What mattered her needs, or wants? What mattered his?
Needs and wants were to be defined by others, not those with them, not those suffering from them, not those exalted by them, and defined in such ways as to obtain political goals frustrative of nature and biology. That much was clear from the politics of a thousand years. Certainly reason, as properly conditioned, the term shifting its meaning with the requirements of various establishments and ideologies, should take precedence over instinct, over blood, over need. What did fulfillment, satisfaction, the summons to heroism, the call to greatness have to compare with conventionalized proprieties, invented, and inculcated by the weak, the sickly, the hating, the envying, the frustrated, the resentful, the petty, and pallid, that they might remake the world in their own image? Surely the lie must be substituted for the truth, the illusion for the reality, thought Brenner, else it will not be a good world for the small, the petty, the weak, the hating, the frustrated, the resentful. Was that not clear? And surely that is the way we should pretend the world is, in order that such entities will be pleased, that they will not be alarmed, and that we shall not be denounced. How shrill are those shrieks, how frenzied and hysterical, like the squeaks of bats, fluttering about, blinking, disturbed in their caves, daring to go out only at night. Yet, thought Brenner, for those who do not fear the sun, and its light, there is much to be said for clear skies and bright mornings.
But then Brenner turned about, agonized. He seized the sheet and thrust it quickly up, muchly covering the woman, tucking it even about her neck. He then, angrily, again, turned away.
How marvelously successful are conditioning programs, thought Brenner, even in his agony pausing to admire the crime, its subtlety, its insidiousness, its sophistication, its effectiveness, that had been committed against him. Who can bind a person better than himself, and in his own name? Who can watch him more closely, and punish him more terribly, than himself? And how few individuals can transcend these programs? How few even understand what has been done to them? How few understand more than the misery, the frustration, and pain? Do not love the bats. Do not attempt to lead them from their cave. Do not tell them of the sun, and of bright mornings. They will only howl and shriek, and, as they can, lacerate you with their tiny, foul teeth.
He heard a sob from the bed.
He turned about, startled. “Do not weep,” he said.
She lay on the bed, under the sheet, red-eyed, staring up at the ceiling.
He approached her, and she turned her head away. There was the fresh path, narrow and wet, reflecting light, of a tear’s descent on her left cheek.
“I do not understand you,” she said.
Brenner was silent. He did not suppose he was so different from other men, at least those of the home world.
“Do you like the way you are?” she asked.
Brenner would not reply to this question.
“I have met men other than you,” she said. “You need not be as you are.”
“I do not think I am so different from other men,” said Brenner, “at least those of the home world.”
“Your friend does not seem like you,” she said.
“He has been on other worlds,” said Brenner.
“It is true,” she said, “that you remind me of many of the putative males I met, I do not say “men,” on the home world.”
“I have striven to be a true person,” Brenner admitted.
“I had hoped you might prove to be a man,” she said.
“I am not an uncivilized brute,” he said.
“That is true,” she said.
“Doubtless you would prefer a rough, callous, insensitive beast,” he said, “a tyrant who would make demands upon you, and treat you as a thing.”
“A thing of beauty,” she said, “whom he will have serve him according to his dictates.”
“Do not joke,” said Brenner.
“What you do not understand,” she said, “is that there is no ultimate incompatibility between refinement and the beast, nor between learning and power, that one need not languish that the other may thrive, that it is possible to be both cultivated and strong, sensitive and forceful, intelligent and strict. Civilization need not imply weakness. Civilization need not be rejected. It, rather, can be the setting in which nature finds its grandest fulfillment. There is no ultimate antitheticality between the poem and the whip,