Works/Dreaming of Flowers

"Sex alone won't buy these people," she said.

I winced, and didn't manage to prevent it from reaching my face.

"You can't afford hypocrisy," she said, watching me. "You already brought in a Phyllian - it's a bit late to play naive."

"Just because we're forced to this doesn't mean I'm happy about it," I said.

"No. I don't imagine you would be."

I hated her already.

She had a disconcerting habit of not blinking, especially during the periods where she looked through you, reading everything in your head without even the decency to be ashamed of it. Staring without remorse. Eventually she closed her eyes, kept them closed, and drew a long breath.

"You hate things instinctively," she said softly, "And more than that, you relish it. You hate these politicians for having a viewpoint that dares to not be yours. You hate me for believing that I know what I'm doing. You hate me because of the possibility I might be right. You hate yourself for needing my help, and a lot of other things besides. You hate everything that doesn't match the way that you're absolutely certain things should be. And the irony is that you think I have an inflated opinion of myself. So let's just assume, as you like, that I'm evil and you're hopeless, and that way we can actually get started."

That would have been the time to leave the room, but then she'd have won.

"You know what you're doing so well," I said, "you don't need anything from me. Go do whatever it is you do. Leave me out of it."

There. Now I could walk out safely.

- - -

Fifty years ago, the government of a planet named Mira, which had never done anything noteworthy on a galactic scale before then, decided on a new methodology for handling criminals.

There were two problems, they reasoned. One was the difficulty of determining guilt or innocence. The other was the need to remove or cure the causes of crime inside the mind of the criminal, instead of through external motivations.

Both problems ended up having the same solution.

- - -

It had been several months since I'd gone off the pills. My hair had grown out as if making up for lost time, my menstrual cycle had restarted, and my breasts were coming back. Going through puberty again was bad enough, but worse was that suddenly I existed for people - I was no longer invisible. It pissed me off every day that it should matter. It reminded me, every time my eye was caught or a person gave me a smile where there should have been none - or where there should have always been one, no exceptions, no discrimination - why I'd started on the damned pills in the first place.

People did occasionally talk to me now, but I wasn't convinced any of it meant anything.

"I heard," Oriele said to me at the front desk, "that there's a succubus in the complex."

"Where'd you hear that?"

"One of the catering kids claims he delivered a meal to her room. Apparently she disappears when they come to bring things, but he swears he got a glimpse of her. Now they're all hoping they'll get the next order from that room so they can try to get a look."

"Interesting," I said, in a tone which said it wasn't.

"If it's true," she said. "I hope it isn't."

"Why?"

"Oh, that would be a major problem. A succubus while the Commission is in session? Can you imagine the accusations? Swaying votes, manipulation, who knows what."

"Good point," I said.

- - -

The good leaders of Mira, as far as history can tell, seemed to be honestly shocked at vehemence of the public reaction to what they had created.

On the other hand, the effect it had had on criminal justice was such a striking improvement that it was felt eliminating the program would cause an even bigger outcry.

So they compromised. They gave their new employees a unique, distinctive physical appearance. Then they made it law that this appearance not be concealed from the public at any time. Anywhere these employees went, on their own time or the state's, the nature of their job would be known to everyone. Later, when the system was adopted on other planets, the appearance conditions were adopted as well.

Of course, these employees had the ability to conceal themselves from public view in various ways. In fact, the ability was an important tool of their job. But it was felt that the less said about that, the better.

- - -

"You wanted to see me," she said.

I was pleased to find that my nerves were good enough, or my perception fast enough, that I didn't make a noise or lose my bath towel, even though she hadn't been on my bed when I'd stepped into the shower. I wouldn't have wanted her to have the satisfaction.

She wasn't wearing a stitch. I pulled another towel from the back of the door and threw it at her. She looked at it and dropped it on the floor. "Never unless I have to," she said.

"You like living up to the succubus thing, don't you? It's nice and shocking."

"I'm a monster. Didn't you hear? I might as well get some fun out of it."

"I didn't want to see you," I said.

"Yes, you did. You walked past my room the other night and I heard it very clearly."

"That was me worrying about how I was going to contact you if I needed to. The staff have their eye on your room."

"I know. The little boys are funny when they bring meals. They're so transparent."

"You think everyone is transparent. It really ruins life for the rest of us. Get out of my room."

She cocked her head at me. "Why haven't you had sex? You got off the pills, but then you didn't do anything."

"I'm sure you know the answer better than I do," I said, my jaw muscles trying to knot in the back. "You tell me."

"You wouldn't believe it if I did," she said. "That's always the problem."

And then she was gone.

- - -

About that time, I started to notice that some committee members were looking very ragged in the mornings. Exhausted, badly shaven, disheveled, red-eyed. I'd seen those symptoms before.

I told myself, "This is what has to happen," and tried not to think too much about what was going on at night.

In fact I tried not to think too much about much of anything. I gave my speeches every morning, knowing no one was really listening. I was just the blind. The diversionary tactic. I didn't count.

And at night I dreamed. But since they were the same dreams I'd had for months, I was sure they weren't hers. If she meddled there, I had already decided, I was going to kill her.

- - -

"You would explode before you'd admit you are curious as hell," she said, reclining, serene and nude, on the bed.

"I was about to go to sleep in that bed," I said.

"What's stopping you?" she said, moving to one side a little.

"I think you're the same as Ceratia - I fascinate you because I'm immune to you."

She laughed. "You're not immune to me. I'm just not trying. You'd resent it tremendously. You're still playing naive, and it doesn't work for you. You're not a naive person. I take it Ceratia was the Phyllian?"

I nodded.

"And you were on the drugs then. And she's why you got off them. Do you dream of her now? Lying together, you and the plant woman, among all the flowers?" She smiled, lips closed.

"You stay out of my dreams!"

"You see? Resentment."

I leaped, threw myself really, across the distance between the bathroom door and the bed, and then was atop her, with one hand pushing down on her sternum and one hand grasping her throat. "Don't make me," was all I could get out coherently.

"And you could, too," she said. "You're very strong for your size. I imagine you work out because you have so many things to defend against."

I got off and rolled over, lay beside her. It was useless. I closed my eyes, which suddenly hurt.

"Why didn't the Phyllian manage to accomplish what we are trying to do?" she asked quietly.

"Why do you keep asking me things you think you already know?"

"Answer the question."

"She did, for a while. She used her pheromones or whatever on them and slept with them all and they did whatever she wanted. We got the initial vote. Then she left."

"Mmm. And the bigwigs generally don't lack for a sex life anyway, so it's not like she gave them something irreplaceable."

"Well, should we have expected her to stay around for a year while the whole process grinds on?"

"I can't stay around for a year either," she said.

"So it's hopeless."

"Oh, no. In fact I'm nearly finished. But I'm not sure you'll be able to follow through once I go."

"That's the second time someone's accused me of not being devoted enough."

She rolled to face me. "Your devotion isn't what I doubt. I don't think your morality is up to it."

"You think ... oh, no, I see. But I was willing to go along with Ceratia!"

"Not good enough. Go to sleep. Dream of flowers." And she was gone.

- - -

I'm not stupid. I knew what she was trying to lead me to. She thought that I thought I was too pure and unsullied, or something, and that the proof was my not going to bed with anyone.

Thing is, you can't tell someone like her she's wrong, because she'll never believe it. And no matter how much I tried to tell her that I hadn't had sex with anyone simply because I hadn't found anybody who seemed worth the effort, it would be a waste of my time. So I didn't try to tell her.

Well, I wouldn't have tried to tell her if I'd had the opportunity. As it happened, I didn't see her again for a week, and when I did, it was because she was finished.

- - -

"I have a hard time focusing when you're like that," I said.

"'Like that.' Why not just say 'naked'? Did you come from a planet of prudes, or did you learn it as you went along? Or maybe it's just all that sexual repression talking. Would a quick roll in the sheets help you focus?"

"Think whatever you like, as long as you put something on for once."

"No. I don't intend to make this easy. Now, the way I see it, we have to maintain long-term control over four members of the Planetary Commission. That's sufficient to swing all future votes. The representatives of the commercial interests don't matter as long as we can keep those. Everyone else on the Commission has an essentially unalterable vote for one side or the other."

I sighed and picked up my pen. "All right."

"The first of the four is simple. He has an enormous Oedipal fixation. He wants a mother/nanny figure to make decisions for him. We just need to get an older woman into his employ - he has a live-in housekeeper - who will give him sexual attentions in addition to mothering him. All it will take is a few discreet comments from her -"

"No." I threw my pen on the floor. "You must be joking."

"I tried to warn you."

"You didn't tell me it was going to be like this."

"You were refusing the message."

"There's got to be another way."

"Assassinate the opposed members and make sure they're replaced by more sympathetic ones. But we must have some limits, mustn't we? We wouldn't want to do something immoral."

I stared at her. She stared back. I already knew who would blink first. I picked up my pen.

"The second enjoys certain kinds of costume games which would be politically indiscreet. He's been very careful about them and I don't think blackmail is an option, but in the process he's gotten a couple of safe places where he can play, with people that he trusts implicitly. If we can sway one of those, they can sway him, especially in a vulnerable moment."

"Are all these going to be about sex?"

"Are you actually surprised?" she asked. "I think you are! How interesting."

"I'm naive."

"Everyone has a kink. Some people have many. It's the way we work. We like to form patterns, even where there aren't any."

"I don't understand."

"We associate things we like with sexual impulses. Sex is a reward, it's a pleasure, sometimes a guilty pleasure. So we link it to other pleasures - especially guilty pleasures. Our third Commission member has a shoe fetish - and underneath her sexualizing shoes is not just the pleasure of how she and other people look in the shoes, but the pleasure of owning and buying them ... and she feels very guilty about her shoe habit."

"What's wrong with buying shoes?"

"She spends a tenth of her salary on them."

"Oh."

"That's a fetish hard to use in our favor, but she's given us a way. She has regular assignations with another woman who also has this kink. It's amazing how much fetishism amounts to playing dressup. We'd all be much better adjusted if we had more leeway on permissible public dress."

I looked over at her red skin, her nearly-black eyes, the tiny vestigial horns implanted in the bone of her forehead. The tail was out of sight, beneath her. "I know what you're thinking," she said.

"Tell me about the fourth."

"The fourth is already taken care of. I've spent most of my time with him."

"Tell me."

"You don't really want more than that."

"Tell me."

"He has spiritual fantasies, dreams of sexual rapture. He fantasizes of divine beings appearing and speaking to him in the voice of gods and causing him to climax. Not that he thinks of it that way, of course."

"You didn't."

"He was looking for messages from the divine. He wanted them urgently. I gave him one. Do you want me to go back and tell him to cancel the previous message?"

I looked at her closely, then shut my eyes and my face relaxed. "No, no, that's fine."

- - -

The criminal trial system on Mira ended within six months of the introduction of the "succubi" (as they were called informally nearly from the beginning, and later, in some places, called officially). At first they continued to have trials, with the assumption that eventually, in the penance and treatment period, all sentencing errors would be worked out. Gradually it became clear to everyone that the trials had become a sham, and criminal charges were simply remanded to the next available succubus for judgement and correction.

There were any number of allegations of cruel and unusual punishment, especially since the succubi refused to divulge the exact nature of the various dreams/nightmares they were using to punish and modify the behavior of their patients.

But the steadily falling crime rate silenced most citizens' objections.

Crime did not vanish. In some areas it increased. The cure for a certain type of crime - a crime motivated by poverty or hardship - was, after repentance, finding the criminal a job or repairing his economic situation in other ways. Suddenly there was an influx of people commiting petty thefts in order to find their way into "sentencing employment." Since the stigma for being a rehabilitated criminal was eroding quickly, this was considered a fairly smart trick.

Crimes of passion continued to be committed, and of course there were always a handful of genuine sociopaths, but the recidivism rate for these crimes, as with all others, was essentially nonexistent. Any rare criminals the succubi could not succeed in retraining until fit for humanity were not heard from again. No one asked their whereabouts.

- - -

Of course she couldn't be seen getting to the ship, and there was no chance of my seeing her off, but she appeared in my room to say goodbye. I'd say she was wearing clothes just to humor me as a parting gift, but it's more likely that she was just packed and ready to leave.

"I'm sorry to leave you with this," she said.

"You were right. There's no other way. I don't like it, but you've given us what we need. Thank you."

She studied me, looking through me, but for once she didn't find what she was after. "I suppose I shouldn't say this, but I expected -"

"You thought I was going to be more hostile."

She nodded. "What changed?"

"You were finally ashamed of something," I said.

Since she was in control of when the conversation ended, I didn't actually expect to get the last word, and I wasn't sure how I was going to react to anything she would say next. But she didn't say anything next. She thought about it, and then nodded very slightly.

And then it was just me in the room again.

Copyright © November 2006. Do not distribute or reproduce.