Yet now a new hope glimmered in the depths of the hivemind. This strange hive segment from their hostile neighbors seemed to be offering a truce of some sort.
Hoping to find a way to reinforce that impression, Jindigar focused on Threntisn. The Historian carried Cyrus straight across the lab to a small back room where he deposited the Outrider on a treatment table. Jindigar, ignoring the assortment of curious Natives gathering around them, assembled the Oliat around the doorway.
Checking the human’s condition and securing the blanket lightly around him, Threntisn glanced toward Trinarvil as if hoping the medic would take charge. But, of course, Trinarvil could not function so in Oliat. He fixed on Krinata and asked, “Jindigar’s, are they going to let me do it?”
“//They are waiting to see what you are going to do. Move slowly.//”
Threntisn edged out of the room and surveyed the useless mess in the main lab. His stance and expression showed that he was working an Archive access. He set off across the room, stepped around the fire, and punched a lock code to open another side-room door. On ship’s emergency power, the door opened very slowly. It wouldn’t be long before the power failed.
Threntisn glanced inside, then, satisfied that he had the right room, he turned and called to Chinchee in Cassrian, “Tell them to wait. I will show them something.” Then, as Chinchee burst into twittering motion, he added, “Jindigar’s, I think we can do it.” And he disappeared inside, closing the door behind him.
Controlling evidence of her weakness, the Rustlemother settled next to the fire. Seven or eight of Chinchee’s kind rushed to rekindle it for her comfort. The others burst into discussion both vocal and on some hivemind level that leaked through to the Oliat along with the insistent call of the hivebinders in heat.
Jindigar’s knew now what the hivebinders outside had lamented so. Their brothers were suffering, and because of their unfulfillment, the hive would die. But the hive was dying, anyway. They had no more strength to fight. They had admitted the strangers because they had nothing to lose and because the strangers’ hive segment had seemed to understand what it was to lose all. Possibly Chinchee was right, and the strangers did wish to enter the hive to heal.
Threntisn took longer than the technician who had processed Jindigar’s blood. Jindigar kept the Oliat standing around the door to Cyrus’s room, concentrating on shutting out the ever more insistent hivebinders’ fullsong, and consequently they lost track of the hive’s reasoning.
Abruptly a mental silence descended, and a small group of htvebinders appeared in the hatchway, dragging Lelwatha’s whule. They arrayed themselves before the Oliat, as if they intended to form a team to play the long, complex instrument laid before them.
Nut they didn’t touch it. A whisper of another mindsong reached through the Oliat’s defense. Jindigar asked Zannesu, //Can you filter that out of the fullsong background?//
It expanded to occupy their whole attention, and it was unmistakably Lelwatha’s composition. Hesitantly, with many clumsy searchings for the right fingerings, the mind-gatherers arrayed before the whule plucked out a laborious, but accurate, rendition of the opening notes.
Clearly this was a bid for friendly dialogue. Jindigar itched to go to the whule and demonstrate the sounding of the piece. Instead he told his Emulator, //Llistyien, we must discover their motive for doing this.//
His Emulator brought the hivebinders’ viewpoint up, washing them in the obscure symbology. Instantly Darllanyu Formulated an interpretation. The hivemind figured that the strangers’ hive-segment had come here to console the hivebinders in fullsong via their remarkable mindsong. When the strangers’ segment had not resumed its mindsong inside the hiveheart, the hivebinders had brought the odd instrument, which had been captured by a valiant warrior, hoping it would stimulate the song.
The hivebinders faced the grotesque mind-singers now, puzzling over the continued silence, trying to reawaken that moment of mindsong they had shared while, in the background, the fullsong resumed, urgent, demanding.
//We can’t do Lelwatha’s Lament again,// warned Trinarvil. //I won’t be able to Protect us with the fullsong in the background.// Renewal undermining her stability, she had reacted very strongly to Lelwatha’s composition and expected to lose control this time. Especially, thought Jindigar, if I actually play it on his own whule.
He realized with sudden compassion that Trinarvil and Lelwatha must have known each other intimately, for the very thought of him aroused her further. None of my business. The links were leaking personal information again, despite the pensone, and Jindigar could not shut it off.
Zannesu’s grieving for Eithlarin had begun to form a tough scar around the pain, but the wound where his mate had been amputated had not healed yet. However, there was still life in him, despite their suicide mission. Stirred by forces beyond his control, he eyed Trinarvil with speculation and hope. Who could fail to be attracted to her mature vibrancy?
Trinarvil’s awareness of Zannesu’s condition was sharp enough to pierce the veil of pensone. At the same time Jindigar could feel Darllanyu fighting to keep her eyes off his own neck. Venlagar buried his face in his hands and forced his itching fingers not to stray to his aching glands.
Krinata, embarrassed by inexplicable physical sensations, concentrated madly on how much her feet hurt in the higher gravity of Phanphihy. //Jindigar,// asked his Outreach, //what’s going on? The pensone can’t be even half worn off yet.//
Before Jindigar could answer, another awareness raked through the Oliat linkages—almost, but not quite, like being scanned by another Oliat.
Zannesu winced away from the crude intrusion. //The hivemind! Venlagar, watch out!//
The hivemind tugged at the linkages, plucking them loose from Venlagar’s grip.
Stunned, Jindigar struggled to get a new grip on the linkages. But the hivebinders seemed to have combined to lift the linkages out of Jindigar’s control.
It was not an attack. There was no malice in it, only innocent curiosity. The moment of nascent arousal had finally struck another familiar note for the hivebinders, who knew that the survival of their hive might well depend on figuring these strangers out. The rustlemen had to know what their motives were. The hivebinders had studied the linkages binding the strangers and now felt no compunction in candidly probing into them, as if there could be no such thing as a private or personal matter.
Jindigar had never felt anything like it. Nor had he ever dreamed he could react to such an intrusion with amused calm. Since I consider myself dead already, very little can threaten me. It was an odd sort of freedom. His Oliat had not completed its mission, and so he would not permit it to be stolen from him. But he did not resist with his ordinary stridency, telegraphing to his opponent that he was indeed seriously threatened and therefore half beaten already. / never knew how much I feared death.
It was another deep-Renewal insight and had no place in the affairs of a Center.
But something of it communicated to the hivebinders. Their probing went from demanding to respectful. Then they withdrew, leaving behind a poignant sorrow over the Oliat’s dreadful affliction and a reverence for their nobility in the face of such a fate.
The hivebinders climbed onto the whule, sitting erect with their hand limbs clasped before them, here and there a leg draped over the side to keep the bowl-shaped sounding chamber from rocking. They buzzed with a mindtune offering sympathy and hope, apologizing for misunderstanding why they had come, and promising to help the strangers overcome their insensitivity to the vitalizing of the fullsong.
In response to the hivemind’s insight a new group of hivebinders appeared at the door. They had glints of bright red and orange in their carapaces. With scarcely a pause they rushed eagerly into the room, projecting their mindsong before them, targeting now on the Oliat, rather than on any of the members of their own hive. Their glee at the hivemind’s having finally lifted the harsh and unreasonable discipline restraining their fullsong infused it with
a new vigor.
Jindigar seized the links to his Receptor and Protector and wove u tighter defense against the intrusive signal. But the proximity of the singers intensified the song. It beat through his filter.
//Brace yourselves!// warned Llistyien in tandem with Darllanyu.
Understanding didn’t help. The alien rhythm beat through them in ever-increasing waves as the little beings poured all their frustration into it.
Jindigar frantically ran through a desensitizing procedure he’d never had a chance to teach his Oliat. He wrapped them in a cocoon spun of their own linkages, a tangle worse than he’d built to filter the hallucinations. As fast as he worked, the fullsong eroded his efforts, seeping into their nerves, hitting reflexes that triggered vital glands deadened by the drug.
The Dushau felt sick, but Krinata, unprotected by drugs and unable to benefit from Jindigar’s complex cocoon of linkages because her brain couldn’t handle the data flow, could not resist the song. She turned toward Cyrus.
Muttering deliriously, her mate fought free of the blanket he was wrapped in. Driven by her human response to the forces of Renewal, she drifted to her mate’s side and bent to tuck the blanket around him. Before Jindigar knew what she intended, she blotted Cyrus’s damp forehead with one corner, seeking with all her heart to ease his suffering and heal him.
//Jindigar—// warned Trinarvil, trembling with a sudden need to support Krinata’s effort through Oliat function.
Krinata’s intent in her action, to affect the outcome of an illness, was perilously close to a kind of symbolic Inversion of the Oliat. But, lost in the grip of the fullsong, she had all but forgotten that the Oliat was balanced and working and that she could draw the rest of them after her.
With a sudden, determined effort Jindigar snapped them all to attention. //Krinata, we must warn Threntisn of the hiveheart’s function. Then we’ve got to get out of here.//
Krinata glanced at Trinarvil, then at the hivebinders, and the fog cleared from her eyes. Shuddering a little, she tore herself from Cyrus and with more than one backward glance went to the lab door. Just as she arrived the door opened, revealing Threntisn holding a loaded injector. “I’ve got it,” he announced in Cassrian, then searched for Chinchee, puzzled when the Herald wasn’t visible.
Al Threntisn’s first words the fullsong cut off on a note of bewilderment. All around the room, tangled piles of Natives, twined together in mutual enjoyment, ceased their activities, stunned b the sudden interruption. In one far corner Chinchee struggled up among u group of his own species, his harnesses and wishes of rank discarded, his white skin smudged with the dirt from the floor. Threntisn recognized him, anyway, and called out, “Tell them I am ready now to show them why they must leave this ship to us.”
Jindigar could hardly believe that the Historian was oblivious to what had been going on in this room. But Threntisn wasn’t in Renewal. And he was intent on the miracle he was about to demonstrate. He cut straight across to the treatment room and administered the dose to Cyrus while Chinchee self-consciously attempted to recoup his dignity.
Satisfied with Cyrus’s condition, Threntisn turned, saying, us if expecting Chinchee to be standing right behind him, “Tell the Rustlemother here that it will take a while before she sees a change, but – ” Surprised that neither Chinchee nor the Rustlemother was looking over his shoulder, the Historian cut off. Helooked down to find many hivebinders gathered in the doorway, observing his every move, reporting to the hivemind. His gaze lilted, searching for the Rustlemother, who was slumped by her fire, apparently asleep.
am he watched, the elderly female toppled to the floor, the platelets that made up her skin rustling audibly and the myriad accoutrements of her office clattering against the floor as she fell
Two warriors and several of the white-skinned craftsmen dashed to her side while Threntisn darted a look at Krinata. “Jindigar’s, you should have told me the leader was sick too! ‘This could be our chance!” Looking neither left nor right, he went to a locked cabinet, found a blood specimen extractor, and strode directly to the Rustlemother’s side, edging out some of her attendants as he called to Chinchee, “Tell them I am a friend. I will help her.”
Jindigar had his Oliat nearly paralyzed in the net of their own linkages, and as swiftly as he worked, he could not disentangle them quickly enough to shout a warning.
The hivebinders could move as fast as a Cassrian when they chose. The entire complement of them in the room, seeing the giant alien using his sting on their Mothering-one, swarmed all over Threntisn and stung him first.
While the Dushau system could handle most toxins with dispatch, the sheer volume of poison brought Threntisn to his hands and knees. The hivemind, seeing it as an attack by peace-heralds who came to get help—help that was freely given—recoiled in shock.
Chinchee let out an ululating wail of protest and dashed forward, throwing his body into the strenuous contortions of
Herald’s speech, begging the hive to halt the attack on Threntisn. But it was too late. Threntisn slid down and lay prone, unmoving”
Jindigar finally unlocked the last crosslink and addressed his Receptor. //We need to monitor Threntisn’s life functions– if he still lives.//
Zannesu, understandably off-stride, gave them too much amplitude. Threntisn’s vital functions flashed through the Oliat, dominating their own united heart and respiration rhythm. As Llistyien was overwhelmed by the Reception, her Emulation of the effect of the toxin on the Historian’s nervous system awakened similar responses in the Oliat.
Jindigar was as helpless in the grip of the toxin Emulation as if he’d been stung himself. Spontaneously the contact with Threntisn became a link. Aghast, Jindigar watched the link transform and deepen of its own accord into a meta-Oliat link, as if Threntisn were the Center of an allied Oliat.
It’s the toxin, thought Jindigar, repelling panic. It’s just an illusion. Threntisn would not touch Oliat functions for anything in all creation. Me was Historian, through and through, set on guarding and maintaining his Archive. Unless my meddling has damaged something! Jindigar recalled all the times he’d struggled to sift the data properly during the debriefing and how he’d gone too deep into territory he wasn’t authorized to tap, when he’d searched the Aliom files for a way to Dissolve– and found a meta-Oliat function.
But there was no time to think. In a flash the new meta-link Fastened into Jindigar, as if attracted to him. The link opened into Threntisn and beyond Threntisn into the rest of the Archive, as if the Archive were Threntisn’s Oliat.
A familiar terror gripped Jindigar as he thrashed against the forces that swept him up out of his body and into the intangible regions where Archives and Oliat linkages existed. The thick darkness flowed inexorably, carrying him and his Oliat toward a glowing aperture, an Archive Gate.
Breasting that current in an effort to belay their fall, Jindigar glimpsed the structure around the aperture, a glistening network of colored jewels defining a tesseract that warped away into unimaginable dimensions. Windows on its faceted sides showed scenes that enticed the unwary, for they were traps that protected the Archive from unauthorized entry. They had to stay away from those windows.
Not only had Jindigar once carried this very Archive, he also had worked with its reserved Aliom sections, and he’d debriefed to it in link with his Outreach, who had once been lost in it with him, and, who had, together with him, been rescued by Threntisn.
Now the new link that bound them to Threntisn quickened the Archive with welcome, as if it recognized them. / wouldn’t put it past Grisnilter to have taught it to recognize me!
The Gate dilated, inviting Jindigar to enter, to travel the pathways and chambers to the core, to the Archive’s Eye, the origin of the Archive, and the point at which all Archives joined, the point at Infinity where all existence touched non-existence, the Historians’ fabled Gateway to Completion.
As dangerous as he knew it was, as forbidden as it was to an Aliom Priest,
Jindigar was drawn forward by a gripping pang of nostalgia, a need he’d never known was in him. Concurrently he was aware of Krinata paralyzed in the grip of remembered terrors, wanting to break away from the Oliat and flee but refusing to yield to Dushau instinct, which would be human cowardice.
I am Center, he told himself, in Office and working to a purpose. He groped for that solid anchor, struggling to find reality again. And as he found it their headlong rush toward infinity slowed. 11 Must reset Receptor’s focus.11
He lifted the Oliat linkages, but before he could reset them, a vaguely familiar disturbance loomed out of nowhere, permeating the linkages. //The hivemind!// identified Trinarvil.
Simultaneously the hivemind snatched the linkages out of
Jindigar’s grasp, the sudden distortion cutting off the shaleiliu hum, leaving Jindigar stunned.,
The moment Jindigar’s resistance slackened, the Archive pulled them in faster. Shocked by the loss of the linkages, Jindigar was unable to check their uncontrolled fall into the Archive Gate. He and his Oliat were swept into the voracious maw of the Archive as if they were just another datum to be recorded, classified, and stored. But, behind him, attached by the nebulous tissue of the Oliat linkages, came the hivemind, as bewildered as it had been when its members had been electrocuted.
Reflexively Jindigar fought to regain his linkages, acutely aware of the alarming overload of data pouring into Krinata from the hivemind and of the acute shock overcoming his officers at a strange touch on the links. But the hivemind was bigger than the Oliat, stronger, older, and determined to survive.
Suddenly it all made sense. The Dushau had come here to protect the Natives, but this planet would tolerate no intruders, just as an Archive would not, just as an Oliat would not. They could not protect the Natives unless they became Natives. Then Jindigar saw the answer. The two Archives, hive and Dushau, must be joined.
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