“What’s the girl going to do about needing her family when you bring her here?”
“I’m hoping she’ll transfer her need to you.”
Karl groaned.
“I’m also hoping that you won’t find that such a bad thing after a while. You should try to accept her, for the sake of your own comfort.”
“What if talking to her doesn’t quiet her down? You never answered that.”
Doro shrugged. “Then use her methods. Beat the hell out of her. Don’t let her near anything she can hit or cut you with for a while afterward, though.”
MARY
I turned twenty just two days before Doro took me to Karl. Later, I decided Vivian must have been my birthday present. Somehow, Doro forgot to tell me about her until the last minute. Slipped his mind.
So I was not only going to marry a total stranger, a white man, a telepath who wouldn’t even let me think in private, but I was going to marry a man who intended to keep his girl friend right there in the same house with me. Son of a bitch!
I threw a fit. I finally did the yelling and screaming Doro had warned me I would do. I couldn’t help it, I just went out of control.
The whole thing was so Goddamn humiliating! Doro hit me and I bit a piece out of his hand. We sort of stood each other off. He knew that if I hurt him much worse, I would force him out of the body he was wearing?into my body. He’d take me, and all his efforts to get me this far would be wasted. I knew it myself, but I was past caring. I felt like a dog somebody was taking to be bred.
“Now, listen,” he began. “This is stupid. You know you’re going to?”
We both moved at the same time. He meant to hit me. I meant to dodge and kick him. But he moved a lot faster than I expected. He hit me with his fist?not hard enough to knock me unconscious, but hard enough to stop me from doing anything to him for a while.
He picked me up from where I had fallen, threw me onto the bed, and pinned me there. For a minute, he just glared down at me, his face for once looking like the mask it was. There’s usually nothing frightening about the way he looks?nothing to give him away. Now, though, he looked like a corpse some undertaker had done a bad job on. Like whatever he really was had withdrawn way down inside the body and wasn’t bothering to animate anything but the eyes. I had to force myself to stare back at him.
“The one thing I can’t do,” he said softly, “is prevent my people from committing suicide.” Whatever there was about his voice that made it recognizable no matter what body it came from was much stronger. I felt the way I had once when I was ten years old and at a public swimming pool. I couldn’t swim and some fool pushed me into twelve feet of water. I remember I just held my breath and waited. Somebody had told me to do that once, and, scared as I was, I did it. Sure enough, I floated to the surface, where I could breathe and where I could reach the edge of the pool. Now I lay still beneath Doro’s body, waiting.
He reached out to the night table and picked up a switchblade knife. “This came with the body I’m wearing,” he said. He rolled off me and lay on his back. He pressed a stud on the knife and about six inches of blade jumped out.
“As I recall, you like knives,” he said. He took my hand and closed my fingers around the handle of the knife. “It doesn’t really matter where you cut me. Just drive the knife in to the hilt anywhere in this body and the shock will force me to jump.”
I threw the knife across the room. Broke the dresser mirror. “You could at least make him get rid of that damn woman!” I said bitterly.
He just lay there.
“Someday there’s going to be a way for me to hurt you, Doro. Don’t think I won’t do it.”
He shrugged. He didn’t believe it. Neither did I, really. Who the hell could hurt him?
“I loved you. Why are you humiliating me like this?”
“Look,” he said, “if he has the woman there to turn to, he’s a lot less likely to let you
goad him into hurting you.”
“I’d be a lot less likely to goad him into anything if you’d get rid of Vivian.”
“You underestimate yourself,” he said grimly. “Besides, he’s in love with Vivian.. If I made him get rid of her, I guarantee you he’d take it out on you.”
“I just wish I could find a way to take this out on you.”
He got up and looked down at me. “Change your clothes,” he said. “Then we’ll go.”
I looked at myself and saw that my pants and blouse were smeared with blood from his hand. I changed my clothes, then packed the rest of my things. Finally, we drove over to Palo Verde Avenue.
While Doro introduced us, Karl and Vivian stood together looking like sister and brother and staring at my eyes. Which gave them at least one thing in common with everybody else who meets me for the first time. There were times when I wished for a nice, bland pair of brown eyes. Like Karl’s or Vivian’s. Oh, well.
I watched Vivian, saw how pretty she was, how nervous she was. She was no bigger than me, thank God, and she looked scared, which was promising. Doro had told me Karl wouldn’t let her really resent me or feel angry or humiliated. Wouldn’t let her! She was a Goddamn robot and she didn’t even know it. Or, rather, she did know it but she wasn’t allowed to care.
Karl looked like one of the bright, ambitious, bookish white guys I remembered from high school. Intense, hair already thinning. Doro had said he was twenty-eight, but he looked older. And he sounded … well, he sounded just the way I would have expected a well-brought-up guy to sound when he’s trying to be polite to somebody he can’t stand. Strained.
After the short, stiff introductions, Doro took Vivian’s hand as though this wasn’t the first time he had taken it,
