"What sort of game?" Paul said, his voice rasping harsh past the tingling of the strong paste on his tongue.
She giggled and did not answer.
"You didn't ask me if you could see him alone tomorrow," Paul said after a pause, afraid of what the words might lead to yet unable to prevent himself uttering them.
"Ask you? What for?" She raised herself on one elbow and clasped her hands before her bare breasts to stabilise her body.
-- I keep telling myself: the only free person I ever met. But freedom at the expense of . . .
He said, "Why do you want to see him alone, anyway?"
"Why do you think?" The hint of scorn in the voice was perfectly mimicked from some unknown involuntary teacher back at Chent. "He has a beautiful body and strong muscles."
Paul was silent for a while. At length he said, "And what about me?"
It was her turn to fall silent. He prompted her: "Well?"
"Paul, the night we spent on that beach you did not -- "
"You know what I'm talking about, at least!" Paul broke in.
"Am I supposed to be stupid? But why do you talk in that unkind voice? Is it not true that he is" -- she snapped her fingers -- " beau. . . . Handsome?"
"So what?"
-- There suddenly seems to be a total barrier between us, almost as complete as the barrier that shuts away disturbed mental patients. . . . No, stop it.
He regained his self-control with an enormous effort. He said, "You want another man just for a change. You're bored with me. Is that what you're trying to say?"
"Paul, your voice is so hard and -- "
"Is it?" He took a step towards the bed; he still held the wet towel with which he had wiped his chin, and she flinched as if expecting him to strike her with it.
"You are afraid," she said. "Aren't you? You think you are not man enough to interest me all the time, and this makes you frightened. Paul, for -- for goodness' sake! Here or in Llanraw a human being is a human being, and there is nothing to be ashamed of in this simple fact, that we are human."
She swung both legs to the floor and sat with her hands clasping the side of the mattress. " What makes you afraid? I am one single human person, and so are you. I will not go away with Armand tomorrow because I am amused by him and find him handsome. I don't know yet if he is kind, like you; I don't know if he is gentle, like you. Perhaps he is selfish like most people in your world -- who can say?"
"But you're determined to find out!"
"Why not?" She cocked her chin arrogantly. "I ask you again, what are you afraid of? You have lived in England with another girl, you have been with two others that I saw myself. Do you think there is no other woman in this world for you? It is a bad place, but it is not all the same as Chent Hospital!"
Paul felt the muscles of his face clamp into a mask of bitterness, locking away any words he might have hoped to speak.
Not seeming to notice, Urchin went on, "So I'm sorry you did not find someone today as I found Armand. Never mind."
"Never mind!" The dam holding back his voice shattered, but all that passed it was that raging echo of her own words.
"Yes 'never mind' -- a good saying! We have such a saying in Llanraw." She twisted lithely and leaned back on the pillows as though all discussion were at an end. "Paul, you must know from being with me that there are some things we have learned in Llanraw which seemingly you do not think of here. I am -- what do they say in English? -- I am a handful for you. Yes, I see why they say it: something picked up which leaks out between the fingers. I tire you. I wear you out. You were tired today because of it."
"I was tired because I took some -- "
"Paul!" The name was scarcely louder than a whisper, but it carried such force he stopped in mid-sentence. "Paul, in your world everyone, even you, seems to want to be ashamed of things which are not their fault. I don't blame you for it, so don't make excuses." She held out her arms, smiling. "Come to bed. Tonight I will not be . . . ah! . . . demanding . Tomorrow night I shall see if there is something of Llanraw in Armand, ask him to come to this room with us, and I shall teach you a game, as I promised, that we have in Llanraw."
The world shuddered on its axis. Paul, fighting the temblor that made it swirl about him, turned to the wash-basin and at last hung up the towel, pleating it to the length of the rail with exaggerated care. Not looking at Urchin, he said, "You mean you want two men at the same time."
"We will try and find you a girl if you prefer, but -- "
-- It isn't true. I've slipped off the pathway of real life and found myself in one of the ruinous dead ends where the other Paul Fidlers live.
"But," she was continuing, "I did not see any I thought hopeful. Last week, now, there was a tall blonde whom I -- "
"You're crazy," Paul said, and meant it with the whole of his being.
-- That reached her!
She sat bolt upright on the bed. She looked frightened. "Paul, you know that I have had to show you many things that the body likes even though you are a doctor who has studied its nerves! You said they were good things, you shook and moaned and gasped and said you loved me."
-- True, damn it, true. From a finger's end she can milk more ecstasy than Iris from my whole suffering corpse!
"I didn't mean to say you're crazy," Paul blurted desperately. "I mean what you were talking about was crazy."
"Is this crazy?" She leapt from the bed and touched him in a way he had never dreamed of before she used it on him in a routiers hotel on RN5, that instantly brought his nerves tinglingly alive from crown to sole; her fingers found the spot with the same precision she had used to lay low Riley at the hospital dance. "The best thing in the life of a human being is to use the body, and you in this world have never properly learned how! It's your world that's crazy, not me!"
-- I wrote that down, almost in those words, I was going to say that in my book about Llanraw!
But a vision of Maurice Dawkins, slurpily repulsive, came between him and Urchin, and he looked at it -- which she could not see -- with eyes like chips of stone. Before that glare she crumbled on the bed, sobs erupting from the depths of her body to shake her helplessly.
"Paul" -- his name, deformed by weeping, was the first coherent sound he detached from the moans she uttered -- "I can't help it! I have fought it so long, but they made me this way, and . . ."
"Who?" Paul said, not because he expected an answer he could understand, and she spoke the word he had heard before, in his office at Chent, when she insisted she was forbidden to tell him who she was by command of a mysterious "they."
At the fringe of his awareness something detestable crawled into view; he sensed it without being able to focus his attention on it. Distracted, no plan in mind, he sat down awkwardly beside her and tried to comfort her, stroking her nape and back with steady passes of his fingers. She relaxed little by little, until at last as if the fit of crying had exhausted her she slumped into a sort of sleep.
"Urchin?" he said softly.
She replied in the tone he had heard many times before at Chent and in who could count how many places since where the need to hear her tell of Llanraw had overcome his desire to let her be. The loathsome thing creeping around his mind seemed to chuckle as he realised he had put her into a hypnotic trance by his caresses, which preserved the single element she seemed to find indispensable: a regular rhythm.
He withdrew the stroking hand and linked its fingers with those of the other to stop them shaking. He said, "Urchin, what did they do to you?"
Later, he looked about him at the room. Although they had shared it for all the nights since their arrival in Louze, there was nothing familiar in it bar the hideous clock that he had set, according to habit, where the figure of Time might witness their love-making and sprinkle benisons on them with its wagging scythe. All the rest was strange, impossible, incomprehensible: the wash-basin, the bidet, the cupboard where they had hung their clothes, even the very bed on which they took their pleasure.
/> Paul Fidler had retreated somewhere out of contact with the lax body that bore his face and name. From a vantage point across a gulf spanned by no named direction, he looked down on the man who had been sitting beside the lovely naked girl now dozing quietly against the pillows.
He saw the hands of that man open a case brought from some distant, fabulous country and without error take from it a short glass cylinder capped with a shiny needle and pistoned with a smooth steel plunger. This he then carried to the basin where there was water; also, close at hand, there was a bottle containing white tablets, which he shook out without counting and broke to dust in a saucer. Mixed with water, they dissolved, were poured into the glass cylinder which they nearly filled.
"Lie still," he heard a voice say; it was connected with the creature who shared his name. "This will make you sleep."
The needle pierced the delicate pale skin of the girl's arm where a bluish vein shadowed it from below, and the plunger drove the liquid down.
There was a silence which seemed to stretch across those same dimensionless gulfs before the hand withdrew the needle, the head bowed, the lips touched the lips of the sleeping girl, and a single drop of blood ran down to stain the coverlid.
*42*
-- Intravenously it should be fatal in half an hour at most, but kindly: a gentle slowing of the heart, the brain being already lost to any thoughts but dreams.
Paul wandered down the beach, his consciousness seeming to follow his body at a distance, like a child's balloon trailed on a long loose string.
-- There is no such place as Llanraw, never has been, never will be; how was I convinced that there was?
The mistral took small account of night and day. It spoke to him when it whined in the rigging of the boats, and since he paid it no attention showed its anger by tossing sand in his face. He spat out the grains without resentment.
-- "They" did this to her, she fought it (at Chent the agony), but in the end they were too strong for her although she had fled beyond their reach . . .
At the casino, despite the onset of the mistral, lights and music.
-- Define "they." Against the impersonal menace of the sea at night: easy. The greatest tyrants a race with a history of clever tyranny has ever spawned.
The wind said loud and clear, "No-o-o Llan-raw-aw-aw!" He gave a foolish nod in approval of its insight. He had come to the mole leading to the casino; it was broader than a tightrope, but either side of it the sea was whipped by the wind and if he looked down he felt he was poised over an abyss. Also there were people at the casino and he had the impression that if they saw him they would mock. He turned back and continued along the beach instead.
-- Paul the dupe Fidler, who believed a pack of lies so heartily he threw away a marriage, the chance of a child, a career with the prize labelled "Consultant" at its peak . . . Better here on the shore. Quieter except for the wind. The lights out in so many of the promenade cafés. Which way to Llanraw from Louze?
Dry sharp sand filtered into the sides of his shoes and abraded the skin of his feet. He welcomed the sensation as a kind of penance.
-- The fact that I forgot, or overlooked: so silly, such a simple thing. That a half-truth is also half a lie. Somewhere not called Llanraw but perhaps away at this impossible angle from now where the other Paul Fidlers also live, is the half-true truth that they are human beings. But in no vision of paradise called Llanraw. In a prison-world ruled by "they" who can take the spark and essence of a person out at will . . .
He drew a deep breath, and the torrent of his thoughts settled to a pace at which he could review what he had been told tonight and, using for a guide facts that be himself had observed and preferred to disregard, sort the truths from the half-truths.
-- If only I had asked one question I'd have known, but I chose rather to be blind. I should have asked, "Why does the peaceful land of Llanraw teach its children to kill with no other weapons than their hands?" Under my nose! Under my stupid bloody nose!
He moaned aloud for a little, then checked himself, irrationally afraid of being heard.
-- So, more calmly now: there is not a second Eden called Llanraw, where men and. beasts live harmoniously in fields of gorgeous flowers and lovers drift on scent towards the stars. There is an inconceivable dictatorship ruled by a handful of men and women who are only restrained from squandering the lives of the masses under them by a single consideration. Bought or stolen skills have made them effectively immortal, and they love their long lives marginally more than they love the total power they might win at the cost of slaughtering a billion in a war where they would risk being numbered with the dead.
-- Quarrelling without fighting, jealous but afraid to strike, they grow bored. As a palliative, whim suggests orgy. But the pullulating billions of Man sprawl across the raped face of Earth; it is not only for the rulers, refusing offspring because they will not share their privileges, but for the masses too that sex must be reduced to a simple drug. Hence millions of sterile women, neutered like Urchin, to furnish it in bulk, and in their production every now and then an error of judgment, the mixture made too rich.
-- Thus Urchin.
-- After a century of satiation the rulers' tastes grow jaded. It is sometimes not enough for them to share the same erotic ministrations as are supplied to the plebs; these fail to arouse desire. There must be other stimulation. There must be young children. There must be corpses. There must be dramatic preludes. For example, a harmless-looking girl must appear to be so overcome by lust for her master that she fights her way through his bodyguards barehanded and hurls herself upon him reeking of sweat and blood to make frantic love while her victims moan their lives out on the floor behind.
-- But in the abandon of orgy a joygirl might forget her instructions; carried away by the frenzy of slaughter she might turn her terrible skills on the master himself. To insure against this, orders must be implanted hypnotically deep in her mind, so that with a single word the master can stop whatever she is doing and compel her to wait passively for his next command.
-- This can be done. There is little enough left on the ravaged planet Earth except people, of whom there are so many that there is no room for animals, and the desire for meat has been conditioned out of them not through humanitarian reasons but purely because the few surviving cattle and sheep are reserved to the rulers and the plebs have been taught to vomit at the sight of their butchered carcasses. In short, what there is of any desirable thing belongs to the rulers and no one else.
-- Among the things they do have are certain machines that focus upon the brain and degrade the personality so that it conceives only the simple thoughts of a moron; it can no longer plot to wreak vengeance against the rulers. Such machines look not unlike the X-ray equipment of a twentieth-century hospital.
-- This should have been done to Urchin before she was delivered to her owner (owner! And I thought: "the freest person I have ever met . . .") and would have been done but for a whim on his part. Occasionally he liked to preserve the intelligence of his joygirls so that their conversation might not be hopelessly drab. Having once escaped so narrowly from a permanent idiot twilight in the mind, she had resolved she would rather die than suffer that fate later on.
-- In a little while he learned to be afraid of her, for she was cleverer than he was himself. While he was not so stupid as to exterminate his more intelligent inferiors out of hand, he liked to keep them at a distance, confining their opportunities to tasks that would furnish their master with fresh stimulation. He would not have geniuses continually within arm's reach. And he would equally not allow this superlative joygirl to go back among the plebs where they might benefit from her talents. He was too jealous.
-- In the nick of time . . .
-- There was an infinite universe around the rulers, but the boring prospect of struggling outwards to the stars no faster than laggard light had deterred them from searching there for relief from their ennui. Besides, if they embarked on a fruit
less journey of exploration and stayed away until they were sure they could find nothing of interest, they would most probably return to discover that their compeers had stolen their luxuries during their absence.