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otherwise? We were a long time outside, and the window rolled away from me. I slept for some time. When I woke up I could see peripherally out of the window, but had a hard time figuring out what I was looking at. Finally I realized it was the hull of a small spaceship, but it was so shiny that the hull was a curved file:///H|/eMule/Incoming/Haldeman,%20Joe%20-%20Buying%20Time(1989)[v1].htm (171 of 219)15-8-2005 0:24:35 BUYING TIME - Joe Haldeman mirror. The little man looked tall and lean in the reflection. We went through another tedious air lock. Inside, he unzipped the balloon and carried me to an acceleration couch. There were four of them. The ship was a fairly new standard-model Rocketdyne, apparently ordinary except for the mirror finish outside. It was a little faster than Fireball, but if we were headed for Earth, it would still take more than a month. What would that be if this zombi drug didn't wear off? A hundred years? Two hundred? At least I could sleep. After he'd spent about an hour strapping me in, my eyes slowly closed. Waking up was interesting. Mind fast and body slow: I was wide awake but my eyes were just slits, a tiny bit more information coming in every few minutes. I seemed clean; he had wiped the dried blood off my upper body. I could see him off to one side, blurred, ambiguous. With sudden indignation I realized he was stimulating himself sexually, rubbing up and down, staring at me. Each cycle of his hand took about ten minutes. The whole process could take days! Would I be the first woman in history to be bored senseless while being sexually abused? Maybe, in a way, I wasn't being actually abused, since he didn't know I could see him. He could just as easily be raping me, I realized, and about thirty seconds later had an odd ghost of a feeling around the lower chest, loins, scalp, extremities: adrenaline. I tried to will my eyes to shut. If he knew I could see him he might indeed rape me; men can be funny about being observed. Women are funny about it, too. Dallas and I had talked about voyeurism; Italian attitudes are different from American, but I said there was a commonality. The ultimate violation of privacy. He said that, nevertheless, it was the only crime in the world that didn't exist until it was discovered; if the woman didn't know she was being looked at, the crime had no effect on her. I told him he was a pagan and didn't understand sin. It wasn't necessary for the victim to know, for the sin to exist. He tried to wax anthropological on the subject, more than half Page 126 ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html kidding, and I pretended to get angry and moralistic, also kidding, since fornication, rather more serious than peeping, was one sin I had to confess to regularly. We did a lot of that kind of game-playing, silly attitudinizing, and I missed that frivolous side of him with a terrible sudden ache. I laughed more with him, and harder, than I ever had with a man. With two of the sisters at the convent, Dominica and Laraine, before we were old enough for ginnasio, when we went to the orchards outside of the walls, we would talk about things in the world, about men, especially about the gardener and the driver, and sometimes we would laugh so hard, that terrible guilty laughing, that we would cry and our cheeks would hurt from the stretching, and we would be hoarse when we got back, and once the Mother Superior asked us about it and we started laughing again, inside the walls! That was so wicked we laughed until we peed ourselves. Oh well. The one thing you can never find again, after you lose it, is innocence. I did manage to force file:///H|/eMule/Incoming/Haldeman,%20Joe%20-%20Buying%20Time(1989)[v1].htm (172 of 219)15-8-2005 0:24:35 BUYING TIME - Joe Haldeman my eyes completely shut. Spare the man the knowledge that his trivial sin had been observed, and therefore existed. DALLAS I handed back the draft of Big Dick's Vigilante Committee report. "Fast work. You really think it could be a floater, though?"
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