What now?" I asked.
"Just listen: The Sharers have come to the House of their own volition, Mr. Lorca. Most lived and worked on extrakomm worlds toward Glaktik Center before we asked them to work here. The ones who are here accepted the invitation. They came to offer themselves to people much like you."
"Me? Are they misconceived machines?"
"I won't answer that. Let me just say that the variety of services the Sharers offer is wide. As I've told you, a few visitants regard the Sharers as simply a convenient means of satisfying exotically aberrant tastes. For others they're a way back to the larger community. We take whoever comes to us for help, Mr. Lorca, in order that the Sharers not remain idle or the House empty."
"So long as whoever comes has wealth and influence?"
She paused before speaking. "That's true enough. But the matter's out of our hands. I'm an employee of Glaktik Komm, chosen for my empathic abilities. I don't make policy. I don't own title to the House."
"But you are its madam. Its 'wardress,' rather."
"True. For the last twenty-two years. I'm the first and only wardress to have served here, Mr. Lorca, and I love the Sharers. I love their devotion to the fragile mentalities who visit them. Even so, despite the time I've lived among them, I still don't pretend to understand the source of their transcendent concern. That's what I wanted to tell you."
"You think me a 'fragile mentality'?"
"I'm sorry--but you're here, Mr. Lorca, and you certainly aren't fragile of limb, are you?" The Wardress laughed. "I also wanted to ask you to--well, to restrain your crueler impulses when the treatment itself begins."
I stood up and moved away from her. How had I borne her presence for so long?
"Please don't take my request amiss. It's isn't specifically personal. I make it of everyone who comes to the House of Compassionate Sharers. Restraint is an unwritten corollary of the only three rules we have here. Will you hear them?"
I made a noise of compliance.
"First, that you do not leave the session chamber once you've entered it. Second, that you come forth immediately upon my calling."
"And third?"
"That you do not kill the Sharer."
All the myriad disgusts I had been suppressing for seven or eight hours squatted now atop the ladder of my patience, and, rung by painful rung, I stepped them back down. Must a rule be made to prevent a visitant from murdering the partner he had bought? Incredible. The Wardress was perceptibly sweating, her earlobes grotesquely agleam. "Is there a room here for a wealthy and influential client? A private room?"
"Of course," she said. "I'll show you."
It had a full-length mirror. I undressed and stood in front of it. Only during my first "period of adjustment" on Miroste had I spent much time looking at what I had become. Later, back in the Port Iranani Galenshall, Diderits had denied me any sort of reflective surface at all--looking glasses, darkened windows, even metal spoons. The waxen perfection of my features ridiculed those that another Dorian Lorca had possessed before the Haft Paykar Incident. Cosmetic mockery. Faintly corpselike, speciously paradigmatic, I was both more than a man and less. In Wardress Kefa's House the less seemed preeminent. I ran a finger down my inner arm, scrutinizing the track of an intubated vein through which circulated a serum that Diderits called hematocybin: a "low-maintenance" blood substitute, combative of both fatigue and infection, which needs changing only once every six M-months. With a good supply of hematocybin and a plastic recirculator, I change it myself. That night, though, the ridge of my vein, mirrored an arm's length away, was more horror than miracle. Horrified, I closed my eyes.
)
