Chapter 9 Part 2

When Brezine had thought of trying this solution to make her task go faster, her mother had yelled at her in an extreme way.

"Brezine, WHY are you using that drain? Are you too good to dry the floor yourself? Go get an actual towel and dry the floor. There are not shortcuts if you want something done right, so you might as well get used to working hard. The only thing that will separate you from anyone else is your ability to work hard, and not complain about it. When you are married some day, your husband will work hard, and if you expect for him to see you as a woman of worth, you too had better work hard."

Brezine had seen her mother's words be true in action when it came to her father. her father was a chimera miner. Often when her father would come home, he would say little and expect the house to be in order. Some nights not more than four words would pass between he and Bezine's mother. Their relationship was more functional than romantic. Her father would only interact directly with Brezine went from having virtually infinite potential to having a very narrowly defined focus in a relatively short amount of time. This was viewed favorably by the genetic programmers. The quicker that a chimera would assume their role, the better.

Brezine had never shared most of these memories with Uzine. She simply lived them out. Uzine knew a little about her father being a miner, and she also knew her mother had trained her exhaustively on how to be a domestic partner, and Uzine was grateful for that.

One thing that Uzine was less than happy with though was his sex life with Brezine. The issue that made him the most unhappy was that it was practically non-existent. Once every four months, he might be able to persuade Brezine to make love. Even on the relatively scant occasions he was able to do this, it was as though Brezine was there in body but not in heart. Her breasts would heave, her body would respond to his touch, but there was something vacant that he could not quite comprehend. Perhaps it was because that in her training to hold this domestic role, there was not much instruction on love-making. Her mother could teach her about a lot of things, but probably not much about that.

Brezine would have disagreed with Uzine's conclusion. Her mother had told her that a woman's duties included, to the best of her ability, pleasing her husband sexually. The conversation had happened when Brezine was older, naturally, and Brezine wondered exactly what her mother had meant about pleasing her husband. She had been bold enough that day to ask her mother. 

"There are things, Brezine, that women have and men do not. When men and women come together, particularly husband and wife, they can give each other that which they do not each have to the mutual pleasure of both of them."

Brezine knew enough to infer that her mother was speaking in part about anatomy. So, Brezine figured that was all. She had noticed, somewhat to her distaste, that her body would respond to certain touches. If Brezine's duty was to make sure the house was clean and to work, what need she did she have of the ability for her body to sense pleasure? At least now she understood it in the context that it was her body's job to feel pleasure for her husband's benefit. In the sense that she understood the world in shades of duty and work, then sex was just one more duty to be performed in the service of holding a house together.

Yet, even if she had told Uzine this, he still would not have been entirely satisfied with her explanation. What Uzine could not escape noticing was it was almost as though Brezine simply *was not there*, which was the problem Uzine was facing today, come to think of it, except in a different form.