Choices (17 page)

I shook my head, unable to think of a reply.
Tomasz’s matter-of-fact admission of having provided the same
“comfort” to Paolo had been so surprising that I was forced to
reevaluate. I knew Tomasz was telling the truth; his memory of the
time with Paolo, called to the fore by my question, had a physical
reality to it, a three-dimensional solidity, which both embarrassed
and attracted me. More amazing was that Tomasz saw nothing unusual
in the fact, felt no discomfiture or loss of manhood in the
same-sex episode. Like Paolo with Raquel, Tomasz’s sexual interlude
with Paolo was accepted, by him and everyone, as the only
compassionate response under trying circumstances.

But I was still incapable of conforming to
this new mode of behavior. “Please, Tomasz,” I said, “I don’t seem
able to do what you want.” My face had lost its sneer, and I was
probably looking as agonized as I felt.

Tomasz smiled sadly at me. “Amalie,” he said,
“you do not understand as much as we think you do. Please, forgive
me if I upset you with what I thought was a reasonable request.”
The communion between us had shattered, but the fragments still
lingered. He wordlessly asked permission to approach, to take my
hand again. I nodded. With the touch, his thoughts were
transparent.
Beautiful
, he was thinking,
but shallow.
Empty
.

I wanted to slap him, but he felt the urge
and dropped my hand, breaking the last remnant of communion. He
looked at me, my eyes welling with tears, the pain of it too much
for me to conceal, and he put his arms around me in his intuitive,
affectionate way, holding me as he would a child, with no sexual
tension between us. “Yes, Amalie,” he said. “You are like a child.
We see your beautiful face and your womanly body, and we forget
that your mind is not on the same level.”

Before I could react he had gone, shutting
the door behind him. I sat down on the bed, wilting and depleted
after our confrontation. He had called me retarded, I realized. He
thought of me, maybe they had all come to think of me, as
slowwitted. “Mentally challenged.” Beautiful but stupid. I laughed
out loud, heard the hysterical sound, then put my hands over my
mouth to stifle it.
This can’t be happening
, I
thought.

T
he next day I
dreaded even attempting communion in the cell. The others knew
something was not right, and once again I observed instead of
participating. When the session ended, Matilda decided, “I will
take a turn at communion with you. Whatever is holding you back,
perhaps it needs a sibyl to get to the bottom of it.” She winked at
me suggestively; I hoped I would not have to endure another attempt
at seduction.

Communion with Matilda was a revelation, a
look at a remarkable woman, strong and confident. The contrast
between her energy and determination and my weaker, aimless
existence was humbling. Matilda was generous; she couldn’t help
feeling superior, but she tried to be fair, accustomed as she was
to the minds of less powerful telepaths.

My lack of ambition worried her more than my
physical limitations, but she started by tackling the easier,
specific problem. Encouragement in this simple matter, she felt,
might lead me to develop motivation on my own.
You use the
strength you have as best you can
, she said.
You will not
need to be a warrior to become a sibyl. People much more fragile
than you have been able to do it
.

I had begun to lose any hope of becoming a
sibyl, and appreciated Matilda’s attempt to rally my spirits. And I
did envy her vitality. She preferred women as lovers, I saw, but
wanted traditional marriage as well: for children, but also for its
own sake, for extended family, the merging of two clans, the
importance of it in her world of Eclipsian gentry. With her
commanding personality, she felt none of Cassandra’s fear of being
dominated by her husband, and knew she was well able to handle the
double load of childbearing and household management. She was
doing, in Eclipsian terms, what I would have done on Terra if I had
stayed and worked and risen in my profession.

The communion between us had come on
gradually, almost without my knowing it. I had felt Matilda’s
strength first, then her thoughts, finally her emotions. Only now
did I begin to sense her desire for me, the narrowing of her focus
in my mind. Unlike Tomasz, Matilda could not act on her feelings,
since she was working as the nucleus of the cell.

Early on in my training it had been explained
to me and the four young people that the electrical impulses of
crypta
use the same nerve pathways as sexual response. A
sibyl overloads these paths by her cell work alone, and must adjust
little by little, through practice, just as a bodybuilder, with
training, can lift increasingly heavier weights. Adding on sexual
activity would literally burn out her circuits, killing her, or
worse—destroying her sensations, paralyzing her mentally and
physically. The communion we shared made Matilda’s feelings
inescapable, and although I could not have done otherwise,
nevertheless I felt sorry that on Midwinter, her one night of
freedom, I had had to reject her.

“It’s all right,” Matilda said, pulling back
from the communion into speech. “I’m beginning to appreciate just
how different things are on Terra.” She looked into my eyes and my
mind, mulling over the situation with a barely suppressed hunger.
“Listen, Amalie,” she said, “you know the nucleus of a cell must be
celibate while she is working?”

I nodded, seeing in her mind already a train
of thought I didn’t like.

Matilda was wrapped up in her own analysis,
unaware of or deliberately ignoring my discomfort. “But the other
people in the cell aren’t limited in this way. Look at Tomasz, with
Alicia. There is no danger to him in a reasonable level of sexual
activity so long as it is not excessive, or obsessive.” She told me
this in a neutral tone of voice, watching me to see whether I was
following where she was leading.

Again I nodded. I understood her words, in
the sense that I understood the language. But the idea she was
working towards was not one I shared.

“At the same time,” Matilda continued,
“sexuality can be an impediment to the work of the cell. That is,
sexual feelings which are not expressed, not discharged, which
build up in people and cause frustration—these obstruct the flow of
crypta
that creates the amplified electric field of the
cell.” She took my hand, asking permission only subtly, in thought.
With her power as a sibyl, we had achieved a kind of communion
without physical contact.

I let her hold my hand while she talked. “I
think,” she said, “that, as a Terran, you did not know what the
rest of us take for granted: that we expect each member of the cell
to comfort any other who needs it.” She was recapitulating Tomasz’s
whole line of reasoning from a few days ago, going over everything
slowly and carefully, as if for a poor student with a difficult
lesson to learn. She was no doubt aware, as sibyl, of Tomasz’s and
my abortive discussion, and wished to explain things to me in a
more impartial setting, with none of the accusations and surprise
that were the result of my ignorance and Tomasz’s expectations.

“We think of Terrans as libertines,” she
said, smiling at the misconception, “people with little respect for
marriage and family. But, judging from you, it seems as if Terrans
have more taboos than Eclipsians, or at least different ones. And
you have broken one of ours.” She paused as I tore my hand out of
hers.

I waited in frowning silence for my liaison
with Dominic, or my short hair, or both, to be once again thrown in
my face.

“No, Amalie,” Matilda said, “it has nothing
to do with those external things.” She reached for my hand again,
but I had moved away from her, and she continued her explanation in
the soft speech of partial communion. “You are merely unfamiliar
with the ways of seminary and cell. What you have done has created
disharmony in the group. You have seen and felt my desire, and
Tomasz’s. And instead of easing us, instead of accepting our
feelings for you and accommodating them, you have rejected us, so
that the entire group is affected. That is why, despite all the
communion you have achieved, the cell still does not function
properly with you in it. You are blocking yourself from doing the
one thing that will allow you to join the cell as a full,
productive member.”

There was one flaw in her argument. “But why
is it my fault?” I asked. “If you and Tomasz find me attractive,
but I do not desire you in the same way, why is the burden on me? I
mean, nobody, even on Eclipsis, goes around sleeping with everyone
who asks, who looks at us with lust or makes a suggestive
invitation—do you?”

Matilda let loose with a loud, throaty laugh.
“By all the gods, Amalie,” she said. “You’re not a virgin, are
you?”

I shook my head, experiencing that same
feeling, from my first days here, that I had regressed to the
preoccupations and the emotional atmosphere of high school, and
disliking it more than ever.

“I’m sorry,” Matilda said, controlling
herself with an effort, “only you sounded like a child, like
Drusilla Ladakh’s Christer little brother.”

The word thudded in my mind:
Christer
, a pejorative form of
Christian
, the
ultimate verbal weapon in the sexual war between those who would
take and those who would not give, the last resort of the sexually
thwarted against the holdout. The diehard monotheistic religions
had survived here, as on Terra, necessarily taking some different
turns over the centuries of isolation, but still recognizable. I
had seen the gold ornament Drusilla wore on a chain around her
neck, the little charm in the shape of a cross. Apparently the
sect’s adherents had the same reputation on both worlds, for
repression, a laughable denial of the natural instincts of the
human animal.

Matilda saw how offended I felt, and how
confused. “I’m sorry,” she said again, genuinely this time. “Of
course we don’t go around doing it with everybody. We would wreak
havoc with our marriage and our family. But I’m talking about here,
in a seminary. In a cell. Our cell has five or six members
including you and me. Among any five or six people living so
intimately together, especially young people, one or two will
desire another. And if the object of desire behaves as you have
been doing, withholding herself, denying her pursuers satisfaction,
those feelings don’t disappear. They only build up and become
unmanageable, until they dominate everything else, and the cell is
paralyzed. As ours is.”

“So it’s up to me,” I said.

“Yes,” Matilda said. “Nobody’s asking you for
marriage. In a little while Tomasz and I will lose interest in you,
and we can all go back to friendly terms. But that sexual tension
will be out of our systems, and the cell will function, because
this won’t be in our way.”

I tried to put on a brave front and make a
joke. “ ‘Lose interest?’ ” I repeated. “That’s a romantic
invitation.” I smiled a tight little smile, emphasizing the forced
humor.

Matilda regarded me critically. “I think
that’s part of the problem. You are like a virgin, even if you
aren’t one technically. You expect romance. You think that in order
for two people to come together for pleasure and comfort they must
be in love with each other. But surely Terrans don’t believe that?”
she asked, wondering just how strange were the customs of my world.
“Most of them aren’t even married!”

I stared into her eyes, not knowing what to
say. I had thought I was safe, that Matilda’s work would require
her to remain celibate. But I saw that she was prepared to take a
few days off, to ask Raquel or Cassandra to fill in for her as
nucleus, while she got this “out of her system.”
Soon
,
Matilda had thought to me at Midwinter, over a month ago. It had
not been wishful thinking on her part. But despite the intimacy I
had been developing with them all, even after Tomasz’s and now
Matilda’s clear explanation of what was expected of me, I remained
devoid of sexual feelings for either of them. Matilda, as a woman,
was not repulsive to me, any more than Tomasz had been. I simply
wasn’t interested.

It was still difficult for me to believe that
all this seemingly reasonable talk wasn’t just a sophisticated
attempt to take advantage of an exotic newcomer. I had learned
about the effect of my short hair, and I knew that, while people
had the courtesy to pretend amnesia, they could not help
remembering my overheard encounter with Dominic. Although I was a
good ten years older than Tomasz and Matilda, the age difference
meant little in this hothouse setting, and my apparent virginal
shyness made me seem younger than both of them.

“Amalie,” Matilda broke in on my thoughts,
“you have made us all work hard for you. Perhaps you can bring
yourself to repay a little of our trouble.” She smiled, but she was
serious. She had of course felt my lack of response all along, but
with her active approach to most problems, thought I merely needed
a gentle push to begin the process.

We were already sitting on my bed, where
these private communion sessions took place, and Matilda had only
to pull me down and kiss me, as she had at the festival. This time
I surrendered. As she had pointed out, I was not so strong, and I
was tired of fending this off.
Maybe it would help
, I told
myself, as everybody else kept telling me it would.

I did my best, thinking warm thoughts of her,
opening myself—my mouth, my legs, my mind. It was Matilda who drew
back.
I do not understand you
, she said.
You are not
cruel. You are not shielded. You are not even cold.
She eyed
me from a few inches away.
You are beautiful, but there is
nothing beneath the surface
.