My knees began to collapse under me; I sank on the bed and heard my voice cracking as I said, “I remember nothing, nothing, only terrible ghastly dreams….” The implications of Marjorie’s words turned me sick. With a fierce effort I controlled the interior heaving and managed to whisper, “I swear, I remember nothing, nothing. Whatever I may have done . . . Tell me, in Zandru’s name, did I hurt you, mishandle your*
She put her arms around me again and said, “You haven’t even looked at me. Far less touched me. That was why I said I couldn’t go on.” Her voice died. She put her hand on mine. I cried out with the pain and she quickly caught it up, saying tenderly, “Your poor hand!” She looked at it carefully. “It’s better, though, it’s much better.”
I didn’t like to think what it must have been, if this was better. No wonder fire had flamed, burned, raged through all my nightmares! But how, in the name of all the devils in all the hells, had I done this?
There was only one answer. Sharra. Kadarin had somehow forced me vback into the service of Sharra. But how, how? How could he use the skills of my brain while my conscious mind was elsewhere? I’d have sworn it was impossible. Matrix work takes deliberate, conscious concentration. . . . My fists clenched. At the searing pain in my palm I unclenched them again, slowly.
He dared! He dared to steal my mind, my consciousness …
But how? How?
There was only one answer, only one thing he could have done; use all the free-floating rage, hatred, compulsion in my mind, when my conscious control was gone—and take all that and channel it through Sharra! All my burning hatred, all the frenzies of my unconscious, freed of the discipline I kept on them, fed through that vicious thing.
He had done that to me, while my own conscious mind was in abeyance. Next to that, Dyan’s crime was a boy’s prank. The ruin of my face, the burn of my hand, these were nothing, nothing. He had stolen my conscious mind, he had used my unconscious, uncontrolled, repressed passions. . . . Horrible!
I asked Marjorie, “Did they force you, too, into Sharra?” She shivered. “I don’t want to talk about it, Lew,” she said, whimpering like a hurt puppy. “Please, no, no. Just… just let’s be together for now.”
I drew her down on the bed beside me, held her gently in the circle of my arms. My thoughts were grim. She stroked her light fingers across my battered face and I could feel her horror at the touch of the scars. I said, my voice thick in my throat, “Is my face so … so repulsive to you?”
She bent down and laid her lips against the scars. She said with that simplicity which, more than anything else, meant Marjorie to me, “You could never be horrible to me, Lew. I was only thinking of the pain you have suffered, my darling.”
“Fortunately I don’t remember much of it,” I said. How long would we be here uninterrupted? I knew without asking that we were both prisoners now, that there was no hope of any such trick as we had managed before. It was hopeless. Kadarin, it seemed, could force us to do anything. Anything!
I held her tight, with a helpless anguish. I think it was then that I knew, for the first time, what impotence meant, the chilling, total helplessness of true impotence.
I had never wanted personal power. Even when it was thrust on me, I had tried to renounce it. And now I could not even protect this girl, my wife, from whatever tortures, mental or physical, Kadarin wanted to inflict on her.
All my life I had been submissive, willing to be ruled, willing to discipline my anger, to accept continence at the peak of early manhood, bending my head to whatever lawful yoke was placed on it.
And now I was helpless, bound hand and foot. What they had done they could do again…. And now, when I needed strength, I was truly impotent…