Capitol - By Orson Scott Card Page 0,33

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