“Which you apparently took,” I said, having finally found a comment to make. It might not have been the most diplomatic comment ever uttered, but I’d been waiting to hear that they’d found they couldn’t break him and had offered something to make him change his mind instead. That they’ll defeated him was something I didn’t want to hear, not then and not ever. For some reason I felt it was wrong that he’d been defeated, wrong and totally unacceptable.
“Damned right I took it,” he said, finally looking up at me again. “I’d been taught the hard way that I couldn’t hope to beat them by bashing my brains out against the walls they’d built around me. All that would have accomplished would have been to make me a smear on the floor to be washed off and forgotten about. Just in case you have no personal knowledge on the subject, let me assure you that that isn’t the best of all possible things to be.”
“You consider it better to be someone who’s sold out?” I asked, noticing almost peripherally that the water I sat in had begun to cool. I moved away from the headrest and wet my hair, then used both hands to squeeze it out. Since I knew I wouldn’t be there for much longer, I decided it would be best if I washed as much of me as fast as I could.
“The position and outfit I found you in said you did some selling of your own,” he came back, but not as sharply as I was expecting. “And Jer-Mar did mention something about you starting out the evening apologizing to him. Pain has a way of turning even someone with the most inflexible code of bravery practical, and only its easing and disappearance lets the nonsense come back. Don’t get out of the tub without first showering off in clean water. You don’t want to leave a film of that reagent still on you in places, just waiting to dry out.”
I had already begun standing when he said that, and I didn’t need to think about it to know he was right. At least about the showering part. I moved over to the white and gold shower block and stepped up onto it, waited while the clean water came at me from both above and below, then left the block to walk the tub rim to its edge. Just beyond the tub on the floor a section of the carpeting had been turned into a drip-mat, and a .fluffy white towel sat folded on a raised pedestal beside the mat. I stepped off and got the towel, and only when it was wrapped around me did I turn to Kel-Ten again.
“Sometimes pain can force you into making the wrong decisions,” I said, watching him sip his wine as he listened and watched me back. “It lies to you and tells you everything will be all right if only you give in, but everything doesn’t turn out all right- You find that giving in hurts more than the pain did, but doesn’t even allow you the luxury of unconsciousness when it reaches the unbearable level. I’ve heard it said that enough pain can kill you, even if those giving you the pain are trying to keep you alive. People do make mistakes, a possibility not too farfetched to spend your time hoping for. Or, maybe I should say it’s something I’ll be spending my time hoping for. And I’m ready to go back now.”
“To the hope of that possibility,” he said, his light eyes filled with something very much like anger. “You still don’t understand why I brought you here, do you? Did you somehow get the idea I have a thing about wanting to bathe female newcomers? Or that I enjoy being insulted by idealistic infants who have managed to move through life without learning anything about it? Come over here.”
“I can see and hear anything I have to from where I am,” I returned, holding the towel more tightly around me. “To prove it, I can show you what I’ve already seen. For you, giving in means being forced to enjoy the satisfaction of success over your competition, of having tocover-all those women, of needing to live in luxury. For me it means becoming little more than a slave, accepting constant humiliation and even more constant rape. Someone once told me you can’t enslave a free man or free a slave, no matter how hard you try. A free man will still be free even with chains weighing him down, and a slave, unchained, will soon crawl back to his fetters. I can’t quite remember who said it, but I have the feeling he meant it to refer to women as well as men. I’ve been spending enough breath saying I’m not a slave; I think the time has come to try proving it.”
I somehow had the feeling he could be swayed to my way of looking at things if I spoke with enough belief and conviction, which I thought my speech had had. When he put his wine glass aside with a sound of annoyance and got to his feet, I began wondering if I weren’t mistaken. He didn’t look very convinced, and the closer he got the less swayed he seemed to be. It occurred to me it might be wise to take a step or two back from him, but the thought came the least bit too late. Even before I could decide whether or not that would constitute backing down as well as up, he bent and lifted me off the floor in his arms.
“You’re going to learn that when I tell you to do something, you’d better do it,” he said, ignoring my yelp of startlement as he turned back toward his dry-chair. “The practice will come in handy for use around section leaders and Secs as well as the Primes you’re assigned to, and won’t turn out to be a waste with me, either. Unquestioning adoration may make me queasy, but I’ve discovered I enjoy having women obey me. Life turns out less complicated that way, and at the moment I have all the complications I need.”
By that time he was sitting back down in the chair, settling me into his lap as though carefully tending to an infant. My being all wrapped up in that towel may have given him the impression he was dealing with a child, but just because he thought it didn’t make it so. The volume of air inside the dry-chair’s radius was as moisture free as the rest of the bathroom was steamy, the object, of course, being to keep any nonbather from wilting. Being brought out of the heat like that may have felt good, but it didn’t do anything to cool me down.
“I think you’d better have your hearing checked,” I stated, trying to bring my arms out of the towel without completely uncovering myself. “I have no need to learn anything where section leaders and Secs—and most especially Primes-are concerned, because I have no intentions of being anywhere near any of them. I will not cooperate with what everybody considers unavoidable, and that decision will stand no matter how much they hurt me. Now, let me go so I can get out of here.”
“Don’t you think it’s time to leave that fantasy world behind?” he asked, his left arm firmly around my waist to hold me where he’d put me. “The leaders would enjoy having your cooperation, but the full, dirty truth is, they don’t need it. If you don’t come around permanently the second time they give you pain, the next thing they’ll give you is a vacant smile, which will mean they never have to worry about the problem again. Don’t you understand that they’d prefer having your mind left alive, but all they really need is your body? Do you want to be turned into a willing and agreeable vegetable incapable of any sort of thoughts at all?”
He was looking straight at me as he asked his question, and because of that didn’t miss seeing my shudder. Most people believed that to kill the I in someone was the same as killing their body, but what would happen if it wasn’t? What would happen if some very tiny portion of that I was left, deep down and too small to change anything, but not too small to know what was happening? How could I go on living like that—and how would I find it possible do anything else?
“Okay, now, you’re finally beginning to understand,” he said gently as he held me to him, his arms tight to keep my shuddering from getting out of control. “You thought you were ahead of the game by being able to tell them to go ahead and hurt you and be damned, but now you know that isn’t true. You weren’t lucky you weren’t cowed into submission by the first punishment they gave, you had the bad luck to be shifted into line for a lot worse. If you can bring yourself to believe that, and believe as well that you have no choice about cooperating, we’ll have exactly the starting point we need.”