of thing to acquire which expeditions might be launched and wars fought, the sort of thing for which a man might kill, to possess which he might willingly die.
“Kneel!” cried Brenner, leaping to his feet.
Startled, she knelt where she was, on the surface of the bed, on the edge nearest to him. He seized her by the upper arms, and drew her toward him. He saw that she was frightened. Perhaps she had not understood her own marvelousness, and what she might mean to a man! Then, with a cry of rage, he flung her back, to her side, on the bed. He then turned away, facing the wall. His fists were clenched. He would not now look at her. “Remove your silk,” he said. “And begin again.”
In a little while he heard her behind him, from across the room, from the other side of the bed. “I am ready,” she said.
Brenner turned about.
She stood on the other side of the bed, the sheet clutched about her. To the left, on the foot of the bed, discarded, lying in a small, crumpled pile, partly folded over one another, were the silks she had worn, those silks with which, though they had covered much of her, she had been less clothed than adorned. Such, Brenner gathered, was the function of such silks, certainly insofar as they approximated those of slaves.
She regarded him. She trembled a little. Her eyes were wide.
Brenner clenched his fists. He must surely stop this. He must not permit her to express herself as a woman. How demeaning that would be to her, to fulfill herself, to be herself! How wrong to do what honestly, and in reality, shows oneself! Must one not forever keep the self hidden, and if not deny, at least keep, the secret of one’s own being? Must lies forever form the foundation of civilization, he wondered. Can people really be that stupid, he wondered, to believe all they are told? Do the captains, and the kings, and such, believe the people believe them? Can they believe themselves? Is hypocrisy really the price of order? It does not seem so in nature. Is self-deception so necessary, really? Is truth so dreadful, so terrible, he wondered, as to generate its own denial? Would it really, in its light and heat, so obviously pierce and melt, and thus destroy, the carefully wrought crystalline structures of a world, those conventionalized architectures of absurdity, those defenses theoretically constructed to protect us from ourselves? Even if so, perhaps it were not irrational to transcend such accidents of time, to strip away the artificial accretions of ages, to let them subside and drain away into the swamps from whence they derived their pestilential origin. Perhaps it is time for a newer, and more joyful, science, a less eccentric, apter wisdom. Perhaps it is time to recognize that reality is not held in orbit by the conventions, the declarations, the decisions, the pronouncements, or even the needs, of men, but rather that men, and their needs, are held in place, in the very cosmos, even in their most strained and grievous ellipticities, by the nature of reality.
“Sir?” she asked.
She regarded him, questioningly.
He must not permit her to do this!
A wave of resolve, of merciless volcanism, welled up in him momentarily. This thing came from his deepest brain, from the foundations of his existence, antedating conditioning, antedating politics, antedating the capture of fire, the bending of heated wood, the shaping of stone, the insight that a sound might mean, that one could make words.
He pulled the straight-backed chair before him, turning it about, so that its back was between him and the woman, like a fence, like a rail, a wall, and then he sat upon it. He was sweating. He grasped the sides of the back. He closed his eyes. He then opened them. “Begin,” he said, quietly.
She ascended to the surface of the bed, standing upon it.
“Do not cover your head with the sheet,” he said.
“Yes, sir,” she said.
He supposed that sometime he, or others, might wish to hood her and use her, enforcing a decisive anonymity upon her, keeping her a prisoner in the hood, in this fashion perhaps reducing her, in their minds and in her own, to certain basic feminine essentials, but at the moment he did not wish her features to be concealed. He did not wish to lose sight of her lovely face for even a moment. Was it not, in its way, properly understood,