But we feel pain, just like anyone else. Our women faint in childbirth when
the flesh is torn. When you put our hand into the fire, the agony burns as hot
inside our brain as inside any other man's. We feel pain; what we don't feel
is fear. Or rather, we've learned to separate pain and fear.
To other people, pain means that their life is in danger; to preserve
themselves, they must have the reflex to avoid that pain by any means they
can. But to a Mueller, pain means that the danger is small. Death comes to us
only in ways that are beyond pain-- the crumbling of senility, the cold hard
breath of drowning, the loss of all feeling when the body is severed from the
head. A mere cut or burn or stab or broken bone means only that some vigor
will be taken from us as our body quickly heals; it means well be fed on
blood-rare steak and not on radishes when the battle ends.
And the worst fear that others feel-- the fear of dismemberment, of losing
toes or fingers, hands or feet, ears or nose or eyes or genitals-- we laugh at
that.
Why is it their worst fear? Because they've come to think of their present
shape as their true self, and if they lose that shape, they lose their self,
they become a monster even in their own eyes.
But we Muellers have long since learned that our present shape is not
ourself at all. We can have many different shapes and still be who we always
were. It's a lesson we learn during the madness of adolescence. At twelve or
fourteen years of age, we also go through the bizarre jumbling of chemicals
that cause others to grow hair in strange places, and become machines that can
build copies of themselves. With us, though, since our bodies are so powerful,
adolescence is also stronger. We bred ourselves to regenerate lost or broken
body parts; during the madness of puberty, our bodies forget their proper
shape and try to grow parts that are already there. Every young man and woman
has waved a third arm tauntingly at friends, danced some complicated step
designed to make use of an extra leg or two, winked a superfluous eye,
grimaced with three rows of teeth above and four below. I endured having four
arms once, an extra nose, and two hearts pumping away before the surgeon took
me under his knife to cut away the excess. Our self is not our shape. We can
have any shape, and still be who we are. We have no dread of losing limbs. We
can't distort or destroy our self through subtraction.
We have other dreads.
All during my adolescence, Father had me watched. Even at the age of
fifteen, when my body was only a decimeter or two from a man's full height and
my sexual changes should have been complete-- complete enough for Saranna to
have my child in her already-- even then, I could still feel their eyes on me
from dawn to dusk, measuring me body and soul, so they could tell the tale to
Father, in those moments when he had the time to think of me. It's impossible
that they missed what was happening to me; Father must have known before
Dinte, even before Saranna did. They all knew.
But I didn't know.
Oh, of course I knew. I knew it well enough to abandon all my tight-fitting
clothing and wear only the looser, blousier clothes. I knew it well enough to
find excuses rather than go swimming with my friends, well enough not to snap
at Dinte for being even snottier than ever, as if I dared not provoke him into