RenSime
( Sime-Gen - 6 )
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
Laneff Farris ambrov Sat’htine, a renSime – an oddity in a Farris family – and worse yet, a disjunct renSime – will be presented by Mairis to give a speech about her research, heralding a New Era. She believes she can find the way to tell Sime from Gen before birth – children would not face changeover in a situation where they might Kill. No child would be scarred by the shock of changeover or establishment, the long years of childhood anxiety would never happen – if she can get the funding.
His name is Yuan, and he is offering her refuge from the Tecton where an adult junct is under a death sentence. Yuan heads the Neo-Distect – a secret enclave where Laneff can be matched to a Donor who will provide satisfying junct-style transfers but not die in the process. The Neo-Distect gives her a laboratory and all the support she could ask for to continue her research. She knows she will live only a few more months…
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
Sime~Gen #6
RENSIME
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
To
Ray H. Block May He Rest in Peace
All of the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
When Jean Lorrah saw Raiders of the Lost Ark, she was inspired to write a book of nonstop, breathless action: Dragon Lord of the Savage Empire. She also insisted that I see the movie because I needed to use the same effect in this book. Well, I think I got the “breathless,” not the “action.” But that’s not Jean’s fault. She tried.
Thanks also go to the editors and publishers of the three Sime~Gen fanzines: Karen and Bruce Litman, who put out issues of Companion in Zeor despite financial and physical crises; Jean Airey, who edits Ambrov Zeor in Ohio, far from the Executive Editor, Anne Pinzow; and Katie Filipowicz, who hated the first two drafts of RenSime and made me work until I got it right. Katie has culled segments from the discarded drafts for printing in Zeor Forum and the other zines. (For information, send a business-size self-addressed stamped envelope to Ambrov Zeor, Dept. RN, Box 290, Monsey, N.Y. 10952.)
And thanks also go to all the Sime~Gen readers whose letters have helped to develop individual books, and the whole series. For this book, special thanks go to Howard Wilkins and Judith Segal, who read the final draft. My personal gratitude goes to anyone who will comment on RenSime or any other Sime~Gen story. Please write me through Ambrov Zeor, address above. I’m especially eager to know which book you would like to see next in the Sime~Gen Universe.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
Spring Valley, New York
CHAPTER 1
PUBLIC DISPLAY
Even in the last moments before dawn, the flow of mourners did not slacken. The colonnaded rotunda echoed with the soft rustle of formal Householding capes, their bright colors picked out by the newscamera lights. The public filed by the open coffin to bid goodbye to an era in Sime~Gen history and to rededicate themselves to an idealistic dream.
Now, Laneff dared to hope she was about to make her own dream a part of the new era. At the private, guarded entrance to the rotunda, she presented her pass to the armed honor guard. “Laneff Farris ambrov Sat’htine,” she said crisply. “Mairis Farris wishes to see me.”
“He is standing vigil. He is not to be disturbed,” claimed the Sime woman.
“The pass says immediately,” argued Laneff, trying to keep the edge out of her voice. She was too close to need to allow herself the luxury of a temper. Nevertheless, she felt her tentacles knotting with the tension.
The guard couldn’t help noticing Laneff’s state, even as she examined the pass. Then she nodded. “I’ll take this to him, but you’d better wait out here. The emotional nager in there is enough to take your breath away.”
She turned smartly and marched between the columns, disappearing behind the inner ranks of columns. She was not in need, as Laneff was.
Laneff threw back the Sat’htine cloak she wore and fished a pair of attenuator rings from the pocket of her jacket. She slipped them on the ring finger of each hand, tuning them up to maximum intensity and bracing herself against the sickening surge as the tiny instruments cut the shimmering waves of emotion radiating from the building before her. It was worse than stuffing cotton in ears and nose. The attenuators damped her Sime senses, leaving her feeling drugged and disoriented but protecting her need-sensitized nerves. She was glad she’d had no breakfast. I’ll never get used to these things.
Swallowing hard, she made her way up the steps and through the screen of columns to a vantage from which she could see the dais where Digen Farris ambrov Zeor lay in state. The bier was draped in
the blue of the House of Zeor, the white of the head of the House, and the black of the Farris mutation. Mairis Farris ambrov Zeor, Digen’s heir and thus Sectuib-Apparent in the House of Zeor, stood vigil, also arrayed in full archaic heraldic splendor.
The honor guard was approaching the dais from the side where Shanlun ambrov Zeor stood next to Mairis, also decked in Zeor colors. He’d stationed himself close to Mairis, half turned to face him, rather than the crowd filing by the open coffin, as if he were already assuming the office of Mairis’s Companion in Zeor. He seemed comfortable, as if he’d functioned at full-dress state occasions all his life, and not just since he’d pledged to Zeor to become Digen’s Companion. This uncanny knack of blending into any background, such as Laneff’s laboratory, Digen’s sickroom, or the midst of bizarre emergencies, had originally attracted Laneff to him.
The guard delivered the pass to Mairis, and the flow of mourners, four abreast in a line that snaked back across the polished-stone floor of the Unity Gate rotunda, paused. They had all entered on the Gen Territory side of the Gate building. The line looped around the document display case in the center of the rotunda, housing the first Unity Proposal, purportedly written by Klyd Farris ambrov Zeor, Mairis’s five times great grandfather, more than two centuries ago. Each mourner was graphically reminded that the first effort to stop the Sime~Gen wars had been made by the Householdings, led by Zeor.
As the line halted, Laneff could make out a small knot of blond-haired, pale-skinned gypsies in their ethnic buff-and-beige costumes, reverently examining the Unity Proposal. Blond–like Shanlun.
Shanlun, tall as Mairis, with broad, Gen shoulders and well-sculpted muscles such as only a Gen could have, nevertheless moved with all the grace of a Sime. Against the vivid Zeor blue, Shanlun’s pale-blond hair seemed even more bizarre—perhaps even akin to that of the gypsies. Ridiculous.
Mairis waved the waiting line into motion again and let the honor guard escort him out of the spotlights. Laneff could imagine the excited whispers of the reporters speculating on the cause of this interruption. Shanlun moved at Mairis’s side as if they’d rehearsed that march hundreds of times.
“Laneff,” said Mairis, waving the guards away from them. “I didn’t expect you to get here until dawn.”
“I couldn’t sleep. I was watching the whole thing from my hotel room when your message came. I was hoping you’d made a decision.”
“I have.” He glanced at Shanlun. “You’re right, Laneff. The time has come to make Digen’s dream, the reunification of humanity, a reality. The wave of sentiment caused by his death—” He half turned
toward the crowd behind him. “Zlin that nager!” He gestured expansively.
Since he had approached, he had very smoothly taken control of the ambient nager in their vicinity. This was the channel’s talent, and Mairis was known as one of the best channels in the world. As he dropped his blanketing of the crowd’s emotions, Laneff felt the weight of collective grief wash over her anew, despite the attenuators.
Tear
s rushed to her eyes again, and she said, “I don’t require them to remind me what a good man he was.”
“No, that’s not what I mean. Here, take those attenuators off, and really zlin them.” As he spoke, he stepped closer, enveloping her in the deep silence of a channel’s controlling nager.
She divested herself of the tiny machines and slipped them into a pocket. Then, gradually, Mairis let up on his grip of the fields, and she was zlinning the ambient with her own senses.
“Focus on those nearest the casket,” said Mairis. “Zlin how the sense of bereavement and even fear for the future gives way to a vision of hope as they look at him. I’ve been watching this all night. They’re ready, Laneff, as they’ve never been before. Look.” He brought something from a pocket.
She followed his gesture and was gazing upon a small jewelry box which opened to expose a gleaming steel coin. “It’s Digen!”
The coin bore the unmistakable profile of the age-ravaged face within the coffin: the elegant Farris forehead no longer graced by the characteristic cowlick, the aquiline nose, the sensitive lips so typically Farris, yet the whole imprinted by the dynamic personality of this unique individual. He was unmistakably Farris, yet no longer typically Farris.
This was what the public saw as they paused beside the coffin, and what they felt was reverberating through Laneff. Her breath caught in her throat, as Sime and Gen alike shared one powerful moment of true emotional unity, naked to each other without the cloaking of their fears.
It was too potent. This was what she had always imagined a channel and Donor shared during selyn transfer. For a renSime, a Sime who wasn’t a channel, it was altogether too dangerous.
But Mairis gave her only a momentary glimpse and then gently blurred and damped the fields until the three of them were standing in a bubble of privacy amid the emotional torrents. Laneff, still duoconscious, aware at one and the same time of her ordinary five senses and of the nageric fields produced by living selyn fields, living Gens and Simes, perceived Shanlun as a dizzying whirl of particolored fluorescent confetti, while Mairis blurred and shimmered as all channels did when working to control the nageric fields. Shanlun, too, was working as a Donor, his full concentration focused on Mairis, his awareness of her so dim that she hardly knew he was there.
When they were all breathing easily again, Mairis said, “Now do you understand? You knew how people would feel when Digen’s death was announced, and I didn’t. You were right. Now is the time to make Unity a reality. And your research is the key that makes it feasible.”
“But it’s so far from complete!” Laneff’s research in Sime neurochemistry had led her to synthesize a compound which should provide the key to distinguishing Sime from Gen before birth.
He nodded. “You can’t go any further without a fifteen– to twenty-year study, and that means government funding. At the funeral this morning, I’m going to go up on that podium and challenge the world: elect me World Controller, and I will see that this research—and other projects like it—gets the funding necessary to make Digen’s dream a reality. When children no longer have to grow up wondering or fearing which they’ll be, Sime or Gen; when no child unexpectedly goes through changeover becoming Sime and killing the nearest Gen in the berserk raging of First Need—as you did—then it will be possible to abolish the borders between Sime and Gen Territory, and to stop tearing families apart at the very roots. Humans cannot have peace in this world until we accomplish this. Digen knew that. He understood the importance of what you were doing. And I now know that the time is right. Laneff, will you help me?”
“What if they don’t elect you?”
“Then the time isn’t right. But I’ll keep working all my life—as Digen did. And I’ll keep asking for your help.”
His dark Farris eyes bored into hers, but the nageric atmosphere was cool. She said, “I had thought I was asking for your help to find funding for my project.”
He held out a hand to her, extending his handling tentacles, the two dorsals from the sheaths that lay along the tops of his forearms, and the two ventrals from the bottoms of each forearm, so that as their fingers met, his four tentacles reached for hers in a grip of mutual trust. The contact sent a pulse of slow, calm power through her, as if it came from Shanlun.
But with that skin contact, she realized that Mairis was himself on the edge of hard need. She could perceive the two separate selyn-transport nerve systems in the channel, where the renSimes such as herself had only one system. The primary system, which supplied energy to the channel’s own body, was dim to Laneff’s perceptions, though the secondary system which the channel used to collect selyn from Gens and transmit it to renSimes in need, glowed brightly.
Mairis was in need, but he carried a vast store of selyn which circulated throughout his body, allowing him to control the nager in his vicinity. The intense, solid power she felt at his touch was really being transmitted to her directly from Shanlun. And Shanlun, a Gen whose body was hyperdeveloped in the ability to produce selyn, seemed engorged with selyn.
Entranced with the immanence of such Gen essence, Laneff barely heard Mairis say, “It is best when partners help each other.” He withdrew his touch, insulating her once again from the compelling field. “We’ll announce our partnership on the podium later this morning. Digen’s funeral shouldn’t be an ending but a new beginning. You’ll stand with Shanlun and me and explain your discovery to the world.”
Laneff could feel the grinding effort Shanlun was making to keep his attention on Mairis. She tore her eyes from the Gen and said, “I’d be afraid to even try that without a prepared speech to read. All night, I’ve been listening to the reporters insisting I already have a safe chemical test for pregnant women to determine whether the child will be Sime or Gen. And they even interviewed two police chiefs in different cities claiming Distect terrorists threatened to bomb any lab where such tests were done.”
Shanlun’s nager flared, and his full attention came to focus on her. “Of course it’s Diet terrorists.”
“True. Bombings are more the Diet’s style, not the Distect’s,” said Mairis, turning curiously toward the Gen.
But Laneff scarcely heard him. Need thrilled across her nerves in answer to the fabulously rich Gen nager that now tantalized with promise.
Mairis stepped between them and did something with the fields that blunted the effect. She drew a shaky breath. It’s only natural it should feel good to be the focus of a high-field Gen’s attention, she told herself. Her hard-won conditioning to be attracted only to the channel’s field when in need couldn’t be failing. It was just that Shanlun had been due to give Digen transfer, but the death had intervened, so he was exceptionally high field.
As Shanlun steadied back to his job, narrowing his attention onto Mairis alone, Mairis said, “These threats of violence make it all the more important to get you up there to convince them you don’t yet have all the answers. I’m pledging only to fund your research if I’m elected World Controller—not to institute massive prenatal screening tomorrow! The majority of the people on both sides of the borders are ready for this, but it’s got to be done slowly, to build trust.”
Laneff nodded. The out-Territory Gens feared that with real Unity, the Simes would take over all Gen governments, and there would be nothing to prevent them from beginning again to keep Gens in pens and breed them for the kill. Most Gens had more sense than that, but even out-Territory had its own terrorist groups—such as the Diet. Mairis asked, “You’re not afraid of the terrorists?” “No,” she said, glancing about at the far-flung ring of guards. “But I can’t say I’d care to live like this.”
“It won’t be very long. When the reporters find something more exciting, we can relax the precautions. And research, face it, is always dull.”
She had to smile at that, despite the thrumming anxiety of prematurely roused need. Her awareness of Shanlun was heightened now, despite all Mairis could do. The ronaplin hormones and selyn-con-ducting fluids were
seeping into the sheaths of her lateral tentacles, that normally lay quiescent and all but invisible along the sides of each arm. Mairis, she was sure, was acutely aware of her condition. I’ve got to think of a way out of this. I can’t stand next to Shanlun for hours, in public.
“I’m sorry, Laneff,” whispered Shanlun forlornly.
Their eyes met and locked. His shame flooded hotly through her, shame that he had failed to protect her from his nager. His yearning to touch her, to ease her need, was as sharp as her own. For a split instant, she felt englobed by the shell of scintillating nageric fragments that seemed to fluoresce in every color. It cut off awareness of Mairis and the whole world. They were alone in featureless space, and though they never touched, Laneff could feel Shanlun’s expressive fingers resting on her sensitive lateral sheaths, turning her whole forearm to golden fire.
Shanlun’s nager sank deeply into her body, making her feel as if her own cells produced selyn as a Gen’s did, instead of merely using it to stay alive. Her laterals strained to emerge, to seek Gen skin and take the selyn her body now craved, though she knew it was too early in her cycle. It would only leave her discontent now.
Mairis, showing a bright and powerful field, intervened, denying her urge, shattering the bubble of privacy with his intrusion. Laneff’s heart thundered in her ears.
Long ago she’d given up the kill—given up all hope of ever taking selyn directly from a Gen again. To be tempted, even mildly, was to risk losing control during need and killing the nearest Gen. Only channels were allowed to assuage need directly from Gens—specially trained Donors such as Shanlun who could not be killed– because channels couldn’t function otherwise.
“Are you all right, Shanlun?” asked Mairis, and simultaneously, Laneff was aware of Mairis’s attention focused on her, soothing the jangle of her nerves.
In the space of two breaths, Shanlun had steadied down to a particolored fluorescent shell, neutral in its effect on her. “My apologies, Sectuib,” said Shanlun, his voice schooled to a colorless, emotionless distance.
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