Capitol

SECOND CHANCE

It is the blight man was born for,

It is Margaret you mourn for.

-- Gerard Manley Hopkins

By the age of seven Batta was thoroughly trapped, though she scarcely recognized it until she was twenty-two. The bars were so fragile that to most other people they would not have existed at all:

A father, crippled in a freak tube accident and pensioned off by the government months before Batta was born.

A mother, whose heart was gold but whose mind was unable to concentrate meaningfully for more than three minutes at a time.

And brothers and sisters who, in the chaos and depression of the mindless, will-less home, might have come unstuck from the fabric of adjusted society had not Batta decided (without deciding) that she would be mother and father to her siblings, her parents, and herself.

Many another person would have rebelled at having to come home directly after school, with never an opportunity to meet with friends and do the mad things through the endless corridors of Capitol that occupied the time of most adolescents of the middle class. Batta merely returned from school and did homework, fixed dinner, talked to mother (or rather, listened), helped the other children with their problems, and braved the den where father hid from the world, pretending that he had legs or that, lacking them, he had not diminished in worth. ("I fathered five damned children, didn't I?" he insisted from time to time.)

But all was not bleak. Batta loved studying, was, in fact, not far from being a genius-- and she indulged herself enough to go to college, largely because she got a scholarship and her mother believed in taking advantage of every free thing that came.

Aqd in college there was this one young man.

He was not far from being a genius, too-- from the other side. Batta had never known anyone like him (she didn't realize that she had hardly known anyone at all) but a crazy friendship grew up that ranged from gift-wrapped presents of dissected thwands from Basic Zoology to hours of silence together, studying for examinations.

No held hands. No attempted kisses. No fumbling experimentation in the dark. Batta was unsure of what it was like and whether she would want it (she always imagined her mother making love to a legless man), while she wondered if Abner Doon ever thought of sex at all.

And then college ended, degrees were granted-- hers in physics, his in government service-- and they stopped seeing each other and the months went by and she was twenty-two and it suddenly occurred to her that she was trapped.

"Where are you going? You're through with college, you don't have to go to class anymore, do you?" her mother asked plaintively.

"I thought I'd take a walk," Batta answered.

"But Batta, your father needs you. You know he's only happy when you're here."

Which was true. And Batta spent more and mcne hours inside the three-room flat until one day, almost a year after graduation, a buzzer.

"Abner," she said, more in surprise than in delight. She had almost forgotten him. Indeed, she had almost forgotten that she had a college education.

"Batta. I haven't seen you. I wanted to."

"Well," she said, turning around for him to see her but knowing she looked terrible even as she did it, "here I am."

"You look like hell."

"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.

"Batta, I'm doing embroidery, they do it with real cotton in the rich houses but there's no way we could afford that, of course, on your father's pension, but see what a lovely flower I'm making-- or is it a bee? Heaven knows, I've never seen either, but don't you see what a lovely flower it is? Thank you, dear, it's a lovely flower, isn't it? They do it with real cotton in the rich houses, you know, but we could never afford that on your father's pension, could we? So this is a synthetic. It's called embroidery, will you look at the lovely bee I'm making? Isn't it lovely? Thank you, Batta dear, you have such a wonderful way of making me feel just lovely. I'm doing embroidery, you know. Oh, dear, I think your father's calling. I must go to him-- oh, will you? Thank you. I'll just sit here and embroider, if you don't mind."

And in the bedroom, stolid silence. A groan of pain. The legs starting normally at the hip and then suddenly, abruptly, ending (not two centimeters from the crotch) in a steep cliff of sheets and blankets that fell away and left the bed flat and smooth and unslept-in. "Do you remember?" he grunts as she turns the pillow and brings him his pills, "do you remember when Darff was three he came in and said, 'Daddy, you should have my bed and I should have yours, because you're as little as I am.' Damnfool kid, and I picked him up and gave him a hug and wanted to strangle the little bastard."

"I didn't remember."

"Science has done everything else, but they can't figure out how to heal man when he's lost his hams, lost his legs, lost every damn nerve. But one, thank heaven, but one."

She loathed bathing him. The tube had caught him slantwise in the mouth of the tubeway. If he'd been turned around it would have ripped out his abdomen and killed him on the spot. As it was, he had lost his buttocks to the bone, his intestines were a mess, he had no bowel control, and his legs were a fragment of bone. "But they left me enough," he so proudly pointed out, "to father children."

And so it went endlessly day after day and Batta refused to remember Abner Doon, refused to admit that she had once had a chance to get away from these people (if only) and live her own life (if only) and be happy for a while (if only I hadn't-- no, no, can't think that way).

Then mother decided to make a salad while Batta was away shopping and cut her wrist with the knife and apparently forgot that the emergency call button was only a few meters away because she had bled to death before Batta could get home, a look of surprise frozen on her face.

Batta was twenty-nine.

And after a while father began making hints about how a man's sexual drive doesn't diminish with nonuse, but only increases. She ignored him with gritted teeth until he, too, died one night and the doctor said it had only been a matter of time, the accident had messed him up so badly, and in fact if he hadn't had such excellent care he wouldn't have lasted this long. You should be proud of yourself, girl.

Age thirty.

She sat in the living room of the apartment that she alone controlled. Her father's pension would continue-- the government was kind to victims of chance in the transportation system. She kept staring at the door and wondering why in the world she had longed to get away. After all, what was them to do outside?

The walls closed in on her. The flat bed in her parents' room looked just as it had when father lay there all day, at least from where his legs would be on down. But when she rolled up blankets to look like legs and stretched them under the sheets n the bed, putting legs where she had never see legs before, it occurred to her that she had lost her mind.

She packed her few belongings (everything else belonged to them and they were dead) and left the apartment and went to the nearest colony office because she couldn't think of anything better to do with the rest of her disastrous life than to go off to a colony and work until she died.

"Name?" asked the man behind the counter.

"Batta Heddis."

"This is a wonderful step you've decided to take, Miss Heddis-- single, yes? --because these colonies are the empire's newest way of fighting and winning the war. Only peacefully, you understand. Heddis, did you say? Come this way, please.

"Heddis, did you say?"

Why had he looked so surprised? And so excited (or was it alarmed?)

She followed him to a room a corridor away, a plush, convenient room with only the one door. A guard stood outside it, and she thought with terror that something was wrong, that Mother's Little Boys were going to accuse her of something, and she was innocent but how can you ever prove innocence to people already convinced of their own infallibility?

The wait was interminable-- two hours-- and she was reduced to a wreck by the time the door opened. Reduced to a wreck, that is, by her own perceptions. To an impartial observer coming in the door she was utterly calm-- she had learned to exude calm no matter what the stress years before.

But it was not an impartial observer who walked in the door. It was Abner Doon.

"Hello, Batta," he said.

"My God," she answered, "my dear sweet God, do I have to be punished like this?"

His face went tense somehow, and he looked at her carefully. ""What have they done to you, lady?"

"Nothing. Let me out of here."

"I want to talk to you."

"We forgot it years ago! I forgot it! Now don't remind me!"

He stood by the door, and it was obvious that he was horrified and fascinated-- horrified because as she spoke so passionately her voice remained flat and calm, her body remained erect, there was no hint that she was in any kind of turmoil; fascinated because the body was still Batta, still the woman he had loved and had been willing to share his dream with not that many years before, and yet she was a complete stranger to him now.

"I've been on somec for several years," he said. "This is my first waking. I had them all warned-- a code was to be set off when your name came upfor colonization."

"What made you think it would?"

"Your parents had to die sometime. And when they did, I knew you'd have nowhere to go. People with nowhere to go, go to the colonies. It's politer than suicide."

"Leave me alone, please. Can't you have a little forgiveness for my mistake?"

He looked eager. "Did you call it a mistake? Do you regret it?"

"Yes!" she said, and now her voice raised in pitch, and she actually looked agitated.

"Then, by heaven, let's undo it!"

She looked at him with contempt. "Undo it! It can't be undone! I'm a monster now, Mr. Doon, not a girl anymore, a robot that performs services for revolting people without complaint, not a woman who can respond to anything the way you wanted me to. Nothing can be undone."

And then he reached into his pocket and held out a tape.

"You can go under somec right now and let the drug wipe out all your memories. Then I'll play this back into your mind, and you'll wake up believing that you did not decide to go back to your parents. That you decided to stay with me in the first place. You will be unchanged. The last few years will be erased."

She sat, uncomprehending for a few moments. Then, hoarsely, huskily, she said. "Yes. Yes. Hurry." And he led her to a tape-and-tap where they taped her brain and put her under somec and her mind washed away in the drug.

"Batta," a voice said softly, and Batta awoke, naked and sweating on a table in a strange place. But the face and the voice were not strange.

"Ab," she said.

"It's been five years," he said. "Your parents both passed away. From natural causes. They weren't unhappy. You made the right choice."

She was conscious of being naked, and the eternal virgin in her made her flush with embarrassment. But he touched her (and the memory of the night they first almost made love was still fresh-- it had been only a few hours ago-- and she was already aroused, already ready) and she was no longer embarrassed.

They went to his apartment, and made love gloriously, and they were blissfully happy for days until she finally admitted what was gnawing at the back of her mind.

"Ab. Ab, I have dreams about them."

"Who?"

"Mother and father. You've told me it's been years, and I know that. But it still feels like yesterday to me, and I feel terrible for having left them alone."

"You'll get over it."

But she did not get over it. She began to think of them more and more, guilt gnawing at her, tearing at her dreams, stabbing like a knife when she made love with Abner Doon, destroying her as she did all the things that she had wished, since she was a child, she could do.

"Oh, Ab," she wept one night-- only six nights since waking-- "Ab, I'd do anything, anything to undo this!"

He stopped moving, just froze. "Do you mean that?"

"No, no, Abner, you know I love you. I've loved you ever since we met, all my life, even before I knew you existed I loved you, don't you know that? But I hate myself! I feel like a coward, like a traitor for having left my family. They needed me. I know it, and I know they were miserable when I left them."

"They were perfectly happy. They never noticed you were gone."

"That's a lie."

"Batta, please forget them."

"I can't. Why couldn't I have done the right thing?"

"And what was that?" He looked afraid. Why is he afraid?

"To stay with them. They only lived a few years. If I'd stayed with them, if I'd helped them through the last few years, then Ab, I could face myself. Even if they were miserable years, I'd feel like a decent person."

"Then feel like a decent person. Because you did stay with them."

And he explained it to her. Everything.

She lay silently on the bed, staring at the ceiling.

"Then this is a fraud, isn't it? Secretly, truly, I'm a miserable bitch of an old maid who rotted away in her parents' house until they had the courtesy to die, a woman without the guts to commit suicide--"

"Absurd--"

"Who was only saved from her fate by a man who contrived to play God."

"Batta, you have the best of both worlds. You did stay with your parents. You did the right thing. But you can go on with your life now without having the memories of what they did to you, without having to become what you became."

"And was I so horrible?"

He thought of lying to her, but decided against it. "Batta, when I saw you in that room in the colonization office, I nearly cried. You looked dead."

She reached over and stroked his cheek, his shoulder. "You saved me from the penalty of my own mistake."

"If you want to look at it that way."

"But there's a contradiction here. Let's be logical. Let's call the woman who decided to stay with her parents Batta A. Batta A actually stayed and went crazy, like you said, and she chose to go off to the colonies and keep her madness to herself."

"But it didn't happen that way--"

"No, listen," Batta insisted, quietly, intensely, and he listened. "Batta B, however, decided not to go back to her parents. She stayed with Abner Doon and tried to be happy, but her conscience tore at her and drove her mad."

"But it didn't happen that way--"

"No, Ab, you don't. You don't understand. Understand at all." Her voice cracked. "This woman lying on the bed beside you-- this is Batta B. This is the woman who turned away from her parents and didn't fulfil her commitment--"

"Dammit, Batta, listen to reason--"

"I have no memory of helping them. They suddenly-- end. I walked out on them--"

"No you didn't!"

"In my own mind I did, Ab, and that's where I have to live! You tell me I helped them but I can't remember it and so it isn't true! That choice-- that was the choice that the real Batta made, staying with them. And so the real Batta was shaped by that experience. The real Batta suffered through those years, even if they were awful."

"Batta, they were worse than awful! They destroyed you!"

"But it was me they destroyed! Me! The Batta who chooses to do what she believes she ought to!"

"What is this, the old-time religion? You have a chance to be spared the consequences of your own suicidal sense of right and wrong! You have a chance to be happy, dammit! What difference does it make which Batta is which? I love you, and you love me, lady, and that's the truth, too!"

"But Ab, how can I be anything but what I am?"

"Listen. You agreed. Instantly. You agreed to let me erase those years, to wake you up and have you live with me as if that agony had never happened. It was voluntary!"

She didn't answer. Only asked, "Did they tape me when they put me under somec? Did they record the way I really am?"

"Yes," he said, knowing what was coming.

"Then put me under again and wake me up with that tape. Send me to a colony."

He stared at her. He got up from the bed and stared at her incredulously and laughed. "Do you realize what you're saying? You're saying, please take me out of heaven, God, and send me to hell."

"I know it," she said, and she began trembling.

"You're insane. This is insane, Batta. Do you know what I've risked, what I've gone through to bring you here? I've broken every law concerning the use of somec that there is--"

"You rule the world, don't you?"

Was she sneering?

"I pull all the strings, but if I make a mistake I could fall anytime. I've deliberately made mistakes for you--"

"And so I owe you something. But what about me? Don't I owe me?"

He was exasperated. He hit the wall with his hand. "Of course you do! You owe yourself a life with a man who loves you more than he loves his life's work! You owe yourself a chance to be pampered, to be coddled, to be cared for--"

"I owe me myself." And she trembled more and more. "Ab. I haven't. I haven't been happy."

Silence.

"Ab, please believe me, because this is the hardest thing I've had to say. Since the moment I woke up, something was wrong. Something was terribly, terribly wrong. I had made the wrong choice. I hadn't gone back to my parents. I have felt wrong. Everything has been colored by that. It's wrong. I wouldn't choose to live with you, and so everything about it is wrong!" She spoke softly, but her voice was intense.

"I would not be here," she said.

"You are here."

"I can't live a lie. I can't live with the contradiction. I must live my own life, bitter or not. Every moment I stay here is pain. It couldn't be worse. Nothing I suffered in my real life could be worse than the agony of living falsely. I must have the memory of having done what I knew was right. Without that memory, I can't keep my sanity. I've been feeling it slip away. Ab--"

And he held her closely, felt her tremble in his arms. "Whatever you want," he whispered. "I didn't know. I thought the somec could-- make things over."

"It can't stop me from being who I--"

"Who you are, I know that, I know it now. But Batta, don't you realize-- if I use that other tape, you won't remember this, you won't remember these days we had together--"

And she began to sob. And he thought of something else.

"You'll-- the last thing you'll remember is my having told you I could erase all the pain. And you saying yes, yes, do it, erase it-- and then you'll wake up with those memories and you'll think that I lied."

She shook her head.

"No," he said. "That's what you'll believe. You'll hate me for having promised you happiness and then not giving it to you. You won't remember this."

"I can't help it," she said, and they held each other and wept together and comforted each other and made love one last time and then he took her to the tape-and-tap where the past was washed away and a crueler life would be restored to her.

"What, is she a criminal?" asked the attendant as Abner Doon substituted the tapes-- for only criminals had their minds wiped and an old tape used to erase all memory of the crime.

"Yes," said Doon, to keep things simple. And so her body was enclosed in the coffin that would satisfy her few needs as her body slowed down to a crawl through the years until he awakened her.

She would awaken on a colony. But one of my choosing, Abner vowed. A kind one, where she might have a chance of making something of her life. And who knows? Maybe hating me will make it all easier for her to bear.

Easier for her. But what about me?

I will not, he decided, spend any more of myself on her. I will close her from my mind. I will-- I will forgetf?

Nonsense.

I will merely devote my life to fulfilling other, older, colder dreams.