My point was six.
Hot anger swept over me. Dori had not touched the dice with her mind. It was not just that it hadn't been a natural—I could tell. I had gambled long enough to tell when the dice fell free, and when they were influenced.
"My point is six," I said. "Excuse me, Odaan, I want to talk with my bet a minute."
I took Dori into the next room.
"Dori, for God's sake!" I cried in a desperate undertone. "You are letting those dice roll free. Do you realize what happens to me—to us—if I don't make that point?"
I give her credit for this: she didn't rant at me, as most women would, that I had no right to bet her in a dice game, like a slave. Nor did she throw up to me what she had overheard on the spaceship. She just looked at me silently, and that look told everything she could have said in words.
"Dori, please," I said. I felt like getting on my knees to her. "Maybe you despise me now, but for the sake of what we've been to each other once, just this one time control the dice!"
She looked at me, and now I could read nothing in her expression.
"I'll control the dice," she said tonelessly.
We went back in, and I was sweating in terror and anguish when I picked up the dice. One of us was to be destroyed utterly on that roll, and only Dori could decide which one. Would she destroy Odaan? Or me?