Afterward we talk, very quietly, underneath the bed-clothing, instinctively trying to conceal our voices from the monitors. “You have no plan yet, do you?” she says. “You don’t know exactly what you’re going to do.”
I see no reason to deny her. “Tomorrow night the individual meetings will begin,” I say, “and by that time I will have thought of something. I am considering several alternatives already.”
“It was marvelous the way in which you moved them. These are creatures living without hope. They were far down in the hierarchy, they are so unspeakably limited that they can see nothing but circumstance. Nevertheless, you changed them. They believe now in your plan.”
“I will not fail them.”
“I understand you,” Nala says, touching my ear. “You are a traitor. You betrayed Plotar. You turned him over to the administration.” I try to make protesting sounds but she covers my mouth gently. “No,” she says, “that is all right. I do not hate you. Now you are overtaken by remorse; you feel guilty. Therefore you wish to create your own plan and escape so that you will not think of yourself eternally as a betrayer. That is all right. That is to be expected. I do not care.
“I understand you,” she says again. “I understood you from the moment I first saw you months ago. Do you know that you had sex with me once? Do you remember?”
“Of course,” I mumble.
“No you don’t. You are lying. You remembered nothing; you made quick contacts and were gone. Nothing could touch you, although I tried. But I respected you. I respected the effort you were making. The rest of us had given up, but you were still trying to deal with the enclosure. I knew that sometime we would meet again.”
“All right,” I say, shaken by the knowledge that I had possessed her before and not remembered it. “All right.”
“I believe that you can do anything you want to do. You have more—capacity—than the rest of us. The rest of us, even those high in the order, are manipulated, have no initiative, are merely collaborators. But you are something else. You are interesting to me. Tell me your plans.”
“I am evolving them.”
“You are evolving nothing. You do not have the gift of fore-thought. You create as you go along; you had no understanding of what you would actually do in that meeting until you did it. Yet it worked. That is why you are right for the enclosure; because you live only in the present, creating responses as you go along. Without imagination, confined to the enclosure as you are, you can do better than the rest of us.” She begins to fumble with my ear urgently, run her hand across my thighs. “This excites me,” she says. “You excite me. It is perverse but I desire you. I want you for these qualities. I want you again.” I mount her, anxious now to quiet her and to avoid this uncomfortable line of insight but she is insistent; she will not permit me to be perfunctory, and I feel myself once again moving toward her center. It seems impossible that I will be able, once again, to perform with her; my capacities are not limitless but somehow, in the darkness, I am surrounded by a pinwheel of energy, small flashes of fire, and so I do what I must as Nala gathers herself to me groaning, then flings herself away like a damp sheet, sated. “Ah,” she says, “ah, the release of it. Quir. Your name is Quir, is it not? I heard you called that.”
“My name is Quir.”
“You must find us a way to escape, Quir. I came to you equivocally, not wanting to believe, but now I feel I must. You are our last hope. If you can not find a way to escape we will remain in the enclosure forever.”
“I will find a way,” I say. “I am evolving a plan. At this moment the plan is taking shape. I must have time to think. But where are the higher ones in the hierarchy? Why were none of them at the meeting?”
She says nothing and I feel that somehow I have hurt her; then she answers and her tone is not accusing. “There is no way that they would have come,” she says. “They have all become fully the property of the masters. They have the most to lose, you see. They want to believe that we will be free again and when we are they will reclaim their places in the hierarchy. Only those with nothing left to lose can be daring. Except for Plotar. Plotar did not believe them anymore and was willing to risk everything. And now he is dead.”
“How do you know that?”
“I know it,” she says, “I know it. The master of the rituals is dead. Hold me, Quir. Hold me.” And I hold her unspeaking for a long time, feeling the boards and planes of her hard body against mine while I revolve slowly in the bed, looking at the ceiling, and trying to formulate my plan. I feel that there is a tube extending from the ceiling; a black monitor of a funnel seizing my very thoughts to say nothing of what has gone on in this bed, but the monitor is speechless for now and without observation. “For you,” I say, raising a hand toward the monitor, “for you,” and puzzled by what I am saying allow myself to slide into sleep, piece by piece, like a man letting go of a bulkhead in small stages. When I awaken, Nala is gone.