She tried to get a grip on herself and some understanding of those people as she continued to spy upon them. The servants she could understand, if their culture and background had raised them in this sort of thing, and people like the Dark Man, whoever he was, and the rest of the top Institute staff who had to be in on it could also be understood by the oldest of rationalizations—a lust for power. But there were others there, in the middle management levels, the product of Christian culture and yet far down in the power structure, both from the village and from the technocrats of the Institute, that were inexplicable. How did the leaders bind and corrupt so many souls so absolutely and so easily?
She would eventually sicken of the spectacles in the meadow and work her way around them, usually going down the cliff trail to the beach where her father died and sit in the sand and let the warm Caribbean waters come up around her and try and think it all out.
She made her way down to the village after a while, and saw the little church in ruins and the graveyard in disarray, and wondered what could have happened here in so short a time, and how the people down here, no matter what, could accept such unspeakable horrors. Did they just look the other way and pretend to know nothing? Had they all been corrupted or enslaved? Some had boats—motor boats, small fishing vessels and sailing boats. Surely some would have tried to escape by now.
Perhaps, she thought, they had tried. Tried and just not made it.
She adapted quickly to her own situation, no longer embarrassed or worried at the thought that her nudity would be seen by someone, no longer even thinking about it or her other limitations, so minor were they when compared to the seven years of far greater limits she had endured. She began to go out during the daytime and get quite close to human activity. Once in a while she’d been spotted by someone, but she’d managed to duck out of sight and avoid any serious investigation. She even discovered that many of the staff and servant women went topless during the heat of the day when outside. This was something new, and indicated how lax any sense of morality and standards had become, but it made it easier for her. Behind a bush, explosed only from the waist up, she might be mistaken for one of the staff workers herself. The imposed physiological changes made on her by the Dark Man to conceal her identity acted in an odd way as a wall against embarrassment. As Angelique she would have suffered acute embarrassment and upset at being seen topless, let alone nude, but as this stranger—it didn’t seem to matter to her at all.
She returned to the cabin one afternoon and immediately sensed that something was different, that someone was there. Her sharpened senses gave her caution, but somehow it just didn’t feel like the Dark Man. Deciding it must be one of the mysterious ones who dropped off fresh supplies, she took a deep breath and walked boldly up to the cabin and in the door. She hadn’t really realized until now just how much she had missed human company, no matter what sort it might be.
She was shocked to find a single young woman there. She was dressed in what was becoming the island fashion—topless, with a colorful print skirt—and she looked lean and tan and somehow familiar, but Angelique couldn’t quite place her.
The woman put a finger to her lips and pointed at the door. After first thinking that this was a warning that someone was listening, she realized that the woman was motioning for them to go outside, and she did so, the other following quietly. Realizing that the woman wanted to talk and did not want to be overheard, and desperate for any sort of direct human contact, Angelique led her through the wooded area over to one of the clearings on the side of the cliff.
The woman seemed satisfied. She was white and looked to be no more than in her late teens or early twenties. She sat down beside Angelique and said, softly, “Do you remember me, Angelique? Do you know who I am?”
She stared at the other, and tried to speak, but no sound came out. She shook her head negatively.
“You can’t talk to me, for I haven’t had the guts to take the sign upon me, at least not yet. Just look at me and speak slowly, as if you had a voice. I can read lips.”
Who are you? Angelique asked her. What is this all about?
“I—I was Sister Maria Theresa when you knew me.”
Angelique was stunned and stared at the other disbelievingly. You can not be her. She was—old!
“I know. You see, we all have our price, don’t we? Motion, feeling for you, and for me—from menopause to adolescence, physically speaking. Forty-six is a difficult age. They made me seventeen again—seventeen always, they say—in exchange for renouncing my vows and joining them.”
But—you were a nun! In God’s name, how could you do such a thing?
Maria smiled a bit wistfully. “It’s all so simple for you, isn’t it? So cut and dried. Good and evil and that’s that. I don’t put you down for it. They kept you a child, denied you—experience. Not so with me. I was fairly late coming to the Church. Oh, I was born a Catholic and had the usual pressures as a kid and teen, but I was wild. Nobody’s fault, least of all my parents. I fell into a bad crowd in high school—right around seventeen, in fact. I didn’t want to work, didn’t want to grow up, and I wanted independence right then and there. I liked sex. I loved men, and I was in the kind of city that had a lot of them, lots of tourists, too. New Orleans. Wide open. So me and a couple of other girls from good middle class Catholic homes started selling ourselves for pay.”
Had Angelique been able to speak she could not have done so. She simply couldn’t imagine someone doing what Maria described unless forced to it by economic desperation. It was unheard of in the world Angelique had known.
“I know, I know. Welcome to the grown-up world. It wasn’t like you read about it in the books. It was easy. Just look through the papers, see what conventions were in town, go to the right hotels, and you made a pretty good amount of money just letting them make a pass at you. For a while it was fun, but then we got well known to the organized working girls. We were competition. We got threats and they really meant it, and we wound up with a Mac—a pimp—for protection. That’s when it stops being fun. You get a quota, and you suffer if you don’t make the nut. You turn it all over to the Mac and are totally dependent on him for everything. You stop being a person and start being property. Finally you get older and sick and tired of it and you want to quit and they don’t let you. You can’t anyway. Try being property for eighteen years and you realize you don’t even know how to take care of yourself. You start gettin’ bags under your eyes and spotting gray hairs and you know you’re in the home stretch, that you’re gonna be finished, and it’s organized crime and after all that time you know too much and can’t run. Well, I figured out a place to run to and I did.”
Angelique stared at her. You never told me. You never told anyone.
She reached into a small purse, took out a cigarette, lit it, and inhaled deeply. “Would you? Oh, I told the Church, sure. And they took me in, and I went through all the training and took my vows, and then went on and became a nurse—on them. I wanted to try and do a little good with the rest of my life. They stuck me in Quebec because it was a different country and I wasn’t likely to ever run into anybody familiar, and I took a new name and all that. So eight months after I first met you and took on your job, I wound up back in the fire again. These people knew everything about me. They knew things I’d forgotten for years. I put up a fuss at the start, yeah, but when they swore to me that they weren’t going to harm you and could cure you, there wasn’t much else I could do. I never really could be on my own, you know. I sold myself to the Macs, then I went and found the Church to take care of me, then when they couldn’t any more these people made an offer and I sold myself again. I’m not real proud of it, but it’s a fact.”