“So you are finally back among the living,” a voice said suddenly, a female voice that sounded more arrogant than interested, more imposed upon than concerned. “I don’t want a thousand questions from you, and I certainly won’t allow any crying fits. You’ll be told why you’re here in due course, and until then you’re to behave yourself. And don’t bother putting on any airs, either. You’ll find I couldn’t possibly be less impressed with you.”
I sat up and turned my head toward the spot the voice was coming from, finally discovering where the door to that room was hidden. Part of the right-hand wall had slid back to show something of a corridor beyond, and the woman who had spoken to me stood directly in the middle of what was now a doorway. She was my height or possibly a bit smaller, had dark hair tinted with orange, and wore an expensive Alderanean day suit and short boots of a matching orange. The makeup on her face was impeccably done, a thick peach with orangy highlights and black emphasis lines, but I found myself almost as repelled by that as by her attitude. It was hate at first sight between us, but somehow that didn’t bother me as much as it once would have.
“Of course you could be less impressed with me,” I answered, swinging my legs over the side of the bed and getting to my bare feet. “You could be as impressed with me as I am with you. If a thousand questions are too many for you to handle, how about just one: where am IT’
“I told you your questions would be answered later,” she came back, a graceful frown denting her makeup, something like faintly outraged shock in her dark eyes. “And don’t you dare try taking that tone with me, not unless you want to find yourself in more trouble than you can imagine. I happen to be very important around here, and no one talks to me that way.”
“If you don’t even know where we are, how important can you be?” I countered, moving closer to where she stood. She was shorter than I, by two or three inches, and for some reason that felt very, very strange.
“Of course I know where we are,” she retorted with a snort, raising her head in a superior sort of way. “We’re on New Dawn, and
Her mouth closed again with a snap furious annoyance twisting her face, the darkening of her skin obvious even under all that makeup. By trying to show how important she was shed told me something she wasn’t supposed to have not that it did me any particular good. I’d never heard of a planet named New Dawn, and had no idea what it had to do with Central or the Amalgamation.
“So, we have one who thinks she’s really smart,” the woman said with a good deal of fury in her sneer, her right hand closed into a fist, her eyes smoldering. “We’ll see how much good being smart does you once you’re transferred out of here to the main complex. I know all about you, you-Prime, and once you’re with the others you’ll spend most of your time trying to attract the attention you’ll need. If you don’t attract it you’ll spend your time crying, just the way the other oh-so-smart ones do. Just wait, you’ll get yours.”
“Others?” I said, beginning to get really confused again. “What others are you talking about? What is going on here?”
“I thought I told you not to bother me with questions,” she replied with a smug, vindictive look, then took a step back, out into the corridor partially visible behind her. “The director has time for you now, and maybe he’ll feel like telling you things. If you behave yourself and ask him nicely. Or maybe not, after I tell him how I feel about it. Probably not, since he usually listens to me, but you’ll see that for yourself. Come along right now, you’ve wasted enough of my time.”
She took her self-satisfied smirk up the corridor to the left, apparently not caring whether I followed or not. I had the oddest feeling I’d been treated that way before, by another woman in another place who had expected me to follow just because she told me to, and the memory wasn’t one I enjoyed. I looked down at myself and the-thing—I was wearing, compared it to what the woman had on, and the odd feeling hadn’t changed. The situations weren’t the same, only somewhat alike, but were enough like one another that I walked out into the corridor filled with a very unusual, unexpected anger.
My new surroundings weren’t much like the room I’d awakened in; the corridor was a very pale green instead of white, and there were no beds in sight. Aside from those things, however, there was a distinct similarity in that there were still no windows and artificial light lit our way. The woman led me past quite a few closed and silent doors, her pace rather slow where she walked about ten or fifteen feet ahead of me, but she wasn’t taking it easy for my benefit. Someone seemed to have taught her that one must undulate when one walked, even though undulation doubled the time it took you to get somewhere. Due to that I was able to close the lead she’d started with, so that I was only just behind her when she got to a blank wall at the end of the corridor. She paused to touch her fingers to the wall on her right at about midbody height, the movement indicating a combination of sorts rather than print identification, and then, when the wall slid aside to make a doorway, walked on through. She knew well enough that I was behind her, but still couldn’t be bothered with acknowledging the fact.
The other side of the doorway brought a considerable change in my surroundings, all of it plush and luxurious. The resilient floor changed to thick carpeting, the walls now shimmered with tasteful, shifting color, works of art hung in the midst of the shimmering, and starbursts lit the tessellated ceiling with purely decorative light. True daylight came in from the window wall on the right that was designed to match the ceiling, but most of its squares were closed to top-of-head height. I would have enjoyed opening one of the large squares and looking out, but my guide was moving off to the left, toward a door of gently glowing red. To the right of that door and about thirty feet away was a second door of pink, but the glow of that one had been turned off. In common usage that meant the red door was closed on someone who was in and available to visitors, but whoever belonged to the pink door was gone off somewhere. It would have taken a lot of really deep thought to figure out who belonged to the door, but the woman I followed didn’t give me the two or three seconds necessary for consideration of the matter. She walked to the red door, stroked her hand through the air in front of it, then stepped forward to enter the room beyond.
“Director Gearing, I have the newest one,” she began with a sniff of distaste, standing a few steps into the room with her hand on the oblong extrusion of the door dial. “She’s really quite impossible, and should be sent to the main complex immediately for strict reorientation. She actually had the nerve to insult me!”
“Now, now, Resson, you know our guests are upset when they first get here,” a man’s voice came, and I stepped past the woman to see him where he was just rising from behind a large, ornate desk that held nothing whatsoever. Even the woman I’d followed was taller than he, and she and I together might have made up most of his weight. He wore a conservative, well-tailored leisure suit of red with hints of gray, and despite the air conditioning of the room his round, pudgy face was sweating. It was also wearing a look of upper-class condescension, the superiority in his dark eyes turning his smooth smile into an outright lie. His brown hair was thinning quite a bit, but that didn’t stop him from brushing at it with a swollen hand as he came to a stop beside the desk to stare at me.