Gateway To Xanadu (22 page)

His breath was coming the least bit faster and his eyes had dropped to belt level, and all I could do for a minute was sit ‘here- and stare at him. It’s been contended that most men, no matter how polite and easy to get along with they were normally, deep-down inside enjoyed the thought of taking women by force.

Quite a lot of Exotic Rooms experiences were based on that contention, and very few people saw anything wrong in it. As long as a man didn’t go around exercising his preference with women who wanted no part of the deal, no one had the right to tell him his preferences were wrong. From my own experiences with Val I knew he’d been conditioned against using force, but his basic nature and the way he’d begun acting with me should have kept him from being as bothered as he obviously was. I was clearly missing something, but I didn’t know how to get at it.

“I can see there was something involved in that that you didn’t like,” I said slowly, trying not to push too hard. “When you and the girl were on the desert world, did you hurt her?”

“No,” he answered with a faint headshake, looking up at me again. “I only raped her. I wanted to rape her and it felt good. But it wasn’t me doing it, it was that stranger, and everyone said he was doing the right thing. But then we came back.”

His gaze flickered at that, at the thought of coming back, and that was the help I needed.

“And once you came back it was you,” I said with as much understanding in my voice as I could manage. “But you didn’t hurt her then, did you?”

“Of course I did,” he said with what I swear was the ghost of indignation in his voice. “I looked at her where she lay next to me on the carpeting and she shook her head, trying to beg me not to do anything to her. I knew she didn’t want to be taken but I did it anyway, and what’s more, I enjoyed it. A part of me tried to tell me she didn’t belong to me, but I didn’t listen to that part. It just felt good and right until John and I had finished the lunch we were brought, and then I was able to understand what I really was and how right all those women were not to trust me. That’s when I left John and came back here. If I’d had anywhere else to go, I wouldn’t have come back.”

He was speaking almost matter-of-factly again, the confession behind him, the brutal truth laid out for the universe to see. I cursed under my breath at the way I’d blundered, but how the hell could I have told him everything about the Federation in a handful of days? I’d missed something important and he’d been caught by it-and then I remembered how I’d accused him that morning, which had to have made it worse I got my kit again, refilled the hypo with paneutrol, then gave him the dose and sat back on the chair arm, waiting for it to take effect. When his eyes started blinking and he took a deep breath, I knew it was time.

“You should be just about clear now,” I said, drawing a sharper gaze than I’d been getting up till then.

“Is all the fog cleaned out, or do you need another couple of minutes?”

“What have you been giving me?” he asked with definite annoyance, running a hand through his hair as he shifted an inch or so away from me. “And get back to your own chair, I don’t like being crowded.”

“Tough,” I answered without the least compassion, ready for the stare that quickly turned in my direction. “Why should I worry about how comfortable a heartless rapist is? And that is what you are, isn’t it?”

“You don’t sound very convinced,” he said, an odd flicker coming to those eyes. “Are you waiting to be grabbed and jumped before you’ll believe it?”

“I’m waiting to explain to you about Exotic Rooms drugs,” I came back flatly. “Are you ready to listen with an open mind, or do I need to get another glass of water first?”

His eyes went briefly startled as he remembered our time together on the ship, and then he lost some of the intensity he’d been building toward again.

“If you’re trying to say you know something I don’t, you won’t have to twist my arm to make me listen,”

he said, not quite up to finding humor in the situation. “I’d like to hear that the whole thing was just a bad dream, but I know it wasn’t. ”

“Do you think you can get it through your thick head that you don’t know one damned thing?” I asked, not bothering to hide my impatience. “The truth of the matter is that it was a dream, every bit of it including the time you woke up back in the room. That’s part of what the drugs are supposed to do when you’re escorted: carrying the dream over into the real world for a while.”

“I don’t understand,” he said, looking horribly confused. “I know I was awake when we got back to that room, so how could it still have been a dream? Dreams stop when you wake up. ”

“Not if they’re being helped along by drugs, they don’t,” I said “The four of you started out ‘drinking’

together, something that tasted strange. That was the drug, of course, the one that let you all enter the experience together. Then they ended the experience to make it carry over into reality, and let your escort earn her pay. Experiences always carry over anyway, but when there’s no escort involved they add some sort of sleepy stuff, to cut you down in time to keep r things from getting out of hand with anyone who might be waiting for you in your room. You’ll never go after a stranger because of an Exotic Rooms experience, but if you’re traveling with someone you could have a problem. Or she could. The point I’m trying to make is that your great revelation t’warn’t no such thing. The girl cringed back from you because of the experience carry-over and because it’s her job; you ignored her pretend terror because of the drug; once you negated the after-effects a little with food, you came back to yourself enough to see what you’d ‘ done with critical eyes, but weren’t back far enough to understand it was the drug rather than you. if you didn’t spend so much time feeling guilty about the chicken reactions of other people, you never would have come apart over a stupid little experience. And I was awfully glad to hear that you’d already eaten. Now how about being a good little rapist and ordering something for me before I fall over from starvation.”

I got up from the arm of the chair and started to take the kit back to my bedroom, but I didn’t get more than three steps before a big hand was on my arm, stopping me. I didn’t know what he wanted this time, but he didn’t leave me in the dark long.

“You’re really angry,” he said, and although he still sounded confused, he also sounded calm and back in control. “Why are you so angry with me?”

“I’m not angry at you,” I said, keeping my eyes on the door to my bedroom. “As a matter of fact, it has nothing to do with you. Are you going to order lunch for me or not?”

“It has to have something to do with me,” he persisted, ignoring the question I’d asked. “You weren’t angry, when we first started talking, and you weren’t angry when you were questioning me. I couldn’t keep from answering your questions, but nothing stopped me from noticing things. It seemed to start when you brought me out of that muddled sea of confusion and began explaining the facts of life. If you aren’t angry at me, what are you angry at?”

“I told you it was nothing!” I snapped, pulling my arm out of his grip. “We’ve got an assignment to see to, and it’s about time we started seeing to it. I’ve got things to do and so do you, so . . . ”

“No,” he interrupted very quietly, and then his hand was on my arm again, this time pulling me around to face him. I didn’t want to face him and tried to pull away again, but would have had to use a kick to get both of his hands unpeeled from where they held me. For some stupid reason I felt like trembling, and I had no interest at all in looking up at him.

“You’re not by any chance-angry at yourself?” he asked with that same damned calm, probably looking down at me. “You can’t think that what happened to me was your fault? Diana; you weren’t even there. ”

“I noticed that, too,” I answered, looking at the fourth button of his pretty yellow shirt. “If I hadn’t been so clever about getting out of the way, though, I would have been. And would have been around to explain about how Exotic Rooms work, the way I should have before this. Considering where we’re going you should have been told all about Exotic Rooms, but I wasn’t bright enough to think of it. It just goes to show you what happens when you rely on a partner to watch your back: you end up getting it in the neck. If you’d prefer forgetting about the lunch, I’ll understand.”

For what seemed like the fiftieth time I tried turning away from him, but he still wasn’t having any. His breath came out in a long, deep sigh, and then he pulled me up against him so that he could put his arms around me.

“I really do wish you would learn to apologize like other people,” he said, and damned if there wasn’t a faint chuckle in his voice. “It would make life so much easier for both of us. If you don’t apologize to me for something that isn’t your fault, how can I play the big-hearted hero and forgive you?”

“Like hell it wasn’t my fault,” I muttered into his chest, raising my left hand to toy with one of his buttons. “If you’d known what to expect from the experience, it wouldn’t have strung you out like that.

I’m the one who’s supposed to be making sure you don’t get caught, so what do I do when I’m really needed? I take a nap.”

“Diana, you’re not responsible for my basic nature, or the way I was raised, or the-chicken way people react to me,” he disagreed without the chuckle, one hand stroking my hair. “I was taught to treat women gently and never use my size and strength to force them into anything they didn’t want to do, even if the growling hunger inside me had to go unfed. I never saw anything wrong in going along with that and always did go along with it, even though I felt hurt and somehow disgruntled when women first began acting as if they didn’t believe I would keep my word. I was very young, then, and very touchy about my

‘honor,’ but as the years went by I couldn’t help wondering if all those women knew something about me that I didn’t know myself. The ones who didn’t shy away told me that I was very different from other men they’d tried, but they never said different in what way. When I found myself raping a woman and actually enjoying it, I felt as though I’d betrayed everything I believed in, everything I’d ever been taught, proving how right all those women were not to trust me. All the explanations in the world wouldn’t have prepared me for facing something like that while still drugged, so why shouldn’t you have taken a nap instead of wasting oceans of breath? The explanation couldn’t have done me any good until I was free of the drug and could think clearly again.”

“Do you plan on making a career out of excusing the lousy things I do to you?” I asked, finally looking up at him. “You get mad at the jokes, but the seriously damaging things you just laugh off. Are you a card-carrying masochist, or just into amateur pain? And if that emotional upheaval was so inevitable that a warning wouldn’t have done anything to head it off, why didn’t it happen when you raped me?”

“It didn’t happen because I didn’t rape you,” he said with a grin, pushing some hair back from my face.

“You were so ready for me that I would have been blind to miss it, and you gave me your permission a long time ago. If it had been any other woman that off-balance I wouldn’t have been able to go against my up-bringing by taking advantage of her, but you’re not like other women. You’re so different that everyday rules don’t apply to you, mine or anyone else’s, and I knew that once I got around the mad you were feeling you would respond to me the way you always do. You did respond to me, and so strongly that you almost overwhelmed me, so if there was any rape involved, I wasn’t the one guilty of it. Isn’t forcing yourself on someone rape?”

“But I didn’t!” I protested, knowing he was teasing me, but finding his argument too close to the reason I hadn’t wanted to buy that outfit in the first place. “I didn’t deliberately put it on to force you into anything! It just-happened.”

“Just like that,” he said with another nod that rejected the whole idea. “You didn’t once glance in the mirror after getting dressed, so you had no idea what you looked like.

And since you know you’re not built very well, you didn’t have to spend any time wondering how you would affect everyone. I guess you’re right about it just happening. I’ll order up some lunch for you now.”

He turned away from me and headed for the phone, leaving me standing there like a dummy with nothing to say. My mind fluttered around for a minute trying to find a counter to his contention that didn’t seem to exist, and then it found something else that gave me a small jolt. I knew Val wasn’t seriously insisting that I’d raped him, and he knew I knew it. The whole point to the silliness had been to make me forget how I’d been feeling, to give me something else to think about besides what my negligence had made him go through. If he’d known what to expect he could have taken it in stride, and that was the bottom line even if he refused to admit it. I watched him using the phone with only a trace of his original awkwardness, then turned away to reclaim the chair I’d been using. I was taking him into a dangerous situation because I had no choice in the matter, but there was something I did have a choice about. Val could either be my active partner or simply along for the ride, and if he was just along for the ride the situation would not be nearly so dangerous for him. Since I owed him more than one I would handle it that way, keeping him out of trouble even if it meant more work for me. For someone who was just visiting he’d been hurt enough, and as he turned off the phone I promised myself that it would not happen again.

“Stop fidgeting,” Val said to me in a low voice as we moved into the docking area. “You’re supposed to be seventeen, not seven.”

“It’s too bad you didn’t remember that when you were buying these clothes,” I almost snarled, keeping my voice as low as his only with an effort. “You had no right forcing me into wearing them.”

“I didn’t buy them so you could leave them behind,” he came back, able to keep the grin off his face but not out of his eyes. “You look just the way we agreed you should, so forget about it.”

“Forget about it,” I muttered, then shut up before I started a real fight with him. We’d spent the last few hours with me dredging up everything I could remember hearing about Xanadu and the Pleasure Sphere, during which time my new clothes had been delivered. We both ignored them until business was taken care of, but then Val had started getting stubborn about seeing how wrong the clothes were. He refused to let me try finding something among my own things to use instead of the new stuff, and there was no arguing with that babysitting service threat. The idea of leaving me behind really appealed to him, and the more he thought about it, the more he liked it. I couldn’t afford to be left behind, not with that service having the help of the Station computer in keeping their charges where they belonged; it would take me too long to get around the surveillance and follow him down. That meant I had to do things his way, even if it made me feel like a prize fool.