not the same man now, he was a much more interesting person, an intelligent person with a mind and a will, and while she didn't exactly feel a great flood of love or even sexual desire for him, she still felt enough new respect that his utter lack of desire for her was painful.
Another wound in the same old place, opening all the fragile scabs and scars, and she bled afresh at the shame of being a woman that no man wanted.
"You're not paying attention," said Zdorab.
"Sorry," she said.
He said nothing in reply. She opened her eyes. He was looking at her.
"Nothing," she said, brushing away the tear that clung to her lower eyelashes. "I didn't mean to distract you. Can we start again?"
But he didn't look back down to the Index. "It isn't that I don't desire you, Shedemei."
What, was her heart naked, that he could see right through her pretenses and see into the source of her pain?
"It's that I don't desire any woman."
It took her a moment for the idea to register. Then she laughed. "You're a zhop."
"That's really an old word for the human anus," said Zdorab quietly. "There are those who might be hurt at being called by such a name."
"But no one guessed," she said.
"I have made quite sure that no one would guess," said Zdorab, "and I'm putting my life in your hands telling you."
"Oh, it's not as dramatic as that," she said.
"Two of my friends were killed in Dog Town," he said.
Dog Town was where men who didn't have a woman in Basilica had to live, since it was illegal for an unattached male to live or even stay overnight inside the city walls.
"One was set upon by a mob because they heard a rumor he was a zhop, a peedar. They hung him by the feet from a second-story window, cut off his male organs, and then slashed him to death with knives. The other one was tricked by a man who pretended to be ... one of us. He was arrested, but on the way to prison he had an accident. It was the oddest sort of accident, too. He was trying to escape, and somehow he tripped and in the act of falling, his testicles somehow came off and got jammed down his throat, probably with a broomhandle or the butt of a spear, and he suffocated on them before anybody could come to his aid."
"They do that?"
"Oh, I can understand it perfectly. Basilica was a very difficult place for male humans. We have an innate need to dominate, you see, but in Basilica we had to deal with the fact that we had no control except as we had influence with a woman. The men living outside the walls in Dog Town were, by the very fact they didn't live inside, branded as second-raters, men that women didn't want. There was the constant imputation that Dog Town men weren't real men at all, that they didn't have what it took to please a woman. Their very identity as males was in question. And so their fear and hatred of zhops" - he said the word with scorching contempt - "reached peaks I've never heard of anywhere else."
"These friends of yours ... were they your lovers?"
"The one who was arrested - he had been my lover for several weeks, and he wanted to continue, but I wouldn't let him because if we went on any longer people would begin to suspect what we were. To save our lives I refused to see him again. He went straight from me into the trap. So you see, Nafai and Elemak aren't the only ones who have killed a man."
The pain and grief he was showing seemed deeper than anything Shedemei had ever felt. For the first time she realized how sheltered her scholarly life had been. She had never had such a close connection with someone that she would feel their death this strongly, so long after. If it was long after.
"How long ago?"
"I was twenty. Nine years ago. No, ten. I'm thirty now. I forgot."
"And the other one?"
"A couple of months before I - left the city."
"He was your lover, too?"
"Oh, no - he wasn't like me that way. He had a girl in the city, only she wanted it kept secret so he didn't talk about it - she was in a bad marriage and was marking time till it ended, and so he never spoke about her.