RenSime

by Jacqueline Lichtenberg

  It was obvious, though, why they had done it. This place ran on selyn power, and everyone had to pay their own way. Also, it certainly made it easier to be in the man’s presence.

  On the bed, the Gen tossed fitfully, reacting, Laneff surmised, to the corridor lighting. And then he was sitting bolt upright. “Who’s there?”

  Laneff noticed the wrist shackle had been removed. For the night, so he could sleep? That was Yuan’s compassion. And now the sign on the door made sense. “It’s only me,” she answered, turning a bit so he could see her by the light.

  “The Farris!” Startled as he was, his hand stayed habitually near the point where it had been moored by the shackle.

  “I came to ask if Bianka had done a good job taking down your field.” It had been weeks since Laneff had spoken English, and the idiom now came hard.

  “She never did any such thing!” charged the pilot.

  So it was under drugs. “Oh. I see.”

  But he knew. “She did it while I was out cold?”

  The lancing panic in the Gen was a mere whisper compared to what it had been during the interrogation when his emotions had been carried on a replete selyn field. Laneff stepped closer to speak more quietly. “You’re a lot safer now around Simes. Bianka tried to make it easy for you.” She added in a rhetorical tone, “Has anybody here tortured you?”

  Wonderingly, he noticed that his hand was free. They took off the shackle while he was asleep!

  He eyed her, puzzled. “You don’t think waiting for torture is torture? You think I don’t know what you came here for tonight? You go back and tell that Mairis that the Diet doesn’t breed fools!”

  And with that, he launched himself at the open door, in a forward rolling dive. While his body flew through the air, Laneff went into high level augmentation and stepped forward to block the Gen. She caught his rotating body by the shoulders, tensing to absorb the momentum of the massive Gen.

  His shoulders smacked into her palms and she grabbed with outspread tentacles, taking the expected weight on flexed thigh muscles as her whole body leaned into the task. But she had forgotten the slick, polished floor and her smooth soled shoes. Her feet slipped out from under her and she pitched forward, landing prone with the Gen’s weight smashing down right on top of her. Her head snapped down hard against the tile floor. Pain starred her forehead, and a black curtain engulfed her.

  Twenty-two minutes later, she came to with a Gen bending over her anxiously—a Donor, the one from the front desk. “Hajene Fa—I mean, you must be Laneff!” He looked up at the empty bed. He had flipped on the light—painfully bright. “The prisoner! Shenshay!” He lunged toward the door, then checked himself. “You all right?”

  Laneff tried to pull her legs under her, then gave up as her head burst. “Go! Tell Yuan. Call out the guards! Polk has a twenty-three minute head start!”

  The Gen pounded away down the narrow corridor. Moments later, loudspeakers filled the compound with a raucous buzzing sound. Laneff groped her way to the door, clutching her ears to cut the aching sound. Yuan’s voice came on over the alarm giving cryptic instructions. Before the booming echoes died, feet were pounding everywhere, and Laneff thought her head would fly apart.

  Ten minutes later, Bianka arrived, took in Laneff’s condition, and called for Jarmi. Then she helped Laneff to an examining table. “Can you walk, or should I carry you?”

  “Walk! I’ve got to go help—” The world dissolved into a dazzle with billowing blackness on the edges.

  “How long were you unconscious?”

  Laneff told her, certain of the time by her Sime senses.

  Bianka draped one of Laneff’s arms over her shoulders and lifted her onto the hard treatment table in the emergency room. Flat on her back, Laneff actually felt better. Bianka bandaged Laneff’s forehead, which had bled mightily, all the while muttering about having just cured one concussion patient and being saddled with another. Then she made a full lateral contact examination.

  Nen came in with Jarmi, and the ambient nager was suffused with pure Genness. Jarmi ran to Laneff’s side, taking her arms to look for bruises. “What happened?” she demanded.

  At that moment, Yuan appeared in the doorway, his nageric brilliance overshadowing the other two Gens. Laneff felt instantly better and began to struggle against the restraining chest strap to sit up.

  “Oh, no you don’t!” warned Bianka, pushing her down. “You’re not moving that head for at least twenty-four hours even if I have to sandbag it for you! Understand?”

  “Will you let her answer some questions?” asked Yuan.

  “Make it quick,” answered Bianka from her drug cabinet.

  Yuan spread his hands wide in a silent plea.

  Laneff confessed why she had been there, and how she’d let the Gen get by her. Tears of shame pooling at the outer corners of her eyes, she finished, “And now I can’t even help you get him back!”

  “You’re a scientist, Laneff, not combat-trained. And that man was willing to die in that escape attempt. I knew his state of mind when I decided to let him sleep without the shackle. Don’t blame yourself too harshly. But next time you doubt me, do a little more research before trying your experiments!”

  “Any chance of recapturing him?” asked Jarmi.

  Yuan sighed. “Not if he’s gotten outside, like we think he did. Besides—there’s no point to it. One look at the sky and he’ll know where he is. Let’s just hope he doesn’t realize how large this installation is. And—I think they’ll still go for the Last Year House—Oh, no! I’ve got to warn Mairis!” He turned on his heel and ran from the room.

  Laneff remembered the times Mairis had been called away from Digen’s funeral arrangements for a supersecret phone call, the rumors that it was the self-styled Sosectu ambrov Rior urging Mairis to stand for Unification now and pledging the support of the powerful Neo-Distect in a true alliance. Now she was the cause of a call of a different kind.

  They moved her into a room off the hospital corridor, and she slept holding Jarmi’s hand to blunt the pain Bianka’s drugs couldn’t reach.

  In a few days, she was back on her feet, determined to let nothing interfere with her concentration on the problem in hand: the real cause of Digen’s death. With the Diet knowing of this location, she couldn’t be sure how much time she’d have in this well equipped lab.

  But still, in the hours between midnight and dawn when Jarmi had gone off to sleep and she had to face the cold fingers of need gripping her guts, she found herself dwelling on getting her life in order for her own death.

  Unable to work, she often sat writing letters to Shanlun, Mairis, and her father, her older brother, and others she’d known in her life. She wrote them among the notes in her bound notebooks, certain that people considered those so valuable they would see that they survived. She didn’t bother disposing of her few personal possessions. As she’d already been proclaimed dead, no doubt her possessions had been disposed of. She told them how she felt about them, and what she remembered best about them.

  She found herself composing a letter to Shanlun in which she tried to explain Yuan, and how much it had meant to her when Yuan had not been angry at her for what she’d done behind his back. No! It’s impossible. Just a waste of time! Jarmi had found her slumped exhausted over the open notebook page, having accomplished little or nothing through the night.

  The next night, she steadfastly refused to indulge in letter writing, but despite her good intentions, she found herself reviewing each task and her notes on it with a very real sense that someone else would be forced to finish her job. She became so meticulous in her note taking that each procedure took twice the time it should have.

  A little over a week after her turnover, there was a raid by the Diet on a Tecton Last Year House. Twelve people died—eleven terrorists and a channel.

  Yuan brought the newspaper to the lab personally, sitting on one corner of her desk, his nager paralyzingly brilliant and terribly controlled. “Mairis
’ strategy worked. He told me he’d triple the guard at Teeren House, and make no changes elsewhere, so they’d attack Teeren, which was prepared.”

  Teeren House was the Last Year House just off the Rialite campus, and run mostly by the Zeor Farrises who answered to Mairis. It was an old renovated Householding compound, originally built to be defended against Freeband Raiders. “They were foolish to attack Teeren,” said Laneff.

  “Not foolish, desperate. They believe everything they’ve been saying for ten years.” He handed her a more disreputable newspaper.

  “Do you read this thing?” she asked, taking it with the tips of two tentacles, as if it were a noxious substance.

  “There are people who believe every word of that garbage just because it’s in print and contradicts what the legitimate press has verified.”

  This article suggested that the Diet in fact knew that Laneff was alive and working—if not at Teeren, then somewhere under Tecton supervision. Mairis, it said, had staked so much of his campaign on Laneff’s research that it seemed logical he would lie about her death to protect her remaining time for her work. And since the Distect was his known ally, and it was known that the Distect condoned the kill and harbored real juncts, it could easily be providing Donors and even real kills for Laneff.

  The editorial took off on that article and suggested that the only way for Mairis to clear his name was to renounce his alliance with the Distect.

  “But Mairis never publicly espoused your shenned Distect! You are the only one who ever said anything about an alliance!”

  Yuan laughed. “It’s easy to see where your loyalties lie! Mairis is a good man. He’s accepted our support privately. And I understand why he hasn’t been able to make a public statement; opinions like this,” he said, smacking the paper with one hand, “aren’t limited to the wild fringes. But Mairis knows that some of the prominent people who are now supporting his candidacy, who have never done anything like it before, are our people. He knows how much weight we swing in modern politics. Nobody else has to know—yet.”

  Laneff wondered just how closely Yuan’s vision matched Digen’s vision of Unity. What kind of world would the Distect build? Even if her method were foolproof, and every Sime was spotted long enough before changeover to be trained to seek help, and there were no more berserkers, still there would be Gens who couldn’t tolerate the sensation of selyn movement. Such Gens could be killed. And as long as they existed, a world in which each renSime was free to seek his own transfer arrangements would be a world in which the kill was common.

  Other papers carried the story of the public outcry that forced an open inspection of the Teeren facility which was televised around the world, to convince people it had never harbored Laneff or permitted rejuncts to kill.

  Yuan brought her a small television monitor on which to view the inspection, but she busied herself with setting up some glassware and running a calibration, only glancing at the screen.

  Afterward, Yuan said, quietly, “The Diet has had spies checking every other Last Year House. There aren’t so many, you know. Soon they are going to conclude that we have you.”

  “They’ll raid us,” said Jarmi, who had watched the televised inspection with horrified fascination. “Shouldn’t we think about moving Laneff?”

  “To where?” asked Yuan. “No. This is our most defensible installation. We’ll stand here.”

  Over the next day or so, people began to arrive, transforming themselves from ordinary citizens to combat troops within hours. They had to double up in the sleeping rooms, and Laneff was asked to move in with Jarmi. They even quartered troops in the hospital. Men and women, Sime and Gen, they carried arms, field rations, and ammunition, and wore high laced boots, crash helmets, and unmarked uniforms.

  Laneff had once thought such things existed only in history—or films. But these were live people with a collective nager of leashed threat and brawny eagerness.

  When she told Jarmi, as they were waiting for a slow reaction to terminate, that she found them frightening, Jarmi only said, “They’re all ours, and they’re good at fighting. It’s only that you’re in need, now, and so anxious about—us. Afterward, you’ll see. They really are friendly.”

  Trying to see Jarmi’s point of view, Laneff zlinned many of the strangers. She found no obvious juncts among the Simes now guarding them, though many of those who lived underground all the time bore the stigma she knew glowed in her own nager.

  “Yuan wouldn’t ask juncts to fight Gens,” assured Jarmi. “They might accidentally kill someone.”

  Jarmi’s attitude seemed to be that any Gen who wanted to get himself killed ought to do it on purpose, and ought to get the Sime to agree first! Laneff couldn’t encompass that.

  In a few days, the defenders settled into a routine, melding themselves into the life of the installation, helping with construction as well as defense. The cafeteria now worked around the clock. Extra tables were set up and the rules changed to allow trays to leave the area. A schedule was instituted on flushing toilets, because sewers were overloading. And the thermostats were turned up because the air conditioners couldn’t cope with all the body heat and kept burning out their condensers.

  The troops trained constantly in a large underground garage area Laneff hadn’t even known was there until Jarmi took her to watch the mock battles. “Some archaeologists once decided this was an old church. I don’t believe it.”

  On the twenty-third day after her kill, Laneff found Jarmi dogging her tracks unmercifully. She rounded on the woman, letting out a bellow of frustration. “Can’t I even go to pee without you looking over my shoulder!”

  Jarmi grinned, shrugged, and waited in the corridor. The public room had three stalls, used by Sime and Gen women. It was an arrangement that had always made Laneff nervous. Now, as she waited her turn among noncombatants and troops, she couldn’t keep the four Gens in the room from etching into her consciousness. She fidgeted and wished for Jarmi’s buffering field.

  Then she berated herself for that wish, horrified at how dependent she was becoming on the Gen. And if I kill her?

  When she claimed a stall, she found it ridiculously difficult to relax enough to do her business. Having wasted almost five minutes, when others were waiting—some of them Sime and aware of her problem—she gave up, washed her hands and left.

  That night, she was going over some test results at her desk in the lab—the only place that had not been invaded by troops—when a woman came hesitantly through the door. “I thought I’d find you here,” she said in a Simelan dialect that sounded local.

  The woman was renSime and had been here for years. She was pale, and her nager seemed to echo with the tremor of the junct stigma.

  “Did I forget to file a form?”

  “No—I was—it’s just that I—Well, maybe it’s not my place… it’s personal of course….”

  Laneff scrutinized the woman more closely. She was of advanced middle years, thin as any Sime, medium height, mouse-brown hair. And there was an aura of calm there that Laneff had not noticed before, despite the woman’s obvious embarrassment. “Is there something I can help you with?” asked Laneff.

  She beamed. “No. I just wanted to tell you that—well, I killed for the first and last time when I was fifteen years past changeover. And that was nearly five years ago. If you don’t fight Jarmi, I’ll bet she can do the same for you.”

  Surprised, Laneff zlinned the woman and remembered the last time she’d seen her. In the toilet room. She’d taken the stall Laneff had vacated, unsuccessful.

  “Well, I’ve got to get back to the kitchen. We’ve got hungry troops to feed!” And she was gone.

  Laneff decided nobody had put the woman up to this. But by the time her shock had worn off, it was too late to call her back. When Jarmi turned up, near dawn the next morning, Laneff had made peace with the idea of the Gen’s solicitous and permeating presence.

  Jarmi’s attitude seemed to be a signal to the other Gens they m
et in halls and cafeteria. It seemed all the Distect Gens were Donors, and the ones who were high field were dreadfully polite about it, being very careful never to tempt Laneff. Yet she couldn’t help but shy from every high field Gen except Yuan.

  His field continued at that searingly brilliant level, but he seemed to be making his peace with his condition. When he was around, Laneff found she could truly relax her guard. And so she encouraged him to drop into the lab to talk about her work, not caring whether he understood or not.

  The morning of the twenty-fifth day, after Yuan had left the lab, Jarmi followed Laneff to the exhaust chamber where they had set up a trin tea service using a lab flask and a sand bath. “We’ve got to talk, Laneff.”

  Laneff had been indulging in the thousandth comparison between Shanlun and Yuan. “Why?” she snapped.

  “A lot of things haven’t been said yet. Like—well, I know the Tecton keeps renSimes on a twenty-five or six-day cycle. But I don’t know your cycle, exactly.”

  Laneff wasn’t used to discussing need with Gens. Need was a medical condition treated in confidence by a channel—a fellow Sime who knew without asking what it was like. Jarmi didn’t have the clinical attitude that would have made Laneff comfortable. She hitched herself onto a wickerwork lab stool and toyed with a rack of test tubes. “Do you realize, Jarmi, I know even less about you than you know about me?”

  “We’ve both put the work above personal interests. And we’ve accomplished a lot. We’ll accomplish a lot more after this transfer. You can’t expect your mind to be working efficiently now!”

  “It’s not so bad yet—at least when you’re around.” She grinned and confessed her experience in the public toilet. “The Tecton had me on a twenty-five day cycle most of the time. But I don’t feel twenty-fifth day right now. Even when Yuan was here—he was comfortable, not raising my intil.”

  Even without technical training, Jarmi knew that intil meant the appetite for transfer which was as different from need as appetite was from hunger. “If you’re not high intil, then we shouldn’t push it. But you don’t know when you might be taken by it.”