“I’m so very sorry. I’ll make it as easy on you as I can,” I soothed.
She managed a wan smile. “I know you will. Look, I told you I took the risk freely. We crapped out this time, that’s all. Look on the bright side: you won’t have to worry any more about my getting killed, and those bastards turned me into an adolescent sex fantasy all for you.”
“I didn’t ask for that.”
“I know.” She turned. “Here’s Sanda.”
Our other woman looked really stricken, filled with guilt, a guilt I knew would surface not only every time she looked at Dylan but also every time she looked in a mirror. She had done her idol in, and that was her true punishment.
Dylan grabbed her and hugged her. “Don’t feel so bad! Don’t feel so guilty! No more babies for you, no more prisoner! And we’re still together!” She turned back to me. “You can find a job for her, can’t you?”
I nodded, feeling relieved that that was out of the way. “Sure.” I looked around. “Let’s get out of this place.”
We walked out into the sunshine and sea breeze, and I hailed a cab to take us back to the dock. When we got out, Dylan looked up at Akeba House, out on the promontory. “There is one requirement they made that I have to observe, permission or no,” she told me. “I have to go up to the House in the next few days and, before an assembly of the women there, tell what happened to me and recant my crimes in front of them. That’ll be the hardest thing.”
We entered the old, familiar apartment. “You can set that up now and get it over with,” I noted, gestcring toward the phone.
She went over, took out her card, put it in the slot, and waited. Nothing happened. She sighed and turned to me. “You’ll have to dial for me,” she said wearily. “With no credit of any kind I can’t even make a simple phone call.”
I tried to console her. “I’m going after Laroo and this whole rotten system. You’re gonna be free and on the seas once more someday. I swear it.”
I was going to try as hard as hell to make her believe that, too.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Project Phoenix
Dylan’s luck had gone down the drain, but mine was still holding up. She went up to the House for her obligatory purging, then stayed around a bit, with my blessings, looking up some old friends, getting some consolation and advice, and doing some general talking. Misery loves company, as Sanda pointed out, and deep down, nobody was more miserable than Dylan. Still, when she finally returned, it was with some interesting news. Sanda, after all, had been spending her leave with us and had hardly checked in up there at all.
“There’s a couple of women there under Cloister,” she told me. “New people I never heard of before. Really gorgeous, too.”
“What’s Cloister?”
“It means they’re restricted to the grounds of the House, and they’ve had their cards completely lifted. They can’t leave the place. It’s usually only done by the Syndicate as punishment for offenses, but they don’t seem to be like that at all. In fact you’ll never guess where they come from.”
I shrugged. “What’s the mystery?”
“They’re from Laroo’s Island,” she told me. “They were some of his—what? Courtesans? Harem? Whatever.”
The news piqued my interest for several reasons. “What did they do? Have a falling out with the old bastard? Or did he just get tired of them?”
“They’re not sure. One day—zap! The whole bunch were picked up and shipped to Houses up and down the coast under Cloister. They say they think it’s because of some big deal that Laroo’s using the island for. According to them lots of new faces and equipment were coming in—and have been for the past few months.”
She shook her head negatively. “But one of them saw a name on a stack of boxes—looker boxes.”
Better and better. “What was the name?”
“Project Phoenix.”
I punched up the encyclopedia on the roomvision monitor and checked the word. A legendary bird from ancient Earth cultures that was totally reborn by being completely consumed in names.
“Can you go back up to the House whenever you want?”
“As a Syndicate member, sure.”
“I want you to do just that. Get to know these women. Find out as discreetly as possible everything you can about Laroo and his island and this mysterious project.”
“As you wish,” she responded. “But I should warn you if you have any new schemes in your head. One of the things they psyched into me might foul you up. I cannot tell a lie. Not only not to you, not to anybody.”
I considered that. “Can you not tell the truth? I mean, if somebody asks you a question and you don’t want to give the answer, can you withhold it?”
She thought about it. “Yeah, sure. Otherwise anybody could pump me about you, and that would be illegal.”
“Well, use your common sense, but if anybody asks you a question the answer to which would cause any problems, tell them you aren’t permitted to answer that.”
“As you wish,” she repeated again in that rote tone.
I looked at her. “What’s that ‘as you wish’ stuff?”
“Conditioning. Any order or direction you give me that doesn’t violate Syndicate rules or my other conditioning I must obey. Don’t look so upset—you can’t change the rules. You can’t even order me to disregard them, because they thought of that, damn them! I have—a—a compulsion to serve. They have made me a totally passive individual and I will, well, suffer mentally if I’m not ordered about, set to tasks—in a word, dominated. Every time you give me an order and I respond I get—well, a feeling of pleasure, of well-being, of importance. I’m a human robot—I exist to serve you, and you must let me. You must—for me.”
I looked at her strangely. Was this the same Dylan Kohl who only a day before had coolly faced down one of the most horrible monsters of the sea? Was this the independent, gutsy schemer who got out of the motherhood, worked her way to captain, and helped rig a computer? It didn’t seem so. They had certainly done something to her. Something in its own way more horrible than the lobotomies the judge said were no longer civilized. In more than one sense, this was a far crueler thing to do. I didn’t know how to handle it.
“What sort of tasks?” I wanted to know.
“Prepare your meals, clean, run errands. Anything and everything. Qwin, I know this is hard on you, and you must know it’s hard on me, but it’s done. I accept it, and you must, too. Otherwise send me away to the House and forget me.”
“Never—unless you want it.”
“Qwin, I no longer have wants. Wants have been forbidden me. They stripped the wants away and left only a series of needs. I need to serve. I need to do my work as a mother. I want nothing. If you choose to keep me naked constantly scrubbing the apartment, that is what I will do, and what I must do.”
“Damn! There must be some crooked psychs I can pressure into getting this lifted!”
“No. These compulsions are so deep-planted that to remove them other than in the precise manner that they were applied would destroy my mind and make me a permanent vegetable—and that precise manner is stored in the master computer alone. They didn’t even have just one tech do it, but many, one at a time, so it couldn’t be reconstructed; that is the added hold they have. They alone can restore me. As long as I am a good example to the motherhood of what happens if you try and change your lot, I will remain this way. I would be this way even at the House, only subject to the orders of all the women of the motherhood.”