Free Empyrion II: The Siege of Dome by Stephen Lawhead Page A

lacked it, there would be no way to learn it, and neither I nor anyone else could give it to you.” Gerdes gazed levelly at Yarden. “But think about it. When you have decided, come to me. I will be here.”
    Their meeting at an end, Yarden stood slowly and took Gerdes' hand. “Thank you for talking to me. I'll need some time to think about all you've said.”
    “There is no hurry, daughter. Come back when you have chosen.”
    Yarden nodded and thanked her hostess again, then left, stepping out into the sunlit day. She walked along the wide, tree-lined boulevard back to Ianni's house. Ianni lived some distance away, and the walk gave Yarden a chance to think about all she and Gerdes had discussed. By the time she reached home, she had made up her mind. Please, she thought, let me be an artist.
    “Did you enjoy your talk?” asked Ianni as Yarden entered, glancing up from her work of cutting vegetables for a meal.
    “It was—” she began, and then changed the subject. “Ianni, you knew that I could never be a dancer, didn't you? That's why you took me to Gerdes. You knew what she would tell me.”
    Ianni ducked her head to hide a smile and began putting the sliced vegetables in bowls. “I suspected, yes. But you were so full of the wonder of the dance, I could not spoil it for you. What you felt was good and true, and I did not want to discourage you in any way. I knew Gerdes would know how to tell you. Hers is a wise spirit.” She raised her head slightly. “You're not angry with me?”
    “No, not angry. You were right. I am glad to have met Gerdes. And—” She hesitated, finding the title a little presumptuous, but then plunged in anyway. “I'm going to be an artist. A painter. More than anything, that's what I want to do.”

TEN
    Treet stared into the utter blackness of his cold rock cell. Huddled in a corner, he sat with his knees drawn up against his chest and waited for the reorientation to begin, knowing that it would be, could not be anything other than, disagreeable in the extreme.
    He'd read about prisoners in one of Earth's senseless wars being forced to undergo what they called brainwashing —a cruel form of mental abuse designed to destroy a person's will, among other things. Some prisoners of war, though, came through the experience with their faculties intact. These men were mentally tough to begin with, but they also used a few basic survival tactics to counteract the brainwashing. They recognized that the pointless cruelty practiced upon them had no rational basis other than to wear down their mental defenses; all the meaningless tasks and contradictory orders and physical harassment and verbal abuse was an attempt to weaken the inner man and break the mind.
    Just recognizing this went a long way toward defusing its effectiveness. Once a prisoner knew what he was up against, he could take steps to counteract it. The survivors, forced to give up control of the major aspects of their lives, learned to regain control in other, subtler ways, thereby retaining a degree of independence and a sense of personal freedom. Maintaining this control, however limited, was the key: a determined man with even a tiny amount of personal autonomy could not be broken. He might be killed, but not broken. And almost to a person, the survivors Treet had read about had vowed they would die before giving in.
    The general idea of survival was to beat the enemy at their own game, to control them while they were controlling you. When taken for interrogation and ordered to sit down, the prisoner went to the chair and moved it slightly so that he sat, at least symbolically, where he chose; when captors came to his cell, he invited them in and directed them to places on his mat, subtly showing that he controlled the terms of the visit; when dragged from his cell at dawn and ordered to dig his own grave, the survivor determined where to dig, thereby exerting control in the choosing of his own plot; and when at noon he was