“I’m sorry. It’s never hit me like that before.” Then he had to say, “I’ve never had a transfer like that before! Joran, that was incredible.”
The Donor was still smiling. “I’m glad it was good for you. After all that, you deserved a good transfer.”
“It was more than good.” But he knew he hadn’t Qualified Second. Joran’s nager seemed hardly diminished by the selyn he’d taken.
“Maybe, if you put that in your report, they’ll assign us together for your Qualifying transfer.”
“You’d be willing to do that? That wasn’t very good for you this time.”
Joran chuckled, “There’s always a next time!” The Donor got up from the lounge and went to the little desk in the corner. “There’s cold trin tea on the counter if you want some. I iced it down before you got here. Let’s get these forms done so you can get on with your post assignment.”
Ilin! It was the first time he’d thought of her at all in three days, and the first time he’d thought of her that particular way in weeks. The flashing vision of her warmed him all the way down to his toes.
“I have a post assignment again? When will they let me choose a woman for myself?” Maybe they assigned me to Ilin? She’s post, too, by now.
Vret rolled to his feet. His body was glowing, replete with selyn, but oddly shaky, muscles aching, as if still in recovery from some horrendous functional. I had transfer while in recovery. How weird. His only desire now, though, was to find Ilin.
“Oh, you’ll have the whole rest of your life for that. Right now they want you to get experience, and each of these Post Assignments you’ve had was to teach you something, no?” Joran twirled on the stool and handed Vret a salmon colored card.
“Yes! And I’m ready to use that knowledge.” On Ilin. Sex with the most beautiful woman in the world. He had read about some things two channels could do in bed that he really wanted to try.
He looked at the card. It wasn’t Ilin. It was some woman he’d never heard of before. A Second Order channel.
Disappointment thrumming through his veins, Vret took a glass of chilled trin tea over to the desk and began on the forms. This month they had given him three more forms to fill in. He stared at them, vaguely remembering them from some course or another. But he had to read them and struggle to remember, even ask Joran about the abbreviations before he could complete all of them.
And while he worked he felt the insistent aching, yearning, building. By the time he finished the forms, he was a lot more willing to go meet this strange new woman. Ilin would probably have an assignment too. It was only for three days, then maybe they could get together.
As he said goodbye to Joran he had to add, “And I’ve never been this Post before. I just have to thank you again.”
“That’s good to hear. It’s what a Donor works for.”
“Joran, I do have one more question. Maybe you don’t know the answer. I know they don’t tell you everything either. But was I assigned to you because they planned to get me into this accelerated track, or was I assigned to the accelerated track because I just happened to have drawn you as a Donor this month?”
The Gen sat down on the stool again frowning in thought. “I don’t know and I’d never have thought to connect the two events. Lots of Thirds are inducted into the accelerated track, though not all do as well as you did, and very few get to continue. But they’re not usually given Second Order Donors for transfer after the first session.”
Not after the first session? What would it take to make a Third require a Second Order Donor then? Now there was an ominous thought.
But Vret had no patience left to question the Gen. “Well, that’s interesting. Joran, it’s been terrific working with you, and I hope we’ll have another chance. The sooner the better. And maybe next time I can do a little better by you than I have this time.” He grinned and they both knew he meant a Qualifying transfer.
Vret glanced at the post assignment card and took himself off to his appointment, whistling through his teeth and thinking of Ilin Sumz. He knew the post assignment trainers always wrote up detailed reports on their encounters which also included extensive instruction in the pathologies that could develop in various channel sub-mutations without healthy sex during post-syndrome. But this time he had done his reading assigned last month.
His feet bounced on a cloud of pure strength and nothing, no matter how dire, seemed too much for him to handle right now. He was in the grip of an unprecedented post-syndrome optimism, possibly to the point of complete insanity. But the pre-transfer depression was likewise a kind of insanity and just had to be ignored.
I’ll deal with the whole Blissdrip mess tomorrow.
* * * * * * *
The day after his transfer, Vret was on his way to the Memorial to the One Billion where he was to meet his post assignee and attend a shiltpron concert celebrating the anniversary of the first performance of the Unity Anthem by Zhag and Tonio, the world renowned duo who had revolutionized popular music. The performers today were just students, but he’d heard they were good and he didn’t want to be late. He looked forward to a very pleasant after-concert evening.
The sun was setting, shadows elongating, and the scorching temperatures abating. In the desert dryness, it was actually chilly in the shade when the breeze picked up. He was augmenting slightly as he came to the path between the side door of Lelange Hall and the front door of the Infirmary mentally calculating his selyn budget for augmentation.
He’d be penalized grade points if he didn’t use enough, but it would be worse if he used too much, so he was concentrating. As he passed the No-Augmentation sign that forbade Thirds younger than nine transfers to augment on this section of the walkways, he absentmindedly dropped to a fast jogging pace and fixed his attention on the far end of the non-augmentation zone, figuring distance and time to the Memorial Hall.
Several things happened simultaneously.
Joran Nah, carrying three metal gas cylinders and an unbound pile of printouts, emerged from the wide, air-curtained Infirmary door, turned about when someone called to him from inside and walked backwards onto the path as he shouted an answer.
The door from Lelange Hall opened and a troop of First Order channels and Companions emerged, surrounding Iric Chez, clad in one of those ubiquitous paper suits. Chez was walking on his own, which, if Vret understood what he was zlinning, was a miracle in itself. Chez was so low field he was nearly unzlinnable, and it wasn’t the showfields of his escort that masked his presence. He was likely as near attrition as Vret had been after his Development session. And he was on his own feet.
Turning about to continue on his way, Nah saw the approaching group and moved to clear the walkway to the infirmary. But he spun off balance, fumbled and dropped all three cylinders and the printouts which fanned out in a long fluttering strip of paper tangling in the breeze.
Vret, speeding up to get out of the way of the approaching Chez and his escort, leaped over the rolling cylinders but without augmenting, couldn’t clear the expanding mass of paper.
Feet slipping from under him, he fell backwards into Joran Nah who had staggered off balance.
Nah’s right foot landed on one cylinder, his left skidded on paper, and he went down twisting to avoid Vret who was still flailing for balance and footing on the loose gravel that lined the cactus beds beside the path.
Nah’s pale nager exploded with the pain of twisting and sprains. As Nah fell, Vret zlinned the bone break and slice through Nah’s skin releasing pumping blood and gouts of selyn.
Too fascinated with zlinning, Vret lost his battle for equilibrium. A huge cactus frond loomed before his eyes, spiky thorns woven with cobwebs. He flung himself sideways to avoid the thorns and fell toward the pavement. The side of Vret’s head hit the concrete with stunning force.
The next thing Vret knew, Iric Chez was on Nah and the ambient rang with a bizarre and macabre crescendo of selyn in sudden, rapid motion. But it wasn’t just the ambient th
at rang—sensation extended into Vret, through him, and somehow became his own experience. He was drawing that selyn into the aching chasm of his own system.
Without transition, three of the channels came at Chez from either side and behind, battening the nageric turbulence of the searingly rapid and deep selyn draw.
Vret’s awareness of the transfer turbulence in the selyn fields dopplered away. He felt the weight of that dampening force all the way through both his selyn systems, halting selyn movement in a way he’d never thought possible. He was dying. Selyn froze in all his systems.
All at once, Chez went into transfer abort convulsions. Two of the channels pulled him off Nah and pushed him down on the concrete.
Vret felt selyn move in his systems again.
Two of the Donors joined the channels working on Chez. Bucking and grunting, Chez disappeared behind an impenetrate nageric screen.
The other channel, a Farris, was deep into lateral contact with Nah. Selyn had ceased pluming from the broken ankle. To Vret’s perception, Nah was dead, lifeless, beyond help. Then the other Donor joined the channel working over Nah and even that perception was cut off.
Vret sat up, nursing a crashing headache, trying to keep his showfield neutral while guilt, horror and shock warred with the ghastly suspicion that he’d just witnessed a Killmode attack by a Second Order channel, and the Gen was dead—which shouldn’t be possible unless Chez’s anti-kill conditioning had failed.
But Nah had given Vret transfer yesterday without being high field for a Second. Chez had been near attrition, surely needing more selyn than Nah had. Vret wished he’d paid more attention in accounting class. Was that a Kill-abort backlash that sent Chez into convulsions?
People came rushing out of the infirmary doors, dashing about, shouting orders to cordon off the pathway making the ambient into a dense soup of nageric communication and imposed hush. Stretchers, neck braces, and other equipment appeared. And finally a channel stopped beside Vret to zlin him deeply. The whole thing had happened in much less than a minute.
“No concussion. You’re fine,” she assured him. “Just sit right there and don’t move while we get these two inside.”
Two?
Nah was stirring, breathing weakly. Vret saw blood and selyn start to pump out of the wound again, and this time the Farris channel moved down to put hands and tentacles over the selyn plume which instantly diminished.
He’s alive! It wasn’t a Kill.
He clung to that through the next three hours of confusion and frantic action. As more channels descended on the scene, Nah was whisked away on a stretcher, Vret was moved into the infirmary waiting area on his own feet, but with two First Order Donors around him like a bandage, cutting off his view of the world.
He was sitting in the waiting area just inside the infirmary doors, still stunned and in shock, filling out forms when Chez was brought in on a stretcher, barely conscious, breathing irregularly, and still surrounded by three First Order channels and their Donors creating an impenetrable wall around him.
But he’s alive and he didn’t actually Kill. Vret clung to that thought as they moved him to an insulated treatment room. He finally managed to ask someone to tell his assignee why he wasn’t at the concert, and the renSime clerk said she had been informed and they’d arranged for him to miss classes for the rest of the day, too.
Then a strange Farris channel came to examine him putting him through all kinds of tests he’d never had before as if he were the injured one. But nobody would answer his frantic questions.
There was a muttered conference outside his cubicle that he couldn’t hear, and zlinning was impossible. They left him there for over an hour.
He had nothing to do but replay the whole thing in his mind again and again, seeing it was all his fault. He had introduced Chez to the secret boards, and Chez was a lot deeper into Blissdrip’s spell than Vret had been during his own Accelerated Development session.
Vret had felt the wildly spiking intil surges that had started from reading Killroom continuing and getting worse during that whole session. He had fought them, and somehow the instructors hadn’t suspected anything was wrong with him. But he knew it was.
Chez had to have experienced those intil surges too, but maybe he hadn’t fought them down as hard.
Vret couldn’t take any blame for Joran Nah’s low field. The Donor had simply been doing his job. But Vret had not been paying enough attention to where he was jogging. He should have augmented to leap clear of the dropped cylinders and papers. Because he had obeyed that minor rule, he had slammed into Nah, breaking his leg. He hadn’t been paying attention. He hadn’t been thinking.
After all the reading of Aunser and Killroom and the affect of Gen pain on a Sime in Need, Vret knew he had caused Chez’s attack by slamming into Nah.
He was more and more sure that he’d witnessed an actual Killmode attack. If Nah hadn’t been so low field, hadn’t been in such pain, stunned from the accident, he’d have been able to defend himself. Even low field, he might have fended off the attack until the channels could help.
If, if, if and if, was all he could think. By the time two channels and their Donors came for him, he had convinced himself he was to be taken away as a prisoner.
But they took him to another room in the infirmary, on the fourth floor. It was a corner room, overlooking the gymnasium and the large outdoor pool where channels were training for underwater rescues.
The room was designed around two large sofas that faced each other, with chairs set into semi-circles at the ends of the sofas all in soft blues and yellows matching the insulating drapes. There was even a vase of fresh flowers.
Vret curled down onto the chair they indicated and dropped his face into his hands, tentacles gripping his hair as if to pull it out by the roots. “I’m sorry!” he cried unable to take the silent tension any longer. He broke into an unexpected sob. “I’m so sorry!”
“Whoa there!” said one of the channels. “You have nothing to be sorry for!”
After that astonishing announcement the door opened again, and Saelul Farris entered alone. The granite nager was in full evidence as he came in, but then as the door closed behind him, it faded to a kind of glass effect, sparkling with reflections but revealing his primary field.
“Vret, I am so sorry about what has happened to you.”
All the whirling vortex of emotion that had built up in him for the past hour slammed to a halt in utter amazement. “Nothing happened to me!” he protested.
The Farris came to sit in the chair at right angles to where Vret was, silent as if pondering Vret’s pronouncement. The four others in the room took places on the long sofas, facing each other, the ambient reshaping itself about the expert field manipulators until Vret sat in a bubble of calm, marveling at the affect.
Farris attention settled onto Vret and the silence stretched until Vret realized he was being asked to lower his showfield. Finally, clumsily, he did.
“That’s better,” Saelul breathed and sat back as if relaxing for the first time that day. “Vret, I want you to tell me exactly what happened, what you saw and what you zlinned, and what you did as a result.”
By now Vret had organized and memorized the litany of his sins, and he recounted the events and his moves exactly. He only left out his supposition about the reason for Chez’s hair-trigger condition. That wasn’t his secret to give. Strangely though, when he had finished, he had listened to his own words, and somehow the growing anguish over his own guilt was stilled.
“So you made an error in judgment by not paying enough attention to zlinning your total surroundings, but First Year channels do that often. When it was clear you were moving too fast to stop before stepping on the dropped items, you made a second error in attempting to jump over them without augmenting to clear all of them. And that’s the full extent of your guilt here. You obeyed a rule that common sense required you to break, and didn’t augment when you should have.”
“Isn
’t that enough? See what happened because of me!”
“Had it not been for the decisions and actions of others synergistically exacerbating the results of your actions, there would have been no injuries. Had that been the case, what discipline do you think should be imposed for your carelessness and thoughtlessness?”
The Farris nager was still crystal clear and Vret thought he zlinned no ulterior motives, and there was no trace of anger.
Honestly he answered, “I’d say the usual reduction in selyn budgeted for augmentation for two weeks, followed by two weeks of extra hours in physical training with emphasis on spatial awareness.”
“That seems reasonable. I’ll see it added to your schedule. Now with guilt dispensed with, we must address the injury you have sustained, which is mainly psychological.”
“Psychological?”
“Vret, a Third in ninth month of First Year should never have to experience a Second Order channel driven into a Killmode attack on a Donor. This experience has changed your life, forever.”
“My anti-kill conditioning was damaged?”
“No!” answered all three channels at once. Vret was convinced.
The Farris addressed the other two channels. “Nobody told him?”
The two looked at each other. “I thought...,” they chorused and looked at the Farris.
But the Farris was zlinning Vret. “Nobody told you. We’ve tested all your reflexes and examined your systems minutely. There have been changes, severe changes, because of this experience, but you’ve sustained no damage. You would have come to this level of experience early in your third year if you’d followed the usual training regimen as a Third. Or if you’d Qualified Second here at Rialite, you’d have been through this in the middle of your Second year. Physically, you have simply come to a greater maturity sooner. However, emotionally this experience may pose some difficulty simply because you are so young.”
Personal Recognizance (Sime~Gen, Book 9) Page 8