Personal Recognizance (Sime~Gen, Book 9)

by Jacqueline Lichtenberg

  “‘The Tecton’ used to mean just the Householdings,” countered Aunser, “but now it means everyone. We can’t allow Householding scruples to direct public policy—not when it comes to murdering our own people so hideously.”

  With a nager as flat and hard as granite, the Farris stared into the hole in the mountainside. Aunser didn’t have to zlin through that massive showfield to know the Sectuib in Zeor was thinking that Householding scruples had to become public policy. But the Farris wouldn’t say that out loud because it was never going to happen.

  Instead of arguing, the Farris sighed, coughed a little on the smoke, and paced away from the ruin, seeming much older than when he’d arrived just a couple of hours ago.

  Aunser pursued, bringing up another of his favorite points again. “What if some of those Gens in there have been kidnapped from out-Territory—Wild Gens—Choice Kills. If we clean them up and send them home, they’ll report that the Tecton is not keeping The Contract. Then what? Zelerod’s Doom? It’s better by far to keep our citizens from raiding for out-Territory Gens. Use the Gens born and raised in Pens and let them remain Pen Gens, let them meet the fate they were born to. We have a better chance of keeping Pens actually secret if we do it that way.”

  The impenetrable Farris nager shifted and Aunser didn’t have to be a telepath to know the Sectuib was wondering how a Householder, born and raised, could possibly think such a thought.

  “Your logic is compelling, Aunser. But too much of what we’ve done has been based on immediate expediency, clever ideas invented on the spur of the moment. Eventually all this desperate improvising will collapse on our heads—and then we may very well see Zelerod’s Doom descend.”

  “How long would we run Pens, Sectuib? Five years? Seven? Even the healthiest semi-juncts can’t live much longer than that. But we have to have them alive, healthy and working hard to train this next generation of non-juncts in how to run a civilization. Would you rather have Householding run Pens—or Secret Killrooms? It’s going to be one or the other. All juncts aren’t going to just quietly accept a horrible death for a distant ideal!”

  “Risa* never stops saying that and insisting the answer is direct Gen ransfer.” His voice was low, flat, depressed by Need. He ran tentacles through his black hair which stood up in sweaty spikes, sighed again, and gazed out across the empty fields between the road house and the town of Poliston. He was still resisting the idea of Secret Pens, but seemed to view them as inevitable.

  [*See Ambrov Keon by Jean Lorrah]

  Suddenly, the Farris started, whirled back toward the cave mouth, kicked into augmentation and ran toward the cave as his showfield melted into a responsive, soft surface, as if feeling for a problem.

  Aunser, stunned into immobility for two blinks of his eyes, heard a shout boom out of the cave carried on a nageric splash of urgency, “Sectuib! Sectuib Zeor!”

  Aunser pelted toward the cave mouth, flying across the smoking rubble in the clouds of ash and soot pluming in the Farris’s wake. Aunser’s foot crunched through a blackened beam and flames shot up where he had stepped, though he wasn’t there anymore. He homed on the voices.

  “This way! Quickly! There’s a survivor!”

  Way back in the cave, inside a barred cage, they found a severely charred Sime. She was huddled in a ball beneath a pile of Gens dead from smoke inhalation. Her back was blackened, her burned clothing stuck to the skin. But she was alive...barely.

  When Aunser arrived, Klyd was kneeling in the muck and ash beside the burn victim. Klyd’s Companion crowded in behind Aunser, sidled past and hovered behind Klyd’s shoulder. Aunser moved in to protect the renSime troopers and edge them out of the cage, though the burned Sime was so far gone there was practically no pain in the ambient.

  As Aunser zlinned his own Companion approaching along the passageway, Klyd turned from his examination. “She’s in disjunction crisis, Aunser. Semi-junct renSime. I think she crawled back here trying to find a Gen to Kill, but they were all dead. It seems she may have taken some selyn from the corpses. This is more your specialty than mine. But I don’t think there’s any hope here.”

  “Nelson!” called Aunser to his Companion. “Hurry!”

  The Gen broke into a full run as Klyd relinquished the field control around the burn victim to Aunser with that incredible finesse which was the hallmark of the Farris. It isn’t something they learn, he reminded himself. It’s just what they are.

  Nelson arrived and skidded to a halt on the slippery floor. Aunser flicked a tentacle at him, and the Donor fell into synch in the familiar and comforting way.

  And then Aunser was into the problem; the world closed away from him by his own Companion’s field. The woman’s burns were faintly oozing selyn. She was barely breathing. Brain activity almost imperceptible.

  Perforce relying on Klyd’s diagnosis of disjunction crisis, he knew an ordinary forced transfer wouldn’t work. He’d have to disarm her abort reflex, and with a renSime that wouldn’t be harmless. She’s going to die anyway, he rationalized what he was about to do to her. This may give her a few more months crippled maybe but alive to get her affairs in order.

  He pulled out of the functional enough to say over his shoulder, “Nelson, on my mark, slam her. Sectuib, clear the room.”

  Klyd turned and scooped everyone toward the entry to the cave that held the cage full of dead Gens. To his credit, the Farris didn’t even stop to ask about this novel technique of murdering a nearly dead renSime to save her life. He used that impenetrable granite field to cut all the onlookers off from the impending Genslam shock.

  Aunser sank into the faint tracery of selyn circulation barely pulsing through the woman’s body. He picked up the rhythm her body was using, though it was fraught with irregular stutters and lengthening hesitations.

  Timing his effort carefully, he signalled his Companion and simultaneously rammed home a flash flood of selyn with merciless speed—more selyn than she could ever take in a transfer, nevermind a Kill. It overwhelmed her nerves at the same moment the Gen shocked her systems into paralysis. And the selyn went in, lighting her body’s nerve pathways though not yet her brain.

  A long, long pause and her heart thud-thumped into motion. He held her nose and blew into her mouth, using his showfield to stimulate her breathing reflex. Twice. Three times. And he felt her brain start to light up with circulating selyn, felt awareness begin to surface.

  He dragged himself duoconscious, letting go of his selyn field perceptions and grabbing for visual and voice, for tactile and odor impressions. That last he regretted as he drew breath and shouted, “Sectuib Farris!” The Farris nager peeked around the edge of the cave wall. “Sectuib, your patient now. Burns are your specialty.”

  More than a little amazed, Klyd Farris approached zlinning as if he couldn’t believe his eyes. “She’s alive.”

  “If you can heal the burns she may have a couple more months...may not thank us for it though.”

  “I understand,” he said, summoning his Companion and taking up the field management again, politely waiting patiently as Aunser’s frozen grip on the fields had to be pried loose a thread at a time. “The burn scars will be disabling all by themselves.”

  “I have several Thirds who can manage the infection for her. Send her to me in Poliston when you’ve done all you can.”

  “I’ll bring her. I want to learn more about that...um, technique you used.”

  Aunser stumbled a little as he rose, helped by his Companion who was wholly and totally focused on him now, trying to untangle his messed up selyn flows. Even all the experience they’d had with this technique didn’t seem to help today. Recovery from forcing a transfer was always hard for Aunser, but complicated by the slam, he battled not only the overall weakness and dizziness but a headache and pervading numbness that left his tentacles clumsy and his eyes refusing to focus.

  Still, beneath it, all his systems sang with renewed vitality and a tingling warmth that could only be described as a uni
que and precious pleasure, a reason to live.

  “You all right?” asked the Farris as he worked.

  Aunser would have sworn the man shouldn’t have been able to notice Aunser at that point. “Yes, Nelson will take care of me. I’m just slow to recover.”

  Still working carefully on the unconscious renSime’s burns, Klyd muttered, “Risked your life to give this woman a few more days of misery.”

  “Wouldn’t have had to risk myself—or my Companion—if she could have found a Kill.”

  The Farris turned from what he was doing, eyes on Aunser but with his attention unwavering on the renSime. “And the misery she faces would not be at all this intense.”

  That was when Aunser knew the Sectuib in Zeor had given up. They would get their Secret Pens in order to make Unity work.

  * * * * * * *

  The day after Vret posted his masterpiece, flinching from reading the message boards for comments on it, Bilateral posted another installment in her Aunser.

  Instantly, the comment board exploded in activity. There were a few half-hearted disparaging remarks about the dry and uninteresting new post by Asymmetric. A few people objected heatedly to his destroying The Mellow Ambient and its Secret Killroom—locale of the very best episodes Blissdrip had posted.

  His choice of title was even seen as a sarcastic attack on Blissdrip’s fine writing by a writer with no talent, who was obviously jealous.

  But Blissdrip—at least under that nickname—didn’t post any comments.

  But then came the comment that gave him pause. “At least that wretched trash Asymmetric posted has had one good effect. Bilateral seems to have woken up from a long nap with some new ideas, and his writing has matured remarkably. The transfer scene in Part 42 between Mirindi and Sosu Fane shows just what the semi-junct really craves in a transfer. Now if he’ll just keep on developing like this, the Aunser stuff might become worthwhile reading.”

  Vret instantly flipped to the newest Bilateral installment and read, more appalled with each paragraph.

  Ilin had taken his idea that Risa Tigue hadn’t been the inventor of the slam-ram technique, but that Aunser had, and that Klyd Farris admired it and wanted to learn it from Aunser, and she’d incorporated that into her Aunser.

  She had written an entire episode of close medical detail on three renSimes dying of the typical semi-junct transfer abort syndrome. Each had a complicated personal history and compelling desire to live just a little longer.

  The episode delineated in vivid detail every moment of their suffering. One committed suicide, another died in abort taking a channel with her, and the third accepted being Klyd Farris’s first slam-ram client to live long enough to apologize to her estranged son and turn over a treasured family heirloom. Then she died peacefully.

  If Vret had been in post-syndrome instead of deep into Need, he’d have cried his heart out over the terrible tragedies. As it was, he could only respond to the descriptions of the transfers.

  Vret read the description of transfer the commenter had praised so highly with horrified amazement. Point by point, the description could just have well have been of a Kill—from the Killer’s point of view. It was so realistic it left him struggling for vriamic control and wishing he didn’t have to.

  Bilateral was a more powerful and accomplished craftsman than Blissdrip—and so much more physically effective in evoking a total physiological involvement. Why doesn’t she save that talent for her post-syndrome scenes?

  He couldn’t ask her that. And he couldn’t think just how to put it—certainly would not have posted any comment to the boards after the way the readers had dismissed his work. He was just as glad he didn’t encounter her on the path that day or the next. But he became worried when more of the blatantly evocative Aunser posts appeared. She was spending every spare minute writing, it seemed.

  As if in competition, Blissdrip was pouring out ever more detailed descriptions in his Secret Killroom saga. He rewrote Asymmetric’s episode, incorporating the attack and destruction into his story, but twisting it around so that the attack was by citizens seeking Killable Gens.

  The patrons of the Secret Killroom defended the Mellow Ambient, kept the Killroom secret from the Tecton and rebuilt the way station.

  In the process they reveled in and delighted in augmenting to shake off the doldrums from bad transfers from channels. The renSimes took transfer from Companions, and as a consequence lost all semblance of control around Gens. Most of the wordage consisted of repeated and detailed descriptions of hair-trigger intil, but portrayed as the natural joy of life, not a mortal danger.

  The heat rose as Bilateral and Blissdrip dueled for the admiration of the readers pouring onto the comment boards. Vret spent all his spare time reading the stories and the comments, searching for clues to Blissdrip’s identity.

  As Need clamped down on him, Vret once again found it was all he could think about. He struggled to keep his mind on the search for Blissdrip, but easily soaked up every word of the Secret Killroom. And suddenly it occurred to him that Blissdrip might have the same problem. He went back over all the installments, and correlated when they were posted with the amount of Need description in each.

  It didn’t take long to develop a theory that nailed Blissdrip’s transfer dates, but just reading these descriptions again while in Need gave him hours of struggle against his own intil. Even hours after finishing the research, he was still flying into spikes of intil at every flash of a Gen field.

  Five days before both he and Ilin would have transfer, he found her in the cactus garden waiting for him. But when she turned, there was no smile on her lips or in her eyes. Her nager was ashen. She had lost weight. All his theories about Blissdrip vanished from his mind.

  “Ilin, what’s wrong?”

  “You haven’t heard?”

  “Heard what?”

  “Yesterday, about four hours after I posted Part 50, there was an incident at the Janroz Library—Halarcy.....”

  “Halarcy?”

  “My roommate. She’d been reading the boards. She didn’t know my nickname. I only found out she was on the Secret Boards when she tried to recruit me yesterday.”

  Sumz was babbling, and Vret had never heard her wander through a topic like this. Something bad had happened. “She was reading Aunser?”

  Sumz nodded, choking back a howl of emotions so mixed Vret couldn’t name it. He waited for it to abate. “And something has happened to her?”

  “She’s gone.”

  “Gone?” He sat up in alarm. “Dead?”

  “No! But it’s my fault.”

  “When you’re ready, tell me what happened.”

  “That’s just it. I don’t know! They came for her things this morning, and nobody would tell me anything—just that she’d left Rialite. Vret, she was doing well. She was going to finish as a Third Order channel, but she had a good shot at Second within the year. She had four extra certificates, and had two full Specialties. There was no reason they’d kick her out of Rialite...unless....”

  “Unless what?”

  “It’s just a rumor.”

  Vret’s patience was wearing thin, but he could zlin how distraught Ilin was. If she hadn’t been deep into Need she would have been crying her heart out. As it was, she was just zlinning into space, as if frozen on the brink of an unspeakable nightmare. Waking Need Nightmares. He’d read of such things. Was this an example?

  Eventually, she broke off zlinning a cactus spine and turned to face him. “Vret, it’s just a rumor. I don’t know it was Halarcy. But they’re saying that some Third raised intil and attacked a Donor. Over by the Janroz Library.”

  Stunned, he breathed, “I hadn’t heard that.”

  “If it was her, it would explain why they sent her away. Or maybe she is dead. I haven’t heard and nobody will answer my questions.”

  “Who was the Donor?”

  “I don’t know.” It was a flat statement that would have been a hopeless wail if not for Need.
Vret felt her despair pounding at her beneath the pall of Need.

  “You’re thinking Part 50 caused her intil to spike?”

  She only nodded, the black smoke of guilt pervading her nager. People passing by on the path above the cactus garden’s little glen, zlinned and then politely turned away from what must have seemed like a lovers’ quarrel.

  “If the Donor was a Third, we’ll know soon. They’ll have to juggle the schedule.” His gut screamed, Joran! but he forced his mind away. There was some reason they’d assigned him a Second. “How do you know she was reading Aunser? A couple hours after you posted Part 50, Blissdrip posted his Secret Killroom episode, “What does it take?”

  “You read that?”

  Vret didn’t want to admit it. That episode had focused on the details of the torture used to “work up” a Pen Gen for the Kill when the Sime was so far gone he couldn’t raise intil and would abort out of any Kill over and over until he died of attrition.

  According to Blissdrip, when Klyd Farris authorized the Secret Pens, he did not allow such extreme measures, so Blissdrip made up a new character who offered that kind of service at new Secret Killrooms.

  “Yes, I read every word as I fed it into a style checker I customized to score for Need terms. That’s why I was looking for you. I have a new theory.”

  That captured her interest so he quickly explained, ending, “I think I’ve nailed Blissdrip’s Need cycle.”

  “Then if we could access the transfer records, we could narrow the possibilities. I’ll ask. Maybe one of our people can get the information.”

  She wasn’t as excited as he felt she ought to be at the news. “Listen, if Halarcy was involved in that incident, and if she was reading the boards just before whatever happened happened, she was probably reading Killroom, not Aunser.”