The Worthing Saga (43 page)

“I thought you'd be on somec by now,” she said.

“So did everyone. But there are some things that can't be done while one sleeps the years away. I can't go on somec until I'm ready.”

“And when will that be?”

“When I rule the world.”

She laughed, thinking it was a joke. “And when they find out I'm Mother's long-lost daughter kidnapped by gypsies and kept by space-pirates, they'll make me Empress after her.”

“I'm going on somec within the year.”

And she didn't laugh. Only looked at him carefully and saw the way worry and work and, perhaps, cruelty had worn certain lines in certain places and given him an expression that made his eyes seem deep and hard to plumb. “You look like you're drowning,” she said.

“And you look like you're drowned.”

He reached out and took her hand. She was surprised—he had never done that. But the hand was warm, dry, smooth, firm just as she had thought a man's hand ought to feel (not like Father's claw) and she didn't take her hand away.

“I saw how it was when I came before,” he said. “I've been waiting till you were free. The last of your loving siblings left a week ago. Your affairs should be in order. Will you marry me now?”

Three hours later, they were halfway across the sector in a modest-seeming apartment (only seeming—computers and furniture came, literally, out of the walls) and she was shaking her head.

“Ab,” she said, “I can't. You don't understand.”

He looked concerned. “I thought you'd prefer the contract. It's so much safer for everyone. But if you'd rather we kept it informal—”

“You don't understand. Five minutes before you came I was praying for something like that to happen, anything to get me away from there.”

“Then come away.”

“But I keep thinking about my parents. My mother, who can't manage her own life, let alone Father's, and Father, who does his best to rule everyone and only I can keep him under control and happy. They need me.”

“At the risk of being thought trite, so do I.”

“Not much,” she said, waving her hand to indicate the paraphernalia that proved that he was a man of power and wealth.

“This? In fact, Batta, this is all part of a much grander plan. A direct line leading to something rather fine. But Ill rather share it with you.”

“You are a romantic idiot like all the other adolescents,” she laughed. “Share it with me, nonsense. What makes you even think you love me?”

“Because, Batta, every now and then my dream fails to keep me warm.”

“Women are rather inexpensive.”

“Batta isn't even for sale,” he reminded her, and then he reached out and touched her as she had never been touched and she held him as she had never held anyone. For two hours everything was new, every flutter, every smile.

“No,” she whispered as he was about to end her long sexual solitude. “Please no.”

“Why,” he whispered back, “the hell not?”

“Because if you do, I'll never be able to leave you.”

“Excellent,” he said, and moved again, but she slid away, slid off the bed, began dressing.

“You have very poor timing,” he said. “What's wrong?”

“I can't. I can't leave Mother and Father.”

“What, are they so loving and kind to you?”

“They need me.”

“Dammit, Batta, they're grownup people, they can take care of themselves.”

“Maybe when I was seven, they could,” she said, “but by the time I was twelve they couldn't. I was dependable. I could do it. And so they lost all their pretenses at adulthood, Ab. I couldn't go off and be happy knowing they'd disintegrate, having to watch them.”

“Yes you can. Knowing that if you don't,
you'd
disintegrate. I can put you on somec, Batta, right now. I can put you under for five years and when you woke up they'd have learned to take care of themselves and you could go see them and know that everything was all right.”

“Do you have that kind of money?”

“When you get enough power in this lovely little empire,” Abner Doon answered, “money becomes unnecessary.”

“When I woke up they might be dead.”

“Perhaps. And then they'll definitely not need you.”

“I'd feel guilty, Ab. It would destroy me.”

But Abner Doon was persuasive, and by small stages he got her to lie down on a wheeled table and he put a sleepcap on her head and taped her brain. All her memories, all her personality, all her hopes, all her terrors were recorded and filed in a tape that Abner Doon tossed up and down in his hand.

“When you wake up, I'll play it back into your head, and you won't even notice that you were asleep.”

She laughed nervously. “But anything that happens now, the somec wipes out, right?”

“True,” Doon answered. “I could ravish you and perform all kinds of obscene acts, and when you woke up you'd still think I was a gentleman.”

“I never have thought such a thing,” she said.

He smiled. “Now let's get you to sleep.”

“What about you?” she asked.

“I told you. I'm a year away. I'll be a year older when I wake you up, and we begin our life together, with or without benefit of contract. Good enough?”

But she began to cry, and she kept crying until it was near hysteria. He held her, rocked her back and forth, tried to find out why she was crying, tried to understand what he had
done,
but she answered, “Nothing. Nothing.”

Until finally he brought out the somec bottle. (But no one has a private supply of somec! It's the law) and a needle and reached for her to lay her on the table. She pulled away, retreated to the other side of the room.

“No.”

“Why not!”

“I can't run away from my parents.”

“You've got your own life to live!”

“Ab, I can't do it! Don't you see? Love isn't just a matter of liking somebody. I don't like my parents very much. But they trust me, they lean on me, I'm their whole damn foundation, and I can't just walk away and let them fall down.”

“Sure you can! Anybody could! It's sick, what they've done to you, and you have a right to your own life.”

“Anybody could do it except
me.
I, Batta Heddis, am a person who does
not
walk away. That's who I am! If you want the kind of person who would, then go look somewhere else!” And she ran from the apartment to the tube station, returned home, closed the door and lay on the sofa and wept until her father called impatiently from the other room and she walked in and lovingly stroked his forehead until he could go to sleep.

•    •    •

When the brothers and sisters were there, Batta could pretend there was variety. Now, there was no pretense. Now, she was the entire focus of their lives and she was being slowly worn down, at first by the constant work and constant pressure (but she grew stronger than ever and soon settled into the routine better than ever until she couldn't conceive of another way) and later simply by the utter loneliness even while she was utterly unable to be alone.

“Batta, I'm doing embroidery, they do it with real cotton in the rich houses but there's no way we could afford that, of course, on your father's pension, but see what a lovely flower I'm making or is it a bee? Heaven knows, I've never seen either, but don't you see what a lovely flower it is? Thank you, dear, it's a lovely flower, isn't it? They do it with real cotton in the rich houses, you know, but we could never afford that on your father's pension, could we? So this is a synthetic. It's called embroidery, will you look at the lovely bee I'm making? Isn't it lovely? Thank you, Batta dear, you have such a wonderful way of making me feel just lovely. I'm doing embroidery, you know. Oh, dear, I think your father's calling. I must go to him—oh, will you? Thank you. I'll just sit here and embroider, if you don't mind.”

And in the bedroom, stolid silence. A groan of pain. The legs starting normally at the hip and then suddenly, abruptly, ending (not two centimeters from the crotch) in a steep cliff of sheets and blankets that fell away and left the bed fiat and smooth and unslept-in.

“Do you remember?” he grunts as she turns the pillow and brings him his pills. “Do you remember when Darff was three he came in and said, 'Daddy, you should have my bed and I should have yours, because you're as little as I am. Damnfool kid, and I picked him up and gave him a hug and wanted to strangle the little bastard.'”

“I didn't remember.”

“Science has done everything else, but they can't figure out how to heal a man when he's lost his hams, lost his legs, lost every damn nerve. But one, thank heaven, but one.”

She loathed bathing him. The tube had caught him slantwise in the mouth of the tubeway. If he'd been turned around, it would have ripped out his abdomen and killed him on the spot. As it was, he had lost his buttocks to the bone, his intestines were a mess, he had no bowel control, and his legs were a fragment of bone. “But they left me enough,” he so proudly pointed out, “to father children.”

And so it went endlessly day after day and Batta refused to remember Abner Doon, refused to admit that she had once had a chance to get away from these people (if only) and live her own life (if only) and be
happy
for a while (if only I hadn't no, no, can't think that way).

Then Mother decided to make a salad while Batta was away shopping and cut her wrist with the knife and apparently forgot that the emergency call button was only a few meters away because she had bled to death before Batta could get home, a look of surprise frozen on her face.

Batta was twenty-nine.

And after a while Father began making hints about how a man's sexual drive doesn't diminish with nonuse, but only increases. She ignored him with gritted teeth until he too died one night and the doctor said it had only been a matter of time, the accident had messed him up so badly, and in fact if he hadn't had such excellent care he wouldn't have lasted
this
long. You should be proud of yourself, girl.

Age thirty.

She sat in the living room of the apartment that she alone controlled. Her father's pension would continue—the government was kind to victims of chance in the transportation system. She kept staring at the door and wondering why in the world she had longed to get away. After all, what was there to do outside?

The walls closed in on her. The flat bed in her parents' room looked just as it had when Father lay there all day, at least from where his legs would be on down. But when she rolled up blankets to look like legs and stretched them under the sheets on the bed, putting legs where she had never seen legs before, it occurred to her that she had lost her mind.

She packed her few belongings (everything else belonged to them and they were dead) and left the apartment and went to the nearest colony office because she couldn't think of anything better to do with the rest of her disastrous life than to go off to a colony and work until she died.

“Name?” asked the man behind the counter.

“Batta Heddis.”

“This is a wonderful step you've decided to take, Miss He'd— dis—single, yes?—because these colonies are the Empire's newest way of lighting and winning the war. Only peacefully, you understand. Heddis, did you say? Come this way, please.”

Heddis, did you say? Why had he looked so surprised? And so excited (or was it alarmed)?

She followed him to a room a corridor away, a plush convenient room with only the one door. A guard stood outside it, and she thought with terror that something was wrong, that Mother's Little Boys were going to accuse her of something, and she was innocent but how can you ever prove innocence to people already convinced of their own infallibility?

The wait was interminable—two hours—and she was reduced to a wreck by the time the door opened. Reduced to a wreck, that is, by her own perception. To an impartial observer coming in the door she was utterly calm—she had learned to exude calm no matter what the stress years before.

But it was not an impartial observer who walked in the door. It was Abner Doon.

“Hello, Batta,” he said.

“My God,” she answered, “my dear sweet God, do I have to be punished like this?”

His face went tense somehow, and he looked at her carefully. “What have they done to you, lady?”

“Nothing. Let me out of here.”

“I want to talk to you.”

“We forgot it years ago! I forgot it! Now don't remind me!”

He stood by the door, and it was obvious that he was horrified —and fascinated— horrified because as she spoke so passionately her voice remained fiat and calm, her body remained erect. There was no hint that she was in any kind of turmoil; fascinated because the body was still Batta, still the woman he had loved and had been willing to share his dream with not that many years before, and yet she was a complete stranger to him now.

“I've been on somec for several years,” he said. “This is my first waking. I had them all warned—a code was to be set off when your name came up for colonization.”

“What made you think it would?”

“Your parents had to die sometime. And when they did, I knew you'll have nowhere to go. People with nowhere to go, go to the colonies. It's politer than suicide.”

“Leave me alone, please. Can't you have a little forgiveness for my mistake?”

He looked eager. “Did you call it a mistake? Do you regret it?”

“Yes!” she said, and now her voice raised in pitch, and she actually looked agitated.

“Then, by heaven, let's undo it!”

She looked at him with contempt. “Undo it! It can't be undone! I'm a monster now, Mr. Doon, not a girl anymore, a robot that performs services for revolting people without complaint, not a woman who can respond to anything the way you wanted me to. Nothing can be undone.”

And then he reached into his pocket and held out a tape.

“You can go under somec right now and let the drug wipe out all your memories. Then I'll play this back into your mind, and you'll wake up believing that you did not decide to go back to your parents. That you decided to stay with me in the first place. You will be unchanged. The last few years will be erased.”

She sat, uncomprehending for a few moments. Then, hoarsely, huskily, she said, “Yes. Yes. Hurry!” And he led her to a tape-and-tap where they taped her brain and put her under somec and her mind washed away in the drug.