He leaned back a little in the chair, his arm still around my waist, his eyes unmoving from my face. The choice of accepting or rejecting his offer was mine, but it wasn’t simply a matter of saying yes or no. If he was telling the truth I very much wanted to be a part of his plans, but if he was lying in order to get me to cooperate I would find nothing in agreement but betrayal. I could feel something inside me telling me not to trust him, that I would be sorry if I trusted him, but that something was patently ignoring the one point that kept me from outright and immediate refusal. If he was as important as he’d told me, and I had the reactions of the woman in yellow and the Prime Jer-Mar to show that he did seem to be exactly that, what would he get out of betraying me? There could be something to give him that I didn’t know about, but if there wasn’t, then he had to be telling the truth. Maybe. I bit my lip in vexation, wishing I had more than that minute to make a decision, then tried a temporization.
“You said you can key me awake,” I stated, trying to keep the eagerness out of my voice. “Do it now, and then there won’t be any doubt about our being partners. If you really do want me to help you.”
“Yes, I do want your help, but no, I won’t key you now,” he came back, firm decision in both eyes and voice. “In actual fact we will be partners, but there won’t ever be a time that I treat you like one. You have to remember that they’re not stupid, and if you forget even for a moment that I’m in complete charge they’re bound to get suspicious. Your-sisters in service-would never dare think themselves as good as a male Prime, so you won’t be given the chance to do it either. And we won’t ever discuss this unless we’re where we are right now, in a place whose usual field distorts any listening devices they may have planted. I won’t key you awake until I want you awake, and that’s it. Take it or leave it.”
He really was pushing the thing, almost as though he were trying to make me decide against saying yes—or was trying to be absolutely honest and straightforward about what I had to expect. It was much easier—and safer-believing he was hiding something, but until and unless I could find out if that was true, I couldn’t justify refusal. I had to take the only way out offered to me, no matter what I had to do to achieve it.
“All right, you win,” I grudged, not terribly happy about having to do things on his terms. “I help you after you train me, and then we leave together. It just better not take too long, or I won’t be able to keep up the pretense. ”
“Terrilian, you’d better understand right now that you won’t be pretending,” he said with a sigh, not as pleased as I’d thought he’d be. “If you try pretending it simply won’t work, so I’m going to give you my first decision as absolute leader of this effort: no matter how ready you turn out to be, we won’t make our try until after your first pregnancy. It may take even longer than that, but it won’t be sooner. Again, take it or leave it.”
The flatness in his tone brought the illness back to my middle with a stab of—I don’t know, fear, horror, flaring disappointment, maybe all three if not more. I wanted to scream out my denial of what he’d said, wanted to push away from him and just run without stopping, but his arms had closed around me again and he wouldn’t let me go.
“No, if you’re going to refuse you’ll do it in here, still in this chair,” he said, keeping me from struggling out of his hold. “I had to make you know that I don’t want your agreement unless you’re ready to commit yourself completely to my plans, just as completely as I’m committed. I’ve waited years for this chance, but I’ll wait years again rather than throw away all hope of success by having you ruin things. They know the difference between cooperation, no matter how reluctant, and a pretense at cooperation, so you can’t pretend. You have to accept the reality of one or more pregnancies before you can leave here, and you have to decide if you’re willing to pay that sort of price. One or two pregnancies against years and years of the same, and the decision has to be yours. Every other decision will be mine, but that one has to be yours.”
I still sat stiffly in his arms, trying to push away from him, but then my eyes closed, almost by themselves. I was tasting the awful sourness of defeat again, nailed tight into a box with no way out, forced to accept what he’d said or completely reject the only real hope I was ever likely to find. It felt so wrong agreeing to allow what they would do to me, wrong in a way even I couldn’t completely explain, but it was either that or fall back on the flimsy hope that was really no hope at all.
“I would rather be dead,” I said in a whisper, my arms braced flat against his chest. “The only problem is they won’t let me be dead, will they? Why won’t they let me be dead?”
“Because they need you,” he answered, the words completely unsoftened by pity. “Just the way I need you, and for exactly the same reason. You’re a Prime, girl, and no one in their right mind wastes a Prime. You don’t yet really know what that means, but you’ll sure as hell be finding out. And if we’re going to be working together, you’d better learn to stop the dramatics. They’re not going to be cutting you into a whole lot of bloody pieces, they’re going to have men put babies in your belly. As someone who has been doing that to women for years, I think you can believe me when I say you might even get to the point of enjoying it. Other women do, so why should you be any different?”
My eyes opened fast to look at him, wondering if his expression would match his tone, and it certainly did. He was studying me with something very much like impatient ridicule, and that made me mad.
“I can be as different as I like without needing to justify it to you or anyone, simply because I am a Prime,” I grated, wondering how well he it take to having the same done to him. “I may have to go along with all this, but I ‘sure as hell’ don’t have to like it. If you’re expecting me to force myself to the point where I do, you’re wasting your time and mine. If that’s what you need to make your plan work, we might as well forget about it now.”
“If that speech was meant to prove to yourself that success is impossible so you can simply give up, you’re the one who’s wasting time,” he came back with a snort of faint amusement. “As long as you understand and accept what will be done to you, I’ll take care of everything else. Are you understanding and accepting?”
“How about understanding and not accepting?” I asked, trying to dent his rising good humor. “Or at least not accepting on an emotional level as opposed to a physical one? What will they do to me if I take it without the requisite smiles and sighs of delight?”
“They’ll increase the dosage of your injections,” he said, a grin forming despite my attempt to deflate him. “If you think you’d rather hop around whimpering than bat your eyelashes and smile at a man, go right ahead and try it. Once you get it through your head that no one is going to let you do things any way but theirs, you’ll relax and look for the easy road instead of the hard. If you’re capable of recognizing easy, and distinguishing it from hard.”