Gertrude laughed. "I cannot picture you splashing around with the girls."
That was an insult.
"I never splashed. I swam or lounged and watched."
"Hmm."
She kept pushing.
He thought about the pool in the harem, and for a moment, the corridor and the wheelchair and the woman behind him faded out. The blue and gold mosaic floor. The arches that framed depictions of gardens and the artificial lighting that mimicked the sun or the moon, depending on the time of day. Areana's hair pinned up off her neck. Her contented smile because he was there with her.
Daniel went ahead and pushed open the double doors leading to the pool, and Gertrude wheeled him in.
It was an Olympic-sized rectangle of blue water, with marked lanes. The walls were tiled in plain white. The lighting wasbright and unflattering, and the air carried the chemical sting of chlorine. This pool had been built for function, not for style.
"It's so depressingly plain," he said. "I thought your Clan Mother had better taste."
"The pool was built for Guardian training, not for spoiled harem girls to splash in."
"Ladies. They are far too old to be called girls. Almost all of them are older than your Clan Mother."
He couldn't see Gertrude's face, but he hoped she looked chastened.
"They were pretty birds locked in a gilded cage," she said. "Now they are free, and they can choose to be called whatever they want."
Free.
A picture of Areana eating in a Beverly Hills restaurant popped into his head. Areana walking through stores and picking out clothes she had bought with money that wasn't his. Areana telling him about the lives of his sons with a brightness in her face that he had not put there. The female he'd loved for five thousand years was starting to realize that she had been a prisoner. She'd never once told him so, and the reason was either because she hadn't thought of it that way, or she did and preferred the fiction they had both created to make it bearable for her.
It was probably the second one.
"How are they doing, my harem ladies?" he asked, so he could stop thinking about Areana and five thousand years of being locked up in one harem or another.
"They're doing well."
"That is not an answer."
"You want details?"
"Yes. I want details."
"They've been settling in. Several have started taking classes in various subjects. They are still exploring their options, making friends, and getting accustomed to being free. It's not something that happens overnight."
"We are all going through adjustments," he said. "What else? Do they go to the city? Eat in restaurants, shop in stores?"
"Maybe. I don't know. Perhaps the males they are dating take them to the city."
He had been expecting that, and yet hearing it landed like a lump of coal in his stomach.
"They are dating."
"Yes."
"That's ridiculous."
"Why do you say that?"
Dating was a flimsy word for a flimsy concept. "Real males don't date. Real males claim."
