“No,” said Sian. “The channeling staff can’t be involved in this election. Go back to your regular schedule and whatever you do, don’t let Bruce go before we get this settled. It’s too slippery to ride hard out there now. A broken-necked Gen won’t help our cause. For this election, he has to appear to be the level headed, methodical Companion we’ve always thought him to be.”
Kahleen and Garen chuckled, and Kahleen said, “Nothing will stop Bruce, trust me. The only reason I didn’t go with Clire is that she had Killed. I’d have let her try to Kill me any time, but she wouldn’t have wanted me because it wouldn’t work.”
That silenced everyone for a moment. Lexy nodded, and ran her tentacles over the note Bruce had given her. “Clire hates my father, too. This isn’t her hatred driving her. This is love for my half-sibling. This will probably be my father’s last child. My father will Need Bruce to get that baby born alive. Tomorrow or the next day it’ll be possible to ride in this muck, and if my father is still alive now, he’ll still be alive when we get to him with all Jhiti’s Guard.”
Solamar said, “Let’s go talk to Jhiti then.” He plucked the note from her tentacles. It had been handled by so many now that any residue of Rimon’s presence had been obliterated. Still, he had to believe that without the belt, Rimon would surely be out of his body tonight.
When Solamar handed Jhiti the note, the renSime stared at it. “Then he’s alive?” He dropped to his knees before Lexy, imploring her, “Forgive me! I should have gone after him that very day! If he dies, it’s my fault.”
“It’s what you honestly believed,” said Lexy.
Jhiti buried his face in his hands struggling against sobs. “No! I began to believe the lies that Council kept spreading. Delri never lied to us. When he made a mistake, he just did it over again until he got it right.”
“Jhiti, you’re still Post. Take a deep breath. Zlin me,” said Lexy, and gave him nageric support as she put out a hand and levered the man to his feet. “Get ready to have your men moving the moment Sian gives you the word.”
“I’ll send out scouts tonight. I know a few who’ll volunteer. Oberin will be very happy.”
Lexy took the note back. “I have more people to show this to.” They parted company then, Lexy to go check on Tuzhel and talk to the staff and Solamar to talk to Bruce who was being kept under guard in Rimon’s room.
There were two of Jhiti’s guards, a renSime and a Gen, on the door and another pair beneath the window. The Council had sent one of their own to watch each set of guards from a distance.
When Solamar arrived, the two guards on the door were the Fort Hope scout, Kimra who had been badly gored by a bobcat while trying to find Fort Rimon, and Eirelle, a young Gen woman from Fort Tanhara who had been a farmer but became a hardened fighter on the trail.
Bruce’s wife Dayyel and his daughter Iriela holding her infant son were arguing with Kimra about a food basket Dayyel held. The family of course wanted to take it in themselves, right now. The guards had orders that the door opened only at shift-change when there were four guards. Bruce was not to have visitors.
Eirelle stepped forward when Solamar appeared at the end of the hall, but darted a glance at the Council’s monitor. “Solamar, what should we do?”
Solamar said, loudly enough for the Council’s monitor to hear, “Dayyel, I’ll take the basket in to Bruce. I’m sure the Council didn’t mean he’s to be kept in isolation, but only that people he could overpower are kept away.”
With that, he opened the door and went right on in carrying the basket, adjusting his showfield so that his advanced state of Need wasn’t so obvious.
Bruce looked around from where he’d been staring out the window, saw his wife and daughter outside and threw his hands in the air. “Go on home! They aren’t going to hurt me. They’re just trying to protect me.”
“Don’t do anything we’ll regret,” called Dayyel as the guards moved her away from the door.
Solamar closed the door, saying to Bruce’s family, “They aren’t going to starve him either, but I’m sure he’ll be happy to have a good meal now.”
Farther down the hall, the Council representative looked wary but resigned. Solamar’s unauthorized visit would surely be reported. Why do these things always happen when you’re in Need? he asked the universe.
The insulated door made from two layers of hardwood laminated around a layer of selyn refractive sand closed off the protests as effectively as it masked the nageric static. Solamar put the basket on the table. The Gen stared at it without appetite. “When do I get out of here?”
“Earliest would be tomorrow afternoon.” He lowered his voice. “Sian and Lexy are planning to oust that Council tomorrow morning.”
Bruce’s attention finally came to focus on Solamar. “Shen!” he swore. “You’re in Need.”
“And happily fixed on Kahleen.” So much for showfield work around Bruce. It confirmed his new opinion that Farrises were different from other channels, so Farrises required very different Companions, or created that difference in their Companions. “Don’t worry about me. There are more urgent issues.”
Bruce nodded and turned back to the window, focusing the shaft of attention outward. Unconsciously, his hand rested on the Starred Cross buckle of Rimon’s belt that now circled his waist. The belt was let out fully and still bit into the Gen’s flesh. “I should be on my way now.”
“Bruce, if you just break out of here and run, you’ll be hurling yourself into Clire’s power.”
“Clire can’t Kill me. Delri has taken her measure. We discussed it when he discovered she was pregnant.”
“Lexy doubts Clire plans to Kill you. Clire wants you to serve Rimon so he can deliver her baby in about three months. After that, she’ll see you two murdered or worse.”
“I wish I could say Delri and I can take care of ourselves, but it’s not true anymore. We’re too old. If he weren’t badly hurt, he’d be here by now, Raiders or no Raiders. I should just go and let Jhiti rescue us later.”
Solamar sat on the bed he’d so often occupied when Rimon was on duty. “You should just wait.”
Bruce whirled from the window and paced hands on the belt buckle. “He’s lost the belt, Solamar. He goes crazy without it! Clire doesn’t know that. She didn’t take it to destroy his sanity, but it will. I have to be there! I should have ridden out through the flood!”
“Jhiti worked all winter thinking up strategies to oust the Raiders from Shifron. He’s ready to move. Tomorrow.”
“How can you be sure Rimon’ll be all right that long? Did you see him out of his body or something?”
“No. I haven’t seen him...yet. It might happen tonight, or maybe he’s learned how to control his wandering for himself. Bruce, he’s alive now, and Clire wants his Companion there. She’ll keep him alive until you get there because she wants her baby to live.”
“I can’t wait!”
He changed the subject. “Garen has his hands full with Lexy too.”
That stopped Bruce in his tracks. “How is she?”
“None of this is good for a pregnant woman, nevermind a pregnant Farris woman.”
“She has to have Delri to deliver her child too. If Delri told Clire that Lexy’s pregnant...Clire was good friends with Lexy....”
“You can’t count Clire as sane at this point.”
Bruce sat down on the bed next to Solamar and his fields softened. “Solamar, what would it take to get you to help me go now?”
Bribery!?
Stunned, Solamar shook his head. “A complete change in the situation.”
Bruce scrubbed his face. “I thought you liked Delri!”
“I do. And I think he’s our main hope for rescuing the non-junct way of life from extinction. If this Fort is destroyed, well...I doubt if any of the others survived. We can’t afford to make any mistakes. That’s why we have to wait. It isn’t enough to rescue Rimon. We have to unify these people behind him and they have to rescue him.”
That’s what I came here for, thought Solamar bleakly, and maybe tomorrow it will start to happen.
One of their plans did work. The election went overwhelmingly for Sian’s new Council, people accepting the argument that Alind’s Council had not been properly elected by Fort Rimon’s customs. That made this the first election after all but three of the previous Council had died. Sian ordered Jhiti to move, but cautiously.
Sian’s slate of Councilors included Rinda from Fort Hope plus leaders of all the other Forts, even a few who distrusted Rimon’s style. Benart put up as the opposition both Alind’s elected Council and all those who had run in that election and lost. There were plenty of choices.
Xanon told Lexy publicly that he had been wrong about Rimon’s motives and was voting for Sian’s Council. With that and the Church of Unity voting block on their side, they won by a huge majority, all clamoring to rescue Rimon and Clire too if they could manage it.
Tuzhel, heartened immensely by Sian’s win, especially with the Esrens turning against Alind’s Council, breezed through his disjunction crisis, easily choosing Lexy over the Gen Lexy offered him for a Kill, Bekka.
The post election furor died instantly when Jhiti’s first scouts returned from Shifron and the Gen border at an insane gallop and reported, “The Gens are coming through the pass in force!” and “The juncts’ Border Patrol is heading for Shifron to retake it. I’ve never seen so many Patrol all at once! Their scouts have spotted the Gens.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
ZEOR
When Clire had yanked the belt from around his supine body, she had unknowingly released him.
For a long time he had known he was unconscious but had been aware in bright flashes embedded in gray murk.
He had no idea how he’d come to be in Clire’s power, held captive near some out-Territory Gens worn to sick exhaustion by sustained terror. He had no idea why he couldn’t move, why he couldn’t seem to get a grip on his body and on reality, or why though he was aware of the passage of time as his body consumed selyn, he couldn’t remember how much time had passed.
He remembered suddenly finding himself disconnected from time and space, whirling insanely, groping for the world. He had been riding through a cold dark, desperate to catch up to Tuzhel, to recoup his error with the youngster. Then he had been...nowhere he could identify.
Clire had been in nowhere with him, holding a steady field around him, grabbing his consciousness and nailing it in the Pen building in Shifron with ruthless Farris precision, her hatred of him infused with cold junct passion.
He lay suspended, unable to care if he ever connected with his body again. He heard people talking, felt nageric interactions, understood the ambient around him, knew when he swallowed something warm or cold, felt cloth washing his body, felt Kills done in his presence in an attempt to wake him, understood Wild Gens were placed in his cage to stimulate him, knew that Clire knew this wouldn’t work.
She wanted him to wake up to save her child which she insisted now must be his own child too. She wanted to punish him for what he’d done to her. She wanted him junct and awake to watch her destroy Fort Rimon. He heard her spell out her scheme, so sure he couldn’t understand.
When her Raiders had discovered he had traded out-Territory for leather, Clire had ordered Freebander raids on that one town to plant clues to lead the Gens to Fort Rimon. Clire wanted him to watch, helplessly junct, while Gens destroyed all he treasured. Then, after her child was born, she would watch him die slowly, by Attrition of selyn.
She had defeated herself when she had yanked the belt from around his waist. He had flown free, floated high looking down on his cell, on his supine body, Clire standing over him whipping the belt through the air. He couldn’t feel his impending Turnover, his helpless paralysis. Am I dead? Am I a ghost?
The out-Territory Gens in his cell had cringed as Clire whipped the belt near their faces. He didn’t feel their alarm or fear that was intended to wake him. That was the last he knew of Shifron before the fog took him elsewhere.
Del Rimon Farris knew he was in trouble, even if he was dead because an old dream swept him into the amphitheater where he stood reading out the story of Rimon Farris founding the House of Zeor.
He knew it was himself reading about himself.
The audience was unbelievably huge. Circular rows were ranked one above the other to an impossible height. A visible mist, and a nageric fog, shrouded the upper ranks. The faces came in every skin tone, and in colors he couldn’t believe were human. The people lacking any perceptible nager were not human, and this didn’t surprise him.
But what did shock him was the sight of his long dead and much beloved wife, Ehren, in the front row center, looking up at him tenderly. She sat with her arm around one of those nagerically null non-human beings. She was young, and looked very different than when they’d been married, but she was beautiful, and most important, happy.
He knew that everyone in that amphitheater, everyone who had ever pledged their lives Unto Zeor, Forever, had to be reminded that they might ultimately have failed. They had to understand that they had succeeded because every single time they failed, they had started again and excelled their previous mark. When they had failed again, they had renewed their efforts, doing a little better which had moved the world one step closer to this moment.
Each of them had died and been born anew to live all over again, and again, just a little better each time. Now they sat and listened to the story, hearing how it had seemed to Rimon Farris but remembering it from their own memories, remembering Rimon as they had known him, remembering Fort Rimon in that awful year when the other Forts had failed and returned beaten.
They remembered the founding of the House of Zeor from the ashes of Fort Rimon’s destruction.
From the podium, standing before the members of his Householding as Klairon Farris ambrov Zeor, Rimon looked up at the ranks of seats banked impossibly high in front of him, and soaked up their non-junct, never junct ambient throbbing with the joy of total fulfillment of the dream.
Rimon knew that dream. He had dreamed it thousands of times before he’d changed over. It always began with the beautifully colored, glowing, shining image Slina had woven into his baby quilt. He had learned to walk clutching that quilt. He had slept with it so stubbornly that eventually they had stitched the little quilt into the center of a larger one that he could sleep under until he was full grown.
That beautiful image, the sweeping, graceful abstract outline of Slina’s dagger, became his heart in later dreams, his vriamic node where his two selyn systems joined to make him the powerful channel he was. Crazy dream.
This moment, in a weirdly insane distant future, the dream was real. If he turned he would see Slina’s dagger projecting outward, an image made only of selyn fields. He didn’t want to zlin that image. It was too impossible. Such a thing could not exist. Oddly, though, in reality beyond death, it did.
He knew the way to get to this moment of unification of Sime and Gen was to understand failure and even death as part of a repeating cycle. Just do a little better this time. Excellence was all you had to know to get here.
This was the second time he’d been here. So this time he’d take a piece of it with him to remember what it felt like to be here, to remember that excellence was the way to success not perfection.
He made himself turn and confront that looming symbol above him, the image Slina had made for his quilt.
Solamar had said, “Rimon can imagine something, shape and hone it, create it in this other space where people don’t have solid bodies. He can take what he’s imagined and make it real. He healed Sian’s nerves not in Sian’s body itself but in the part of Sian that can move out of his physical body. Then he put Sian’s healed image back into his body and the body did heal.”
So in his mind, Rimon made an image of that huge selyn-rich symbol so vivid he could see it, then gathered up the tone and tenor of the non-junct ambient nager. He pack
ed all that textured emotion into the image, just the way he’d put Sian back into his body.
To keep the vibrantly glowing image safe, he built a small coffer around it, polished so smooth he could see his reflection in it. The top he inlaid with an image of the Starred Cross belt buckle with all its colored gems sparkling.
He worked on every detail until he could open that box, breathe this supreme ambient any time he wished, and remember how to get here.
Finally, he turned around to face the huge crowd of people arrayed in endless ranks above him.
There was nothing but blank gray mist. He whirled about and the huge, selyn-glowing symbol was gone. He was once again nowhere. Tucked under one arm was the small coffer he had made and sealed with the Starred Cross.
If I’m dead, then I’m a ghost. Maybe I can appear to Lexy? No, it would frighten her and now is no time to be frightening her. I could appear to Solamar and give him the box. He can give it to Lexy and they’ll know we’ll all do better next time. Where is Solamar? He always turns up.
* * * * * * *
“They’re all just sitting out there watching each other,” complained BanSha.
Tuzhel, Solamar, and BanSha were on the wall watching developments in the valley around them. Solamar was teaching BanSha how to hold their fields neutral and transparent to any watching renSimes while interpreting faintly zlinned information.
Tuzhel was supposed to be learning to stand a guard watch but was fascinated by BanSha manipulating fields. Solamar sighed and used Tuzhel as BanSha’s study subject.
Solamar was in hard Need just a day and a half from transfer, zlinning keenly. Being away from Kahleen set his nerves on edge, but he couldn’t let the newly disjuncted Tuzhel zlin it. BanSha on the other hand was all too aware of it because he checked the channel’s duty board often.
The Farris Channel Page 30