Ilyana strode to the desk and slapped her hand down on it so hard that both Digen and Mickland flinched as they felt her pain, amplified by her wildcatting selyn nager. “If I made any promise,” she said, “I’d keep it, though I wouldn’t expect any—channel—to understand that.” The way she said “channel,” it became a filthy epithet. “Tecton! You think you know so much about transfer, but you don’t seem to know anything about life. It’s just not possible for any Sime to have a satisfactory transfer where he has to control the selyn flows. I wouldn’t give that kind of transfer to the most evil person in the world. I’m no—prostitute.”
Digen summoned all his much-vaunted Farris control and approached her. He was at once both deathly afraid of this woman and irresistibly attracted to her. Concentrating to shift into the channel’s functional mode, protecting his personal, primary selyn transport system from the effect of her nager, he eased a little closer to her, engaging the edges of her field, reaching to control her selyn production rate by using his own system as a governor.
As Mickland perceived what Digen was doing, his eyes went wide. He was frozen for a moment in sheer disbelief. No channel in the entire world other than Digen Farris, Sectuib in Zeor, could have thought of trying what Digen was doing right before his eyes. Digen felt Mickland’s incredulity on the periphery of his mind. Am I just showing off? thought Digen. No. This has to be done. For her.
It was working, too. Her selyn production rate was dropping slowly, and that kept Mickland silent as Digen said, his voice an octave lower as he went deeper into the delicate channel’s work, balancing on the fine edge of disaster, “It is the nature of the channel to control the Gen, Ilyana. The Donor must be trained never to fear—because only if he fears can harm come to him.”
Still leaning on the desk, Ilyana twisted to look at Digen, apparently confused by the relief washing through her body as well as by Digen’s words. “Trained never to fear?” she said. “Never to fear what?”
He was close to her now, towering over her slight form, standing on the very margin of her inner core field and controlling it utterly. But it was an effort to spare attention from that to say, “Simes, of course—what else?”
Totally bewildered, she said, “What do you mean, trained? You can’t train a Gen not to fear transfer as if you were toilet training a baby. Some do, some don’t, that’s all. Look, if you people are not going to talk sense….”
“Wait—wait,” said Digen. “Hold it.” He suddenly understood the magnitude of the cultural gap between them. She really is from the Distect. It’s real. It still exists someplace.
Outside of Sime Territory, the Gens who lived together without Simes around, who lived in fear of Simes, like those people at the train station in Sorelton, had been convinced that the last remnants of the Distect way of life had long since been stamped out. But apparently, somewhere in some isolated spot, it still existed. And Ilyana was a defector from that way of life—because, with her disease, she had to have channel’s transfer, nothing less would do, and in the Distect there were no functioning channels—and thus no trained Donors. Yet Ilyana seemed perfectly competent and easily matched to the depth of his Need. Don’t think about that, not yet.
“Ilyana,” started Digen, “I—” He broke off, turning to Mickland. “You gave me a choice between Ilyana and Ben Seloyan. I choose Ilyana. Seloyan doesn’t have the capacity to supply my Need, Ilyana does. Seloyan doesn’t have the speed I require. In my judgment, Ilyana does. There really is no choice between them. And, in all humanity, you must admit, she—needs this as much as I do.”
Looking wearily askance at Digen, Mickland said, “When you first came in here, it surely seemed you were in Need. But now….”
A surge of anger tightened in Digen, and momentarily his control slipped. He recovered, though, before a flutter became perceptible in her field strength, and said to Mickland, his voice relaxed, “I’m in Need all right. And if you’ll check your records, you’ll see I’ve been shorted in transfer now for twenty-two consecutive months, assigned—because nobody else was available—to people like Seloyan. I was promised Im’ran and I don’t know or care how you botched it, but you’re controller here, you’re responsible for getting me a Donor comparable to Im’ran. Seloyan is not comparable. Ilyana—is.”
“She’s Distect.”
“So what? Or do you believe every silly myth and legend and fairy tale in kids’ books or horror stories? Isn’t it obvious that I control her?”
Mickland looked—with all his Sime senses—at Ilyana, who darted a thoughtful glance at Digen. “You’re doing that?”
Absently, Digen nodded, watching Mickland. “So you see, Controller, it’s perfectly safe. But it’s not just the convenience of a good transfer. In a few hours I have to show up over at the Gen hospital, prepared to go to work as an intern there. I don’t expect it to be easy. I doubt I can do it at all—without a good transfer. I really am on the ragged edge.”
“You certainly don’t sound like it, and you don’t behave like it.”
Im’ran said, “You didn’t see him on the train. You can’t penalize him just because he’s a good channel. He can control, sure—he had to learn it to survive that lateral injury. And—he’s Sectuib in Zeor. Haven’t you ever worked with a Zeor channel? Don’t you know the kind of control the Zeor training builds into them? And the Sectuib—the best of them all?”
Mickland shook his head in disgust. “Householder evasions. I should have known you’d side with him.”
Uh-oh, thought Digen. Mickland is anti-householder. That was just the wrong kind of controller for him to have to work under. The Householdings still dominated the Tecton, and Digen, as head of the most prestigious of the Householdings, was the acknowledged leader of all the Householding channels. Lately, though, the non-Householding channels had begun to accuse the householders of forming a hereditary aristocracy within the Tecton. The loudest spokesmen of this group were those whose parents had not been householders. Mickland, Digen concluded, must be one of those.
Digen shot Im’ran a glance, nodding his gratitude. The Gen had chosen an oblique but effective way of warning Digen. A quick change of tactics was in order. Technically, Digen outranked Mickland—if not by householder status, then by the law of the Tecton, simply because his proficiency rating was higher than Mickland’s. Yet, Mickland was controller, and it could only undermine the already precarious structure of the Tecton if he pulled rank on his controller. So he had to win Mickland’s support—and he had to have Ilyana. That was becoming increasingly clear with every moment.
Digen’s eye fell on the black file with the Zeor blue stripe blazoned across it and the channel’s crest embossed in the corner. He pointed with one handling tentacle. “If you’ll check my file, you’ll find the World Controller’s special dispensation to study medicine in the Gen schools—and, now to continue that study as an intern at Westfield Memorial Hospital.”
In response, Mickland flipped open the file to that beribboned and embossed page. “I never have understood how you got this—unless….”
“No,” said Digen, “it wasn’t some under-the-table, Householding tradeoff deal. Simple logic. When I recovered from the lateral injury, they discovered that the scar would keep me from working again as a channel—at least for most ordinary functionals. I wouldn’t last an hour in the collectorium—not five minutes in the dispensary. Collecting and dispensing selyn is simply beyond my abilities—forever. Sure, I can do some fancy and exotic specialty functionals—like this one—the kind of thing you might encounter once a month if that often. But that won’t pay for my transfers. Yet it does give me the ability to work in that hospital—where any other channel would simply collapse from the shrieking nager of Gen suffering.
“So the World Controller,” said Digen, emphasizing the title to appeal to Mickland’s reverence for authority, “decided to use me to try to bring a new skill—a new healing technique—in-Territory.”
“Surgery!” said
Mickland. “You can’t tell me the World Controller is in favor of this!”
Digen pointed mutely to the certificate and shrugged. No, of course I can’t tell you that. But you can assume it. “Oh,” said Digen, “you will note that I will be working here in the Sime Center eight hours a day. Administrative, not functional, work.”
“And I intend to take full advantage of that. You will be in charge of the changeover ward and the in-Territory collectorium. Mora Dyen is overworked managing three departments.”
“All the more reason that it makes no sense to deny me a full transfer. There’s work to be done. But I can’t do it like this!”
Mickland eyed Digen silently. Digen knew that the man wanted him to go into that hospital in Need and be brought home on a stretcher in disgrace. It would be a quick and satisfying end to the threat of having to face surgery—the idea of cutting flesh, the ripping, tearing, flashing destruction of selyn replete cells grating through the empathic nerve of a Sime roused a primitive lust for the kill transfer, the kind of lust that modern Tecton culture was designed to repress totally.
For a long, suspended moment, Digen and Mickland faced each other across that huge, polished desk.
Ilyana said, “I don’t pretend to understand your crazy laws, but—you are choosing me, aren’t you?”
Eyes on Mickland, Digen nodded. “I want to.”
It was only then that he began to notice what she had been doing. She was much closer to him now, engulfing him in the inner fire of her nager. In a flash, his firm control over her vanished, and he became subject to her will, control of the fields wrested from his grasp so smoothly that he barely felt it.
Her hands slid up his arms, stroking the bulging tentacle sheaths that lay along the arm from elbow to wrist. As her cool fingers came to the hard, swollen ronaplin glands, halfway up along the side of each forearm, under the lateral tentacle sheaths, Digen sucked breath through his teeth. The ache of Need spread through his whole body, and the ronaplin glands responded, pouring their selyn conducting hormone into the lateral sheaths as the small, delicate transfer organs flicked in and out of the orifices on the side of each wrist.
Expertly then, she seized him, using gentle pressure on the reflex ganglions to bring his tentacles into transfer position along her arms. Dazed and giddy with it, he found himself bending to make the fifth point contact with his lips against hers.
Digen’s Need rose to transfer pitch. Glands poured secretions into his mouth, his blood, his brain, heightened all his senses in a way he hadn’t experienced in far too long to remain aloof from it now. The room blackened around him, illuminated to his Sime sense only by Ilyana’s field.
On the edge of hearing, a voice said, “What do you think you’re doing?”
It was just enough to make Digen hesitate before the contact would be complete. He came to normal awareness, knowing now it was Mickland speaking. “I haven’t given you any assignment!”
Digen was unable to move. It was all he could do to hold himself away from that unsanctioned transfer contact—and he knew that if he completed the circuit, he would draw his fill from her, despite his famed control.
In a ragged hiss, he said, “Then make the shendi-fleckin’ assignment!”
Suddenly the doors burst inward, and Simes and Gens came running into the room. The shock was, to Digen, pure, paralyzing shen, transfer interruption, and it was then he realized how close he had been to an illegal transfer.
He yanked his hands away from her, sheathing his tentacles, then massaging his arms with his hands. “It’s all right!” he called to the guards, stopping them halfway into the office. “The Sectuib in Zeor does not have to be physically restrained to obey a lawful controller’s directive.”
Digen knew Mickland had summoned the guards.
“Why?” said Ilyana. “I don’t understand why you did that.”
“It’s the law,” said Digen.
Mickland, coming around the desk with Im’ran at his side, said, “Am I seeing things, or—” He looked, both with eyes and with Sime senses, from Ilyana to Digen and back, beckoning to one of the Simes by the door, a large man with a limp. “Rin, do you see it, too?”
The Sime a First Order channel, compared the two of them and said, “They’re matchmates!”
“I thought so—not just close, but actually matched!”
Matchmates? thought Digen, looking at Ilyana. Yes, that would explain it, the terrible grip she had on him. Her basal selyn production rate was equal to his basal selyn consumption rate.
Mickland looked at the new channel. “We can’t expose him to a possible lortuen with her!”
The man’s head moved faintly in negation. He was still studying Digen. Digen thought the man looked familiar but couldn’t place him.
“All right,” said Mickland. “Then this is official. Ilyana Dumas will be off Digen’s transfer rotation list, and she is to be kept away from him. Rin, you have charge of her. Keep her in your lab.”
The big Sime seized Ilyana and drew her away from Digen. Digen held himself hard against the pull of that parting. He would not betray how difficult it was. Matchmates! Locked for a lifetime in transfer dependency with a Distect woman? He shook himself, turned, and walked to the door, intent only on maintaining his control.
Behind him, Mickland shoved Im’ran after Digen. “Digen is your responsibility now. You’ll have him on your therapy list—exclusive—for the next two months at least. He’ll pick up slack with Ben Seloyan this month, and next month you will have him on assignment—twice in a row, Im’ran. Keep him away from her!”
That registered only dimly with Digen. All eyes in the room followed him as he went out, closing the door softly behind him. He was eight paces into the strange room before he realized he had gone the wrong way. It was the controller’s inner office, the workroom/library, where the real job of running Westfield was done.
Row after row of shelving, file cases of charts, and stacks of books jammed the long, narrow room. In a crowded corner near the office door was an old, scarred desk overflowing with stacks of papers, card files, well-thumbed reference books, and an assortment of calculating instruments.
As Digen stood, astonished, the office door opened and Im’ran came in, closing it behind him. Digen began to shake all over and then sank to the floor. His control failed him all at once, sending his selyn consumption rate soaring. Need ruled.
Im’ran knelt beside Digen, ignoring the danger to himself. With little selyn in his body to give, he could not face a kill-mode attack and live. “You’re wasting yourself,” he said to Digen. “We’ve got to get you stabilized. Relax. I can do it if you let me.”
And, miraculously, he did. Careful, cool, precise, Im’ran’s antidote to the Distect was the Tecton’s impersonal standard applied with a tender competence. It took the therapist three hours, but at last Digen dropped into a deep, natural sleep. However much the workroom was required, no one disturbed them.
CHAPTER THREE
A GEN ROOMMATE
The sign on the door said: DOCTOR HOWARD BRANOFF, DIRECTOR, WESTFIELD MEMORIAL HOSPITAL. Digen rested his fingers on the handle. Behind him, Gens strode up and down the intersecting corridors of the hospital, intent on their own business. The whole building throbbed with a collective, ambient nager—overtones of pain, narcosis, worry, anxiety, and death dominated.
He wished forlornly that the hospital were as well insulated as the Sime Center. But it’s not, he thought, and I’ll have to stand it anyway. After a couple of hours’ sleep under Im’ran’s skilled care, he was again in the state of dulled, chronic Need in which he had lived the last two years of medical school. I can do it, he told himself.
Pushing all doubts aside, he opened the door and went into the waiting room. A secretary came out of the inner office. Digen said, “I was told to report to the director. Some problem about my room, I believe?”
She looked him over, eyeing the retainers peeking from his sleeves, and said, “Dr. Farris? W
on’t you have a seat, please?”
Digen picked up a magazine and settled into one of the armchairs, while the woman went back inside. He was worried. He had reported to the front desk, expecting to receive his room assignment, work hours, and ward assignment routinely, like all the other interns reporting in today. Already, at the very first step, he was being singled out. Why?
His eye fell on the magazine in his lap, and he recognized its blazing orange and blue cover. It was the latest issue of The Surgeons’ Society Journal. The lead article headlined on the cover was: SIME GRADUATES LASSER; an evaluation. He flipped to the page and began reading. It seemed to be a fair article, not shrill or hysterical, but in the end the author turned bitterly against Westfield for accepting Digen as an intern: “When the foremost surgical service in the country accepts such an intern, how can the rest of the hospitals turn any of them down?”
Digen let the pages riffle shut. They’re afraid, he thought. Surgery has always been the one profession no Sime could ever enter. They’re afraid that if I make it, hordes of Simes will follow, taking surgery away from Gens completely.
From the Gen point of view, it was a perfectly rational fear. Sime dexterity could not be matched by any Gen. Sime endurance in the physically arduous practice of any branch of medicine had always given Digen an edge. When his fellow students were exhausted from long hours in the lab, running from building to building, and working their stints in the hospital, and when they then had to take an exam bleary from lack of sleep, Digen was still fresh enough to tackle anything at top mental capacity. That had lost him many potential friends along the way. He suspected it would not make him popular as an intern, either.
Out-Territory Gens tended to view Simes as basically superior and therefore a perpetual threat in any competitive situation. Medicine was highly competitive, both physically and intellectually. For every opening, in a good medical school there were a hundred applicants. For every internship in a great teaching hospital there were ten equally qualified applicants. Digen had won his place against a field of thousands, all Gens, and all convinced that they would have been chosen had Digen not been Sime.
Unto Zeor, Forever Page 3