“But they’ve taken my money away. They watch me all the time. Every time I go near the door, they watch me.”

“They have a lot to do besides watch you. You have only to watch them. Keep up your courage.”

“Luciente, mercy! Easy. I’m flat on my back. You don’t understand. Never in your life have you been helpless–under somebody’s heel. You never lived where your enemies held power over you, power to run your life or wipe it out. You can’t understand. That’s how come you stand there feeding me empty slogans!”

Luciente bowed her head. “You crit me justly, Connie. Forgive me. I’ll try to see your situation more clearly and make less loud noises in your ears.”

When they came to play with Skip, the doctors were not satisfied. The violence‑triggering electrodes did not cause him to try to attack them, as Alice had. Instead he turned from them and drove his fist into the wall. He pounded his head on the wall and before the attendants could force him down, blood oozed from the bandage.

“That won’t do!” Dr. Argent frowned, passing his hand lightly over his silvery locks. “Don’t bring any visiting firemen in to inspect this one. Hmmmm.” Ever the administrator, whenever anything went wrong he withdrew from the other two, his shoulders, his back seeming to disdain them.

“Suicide attempts are what we started with. We could be playing into the hands of a masochist, eh?” Dr. Redding glanced sideways at Dr. Argent, trying to enlist him in his little joke. “Uh, we’ll discuss the case at staff today. Other procedures may be indicated.”

Dr. Argent linked his hands behind his back and rocked on the balls of his feet. “Not a bad idea. Won’t do to leave him around in this condition. The feds will be by next week for a tour. If we want our grant renewed, we’d better be tidy and shipshape.”

Dr. Morgan perked up. “Surgical procedures?”

Skip asked loudly, “You going to take these out?”

“If our tests prove that’s best for your condition, sonny, maybe so,” Dr. Redding said. “We’ll do what’s best.”

“Man, you must think I’m really crazy, to believe that.”

As they turned to leave, Connie fled from her post at the door to sit in the day room. As the doctors and Acker passed, they were arguing amiably among themselves.

“Lots of talent in your field are working to retrain sexual inversion with electroshock keyed to slides and films,” Redding was saying to Acker. “But the recidivism rate isn’t promising. If we could cure inversion surgically, we’d open up a whole new area.”

“Let’s not get too far off the track, gentlemen,” Dr. Argent said. “We can run some tests, but our major concern is violence. Our funding is specific. Within those perimeters, of course, we have some latitude to fool around.”

“Six to eight thousand for an operation as against hundreds of thousands to keep an invert under treatment or restraint for decades. You can’t tell me that’s not cost‑effective.” Dr. Redding risked touching Dr. Argent’s shoulder companionably. “Dear to the heart of taxpayers and public officials alike. If the crime‑in‑the‑streets money dries up, it’s something to keep in mind.”

Dr. Argent looked at the hand. “I want results on this one, Doctor”That formal address cut like a blade. “I’m an old man. It’s now or never. For your sake, it had better be now.”

Skip was taken to the other hospital again. When he was brought back, they had removed the electrodes but they had done something else. They had coagulated part of his limbic brain, whatever that was. Amygdalotomy was the word they used. The next day she went to see him. He looked terrible, his face sagging. His eyes were dull and bloodshot.

“Why do you want to know how I am? What’s it to you?”

“Don’t you remember me, Skip? I’m Connie. Your friend. You gave me money to call my niece.”

“Some give and some take. Some take everything.”

“Does it hurt? Your head?”

“They say if you lose a leg, if they cut it off–what they call a resection, they have names for everything–the leg goes on hurting.”

“At least they don’t play games with you, like they do with Alice.”

“Different games.”

“What are you scared they’ll do now?”

“Why should I be scared? Who says I’m scared? You’ll see.”

“I didn’t mean it in a bad way, Skip.” She touched his hand.

He jerked back as if she had burned it. “Don’t try to get around me. Now I know better. Give and take, and then it’s all taken.”

Jackrabbit was showing her a bunch of … what? Dream images? Sculptures in light? Shapes that reshaped themselves into other shapes? She felt nervous looking at them with the person who made them, the artist, right there making it happen. She was afraid she wouldn’t seem appreciative or wouldn’t say the right things or look the right way, and he’d think she was stupid. But there at her elbow was Luciente, eating white grapes from a woven basket and grunting rough enjoyment as if it were just a TV program. If she tried to think about what the images were supposed to mean, she felt miserable. But if she looked with her eyes open and let them happen to her, she could not help getting drawn in.

The holi he was showing now had no words, no story, unlike the one he’d done with Bolivar. It was all images having something to do with the ocean and with sex and with power–not power over people, but natural power, energy. Boundaries dissolving. The sea rising, smashing into the land. Under a clear cold blue sky a sea lashed itself into foam and sprang at the shore. Waves with teeth that glinted and hair that tangled and tossed roiled over itself. Wave breaking over wave showed dark bellies arching before they crashed down in froth and slid on the sand spent and hissed dribbling back.

Jackrabbit’s workshop stood near the mill, near enough to hear the wheel turning. There the river ground grains and corn and operated a series of pumps. Four times a day a tidal clock swung the wheel mechanism about so that it was always fixed correctly in the flow of waters. When Jackrabbit did not opaque the window and use only the sliding skylight, ripples danced on his high ceiling. Always, he told her, he could hear the mill wheel, the waves slapping the shore just underneath. The workshop was built out some feet over the river, and the side facing the water had a narrow porch.

“Jackrabbit already has two students,” Luciente said, leaning on the railing outside the open door while Connie looked through the drawings and prints Jackrabbit started to show her next.

“Deborah and Orion aren’t pleased I’m going on defense. They’ve been slinging about it all week,” Jackrabbit complained, knotting his hand in his curly hair.

“Rough!” Luciente said flatly. “They knew when they chose you you hadn’t fulfilled defense. They didn’t have to wait for you as teacher. Let them do service work for sixmonth.”

“Their slinging saddens me,” Jackrabbit said, idly trying to tickle Connie in the ribs as she turned over the stiff sheets. “Rhythm of my life crosscutting rhythms of theirs. They feel they’re growing and want to fly faster.”

“Can’t you work alone? You didn’t always study with a teacher.” Luciente kicked off her shoes and sat with her bare feet hanging off the porch, but she could not quite reach the water.

“Why do you have to go on defense?” Connie turned from the pages. “I can’t look anymore. I’m sorry–I just can’t take more in.”

“But I have to get defending out of the way before I start mothering. It’d be stupid to do it the other way, I grasp that.”

“Your society doesn’t think that much of art and artists and all that, do you?” Connie looked away from the radiant male nude that hung on the far wall, along with twenty other paintings, drawings, prints, whatever. A naked male body hung like that–doubly hung–embarrassed her. It did not seem like something she should stare at, yet the colors glowed, the flesh shone from within. She kept glancing at it, nervously, from the corner of her eye. It was beautiful when it should not have been–like Martin, her first husband. She could not imagine him permitting anyone to paint him that way, yet if someone with talent had, his flesh would have shone so. It was neither Jackrabbit nor Bolivar. Unless Bolivar seven years younger with a bushy beard?