“Now that you’re rid of most of what they did to you, you might consider taking a break on the biting and scratching you’ve been doing in my direction,” Kel-Ten said, drawing my eyes to where he sat in the dry-chair with his glass of wine. “I know that the treatment you got was partially my fault, but I think I made up for it by not letting it happen a second time. Do you think you might try seeing it that way?”
What I thought was that I didn’t understand a word he was saying, and the way I frowned at him must have told him so. He sipped at his wine while showing a very faint smile, and then he shook his head.
“No, Kel-Ten, dear, I don’t think I can see it that way without having everything explained to me,” he said in a high, squeaky voice accompanied by a very bright smile. Then he changed the brightness to a wise-looking, very solemn smile and said in his own voice, “I suppose I was expecting that, girl dear. You’re not yet ready to take my word for things, foolish though that proves you to be. And by the way, what name is there for me to use in place of ‘girl’? Just in case you happen to end up in a crowd of females, and I need to call you.”
By then he was looking at me again, this time waiting patiently for an answer. I knew that everyone I’d met in that place was a good deal stranger than average, but Kel-Ten topped them all by quite a bit.
“The name I’ve so far gone through life with is Terrilian,” I grudged in reply, half wondering why I was bothering. “Are you always this crazy, or are you making a special effort on my account?”
“Sometimes I’m even crazier,” he said with more of a grin than a smile, nodding at me as though in thanks. “Not long after I got here I learned that I had to act crazy, or I’d end up going crazy. The only time I refrain is during a challenge, but that’s not what this is. Or at least not exactly. I take it, Terrilian, you’d like those questions you asked earlier to be answered now.”
“I would have preferred having the questions I asked earlier to be answered earlier,” I answered, splashing some of the delightful water over my shoulders. “Now I have even more questions, and since there’s going to be a wait between asking and answering, I’m going to have to keep track of them all. The only problem is, I’m getting too sleepy to keep track.”
“If that’s the only problem, you can forget about it,” he said, his grin widening. “Once you’re out of that tub, I’ll see to it that you’re feeling something other than sleepy. But to get back to our original topic of conversation. What makes what happened to you partially my fault is the fact that I heard about you not long after they let you wake up, but I couldn’t come looking until after you’d already gotten into trouble. I was in the middle of a training session when the word reached me, and even the First Prime doesn’t get to walk out of a training session.”
His expression had gone from amusement to tight-jawed anger, what seemed like the same sort of raging, burning fury feeding my own core of anger. I still didn’t know why he would feel that way, but he seemed to mentally brush the emotion aside and then went on.
“It isn’t often one of the incoming girls breaks out as soon as you did,” he said, pausing to take a measured sip of his wine. “That in itself would have started the word on its rounds, but the better part of the story made it move even faster. We heard the new girl had marked up that fat fool Gearing, and the Secs vine was confirming it even before we stopped laughing. That was when I knew I had to try getting my hands on you, but I couldn’t rush out of the training session. I couldn’t even sneak out, not when everyone else’s efforts were being measured against mine, so I had to wait until it was over. Once it was, I showered and changed clothes, then rushed over to the low dining room-only to find you’d already had a run-in with Jer-Mar. If cursing had the ability to dissolve metal, this whole facility would right then have come down on everyone’s head. ”
He allowed himself a swallow of wine that time, his expression a sour grimace, and the wine didn’t do much to sweeten it.
“I’d been hoping you would be on the unattractive side to keep the boy Primes in the low world from noticing you, but it didn’t work out that way,” he said after the wine was swallowed. “I didn’t waste my time hoping you’d be smart enough to go along with the usual routine; what you did to Gearing proved you wouldn’t be, and when I. found I was too late I thought it was all over. There have been others over the past couple of years who started making something of a fuss when they first broke out, but none of their fussing lasted beyond the first punishment. I suppose I went back to the low after dinner to see the latest ex-human I’d missed out on, and imagine my surprise when I discovered there was no ex about you. You were giving me a second chance to play rescuing hero, so I lost no time in doing it and here you are.”
“And here I am,” I agreed, pleased to find there was soap in the water as well as perfume. “Kidnapped-excuse me-rescued by a total stranger who heard about the sparkling conversation I was capable of, and who therefore rushed right over to make sure it was him I spoke to. That has to be the most touching story I’ve ever heard.”
“You’re thinking I’m interested in something other than conversation from you,” he said, crossing his legs as he grinned at me. “I can’t imagine what would give you an idea like that, because it so happens it is conversation I’m after. From someone like me, someone who remembers a real life among real worlds. You have no idea how few of us there are.”
I had no doubt that this time I could see pain in his light eyes, a kind of pain I was sure he didn’t usually show to people. He emptied his glass and ordered another glass of wine from the chair, and when it came he took it and smiled at me.
“I’ve been here more than five years,” he said, gesturing with the glass. “Exactly how much more than five years, I don’t really know. Time has a habit of moving strangely in this place, and sometimes you lose track. I grew up on Nopalt and spent my adult life working as a Prime for the Amalgamation—and then I was sent here. I thought it was just another Mediation assignment, but they gave me a room, took away my personal possessions, and told me my real name was Kel-Ten. It was the name I’d been assigned when I was born here on New Dawn, and had the sort of meaning the name I’d been using all my life didn’t. They told me I’d been brought back to see how my training results compared with the results of Primes not only born here but raised here as well. And then they told me I had my pick of the women—after the Primes of higher level first made their choices—but that I was responsible first for covering the women assigned to me. I’d most likely be able to handle pleasure as well as duty, but duty always had to come first. ”
Another swallow of wine went down his throat, one that gave me the impression he wanted to drain the glass, but he didn’t drain it. He took only that one swallow, then rested the glass on the arm of his chair.
“At first I couldn’t believe how lucky I was,” he went on, an odd smile curving his lips as his eyes examined a scene in the elsewhere. “I was going to have my ability trained beyond anything I’d ever thought was possible, and while that was going on I could have just about any female I wanted. The other men I met who had grown up among the worlds felt just the way I did, like we’d died without noticing it and had found there was such a thing as a final reward. We were worked hard in our training classes, but any time we weren’t working it was party time! Party time.”
He repeated the words with something of a small laugh that might have been part sigh, and then his eyes were on me again.
“Have you any idea how boring partying can get to be?” he asked, but not in a way that showed he expected to be answered. “I’ll admit it took a while before I found out, and the revelation came not long after I began being seriously involved with challenging. It felt as though I were going from one level to the next with hardly a pause in between, and people stopped betting on who would win when I issued a challenge. It always turned out that I won, and the defending Prime never got off easy. I finally noticed how much time my ex-opponents were spending in Medical recovering, and then I noticed that being idolized by each and every woman I took to bed was beginning to turn my stomach. I thought about it for a little while, and then I went to my section leader and told him I wanted to go back to Nopalt and the life of nothing more than a Mediator.”