RenSime s-6

by Jacqueline Lichtenberg

  By the time the cavalcade approached in early afternoon, the gypsy adolescents were in the spirit of things. The courtyard, ordered cleared by the marshals, teemed with disorderly youth, dancing to the music, creating confusion.

  Yuan, Azevedo, and Shanlun were watching from an upper window with Laneff. Shanlun’s field was rock-bottom, lower she thought than after a transfer with Digen. And Azevedo seemed in a fine mood. He commented, “They’re trying to make the place as unappealing to Mairis as possible, hoping he’ll just skip the stop.”

  Shanlun said, “If we could get him away from Security we could bring him in any number of other ways.“J

  “That might be possible tomorrow, if he’s still in town.”

  “He won’t be,” said Shanlun morosely. Then, straightening, he said, “I’m going down there and crash that line. The worst they can do to me is fine me for deserting my post, escaping arrest, maybe disturbing the peace!”

  Laneff had prepared for this moment. She wanted to see Mairis– to have her pregnancy checked out. She wanted to tell Mairis all her discoveries, but not without proof. Not while she stood junct.

  Azevedo had had his transfer, and a splendid one if she was any judge. There’s no reason now not to do it.

  From the capacious pockets of her beige smock, she produced the two small vials of liquid she’d prepared, one of the purest moondrop, Azevedo’s own synthesis; the other her own K/B, purified and dissolved. As Shanlun turned from the window, she uncorked the K/B and downed it in one gulp just before Azevedo struck the vial from her hand with one tentacle.

  “Laneff!” he cried, horrified. “Not here! Not like this!”

  The two Gens added to his cry. She tossed the remaining vial, neatly labeled, to Azevedo. “Let Mairis be turned away now. We can find him later, and see him officially!”

  Azevedo frowned at Shanlun, saying cryptically, “There’s no blackroom prepared!”

  “The lab’s windowless,” said Shanlun. Then, “The kittens! Yuan, don’t ask questions, just run and get those cats out of the lab. Make sure you leave the lights off!”

  Laneff began to feel a little woozy and looked about for the hallucinations to begin, to confirm her theory. But there were none, and she was beginning to be scared.

  Yuan’s nager itched with puzzlement as he sidled past Laneff. She tried to scratch his itch with a tentacle. The poor Gen was in such a hurry, he hadn’t time to scratch his own nager. If this stuff doesn’t work, I’ll never get another chance to scratch him.

  Azevedo caught at her hand, his tentacles made of clear blue sparks. They hurt where they touched.

  She flinched away, impatient for the confirming hallucinations. It had surely been nearly two hours since she’d swallowed the stuff. The sun was shining directly into the window; the brightness was unbearable, and it was increasing rapidly. The sun is falling!

  There was panic in Yuan’s nager now as he fled past her. He knows, too. The sun is falling!

  Suddenly, it was unimportant to wait for the hallucinations to begin or for the chemical to make her sick. People had to be warned. With a mighty tug that nearly unrooted one of the tentacles Azevedo was holding, she broke away and pounded after Yuan, augmenting with all her strength.

  Giddy, she flew down the stairs, crashed through the gawkers piled around the front door, and tore through the whirling dancers in the courtyard, shouting.

  They took her for part of their game of deviling the marshals and collected around her as she ran at the cordon. Behind her, Azevedo, far outdistancing Shanlun, was gaining. Then she was in the alley. The cordon of marshals had their backs to her, the tumultuous noise of the gypsies masking Laneff’s approach.

  She breasted the cordon, the slightness of her body fitting cleanly between the shoulders of two burly Gens. The two Simes on either side of the Gens reacted fast enough to get a tentacle hold on Laneff, but Azevedo hit the line at that moment, and three of them went sprawling, dragging Azevedo down with them. .» The swarm of children fell on the marshals, laughing gleefully, but she didn’t pause to watch. She plowed into the standing crowd, shouting in every language she knew, “Hurry, hurry. The sun is falling! Tell everyone. The sun is falling!”

  It was already so bright that she couldn’t see. She was certain her optic nerve had been destroyed. But zlinning, she made her way along the street, leaving astonishment ringing behind her. She thought surely the weight of that rising astonishment would buoy the sun up long enough for everyone to find safety, as she would. • Running, shoving, she cut across the line of bedecked cars creeping along with their waving dignitaries. She spooked an honor guard’s camel mount and made it out a side street. Here she had the sidewalk to herself.

  Running under high augmentation, she barely felt need against the euphoria of hunting mode. People began to pour into the street behind her, spreading her message by their shouts, and the shouts themselves rose like doves carrying blue ribbons of peace to the warring heavens. And it seemed the sun was slowing in its fall!

  She was glad she’d seen it in time; perhaps humanity had a chance after all. She ran. She didn’t know the city, but something about the place seemed familiar.

  With the Simes on her heels, gaining on her again, she beat a jagged path toward that familiarity, wondering when the hallucinations were going to begin. But that hardly mattered if the world came to an end before she had a chance to disjunct. She came out of the narrow streets fronted by a thick-walled stone building into a huge, flat, round area, grassy fields and a few scattered trees, benches, strolling couples. In the center of the area was a dark stone monument, a huge replica of the starred cross. The sun was falling right onto it. Yelling her message, she leaped over the plastic chain fences and ran up to the monument.

  Sandblasters had been working to clean the monument, their scaffold on the ground, cables pooling about it, and the men themselves were gone. An open padlock lay beside the equipment, security forgotten as the men went to lunch.

  The monument itself stood on the two splayed points of the five-pointed star, the fifth point shooting straight upward. The equal-armed cross, carved out of the same solid piece of pink granite as the star, was suspended in the air just high enough for people to walk erect under its bottom flange.

  Laneff’s plunge carried her into the exact spot where she had once stood while her name had been inscribed on this very monument, the Monument to the Last Berserker.

  The memory of that day rose crystal-clear, and the wrenching thrum of her oath to be the Last Berserker seared through the veil of insanity. She found herself standing, cold, in the midst of the plaza, unaware of how she’d come there save that this was the moment her life had been focused on, the moment of the Last Berserker.

  The long run under augmentation had sharpened her need to the pitch it had held at First Need. There were Gens about, alarmed now by the sudden appearance of a haggard Sime gypsy. One or two of them were Donors, aware of her need and moving automatically to her aid.

  No! No matter what, I won’t kill! No matter how much I want it—I won’t. But she was only a renSime. Her resolve meant nothing before the relentless onslaught of physiology. A woman cannot resolve not to give birth; a renSime cannot resolve not to kill.

  The swarm of pursuers boiled from the outlet of the street she’d raced down a moment before. With an anguished cry, she seized up one of the scaffold cables, yanked its looped end free of a bossing, grabbed up the padlock and with desperate, clumsy movements passed the cable around the narrow end of one of the star points that touched the ground. She wrapped the cable around her own body, twisted it through its own loop, and fastened the two grommets together with the padlock, ramming it home with a thundering snap. With her waning strength, and in the disorganized insanity of attrition, there was no way she could get loose to attack a Gen.

  Safe.

  She surrendered.

  CHAPTER 12

  RENSIME!

  Laneff fell into the sun, blinded by brilliance
until all seemed black.

  And after a long time, far in the distance, a tiny light blossomed. Instantly, like fireworks, echoes of colored reflections exploded all about the glimmer. She took heart in her aloneness and wanted to glow like the little light. She ached and yearned—and was kindled.

  She felt the surge of will brighten within her, a smile. And then dots of brilliance danced all about her, herself reflected back a billion times a billion times. Dazzled, she twisted away, only to find more and more dizzying reflections.

  In self-defense, she fixed on just one of those dots. It loomed larger and larger, took on individual characteristics, face, hair, peculiar little nose, wistful smile in a round face.

  Jarmi!

  She twisted away. Another face: red-blond hair, mustache, beetling eyebrows, sunburned nose, fierce joy. Yuan!

  She fled. Azevedo! Another direction. Shanlun! A twist away. Digen! And again. Mairis!

  She was surrounded in every plane not by just one Jarmi and one

  ‘Shanlun, but by thousands of them, spinning around and around, shouting a babel of languages at her. She clenched her fists over her ears, squeezing her eyes shut, and dove into the black silence within her.

  But it was a cubical house that twisted through another dimension; a tesseract within the soul. She sped by the light of herself into a cubical room walled round with mirrors. And she was a zone of quantum mechanical incandescence, converting the essence of eternity from one form to another, emitting excess energy in every plane and dimension.

  Her emissions dopplered back at her as they reached the ends of reality. She saw herself reflected back at herself in a globe that was bigger inside than out. All alone, she thought she’d go mad. She ran and ran off to the wall at the end of the universe.

  But she couldn’t get there. She smashed into an invisible plate of mirror which reflected herself back at herself and reflected all that was behind her, making it seem infinity was ahead of her.

  She pivoted and ran to the nether end of the universe. And again smashed into a clear wall and confronted herself—guardian of eternity that would not let her pass.

  What do you want of me! she wailed. Let me out!

  Look at me, was the answer.

  She resisted forever. And after that, she looked.

  Jarmi!

  She looked into a mirror, and someone else looked back. But it wasn’t someone else. It was the Gen who lurked inside of herself, buried but not dead, buried and eternal. It was like using a dental mirror to look at the back of a tooth in another mirror. She knew it was the inside of her own self, a self she could never see directly.

  If I’d been born Gen, I’d have been Jarmi. I’d have done the same. Jarmi had considered herself a crippled Donor, and had spent her whole life limping, favoring that crippled side of herself so that when she finally did lean on it, it buckled under her.

  The truth of self-knowledge was so painful that Laneff wrenched free of the fascination and fled, only to fling herself against yet another barrier. She looked at herself in this mirror and saw Digen. Or was it Mairis? Ferociously dedicated to a Cause: however necessary the Cause might be, however laudable the capacity for total dedication, the ferocity betrayed the true motive: escape from self-knowledge. There’s only one way to be safe from self-knowledge, and that’s never to look closely at the people around you. Digen had looked only at people’s virtues; Laneff looked only to eliminating their faults.

  Eliminate the kill and cure what’s wrong with humanity. But what about what’s wrong with myself?

  She had to flee from that, to run forever, until she crashed stunningly into another barricade across infinity that was infinity.

  Yuan!

  Yuan hated the Diet for hating Simes, for fearing the kill when it was really themselves who were committing suicide. There is no such thing as the kill; it’s only that Gens commit suicide. That was the basic tenet of Distect philosophy. The ultimate crime in the Distect was to use a Sime to commit suicide. But a self-destructive Gen just naturally ended up doing that. So the ultimate crime that Yuan hated was self-destruction. And she had never met a more self-destructive person than Yuan Sirat Tiernan ambrov Rior. The hate itself had turned on him and compelled him, like a junct in need, to destroy everything he’d built.

  True, he never blamed anyone else for his misfortunes. But he couldn’t quite see for himself that he himself was actually to blame. So he came out to squash self-destruction with the same ferocious dedication she herself pitted against eradicating berserkers.

  I hate berserkers the same way he hates the Diet; I hate because I am a berserker.

  Surrounded by herself in many guises, she understood herself and became one with herself, seeing her own face superimposed thinly over the faces of others and knowing that they saw themselves in her and were at one with her. Keeping herself company, she was not alone.

  A tremendous feeling of belonging, of Unity, overcame her, more powerful than pledging a Householding. We are the same yet individual.

  And all of us are junct. She toured the walls of her prison, greeting the multitudes gathered at infinity, channels, Donors, donor Gens, and nondonor Gens, and renSimes. All junct, all dedicated ferociously to self-destruction.

  Junctedness, then, is not a property of renSimeness. Self-destruction is a human preoccupation, and the kill is our way of cooperatively doing that.

  She relived the four kills that she had made, and from this new perspective of being the Gen while also being the Sime, she saw herself ripping savagely at her very substance to satisfy an inner lack that really couldn’t be reached that way: like a hungry wolf gnawing chunks out of its own leg!

  She looked out of the mirror at herself, long canine jaws dripping blood that plumed selyn in a mist about the drops.

  She fled, but the echo of that vision was everywhere until she fetched up in her father’s arms, in his Farris channel’s nager so Infinitely Gen. She looked up and saw two crippled renSimes leaning 6n each other, trying to pretend to be Gen, needing to be Gen to someone.

  The grotesque image repelled her. She stumbled away, confronting everywhere the reflection of her face with the wolf’s snout sticking out, dripping blood, her own blood, her own selyn misting off to infinity.

  She stared at the image that stared back as if in a contest of wills. No, that’s not the essence of renSime, nor the essence of me– It has been, yes, but it doesn’t have to be.

  The colored-ball models of her two compounds, K/A and K/B, floated into her vision, mirror images perfectly suited to this infinite but limited environment. The universe was constructed on pairs of opposites that were nevertheless identical: channel Donor; Sime Gen; Actor/Reactor. Who was responsible?

  She had seen how everything that had happened to her was the result of a decision she made independently and with full personal responsibility. But she had also seen how each event was just as much the result of the decisions others had made, independent of herself yet a reflection. Each of them in the scenario was both Actor and Reactor, each reacting to something that happened before.

  She stood outside of time and looked at the events since her changeover/kill, and looked backward in time from that moment, and looked and looked to infinity. The reflections dazzled to infinity and beyond until she could go rip further than some abstract First Cause, a Prime Mover whose Word began creation. God.

  She saw those energies weaving down a Jacob’s ladder of twined pylons that supported manifest reality, a brilliant gold current, a flood of pure undifferentiated energy that poked through the mirror-screen that surrounded reality and emerged as the tiny zone of phase conversion at the core of every soul, Sime and Gen alike.

  She saw how channels were able to dam up this energy, refusing to let the polar-opposite Sime and Gen come into direct contact, to let the essence of life flow forth and celebrate the full unifying force of the Will of Nature.

  But renSimes were unable to do this. The renSime would always succumb to the w
ill to live, no matter the cost. The renSime could be the Force of Nature.

  The Gens could choose to oppose that force, and die, or acknowledge their oneness with it, and celebrate life.

  Each could choose, each was Actor and Reactor, each personally responsible, but none totally responsible. To change, they must change as a group. Yet to change as a group, they must each change first separately. Reflections within reflections, where all opposites were identical.

  The dripping beast jaw that protruded from her face began to dissolve. She pulled herself up to her full height and, back straight, head high, she turned without haste and calmly walked away toward her new destiny, free at last of the fear that had made her flee.

  She came-to where the invisible barriers had always stopped her. The sea of reflected faces dimmed, thinned, and evaporated, smiling calmly back at her as they died away.

  The barrier they had formed turned to gossamer and parted before her until she came to a reflection that had no reflection of its own, as if it existed in the instant of its own creation, before reflections could be bounced back.

  Shanlun and Azevedo. More than just faces. Whole and complete bodies. Whole, complete nager, joined into Shanlun’s scintillating pyrotechnic display.

  They were dressed in emerald-green ankle-length robes that enveloped their bodies. Azevedo wore a headdress of three tiers piled on top of each other making him very tall, with folds of white cloth

  shrouding his neck and hair, exposing only his face to her view. Their sleeves were elbow-length, cut full and loose, exposing forearms.

  Each wore a jeweled starred-cross emblem on his breast, and the emblems glowed preternaturally.

  I never found anyone who required me for an enemy, Shanlun had once said.

  Oh, yes you have, Shanlun. And it was me. But I don’t want that to be anymore.

  Let us change together, offered Shanlun, as always answering her unspoken thoughts.