For a moment, Joran’s attention riveted on the Second Order channel being chewed to bits in a class for Thirds. Vret felt the lack of his Donor’s protection when every student in the room seemed to be zlinning him. Then Joran moved to counter the effect of the ambient on his channel and suddenly all attention was on the instructors again.
Neither Farris was even sweating. After all that high precision, deep zlinning through what seemed to Vret opaque curtains they were as fresh as if they’d spent a couple of hours drinking trin tea in the gardens.
And they’re born that way. Farrises! Still, his own life would become markedly easier if only he could Qualify Second and get into a specialty. And that wouldn’t happen if his involvement in the Secret Boards were discovered.
He would have to draw Blissdrip out by getting him to comment on the Boards.
The great gaping flaw in the plan was big enough to swallow Vret whole. It required him not only to read these deeply disturbing stories, he had to write some too, because if Ilin wouldn’t be posting, then someone had to goad Blissdrip into making a mistake and revealing his identity in a comment or response on the Boards.
The day after he had so ignominiously brought himself to Saelul Farris’s attention, he was waiting for Ilin to pass by the cactus garden when he saw Iric Chez galloping toward him in the long-legged stride that was just short of augmented speed. His dusky complexion was darkened by the desert sun, and his bony physique seemed etched sharply under his student Second uniform.
“Vret!” hailed Iric. “That was some performance in Dispensary Lab yesterday. The Farrises really admired your work. I don’t know how you get all the reading done and still get through the class work.”
“Well, yesterday I was just lucky.”
“Yeah. Farrises! They count “almost late” as actually late! You got lost in the Secret Killroom installment, just like I did, didn’t you?”
Vret quickly zlinned all around but nobody was close enough to have heard. He’s a Second now. He’d notice if anyone were close.
“Calm down,” admonished Chez. “I just wanted to thank you for getting me onto the Secret Boards. After Killroom started, it became a real eye-opener. The Tecton has to re-think the legal status of the junct in today’s society. I’m on my way to the library to see if there’s anything on the Distect philosophy. The Gulf Territory direct transfer experiment has to be tried again with modern technology. Killbliss is the natural culmination of the transfer experience.”
And with that, Chez was off down the path toward the library. Unable to read the Second’s fields well, Vret could only guess the man was just shy of turnover.
He’ll change his mind when Need gets a grip on him. That was when the Tecton’s values really made sense, when you knew the forces within you could rip your will to shreds, pound aside your determination, and force you to the Kill no matter what philosophy you espoused, or what your conscience dictated. And just reading Killroom roused those inner forces from their Tecton imposed slumber.
He’ll come to his senses when he knows once again the only thing between him and Killing someone he loves is his anti-kill conditioning, and renSimes can’t even have that advantage.
“Vret, why are you standing out here in the sun staring at that cactus?”
Ilin came up to him, favoring him with a deliberate effervescent nager and a wide grin. It was a remarkable feat three days past turnover. Her skills were improving markedly. He told her his plan. “But how do you write this kind of thing?” His prior scribblings for himself didn’t count. This would have to be posted for all to read. The thought of that left the words frozen in the back of his mind.
“It’s not hard. You just pretend you’re the character and write down what you would say to another character, who is someone you know.”
“You mean you base it on real people?”
“A little bit. It’s like you’re talking to someone you know, but you have to be sure an eavesdropper would completely understand what you mean.”
“I see....”
“Vret, I have to run. I’m almost late for Dispensary Lab and a friend warned me I’ve got Saelul Farris today!”
“Go! And don’t augment on the way there!”
Curiosity burning, she didn’t ask, but took his advice.
Deliberately balancing in duoconsciousness, he watched her speed on down the path, sun and shadow playing around her, primary field fluttering through her showfield in graceful rhythm.
Once again, as she walked away from him, eyes firmly front, her attention was on zlinning him watching her. With a wistful flick of her nager, she added a little sway to her stride.
Just the way she placed her feet as she strode was totally absorbing to him. Maybe we’ll be assigned for our post-reactions this month.
The following month would be her 10th transfer, so she’d have the deferment training exercise, taking transfer a whole day late. That meant they wouldn’t have post-syndrome at the same time. Got to be this month!
Chapter Ten
DISJUNCTION CLASS
He went on to his Mutation Physiology class whistling thoughtfully between his teeth. If Blissdrip were using the same system for generating his stories that Ilin used, if his characters were actually people they all knew, maybe Vret could identify the real person behind one of the characters, and get a lead on the author that way.
He spent most of the lecture reviewing what he remembered of Blissdrip’s writing, studying everyone in the class with a new speculation.
He missed a chunk of the lecture when it suddenly dawned on him that Blissdrip’s descriptions of the channel’s experience of channeling were flat—glossed over as if viewed from outside. But the descriptions of the renSime experience during transfer or the Kill came to life in vivid and compelling detail, repeated in endless variations that evoked a reader’s intil in the oddest ways.
Blissdrip is renSime? Could it be? There were many renSimes on campus as faculty and other staff, and there was Rialite’s facility for renSimes in First Year adjacent to the channel and Donor training schools. He’d ask Ilin if the renSimes could have access to the same network their Secret Boards were on. He vaguely remembered something about that during his tour, but he just wasn’t clear on it. Each of the three First Year Camps had their own mainframes and complete libraries, but were they connected?
Trying to make up for what he had missed while thinking, he lingered after class, talking to some of the other students and listening to the instructor chatting with the more advanced students who were discussing the disjunction characteristics of the various sub-mutations.
He’d done a lot of this kind of eavesdropping and subtle questioning while searching for Bilateral, too, and it had paid off. But now he was searching for someone Blissdrip might be using as a model for his characters. Yet if Blissdrip were a First Year renSime, he wouldn’t know or interact with anyone here.
Only the senior students were sent to give transfers to the First Year renSimes as part of their graduation work, and then under strict supervision. Well, that was true for the Thirds, but what about the Seconds and Firsts? He resolved to ask Joran.
While thinking, jotting notes and chatting with his fellow students, Vret soaked up all the details he overheard the instructor discussing. The mass disjunction at the time of Unity had led to the founding of the Secret Pens, and he hadn’t studied disjunction in depth yet. There was only one brief chapter in this course’s textbook.
He stopped at the library to get more textbooks on disjunction. Bilateral’s stories glossed over most of the ugly details of disjunction, the way Blissdrip sidestepped the details of a channel’s experience of transfer.
Blissdrip wrote endless paragraphs of emotion-laden detail describing each day leading up to disjunction crisis and his descriptions of the crisis itself—which usually lasted no more than a day or two—were often longer and more detailed than his descriptions of the entire year or so leading up to the crisis.
; And he wrote page after page of exacting description of life as a semi-junct, staving off the Need to Kill one more month, hoping to live just a little longer.
Disjunction and the related semi-junct state were specialties usually reserved for the Firsts, and these days not many such specialists were required so few were trained. Still fewer were really interested in the complex intricacies of the subject. But if he were going to write this stuff convincingly enough to get Blissdrip to comment in a white-heat and make a mistake, he had to know all about it.
The library at Rialite had everything about everything, so in one visit he came away with more than he could read in a month.
Outside on the dazzling white granite steps of the library building, he paused to page through the largest of the books he’d acquired. Could a First Year renSime at the adjacent camp access this material? Just skimming some of the section titles, he really didn’t think they should, but he vaguely remembered something about their library having all the books that were here, too.
RenSimes had no vriamic node. The renSime had only one selyn transport system. They had no physiologic way to control the behavior of that primary selyn system. When Need reached a certain level, it triggered a survival reflex and they would attack any selyn source. The same thing could happen to any channel, but it took a lot more Need to trigger the reflex, especially when the vriamic node was developed in First Year and protected by anti-Kill conditioning then strengthened with exercise.
Without a channel’s ability to control Need and all its reflexes, a renSime—especially in First Year—should be protected from intil stimulants outside of a transfer situation. Psychologically and physiologically, the renSime’s only protection from their own Kill reflex was that implanted conditioning in First Year to associate intil and the satisfaction of Need with the channel’s work on their fields. It was a thin protection, but it was all they had, and over the last century or so it had proven effective.
Vret went back into the library and asked at the reference desk. “Are these books available to the First Year renSimes?”
The librarian, a Third Order Donor, laughed. “No, of course not. Those are advanced medical texts. Your vriamic trainer cleared you for them.”
“Oh. I see. Thank you.” Kwotiin cleared me for texts normally used by First and Seconds?
“May I see what else I’ve been cleared for?”
“Oh, that information is not available to students.”
“Ah. Well, thank you.” As he walked across the huge expanse of polished marble floor under the echoing dome, Vret cherished the thought, Kwotiin thinks I can make Second!
He went back to the catalog and dug into the codes on the books’ entries. At the front of the catalog there was a key to the symbols on each entry. With a bit of application, he came to understand how many of these textbooks required several instructors’ clearances before you could get at them. That requirement had been sitting right before his face and he’d never noticed it.
Vret had never been denied access to any subject that took his fancy. It had never occurred to him that the marvelous library censored student reading. The only way he’d discover the limits of his own authorizations was to request something for which he had not been cleared.
And if Blissdrip is a student on this campus, he’s got the same problem.
Chapter Eleven
THE MELLOW AMBIENT
A little after dusk, with brilliant stars overhead and a huge moon on the horizon, he met Ilin by the cacti again and after he reported his intuitive leaps of non-progress, she sorted through the books he’d found, pointing out the best ones. “The Farrises are great channels, but most of them can’t write anything a non-Farris can understand. Stick with Lolungren and Shir. They’re comprehensible.”
He thanked her and came to the question that really bothered him. “So I still don’t understand how this computer network stuff is set up. Can the First Year renSimes log into our mainframe and read our boards?”
She paused a long time before answering. “I don’t...think...so. I’ll ask and let you know.”
“The library says the First Year renSimes can’t get these books—at least not from our library. Would there be any other source of this material for a renSime?”
“Well, any in-Territory home might have books like this a kid could read. But what kid would understand? Or have the patience to wade through it all?”
“The child of two channels?”
“Blissdrip could be a renSime child of two channels?”
“I have no idea.”
“That would narrow it down considerably.”
“And the child of two channels would have a good chance to end up being trained at the Rialite Camp, no?”
“Yes. I’ll find out if they have access to our boards from over there.”
That was a different question than he’d asked. “Someone with knowledge of computers might do it where others couldn’t.”
“Might. I’ll find out.”
They sat a while just being quiet together in the gathering night. It was cooling off. One cactus had a flower opening into the dusk. The paths were limned in the glow of selyn fields as well as lights. It was one of those moments of sheer beauty neither could fully appreciate because of the insistent thrum of Need. But it wasn’t so bad yet that they couldn’t admire the beauty.
“So you’re not posting more installments of Aunser?”
“No.”
“You won’t mind if I usurp your characters?”
“Why should I? Everyone else does.”
Vret zlinned her. She wasn’t at all upset. “Well, mostly because I’ve never done this before. I’m probably a worse writer than a Farris!”
That earned one quick bark of laughter. “It’s all right, you can massacre away.”
“If I’m lucky, I’ll draw Blissdrip out.”
“Don’t say that name out loud! It sounds just like what it is.”
“You’ve got a point.”
“So have you. We haven’t got a whole lot more time to find this crazy and nail him down.”
“True. Then I’ll see you tomorrow.” Even though he’d said it, Vret sat there listening to her nager sing his name. He just didn’t want to move, and it wasn’t the lingering fatigue from the hard workday either.
“I’ve got an accounting class to get to,” Ilin said at last. “Dynopter estimations are the bane of my existence!”
“Oh, just think how much fun you’ll have teaching me next month.”
“That’s a thought,” she grinned. “I’d like to stay here with you for hours—well, not here...we could find someplace more private—but I have to go.” She pulled herself to her feet. “See you tomorrow.”
Vret watched her walk away into the dark, then zlinned her as she went on around the stand of cacti and spiky trees zlinning him back in what had become their parting routine. He noted that he spent a lot of time watching her walk and never tired of the view.
Then he heaved to his feet, stretched the ache out of his back and headed for his Physics Lab. Two hours of tinkering with DeBroglie sensors and he’d have time to write the installment he’d dreamed up.
During the opening lecture to that lab, he read the two shortest books on disjunction, and as a result when he got to the bench work, he almost scorched a lateral tentacle in the DeBroglie circuit he was supposed to be energizing with a selyn charge from his secondary system.
But he went to his room full of ideas for his installment inspired by a particularly detailed and gruesome description of death from attrition in disjunction crisis. He would use a setting from Blissdrip’s story, and the characters and situation from Bilateral’s. That surely would draw comment from their mysterious author.
* * * * * * *
“The Mellow Ambient”
by
Asymmetric
The Tecton’s ground troops were mopping up after the police action against the Secret Killroom. It had been operating from caves set int
o the side of a hill, camouflaged by a rambling old wooden building with a wrap-around veranda and a big painted sign saying, “The Mellow Ambient—Trin and Porstan.” Now the sign hung askew, severely charred around the edges, the words barely legible.
Two chimneys were still standing at either end of the building’s large common room, but the walls had fallen out, the roof had fallen in, and the back wall was no more. They could all see the black hole that led back into the mountainside and zlin the dull throb of drugged Gens being disturbed by troopers who weren’t their usual handlers.
Before the attack, a wagon had been drawn up beside the building delivering the road house’s supplies. Now it was nothing but a charred skeleton still emitting a plume of smoke. The scent of burning trin tea leaves was giving everyone a raw throat.
Off in the distance, several wagons were moving on the trail from town throwing a plume of dust across the fields. The wagons would collect the Gens and take them away for medical treatment.
Visually obscured by that dust cloud, other troopers, augmenting on foot, were chasing down the horses that had broken out of the corral near the road house, fleeing the fire. There had been several dozen patrons in the building at the time, and most of them had died in the first few minutes of the assault as they tried to defend the wooden structure from the Tecton force.
Standing beside the smoking remains of the Secret Killroom, Sectuib Klyd Farris argued with Aunser ambrov D’zehn. “If we do establish an official network of Secret Pens, what will happen when the out-Territory Gens discover such an officially sanctioned lie? The Contract will be no more...and then what?”
“It would be a disaster,” Aunser agreed forlornly. He extended a handling tentacle and rubbed absently at a mosquito bite near its tip.
“And it will happen. There’s no way so many people can keep such a secret. First it will be whispers, insidious distrust, then we’ll have to issue official denials under the Tecton seal.”
Personal Recognizance (Sime~Gen, Book 9) Page 5