`We’ll handle the worries. You needn’t go back to your bed. Unless you want to.’
`Really?’
`Really truly. I do not believe in burning the horse after the barn has been
stolen.’ (If the first billion little wigglers did not shoot you down, dear, the
next billion will never get close to the target. So enjoy it while you can –
because, if you’re pregnant, we’ll have a whole new crop of worries. We haven’t
discussed the real, utterly practical reason to avoid incest… but you are going to
have to have Old Granny Maureen’s Horror Lecture on reinforced harmful recessives,
the one I’ve been giving every little while for centuries, seems like.)
I’m not sure whether this is the frying pan or the fire. Not very many minutes ago I
was sitting here in this jail, petting Pixel – he had been gone three days and I had
been worried about him – and watching a stupid grope opera for lack of anything else
to do, when a squad of spooks – well, four – robed and masked, came in, grabbed me,
put their usual dog collar on me, and secured me by four leashes, then snapped them
to rings in the walls instead of leading me away.
Pixel took one look at them and skittered away. Two of them, one on each side,
started shaving the skin behind my ears.
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`What’s going on?’ I demanded. `May one ask?’
‘Hold still. This is for the electrodes. You have to be animated for the ceremony.’
`What ceremony?’
`After your trial and execution. Quit wiggling.’
So I wiggled harder and he back-handed me across the face, when four others carne in
and suddenly the first four were dead and shoved under my cot. Then they unsnapped
my leashes from the walls.
One said quietly, just above a whisper, `We’re from the Committee for Aesthetic
Deletions. Look scared and don’t make it too easy for us to lead you out of here.’
Looking scared I could do, with no practice. They took me out into the corridor, on
down and past the ‘courtroom’ door, then a sharp left and through a freight door
onto a loading dock, where I was shoved into a lorry and the door clanged shut. Then
it opened again; somebody chucked in a cat. The door slammed shut and the lorry
started up with a jerk. I fell down with a cat on top of me.
`Is that you, Pixel?’
`Mrrow!’ (Don’t be silly!)
We’re still in the lorry and rolling. Now where was I? Oh, yes – I woke up early
from a nightmare in which one of my sons was humping his sister and I was saying,
`Dear, you really ought not to do that on the front lawn; the neighbours will notice
– ‘when the dream woke me and I heaved a sigh of relief; it was just a dream. Then I
realised that it had not been all that much a dream; the essence of it was too, too
solid flesh – and came wide awake with a shot of adrenalin. Oh, Christ! Oh, Mary’s
drawers! Donald, did you knock up your sister? Children, I do want to help you…
but, if you have let that happen, it won’t be easy.
I got up and peed, and sat there and again heard the rhythmic music I had heard in
the night… and it had the same effect on me; it turned me on. And I felt better as
in all my life I have never been able to feel both horny and depressed at the same
time. Had those kids been at it all night?
When the squeaks stopped, I flushed the pot, not having wanted to disturb them until
they were through. Then I used the bidet, so that I would not start the day whiffing
of rut. I brushed my teeth and gave my face and hair a lick and a promise.
I dug out of my wardrobe an old summer bathrobe of Patrick’s that I had confiscated
when I gave him a new one for his honeymoon. For Priscilla I found a wrap of mine.