Inside there were a larger number of amenities to be found, like thick carpeting, stylish drapes on wide windows, chairs and couches, artwork on the walls, and a desk that actually had papers and folders on it. It was basically the same tan and gray as the anteroom, but enhanced by faint touches of other colors and softened by richer fabrics and mediums. Like the first office I’d seen the desk had a man behind it, but unlike the portly Director Gearing this man really seemed to be working. He wore a uniform rather than a suit, in a gray to match his door, and his tanned, unlined face didn’t seem to go with his very white hair. He glanced up at me as I came in, his light eyes touching me in a distracted sort of way, and then he waved his hand toward the chairs in front of his desk.
“Close the door and sit down,” he said, his voice as distracted as his glance had been. “I’ll be with you as soon as I finish this.”
For something I’d expected to be dramatic and terrorizing, his few words had been a crazy sort of letdown, as though a ravening beast had paused in its bloodthirsty attack to hastily check its pockets. I closed the door as directed and went to the chairs indicated, and actually found myself annoyed that the chair I chose was comfortable. When you’re braced to resist horror, running into the humdrum instead can totally ruin your mood. I began to cross my legs, remembered what I was wearing and decided against it, then simply sat back until the man finished with the folder he was working on and raised his eyes to really look at me for the first time.
“So you’re the Prime Terrilian Reya,” he said, tossing his stylus away before leaning back in his chair. “You caused us trouble when we went to pick you up, and now you’re causing even more. Why couldn’t you have been a good girl and behaved yourself?”
“If the choice had been mine, I still would have done it exactly this way,” I answered, the annoyance I’d been feeling beginning to grow to true anger. “And if you persist in talking to me as though I were a backward child, you’re suddenly going to find all those pieces of paper in the air, most of them flying at your head. You haven’t the right to treat me the way you’ve been doing, and I demand to be released.”
“If you’re not a backward child, you should know you’re wasting your time demanding to be released,” he answered, a faint smile turning his lips. “And if you throw any of these papers at me, you’ll waste a lot more time picking them up again. You’re not the first Prime to break through the conditioning, Terrilian, but usually it doesn’t happen quite this fast. That fool Gearing must have caused it with the itch he wanted scratched, and if he wasn’t so useful I would have had him shipped back to Central a long time ago. It would have been easier for you if you’d gotten used to the routine before the conditioning went, but you’re still going to have to go through with it. All of it. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“No, as a matter of fact I don’t,” I said, suddenly finding his calm, patient attitude more chilling than threats would have been. “I don’t understand anything of what’s going on, and if you’d like the truth I don’t particularly want to know. All I want is out of here, and a chance to go back to things as they were. I’ve worked for the Amalgamation most of my life; is that too much to ask in return?”
“It’s not precisely a matter of too much,” he answered, something of a shrug in his tone. “The simple fact is that the Amalgamation needs to make use of you, and has no choice in that need. They can’t take someone else in your place because it’s a Prime they need, not just anyone off a city street or out of a Neighborhood. And if you stop to look at this reasonably instead of emotionally, you’ll find that you’re getting excited over very, very little. The Amalgamation isn’t asking you to have your arms and legs cut off, Terrilian, all it’s asking you to do is have babies.”
All. I put my hands to the chair arms as he continued to stare at me calmly and reasonably, his own hands unconcernedly crossed on the desk in front of him. I’d expected having it put that baldly to be enough to make me feel any number of things, like disgusted or vastly reluctant or even very much afraid. Surprisingly enough none of those feelings surfaced, but what I did feel quite a bit of was embarrassment.
“You see?” he asked, still the most reasonable of beings. “It isn’t anything vile, or obscene, or even outrageous. It’s simply something that women do, and you’re inarguably a woman. I’ll admit we had you conditioned against wanting children while you were still a working Prime, but that was only to keep you from being contaminated by someone whose blood wasn’t worthy of yours. Here we have many men worthy of you, men like yourself, the best of the breed. I’m afraid that initially the choice of who will have access to you will be theirs and ours rather than yours, but intelligent cooperation will earn you what should be a pleasant and satisfying bonus. Would you like to hear about that?”
He held the question out in front of me as though offering a special sweet, the sort that small children will do just about anything for. I think I would have been really angry if I hadn’t been busy digesting that piece of information about having been conditioned in regard to reproducing, and he took my lack of open hostility for unvoiced and reluctant but active interest.
“You, of course; won’t be carrying a fetus yourself for very long, only until it can be safely transferred to a host mother,” he said, the explanation so matter-of-fact it could have been about accounting procedures. “Your time and genes are much too valuable to be wasted with one-at—a-time offspring, so you’ll actually produce quite a number of babies in the time it normally takes to produce only one. Each child will have a different father, and the results of each pairing will be carefully kept track of for the statistics we need almost as badly as the babies themselves. The chance of a bonus comes in when you realize that after a given number of interrupted pregnancies, the exact number varying with the individual woman involved, your body will need to carry one child to term. If you’ve cooperated with us, when you reach that point you’ll be allowed the choice of who the father of the child will be, even if it’s someone who has already sired a child on you. It will be our gift to you for having helped us so much, and from past experience we know how valuable a gift it will be. Believe me when I say you’ll need and appreciate something like that.”
“Oh, I do believe you,” I said, almost disbelieving, instead, that anything that bizarre could be real. “What I don’t understand is why you’re not using test tubes instead of people, or at the very least artificial insemination. If mass production is what you’re after, that’s the way to get it.”
“I can’t deny that we tried it,” he said, this time smiling wryly. “It would have saved us an enormous amount of trouble if it had worked, but by the second generation we discovered we weren’t getting any Primes at all. There are few enough Primes produced under normal circumstances, but in vitro matings seem to eliminate them completely. We haven’t any idea why that should be, only that it is. That’s the reason all of you is here now, not just your ova.”
“And the reason why you don’t use artificial insemination?” I asked, having my own suspicions as to the reason for their failure. “Did that prove to be just as unproductive?”
“It proved to be undesirable,” he answered, the faint amusement back again. “If the female Primes have to be here in their entirety, so to speak, and the only usable sperm donors are also here in training, why deny them the pleasure of delivering that sperm to its destination themselves? It would be a waste of a good reward opportunity, and would save us very little in the way of time. In other words, there’s no true reason to deny the men their fun.”