiveness of former victims of that program, and I couldn’t decide whether to feel angry or nauseated. Even mass murderers didn’t destroy their victims more than once.