The Sisterhood

by Juanita Coulson

  The barrier was unbreakable. Renamos couldn’t reach her — physically.

  But the princess had to be stopped. Now.

  Our weapon is a scalpel, Martil had said. The dealer of death will be dealt death.

  Martil was wounded, perhaps dead. Renamos couldn’t sense his presence. Tae? She sought him with her mind and touched a faint, fluttering something that might have been his essence. But he was really mute, at present. No guidance. No help.

  She was utterly alone.

  No, not alone. Another essence was entering the picture, enveloping her. Becoming her. They were one. And time did not exist, nor did the limitless extent of space. Renamos was swept up in an incredible expansion as she and that other part of her grew infinitely strong. A second essence. Also female. Asking her: “Must it be? It will mean loss. A severing of life. Must it be?”

  “Yes,” Renamos replied without speaking.

  Time seemed arrested. Zia’s hand was moving so slowly, so very slowly, toward the doomsday control.

  The symbiotic essences that were Renamos could not be kept out by any force field. She was in that Gevari command center, beside Zia, entering Zia’s thoughts, probing. Seeking knowledge. Names. How many other Gevaris remained? Which ones would never bend? Which would continue this cosmic destruction, even should Zia fall?

  Zia knew them all. Her loyal adherents. Her fellow die-hards and would-be slaughterers of countless multitudes. Names of power, of important Niandians scattered throughout the twenty-five worlds of the Federation. Living mines, nursing the seeds of an endless war in their beings.

  If Zia failed, they would carry out her final mission, nevertheless. They would permit no truce with the Haukiets. No cessation of hostilities — ever.

  Names. Names Renamos could have tossed in her hands. Names that meant lives — which would take other lives.

  The Gevari were ruthless. They would not hesitate to blot out all existence but their own, for a space of fifty light-years surrounding Niand.

  In a nanosecond, it would be too late to use the Arbiters’ scalpel.

  However, time was nothing. Renamos could be everywhere at once. She was more than herself. Infinitely more. And a third essence was joining that dual presence of Renamos and her Ka-Een. This additional non-anthropomorphic ally was disoriented, torn out of its normal rapport. It anchored itself with Renamos’s Ka-Een. They were asking her analysis of the situation: You are humanoid. You are able to think and feel as Zia does. You must tell us what the Haukiet Tae would, if he were able. You must make the choice …

  The answer came from a pit so deep within Renamos that spoken words could not have expressed it: The fanatics have to die — and so must their Bender Principle weapon.

  The scalpel cut. Bloodlessly. Painlessly. Instantaneously. Throughout the Niandian Federation. The Gevaris’ names were taken from Zia’s mind — an invasion that seared Renamos’s innermost conscience, that. And wherever the rebels were, those ones who were immovable, murderously and permanently committed to death and destruction, fell. They ceased to exist. Spirits, winking out. Hundreds of candle flames, pinched off, and darkness descending. All their minds were probed, another terrible invasion, but necessary, to assure that only the evil was excised. No one innocent, or salvageable, would be struck down.

  And as the Gevaris, so the very destructive device and its connecting network. A technology Renamos alone could never have mastered — smashed.

  Then she was herself again, though not alone, and abyssal despair ripped at her. Gradually, she became aware that she was hammering on that force field and sobbing helplessly.

  Abruptly, the invisible barrier collapsed. Renamos fell forward onto her hands, wincing with pain as they made contact with the floor.

  Chayo knelt beside her, murmuring, “M-my Lady?”

  “Had to. We had to,” she said, staring at her bloody palms. She’d hit the transparent wall desperately, again and again, in her reflexive attempts to break through it physically and stop Zia. The force field had been proof against flesh, as no doubt it would have turned aside most weapons. But the Gevaris’ leader couldn’t have known the field was no protection against the Arbiters’ nonhuman partners.

  “Had to,” Renamos repeated. “She was activating the Bender Principle weapon. In a fraction of a second more, it would have been too late. We couldn’t let that happen.”

  Chayo looked utterly drained. His handsome face was haunted. “My Lady, Zia is dead. My mother-sister is … is dead.”

  Chapter 15

  NUMB, Renamos gazed at him. He might or might not forgive what she — they — had done. But that wasn’t important at this moment. Another matter demanded her attention.

  She staggered across the room. Chayo hurried to help her, despite her attempts to shrug him off. Help her! Even now! Even after she’d participated in his sister’s execution!

  “Martil? Tae?” Martil was lying on his back. His eyes were half-open, his chest covered with gore. Tae was lying beside him, prone, one big arm stretched out, his fingers touching Martil’s shoulder. A puddle of pink foam was spreading out beneath Tae’s head and body.

  Renamos bent over them, hoping against hope. “Please be alive.”

  Then she gasped, stricken. The remains of a pseudo-metallic chain clung to Martil’s neck and tiny fragments of gold wire lay here and there, dotting the blood covering his dark shirt. She saw no trace of what the gold wire had held.

  “My Lady, what is it?”

  She pulled free of Chayo’s concerned grasp and bent over Martil, caressing the broken chain. That pain! That feeling that her very core was being ripped out of her. She moaned. “His Ka-Een. It’s gone! It doesn’t exist anymore. When Zia shot them, it tried to shield him, and it — oh, Martil!” She remembered his words — that he couldn’t envision life without his Ka-Een partner.

  Presences. Reminding her of what had to be done.

  Renamos dried her tears and touched Martil’s throat. There was a pulse, rapid and dangerously light, almost a fluttering. She turned to Tae and forced herself to slide her hand through that pool of pink blood, reaching under his body, searching. Her fingers closed on a small pseudo-metallic cage and sensed the Ka-Een within it.

  Regret. Apology.

  Tae’s Ka-Een hadn’t realized what was about to occur until it was too late.

  “It’s all right,” she whispered comfortingly to two symbiotic and pulsating gray-green-gold essences. “It’s all right! Oh, Chayo! They’re badly hurt, maybe dying.”

  “I’ll get doctors.”

  She caught his arm. “No. Niandian doctors can’t help them, particularly not Tae. They wouldn’t know how to begin to repair a Haukiet converted to humanoid form. And Martil … he’s lost his Ka-Een. I don’t know if he can hang onto life without it.”

  “Here. Give him mine.” Chayo fumbled at his vest-tunic and pulled a chain over his head, holding out a Ka-Een pendant for Renamos to take. She’d almost forgotten. They had given him one, hadn’t they? He laid the pendant in her hand and said, “Take it, my Lady.”

  “How can you bear it?” she exclaimed, appalled. Chayo returned her stare with bewilderment. She and those two essences — no, three now — reached out, probing. He didn’t feel any loss. No aching, pit-deep desolation. “I see. You weren’t really possessed, apparently. It’s — thank you.” Renamos gently touched Chayo’s face, wishing she could explain, and pitying him.

  Then she picked up Martil’s limp right hand and nestled Chayo’s Ka-Een there, forcing his bony, beringed fingers around the pendant. She had to re-create the action of him embracing the little being.

  “It’ll have to do,” Renamos said. “Chayo, wait. Please. Ask your mother to wait, too, until I come back. Don’t let her make any decisions before then.”

  “Come back? Where are you going, my Lady?”

  “I hope I’m going to the Arbiters’ nerve-center world,” she replied, “and taking Martil and Tae with me.”

  How had they d
one it, when they were piggybacking Chayo to safety out of the ruined city of Hell-All? Touching. That was vital in these circumstances. Especially since Martil had only a borrowed Ka-Een to transfer his essence. And Tae needed to be touched as well, because he was so badly wounded.

  She clutched Martil’s hand, ensuring he didn’t drop Chayo’s pendant. Tae was already touching Martil, so that contact link was in place. Renamos placed her bleeding fingers against Tae’s blond head.

  Chayo gawked as she started to expand outside herself. Three presences, non-anthropomorphic, one of them still a bit vague and unsure of its position in this symbiosis.

  You must possess Martil. He needs you.

  Reaching further. Two more presences joined the circle. Very weak presences. One a great, amorphous being, caged in a humanoid body. The other a thin, dark, quicksilver-natured …

  No!

  She had felt herself moving into Martil’s and Tae’s unconscious minds. And she didn’t want that. All she needed was their essences.

  Being swept around and around. Chayo’s face and the room out of focus, disintegrating in an assortment of dots, a wirephoto seen close up and then receding, pulling further and further away from her. Renamos clung to a mental image with all her inner strength: a room with big hassocks and out-of-synch people. Particularly female out-of-synchs carrying big, lovely medical bags over their shoulders, bags full of wonderful tricks to heal that terrible hole in Martil’s chest and stop that pink foam from leaking out of Tae’s head and body.

  You have to get us there. I don’t know the way. You’ve been there before. Do it just as you would for Martil and Tae.

  There was nothing. Blackness. A blackness more total than anything in the real universe. She shouldn’t be able to see anything, but she did: A glittering dance of gray, green, and gold.

  And then there was a hard, shiny floor beneath her, a fancy linoleum floor, and a big room surrounding her. The furnishings were big hassocks. Out-of-synch people were hurrying toward her, Martil, and Tae.

  “Thank you,” she whispered.

  We must be in time. For their sakes …

  “Martil?” His eyes remained partially open, though unseeing; Renamos could detect a glint of hazel irises through the parted lids. A pulse in his throat moved. So making a leap across ten thousand light-years using a borrowed Ka-Een hadn’t killed him outright. Was that because of what Martil referred to as her affinity for the essence?

  “Tae?” She thought his lips twitched, but that wasn’t likely. He wouldn’t speak to assure her he was alive. Renamos sought his presence. It wasn’t strong, but it existed.

  Out-of-synchs were swarming around them. She stood up and edged back to give them room to work. Their forms were blurry, but she seemed to see them in a new light. Renamos and her Ka-Een could sense each and every one of them. Fellow team members. Fellow Arbiters.

  They knew what she had done. She had used the Arbiters’ power and their weapon, which was a light-year-spanning scalpel. She had destroyed lives, a lot of them. Every Gevari who would have endangered the Haukiets and the numberless unknown species in the stellar regions dividing Haukiet and Niand.

  Renamos had killed. The Ka-Eens had given her the choice, and she had made it. Martil had said that she was free to choose, as the Sisterhood had fought for that right, on the planet where she had been born.

  Choice. But actually there hadn’t been much of a choice. And she hadn’t been able to save lives without first taking lives.

  The Many-Voice was speaking to her. “You were ready for that responsibility. It was yours.”

  “I must go back. We’re not through there, yet.”

  “Understood,” the Many-Voice of the Arbiters agreed.

  Renamos couldn’t keep herself from glancing anxiously at the place where the out-of-synch doctors were laboring to save Martil and Tae.

  “It is not finished,” the Many-Voice nudged her. “You have said so yourself.”

  “Yes. I have to take care of that cosmic picture.” She braced herself, stepping into that symbiosis she was feeling more and more at ease with.

  There were only two of them, this time. A female essence was asking, “Where to?”

  Martil and Tae might know stellar coordinates. They could accurately locate a particular world among thousands scattered across the void. Renamos of the Sisterhood of the Nine Worlds couldn’t, not yet. She had to depend on the non-anthropomorphic member of their reduced partnership. “Where we came from,” she said softly. “To the chamber with the doomsday weapon.”

  The room with the big hassocks vanished. Total, heartstopping nothingness.

  And then there was light again. Right on target! The spot her mind had sought beyond ten thousand light-years. The spot her Ka-Een had brought her to. “Good girl,” Renamos murmured.

  The matriarch was standing over the body of her daughter. Chayo was nearby, his handsome face an expressionless mask. Guards circled them. When the soldiers saw Renamos they stiffened and leveled their guns at her. Chayo threw up a hand and ordered them to hold their fire. Wary and nervous, the uniformed Niandians did so, maintaining a close watch on the Arbiter.

  Renamos studied Chayo. He walked toward her, his pace hesitant. Now and then he glanced back at his mother. When he was within arm’s length of the Arbiter, he bowed slightly and said, “My Lady Renamos, I have waited.” His voice was strained. He sounded as though he badly needed a drink.

  The matriarch turned, staring at the two young people. The ruler’s gaze fastened intently on Renamos. The Arbiter saw no hate in the Niandian’s eyes. That would have hurt. She had come to admire that imperious woman bearing the burden of her people on her thin shoulders. “Honored-honored Arbiter, you have done this to my daughter?”

  Zia, in death, was lovely. She had fallen in a graceful way and her features were serene, not contorted with agony. Because she had suffered no agony. That wasn’t necessary. If she had to die, the scalpel would cut cleanly and mercifully. Renamos sighed and said, “No, I did not kill her. She killed herself.”

  “Yes. Yes!” General Vunj was sitting in the room’s shadows, tended by a couple of med staffers who were hovering over his Niandian wheelchair. Renamos wondered if he’d been brought here to see his daughter’s body. Or had those who still suspected Vunj of being a traitor thought that this jolt would make him confess to treason? The former motive seemed to be the one the Niandians had acted on. General Vunj’s attendants were very solicitous, the soldiers’ glances in his direction sympathetic. “Tried to … tried to … dangerous!” Vunj exclaimed. “She would not listen. Not since she was very young. Could not be … I knew something was afoot. Couldn’t ferret them out … not fully out. Her people … too loyal. Impossible to bribe or break. Dangerous! Death! She wouldn’t believe that it is death to harm an Arbiter … death!”

  Chayo shook his head, concentrating his focus on Renamos. “My Lady, I know you did not … did not kill my mother-sister. You couldn’t have. The power screen was on. Your weapon could not penetrate that. And yet … she is dead. All at once, Zia was dead. I am certain she did not kill herself. I was beside her …”

  “Yes, you were, weren’t you?” Renamos didn’t hide the scorn in her tone. Chayo met her stare unashamedly. He’d done — or had not done — what he had to. Just as she had.

  “Arbiter,” the matriarch pleaded, “do not hurt us further. We are beginning to receive the reports. From our sister worlds …”

  “You will receive many more,” Renamos warned. “From every part of your Federation.”

  “You have struck us so deeply! People we never dreamed were Gevari — dead!”

  “Fools,” General Vunj interjected, peering into nothing. “I told her it was death to employ the Ja-Yan device!”

  The matriarch closed her eyes a moment, struggling for control. “I should have realized. Yet I was blind, as only a mother can be to her daughter’s flaws. But, could this not have been handled otherwise, Arbiter? I would have restraine
d her.”

  Renamos didn’t mention Chayo’s failure to “restrain” his sister. “Zia killed herself, Most High,” she said again, “by her act of using the Ja-Yan device, as you call it. The Arbiters have disabled that device as well, an intervention we find very distasteful, but which was necessary. Zia’s own hatred destroyed her. She could not yield to peace, nor could the Gevari we were forced to strike down with her. Martil of the Bright Suns told you of this danger, when we first arrived on Niand. Zia chose to defy that danger, and her rebels have paid the price. Most High, you have complained that the Gevaris have been a thorn in your side, politically. That thorn has removed itself. You are free to initiate a cease-fire. Make it a permanent one.”

  The Niandians were listening fearfully. It was not the sort of fear that might turn, in time, to a lust for revenge. Rather it was terror of something beyond comprehension. Childlike awe of omnipotence.

  “Death to challenge the Arbiters!” Vunj shrieked.

  “Don’t!” the matriarch cried, addressing Renamos, not Vunj. “My assembly of premiers is reconvening now. The war party has been swept away by this — by Zia’s death. Those who resisted peace negotiations are in disorder.” Renamos guessed that a better term would have been “scared shitless.” The older woman vowed, “No more killing! We will send our emissaries to meet with those of the Green Union. At once!”

  “No further disputes over territory,” Renamos said. “No excuses to renew this conflict.”

  “No! I swear! Speak to the assembly, Arbiter. Tell them.”

  The Earthwoman shook her head. “From this point on, you must go forward on your own to achieve peace. We have helped you to take the important first step. For the good of Niand, you must act alone now. As the Haukiets must. This is as it should be. We do not govern for others. It is regrettable that Zia’s murderous scheme forced us to intrude as much as we have. But in a way, her death brings you all a chance for life.”

  Grieving, the matriarch burst into tears anew. Renamos longed to comfort her, but knew she dared not. Niand was going to be far behind her soon, as Earth was. She had to let go.