"And you," she said, "look like a specimen that they forgot to dissect."
They laughed. Old times, old magic. He asked her out. She refused. He asked her to go for a walk. She was too busy. And when her father called her out of the room for the fifth time since he had arrived, he decided the conversation was over and had left the apartment before she returned.
And she felt more trapped than ever.
Days passed, and in every day something different happened as the other children grew older (and married or didn't marry but left home anyway) but looking back, Batta felt that the days were all the same, after all, and the illusion of variety was just her mind's own way of keeping itself sane. And at last, when Batta was twenty-seven and a virgin and lonely as hell, all her brothers and sisters were gone and she was alone with her parents.
That was when Abner Doon came again.
He had not been on somec either, she noticed to her surprise as she showed him into the living room (same battered furniture, only older; same color walls, only dirtier; same Batta Heddis, only deader) and he sat, looking her over carefully.
"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 I'd 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'd 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 make 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.