Dancers in the Afterglow (14 page)

Everything had happened as they'd been conditioned to expect it, this time, down to the orange juice and candies. They didn't know that this time the orange juice contained a chemical used in human psychotherapy. It broke down inhibitions while it also made them open to suggestion.

Ponder, smiled again, noting their expressions that showed it had taken effect. The dosages were correct; they would be loose and malleable, but they would remember everything clearly. It would have been easy to convert them with such drugs, but chemical doings could be undone. He was after a deeper change.

"Yuri Alban," he called out. Yuri looked at him and echoed his smile.

"Stand up, Yuri," he suggested, and the man did.

"Get up here on the stage, stand on the raised platform, and face the people."

Yuri complied, wondering all the while why he was doing so.

"Yuri," Ponder began, "you are the leader of these people. You are their father, their brother, their protector. Now you must tell them about yourself, your
inner
self. Tell us your life, Yuri Alban."

The gentle prodding and flattery opened up a floodgate inside him. He
wanted
to tell them,
wanted
to get it all out

"I was born on Acheron," he began. "My parents were Traditionalists. A standard religious marriage. I was the only child they were allowed, and they raised me with kindness, although they spoiled me rotten. They were also overprotective. I was a little adult, never a child. I associated mostly with adults instead of with people my own age. I was never much to look at, and I was painfully shy around girls, so I never had much experience there, either. It was a kind upbringing, but a lonely one. No dancing, no partying, no moonlight drives, nothing like that

"So I retreated into books and films and televisor material. I lived there, not just when I used them, but the rest of the time, too. My fantasy life became more real than my real life, even as I continued to do well scholastically. I imagined myself a big writer or producer, doing things everyone would read or see, hoping that if I got to be rich and famous people would look up to me, admire me, love me."

He paused for breath and then continued.

"And I did it, too! A big-time writer. Got invited to all the right parties, met all the right people, even met and fell in love with a beautiful model."

He paused again, getting a faraway, dreamy look more from the memory than the drug.

"Fawn was my fantasy. She was beautiful, and she was with
me.
I
could see the looks of envy as we went places, basked in her glow as she basked in my fame and fortune. Everybody envied me. They used to come to me with their problems. Some of them were pretty bad, too. I stopped several suicides, helped out some good people with money, went out of my way to take them through bad emotional times. I really
cared
about them, and I don't know how many I helped."

His face clouded. "Then one day we—Fawn and me—went down to the 'visor studio to check on a script I'd done, and she met Hel Quaeder. He was tall and handsome and athletic, the perfect leading-man type, and he charmed her right in front of me. She left me for him a week later. A lousy
week
after five years!"

He started crying, and it was a few moments before he could stop.

"I fell into complete despair. I continued the act, the routine." He went on, voice quavering, "But it was no good. I just couldn't stand the parties with all those people making it while I just stood there, feeling alone.

"So I went to my friends, the people I'd helped through
their
bad times. I was despondent, I needed help, advice, understanding,
something,
as
they once had needed it from me. And what happened? Friend after friend was too busy, too cold, or downright nasty and sarcastic. Not one was willing to help me, even listen to me, sympathize with me! For the first time in my life I realized how truly
alone
I was."

He broke down again. Many in the group were quietly weeping with him.

"Well, I tried to adjust," he continued, wiping away tears he'd never before been able to shed. "I'd keep going, keep working, but it just didn't work out. Every time I tried for any kind of emotional human contact, twenty bastards would zero in on her and I'd be alone again. Finally, I just couldn't take it anymore."

He looked out at his audience, focused on one of them.

"I came to Ondine because it was a beautiful place, a lonely place, a place I could die," he said softly. "I came here to end it. The pain was too great. And then along came Azure, there." He nodded to her, and she looked away, a slightly stricken expression on her face.

"She flirted with
me,
not even knowing who I was. We went out on the town, we
shared
a good time, a set of experiences, the ocean, the birds, the sunset and the afterglow. It wasn't just the sex, really—either I was pretty bad from being so rusty or I'd lost the capacity to divorce my mind from my acts—but the fact that she
would
have sex with me, that was important. And even though she's drawn herself apart from me, I can still feel affection for her for giving me a little hope."

Ponder nodded, a serious expression on his face. Azure, he noted, had lowered her head, was holding it in her hands. She was crying.

"Loneliness," the old Machist sighed. "You were half-complete. You shared with others, but they would not share with you. They neither understood you nor wanted to understand you. They saw only the outer shell, the superficiality, not the strong human being inside. Strong, yes, but unable to live without understanding, compassion, sharing. If you hold fast to the man that you are, you will yet join in that sharing, I promise you. You may take your seat."

He turned back to the crowd as Yuri sat back down, head bowed.

"Azure Pontine, take the stage," Ponder commanded. She looked up, tears streaming down her face, "Oh, no! I couldn't!" she protested. "Yes you can," Ponder replied gently, and helped her to the podium.

"I was born," she began, "on Alshustis. It's a dirty little world, a waystop for deepspace freighters. My mother was a prostitute, a good one. She was supposed to be fixed never to have children, but someone or something slipped up and I came out. I don't know why I wasn't aborted; I guess'she just wanted to find out what it was to have a kid.

"Anyway, I looked nothing like her. She was pretty —really pretty. She shared a house with three other prostitutes, one other female and two males, and they were all the family I had.

"They did the best they could with me, I guess, what with business and all. I always had toys, and they put in a 'visor for me, and I grew up there. It wasn't bad, really, but I was so fat and dumpy and acne-ridden that the other kids laughed at me and made fun of me and my mother's job and all. I hated them for it, and kept mostly to myself.

"I came out early. By eleven I'd started growin' these big boobs, and by thirteen I looked eighteen. I thought at first of taking up Mama's business, but I was so ugly and they—the good ones, the high-class ones—were so beautiful that it seemed ridiculous.

"So I went out and tried to find some kind of job. Nobody asked my age, and I sure as hell knew how to flirt and shake the right places, and I wound up as the janitor in a travel agency. Not much of a job, but I was payin' my own way, sort of, and I got to meet lots of different kinds of people and see the promos on all those wonderful, far-off places.

"Well, one day a Lin Corporation man came in to drop some new promos, and I flirted with him, and he was a skinny little man with a goatee and a twitchy face that reminded you of a bird. And we went out, and danced, and talked, and all that, and when it was finished he surprised me by asking what I wanted most. I told him I'd love to see Ondine, and the next day I'm scrubbing the floor at the agency when he comes in
and tells me it's all set, I got a job with Lin. It wasn't glamorous—street cleaning, really, an outdoor version of what I was doin' there—but it was on Ondine of all those promos and posters.

"I took it.

"Well, I got here to Lamarine, and it was
so
beautiful and gaudy and wonderful that I didn't mind the job at all. I got to know the boardwalk people, and I had a different person to conquer every night! It was the only thing I had to meet new people.

"One day, I knew, I'd find my lover, the one who would give me some direction, some purpose, who'd change my life. It was only a matter of trying. And there were some close ones, some ones I really thought were right. That kept me going, kept me encouraged. Until this takeover happened, anyway."

"So you used your body to meet other people, to try and find this perfect union?"

She looked at Ponder, moderately surprised by the question.

"It's all I have," she replied quietly. Ponder sighed. "We think not. We think your low estimate of your own true value and worth has reduced you, in your own mind, to the status of a mere object, a utensil—your body. You think so little of yourself that you turned yourself into a thing. Don't look so guilty! It is all too common, sadly, and all too understandable. Loneliness again," he pointed out to the group. "This time combined with guilt, self-degradation, and, in the bargain, selfishness as well, for never once did she consider the feelings of others, even though it was because she considered herself so low and valueless that it never occurred to her that others might also be in the same predicament yet see her differently, as Yuri did. And
this
is the proud product of human civilization? Loneliness, misery, dejection, rejection, despair?

"Some civilization," he concluded bitterly. "You may sit down, Azure."

He called several others, each with their own sad stories to tell. One couple had been together for twenty-two years, yet found they didn't know each other, that they took each other so much for granted that they hurt each other continually, yet kept their pain to themselves.

Fifteen people had come up by the end of the session; fifteen people bared their souls to the rest. The scars were different, but they were substantial, and there were common points. The man who thought his whole life had ended when his wife and companion of many years, whom he dearly loved, was brutally murdered while walking home from work. The man whose group-marriage mothers treated him like dirt while lavishing attention on his sisters, and who had become an emotionally ravenous homosexual. The woman who'd never been able to relate emotionally to anyone, and, scared of sex, had herself neutered. Surprisingly, for so small a group, there was a man who'd done the same thing. And one sex change, from male to functional female, because she'd been a lonely failure as a man and envied the way women—to her eyes, anyway—seemed to have no trouble getting sex when they wanted it.

When they finally left that evening, Azure looked at Yuri for a moment but could say only, "Oh, God! I'm so sorry!" and run off into the night.

The members of the group spent the night mostly in silence, each thinking his own thoughts.

Exactly on Ponder's schedule.

It was a silent, sullen group that went through its exercises the next day, and for the first time many looked on Ponder's classroom with apprehension. Still, they obeyed the whistle.

They were too well conditioned to do otherwise.

The second session went much like the first.

Moira's kept man, Harber, proved to be a businessman who was fairly well pleased with his own success, enjoying the power and position he'd worked hard to get.

But Ponder pounced on him, asked him how he liked pushing around other people, how he regarded the people below him who actually did the work, and noted his contempt for the working class from which he'd come and to which many of the rest of the group belonged. The old Machist heaped mountains of guilt on the man, and, by doing so, exposed him to the rest of them. His justifications became more and more feeble as he looked into their hard faces, and he finally broke down and cried, actually begging their forgiveness.

This was better than Ponder expected; such people as Harber were usually the toughest to crack, although, once they did, they became the most eager converts of all.

The ninth name called in the third session was Moira Sabila. Many had been waiting for her name, and eyes followed her progress to the stage, noting her rocksteady demeanor. But she had changed radically. Her hair was cut very short, as everyone's now was, and it was turning from auburn to black. The once creamy complexion was now tough and leathery from the outdoors; the exercises were thickening her neck, waist, and legs as well as her arms, and her breasts seemed smaller, more a part of her overall muscular build. She looked more like a lady wrestler than a model.

But the imperious manner was still there, in her stance and in her voice. She clearly felt she had nothing to apologize for, or to fear.

"I was born on Venetoulis, in the Shaffer Cluster," she began, voice composed. "My father was a top fashion model who became a great fashion photographer after he became bored with the modeling life. He decided to have a child; not just any child, though. He had money, and influence.

"Sexually, he'd always been attracted to men. He'd often fantasized himself as a woman, even affected women's manners and clothing. So he paid for the extremely difficult job of cloning a female out of his cells—and for the extra genetic engineering to make that child as physically perfect as it was possible to be.

"Nothing was spared in making me his vision of the perfect woman. Since I came out of the tank physiologically adult, my childhood was mostly that of a standard clone's—special educational devices, special tutors and programs. I was walking in six months, talking in nine, and fluent in two languages by three. I never wanted for anything. Daddy doted on me, gave me everything. I was the center of his world.