least talkative men she had ever known. Most men were so wordy. She was fairly wordy herself.
He was quiet. She wished she knew how to be quiet.
'It's just practice, isn't it?' she asked. 'Just sitting there.'
He nodded.
'Years and years and years of practice. , . - Oh, God. Maybe ...'
'No, no,' he said, taking her thought immediately.
'But why don't they do something? What are they waiting for? It's been nine days'
From the beginning, by unptanned, unspoken agreement, the room had been divided in two: the line ran down the middle of the mattress and across to the facing wall. The door was on her side, the left;
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the shit-hole was on his side, the right. Any invasion of the other's space was requested by some almost invisible cue and permitted the same way. When one of them used the shit-hole the other unobtrusively faced away. When they had enough water to take cat-baths, which was seldom, the same arrangement held. The line down the middle of the mattress was absolute. Their voices crossed it, and the sounds and smells of their bodies. Sometimes she felt his warmth; Werelian body temperature was somewhat higher than hers, and in the dank, still air she felt that faint radiance as he slept. But they never crossed the line, not by a finger, not in the deepest sleep.
Solly thought about this, finding it, in some moments, quite funny. At other moments it seemed stupid and perverse. Couldn't they both use some human comfort? The only time she had touched him was the first day, when she had helped him get onto the mattress, and then when they had enough water she had cleaned his scalp wound and little by little washed the clotted, stinking blood out of his hair, using the comb, which had after all been a good thing to have, and pieces of the Goddess's skirt, an invaluable source of washcloths and bandages. Then once his head healed, they practiced aiji daily; but aiji had an impersonal, ritual purity to its clasps and grips that was a long way from creature comfort. The rest of the time his bodily presence was clearly, invariably uninvasive and untouchable.
He was only maintaining, under incredibly difficult circumstances, the rigid restraint he had always shown. Not just he, but Rewe, too; all of them, all of them but Batikam; and yet was
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Batikam's instant yielding to her whim and desire the true contact she had thought it? She thought of the fear in his eyes, that last night. Not restraint, but constraint.
It was the mentality of a slave society: slaves and masters caught in the same trap of radical distrust and self-protection.
'Teyeo,' she said, 'I don't understand slavery.
Let me say what I mean,' though he had shown no sign of interruption or protest, merely civil attention.
'I mean, I do understand how a social institution comes about and how an individual is simply part of
it — I'm not saying why don't you agree with me in seeing it as wicked and unprofitable, I'm not asking you to defend it or renounce it. I'm trying to understand what it feels like to believe that two-thirds of the human beings in your world are actually, rightfully your property. Five-sixths, in fact, including women of your caste.'
After a while he said, 'My family owns about twenty-five assets.'
'Don't quibble.'
He accepted the reproof.
'It seems to me that you cut off human contact.
You don't touch slaves and slaves don't touch you, in the way human beings ought to touch, in mutuality. You have to keep yourselves separate, always working to maintain that boundary. Because it isn't a natural boundary — it's totally artificial, man-made. I can't tell owners and assets apart physically. Can you?'
'Mostly.'
'By cultural, behavioral clues — right?'
After thinking a while, he nodded.
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'You are the same species, race, people, exactly the same in every way, with a slight selection towards color. If you brought up an asset child as an owner it would be an owner in every respect, and vice versa. So you spend your lives keeping up this tremendous division that doesn't exist. What I don't understand is how you can fail to see how appallingly wasteful it is.
I don't mean economically!'
'In the war,' he said, and then there was a very long pause; though Solly had a lot more to say, she waited, curious. '1 was on Yeowe,' he said, 'you know, in the civil war.'
That's where you got all those scars and dents, she thought; for however scrupulously she averted her eyes, it was impossible not to be familiar with
his spare, onyx body by now, and she knew that in aiji he had to favor his left arm, which had a considerable chunk out of it just above the bicep.
'The slaves of the Colonies revolted, you know, some of them at first, then all of them. Nearly all. So we Army men there were all owners. We couldn't send asset soldiers, they might defect. We were all veots and volunteers. Owners fighting assets. I was fighting my equals. I learned that pretty soon. Later on I learned I was fighting my superiors. They defeated us.'
'But that — ' Solly said, and stopped; she did not know what to say.
'They defeated us from beginning to end,' he said. 'Partly because my government didn't understand that they could. That they fought better and harder and more intelligently and more bravely than we did.'
'Because they were fighting for their freedom!'
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FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS 'Maybe so,' he said in his polite way-'So ... '
'I wanted to tell you that I respect the people I fought.'
'I know so little about war, about fighting,' she said, with a mixture of contrition and irritation. 'Nothing, really. I was on Kheakh, but that wasn't war, it was racial suicide, mass slaughter of a biosphere. I guess there's a difference .... That was when the Ekumen finally decided on the Arms Convention, you know. Because of Orint and then Kheakh destroying themselves. The Terrans had been pushing for the Convention for ages- Having nearly committed suicide themselves a while back. I'm half-Terran. My ancestors rushed around their planet slaughtering each other. For millennia. They were masters and slaves, too, some of them, a lot of them.. .. But I don't know if the Anns Convention was a good idea- If it's right. Who are we to tell anybody what to do and not to do? The idea of the
Ekumen was to offer a way. To open it. Not to bar it to anybody.'
He listened intently, but said nothing until after some while. 'We learn to ... close ranks.
Always. You're right, I think, it wastes . . . energy, the spirit. You are open.'
His words cost him so much, she thought, not like hers that just came dancing out of the air and went back into it. He spoke from his marrow. It made what he said a solemn compliment, which she accepted gratefully, for as the days went on she realized occasionally how much confidence she had lost and kept losing: self-confidence, confidence that they would be ransomed, rescued, that they would
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get out of this room, that they would get out of it alive.
'Was the war very brutal?'
'Yes,' he said. 'I can't. . . I've never been able to — to see it — Only something comes like a flash —' He held his hands up as if to shield his eyes. Then he glanced at her, wary. His apparently cast-iron self-respect was, she knew now, vulnerable in many places.
'Things from Kheakh that I didn't even know I saw, they come that way,' she said. 'At night.' And after a while, 'How long were you there?'
'A little over seven years.'
She winced. 'Were you lucky?'
It was a queer question, not coming out the way she meant, but he took it at value. 'Yes,' he said. 'Always.
