Capitol - By Orson Scott Card Page 0,31

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