Woman on the Edge of Time - Marge Piercy [109]
Sybil smiled, cold as a moonbeam. “I can’t do it. I haven’t healed. My pride is hollow … . But I’ll help you.”
“They’ll punish you if you help me and I get loose.”
Sybil shrugged. “Not like they’ll punish you when they bring you back.”
“I’ll ask someone else.”
“Don’t you dare! Haven’t we been friends? Don’t you think my loyalty has some value?” Sybil drew herself up. “Perhaps if you do escape, I’ll consider it in a new light. It’s by far the most intelligent plan for you to escape first with my assistance. Then when you’re safe, you can assist me.”
That evening after lights out, she lay quietly weeping.
Maybe Luciente could help. When she reached her, Luciente was swimming in the river with Jackrabbit, both of them diving and rising and splashing. Luciente hauled herself onto the bank, her hair plastered to her head and her body naked and dripping. Connie turned quickly away as Jackrabbit too clambered up on the grass. “We’ll get dressed, Connie. Don’t hide away!” Luciente obviously thought it was funny. Jackrabbit and she dried themselves on big towels and trotted off to Luciente’s space, with herself following very slowly behind. They were laughing ahead, and she felt left out and awkward. How could they help?
She loitered up the path. When she opened Luciente’s door, they were both roughly dressed and between them they were making the bed. “Our family met last night,” Jackrabbit told her. “I put in as ready for mothering and military service. But everybody decided I ought to take care of going on defense before starting to mother. I know it’s logical, but I feel a little parted. I want to mother a lot more than I feel like marching off for six months to wherever the enemy’s pestering us now.”
Luciente was eyeing her with a gather of skin between her eyes. “What’s wrong, Connie?”
When she described the ward and the project, Luciente grew still. She sat on the not quite made bed with her hands crouching on her spread knees. “So soon. It promises ill.”
“It’s bad, real bad? That’s what I thought. I’m scared.”
Jackrabbit, puzzled but interested, curled up with a pillow behind his back. Luciente frowned. “It’s that race between technology, in the service of those who control, and insurgency—those who want to change the society in our direction. In your time the physical sciences had delivered the weapons technology. But the crux, we think, is in the biological sciences. Control of genetics. Technology of brain control. Birth-to-death surveillance. Chemical control through psychoactive drugs and neurotransmitters.”
“Luciente, help me escape!” Her hand trembling, she touched Luciente’s sinewy arm. “Before they do that to me.”
Luciente shuddered. “Sticking a log in somebody’s eye to dig out an eyelash! They had not even a theory of memory! Their arrogance … amazes me.” She snorted.
“Can you help me? Please.”
“Of course we can!” Jackrabbit said, stroking her shoulder, but Luciente paced with her face screwed up.
“I can’t interfere in the past, Connie,” she said slowly. “But I can give you advice. That’s free as the wind. As we say, nobody asks for it and everybody gets it.”
“I thought I might fake a sickness scary enough to make them take me off the ward and then I could escape.”
“You’d have to be able to create and sustain a high temperature. I could teach you, but it’d take time. I must discuss these problems with my time-travel proj.” Luciente marched over to her television set, fiddled with some dials and spoke into her kenner. In a short while she was meeting with several people. Most of them appeared on the screen as they spoke, but a couple were apparently too far from a set and spoke only through the kenner. Connie strained her ears to hear, but most of the argument was in a weird jargon, about gliding, and fast and slow marcon, flebbing, achieving nevel.
“I’m sorry I bothered the two of you. I guess you were planning to be alone,” Connie said to Jackrabbit, his long body curled up.
“It’s like my naming. Every time I take a step, I start jagging. I want to go back where I was. Not really. But I