Unto Zeor, Forever

by Jacqueline Lichtenberg

  Hogan was strung tight, screaming inwardly, Get it over with!

  Cautiously, Digen eased his tentacles out of the restraining pockets of the interior, releasing the pressure on his lateral extensor reflex nodes so he could sheathe the delicate selyn transfer organs before completely stripping away the protective retainers.

  He wished he could do it quickly. The Gen’s anxiety level was unbearable. But the interior construction of the retainers was designed to hinder all Sime movement, especially the removal of the retainers.

  Invented by the Gens during the Sime~Gen wars, retainers were meant to restrain Sime prisoners and to torture them into revealing military information. The material laminated between the outer walls interfered with the Sime sensory system sickeningly, and the interior bars and pockets forced the tentacles into extension and immobilized them painfully. After a few hours in the old fashioned manacles, any Sime would be willing to promise anything to get out of them. The modern variety had not been modified very much. It took some learning to wear them without absently moving in such a way as to pinch a lateral. One learned to move very slowly when removing them.

  Digen paused for the space of four deep breaths, adjusting his internal selyn flows to the new freedom. Then he withdrew his handling tentacles and laid the retainers open on the desk to dry. The bars had left red dents around his arms. The skin under the retainers was flushed with the heat, and his laterals throbbed unmercifully.

  Hogan said, hardly breathing, “They must be very uncomfortable.”

  Digen nodded, rising, and made his way to the open bathroom door. “Give me a moment,” he said, pulling the door shut behind him to cut the nager and allow Hogan a respite too. Running cold water over his arms—it was tepid but felt cold to him—he worked the cramps and kinks out of his arm muscles.

  He hadn’t actually been wearing the retainers so long this time, but the long train ride, the incessant Need within him, and the draining events of the morning had all taken a toll. And the night to come would be even more demanding.

  He stuck his head under the faucet and ran the water over his face and hair, adding to his list of things to do that he had to install his pharmacy chest in the bathroom. He didn’t dare try the Gen soap in the dish. It would surely give him a bright red rash by nightfall, if not sooner.

  He was worse than most Farrises when it came to allergies, so he was a little afraid of the towels, too. At the Gen-run medical school, the laundry had used some sort of conditioner that had given him such a reaction that the Gen doctors thought for three days it was some new infectious disease. But these towels felt all right, and there was no way to find out but to try, so he toweled briskly and went out into the room, rubbing moisture from his short black hair.

  “That feels good. You should try it,” he said cheerfully.

  Hogan was standing by Digen’s desk, staring at the notebook Digen had left lying open to his list. The Gen flicked an eye from Digen to the list and back, his nager swirling with inchoate emotions.

  Taking care to move with exaggerated slowness yet still to seem casual about it, Digen used two tentacles to flip the towel onto the bed beside his underwear and stepped closer to the desk. Then, looking at the notebook, he understood the Gen’s feelings. He said, “Now why did I do that?”

  The list was written in Simelan, a language not quite cognate to any historic human language. All the Gens used modern versions of languages of the Ancients, the pre-mutation humans. But the Simes had somewhere, somehow, developed their own language to describe the reality that their peculiar senses perceived. The Gens, of course, regarded the Sime language as a form of secret communication designed only to exclude Gens, for even Gens raised among Simes never gained more than a superficial grasp of Simelan.

  Digen, in his fatigue, had made his notes in the way that required the least effort. Now he realized that Hogan had taken it as a graphic illustration of the barrier between them. Hastily Digen explained each notation, and added the last two in Hogan’s form of English. Then he poked a finger at the first item and a tentacle at the second, saying, “Tell you what, if you’ll go fetch our uniforms, I’ll make your bed, fair trade?”

  Hogan tried to dampen his lips with a dry tongue. His eyes never left Digen’s arms, still showing the angry marks of the retainers. “Fair enough,” he said.

  Hogan picked up Digen’s laundry ticket, mating it with his own. “This probably won’t take too long. Everyone else has been down already.”

  It didn’t take long, but by the time Hogan returned with two bulging packages, Digen had made the beds, partially unpacked his things, installed his pharmacy chest under the bathroom sink, and was leaning out the window, positioning the freshly scrubbed drawer so that the afternoon sun would catch the wet spot.

  “You know,” said Digen over his shoulder, “it looks as if previous tenants used this roof as a private patio.”

  Hogan, tossing the packages onto the beds, said, “Which is understandable, rules or no rules. This floor is unbearably stuffy.”

  “But we’ve got the best room—even cross-ventilation, with a window on each side of the building corner. It seems there are advantages to being an outcast.” He drew himself in the window and turned, having said the words lightly.

  But, with a kind of strained gaiety, Hogan said, “The laundry has already altered your uniforms. They had them set aside with your name on them. Somebody down there likes you, it seems.”

  As he spoke, his eyes slid nervously past Digen’s gaze. It was a peculiar mixture of fear and courage. By talking about that which frightened him. Hogan was trying to convince himself that he wasn’t afraid. Digen felt his own tension level rising in response and he knew he couldn’t afford much of that.

  The Gen began stacking clothing in a drawer. “Joel, this won’t do. I can’t—we can’t live like this.”

  Hogan, his back to Digen, continued stacking things. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Turn around and look at me.”

  “I’ve got to get this done.”

  “Joel.”

  The Gen turned. Digen said, “Have you ever really seen a Sime’s tentacles before? In Sorelton you didn’t watch.”

  Hogan’s face worked ever so slightly, but his eyes did not drop to Digen’s arms. “All right,” said Digen, “we both know you feel a certain apprehension. I can understand that. It’s normal. I’ve dealt with it daily when working out-Territory collectoriums, collecting selyn from out-Territory Gen Donors.”

  Drifting to the end of the bed and sitting down, Digen considered. “Joel, it’s not the fact that you’re nervous about me that’s getting to me, it’s the way you’re handling it. You haven’t looked squarely at me since I shed my retainers.

  From Hogan’s reaction, Digen figured that Hogan had not actually been aware of that avoidance. Now the Gen forced his eyes down to Digen’s arms. His pulse and respiration spiked, and a film of perspiration sprang out on his upper lip, but his selyn production rate increased only slightly and in a rhythm wholly divorced from Digen’s nager.

  Sime tentacles had some sort of semantic meaning for Hogan over and above the clinical. In a wild, intuitive stab, Digen said, “You have seen a changeover—a very grisly one, right?”

  Hogan’s eyes locked to Digen’s now and his fear was like a bolt of lightning to Digen. “No, Joel, I can’t read your mind. But I’ve dealt with people from your background all my life. I can recognize a trauma pattern when I see one. And there are few things in this life more traumatic than being the victim of a Sime who’s just come through changeover and is berserk with First Need. That’s what happened to you, isn’t it? I mean before Sorelton.”

  Still unable to speak, Hogan shook his head. Then he shrugged and said, “I don’t remember it.”

  Digen nodded. “Sometimes trauma works that way.” He rummaged in the suitcase that was still on his bed and came up with a bottle of fruit nectar. It was all sudsy and warm, but it would be tart and refreshing m
ixed with a little water. He went into the bathroom to fill glasses, calling over his shoulder, “How old were you at the time?”

  When he came out, Hogan still hadn’t answered. Digen handed him a glass. “How old were you at the time, Joel?”

  Hogan stared at the bright yellow-gold drink. Digen was offering the glass held in two tentacles, his own glass in his fingers, while the bottle was in his other hand. Hogan just stared at the glass he was being offered, wrapped around with two tentacles so that he couldn’t possibly take the glass without touching Digen.

  Digen was tempted to relent and offer his glass in his hand. But he would be sanctioning Hogan’s retreat, and he had to force a confrontation here, now, or he’d never have the strength for it again. His laterals were retracted far up into his lateral sheaths, tensed against the onslaught of the Gen’s nager. “You can’t hurt me by touching the dorsal tentacles,” said Digen. “Only the laterals contain selyn transport nerves. The dorsals and ventrals are just like fingers—a little stronger and more dexterous, that’s all.”

  The Gen’s hand moved a bit, and Digen braced himself for the contact. Come on, Joel, you can do it.

  It took the Gen a long time, but Digen was patient, and at length Hogan plucked the glass from Digen’s grip, the tip of one Gen finger brushing lightly against a Sime tentacle. Hogan looked at the glass in his hand with amazement.

  Digen set the bottle on the closet shelf and sat down with his drink as if nothing unusual had transpired. “You’ll have to tell me about it, you know. How else can I help you get over this?”

  But Hogan apparently didn’t hear Digen. He said blankly, “It’s not slimy.”

  “Hmm?”

  A little more distinctly, Hogan said, “It’s smooth, powdery, silky dry.”

  Ah! “Yes, the skin of the dorsal and ventral tentacles is dry and very smooth to the touch. Only the laterals are kept moist with selyn conducting hormones.”

  Hogan dropped heavily into his own desk chair and forced his eyes back to Digen. The channel said, “How old were you at the time?”

  Hogan shook himself. “I—ah—they say it happened when I was eleven.”

  “Then you were still a child yourself, not established as a Gen?”

  “No. They—the Sime Center had a truck unit at my school, testing everyone for changeover, and the channel said I’d established sometime the previous summer. It was a big relief. It meant I wouldn’t go through changeover. It meant I could become a surgeon.”

  “Then what happened?” Shen! Established at eleven!

  “I—I told you, I don’t remember.”

  “You must have heard, though. Something like that….”

  “They said—they said it was my older brother. He was hiding in the barn, sick with changeover, and my sister—she was a couple of years older than him—found him toward the—the—end….”

  “Breakout,” said Digen. “When the tentacles rupture the wrist orifice membranes and Need really hits in earnest. And what happened?”

  Hogan recited the story with a glassy calm, like a thing that had happened to somebody else. “He started to attack her, but I threw myself onto his back. I’d been hiding in the loft, for some reason, and saw it. He killed my sister and turned on me. They say he burned me in transfer. They said it was a month before I would utter a sound—because I saw them beat him to death with clubs and hoes and such. I loved my brother, they said, even more than my sister, who had been a mother to me since my own mother died.”

  Hogan looked up at Digen. “I can’t even remember his name, and I don’t remember him at all. I never had a brother.”

  “Shenoni!” swore Digen. His brother killed, then burned him that deeply. He must have been a channel. What a Donor Joel could have been. “A month to recover brain function? Were you under care at the Sime Center?”

  “No, of course not. It was much too far away, and nobody trusted them anyhow.”

  The question in Digen’s mind was whether it had been transfer shock or just a psychological shock that caused the amnesia and speech trauma. Digen guessed it to be a mixture.

  “All right,” Digen said. “Now I understand why you feel the way you do. I think you’ve done remarkably well—with me—so far. But I also think you’re suffering uselessly. You’re not eleven years old anymore. The world is not mysterious, inexplicable, or sinister anymore. And I am not renSime. I am no danger to you or to anyone else.”

  “I know it’s senseless,” said Hogan, “but it just comes—the feeling—I don’t know from where. I never expected it to be like this.”

  Digen took one last sip from his glass and got up. He held out both hands, handling tentacles spread. “Come on, Joel. There’s only one way to unlearn an experience, and that’s with another experience.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  Digen let his handling tentacles drift toward the Gen’s arms. “I’m going to touch you. Go ahead and be as frightened as you like. You’re not hurting me.” He let all his handling tentacles rest lightly against the Gen’s skin, saying, “All right. Now I’m going to try something. Holding our fields in exact balance so there can be no selyn flow, I’m going to make a full transfer contact.”

  Hogan jerked away. Digen moved on Hogan then, seizing the Gen’s arms in the transfer grip with the lightning speed of the attacking Sime. It was a move calculated to evoke the very peak of unreasoning terror, to hit that deeply buried nerve and bring it all to the surface. Digen’s only worry was that Hogan might scream.

  He timed his move for the end of Hogan’s exhalation, and in the instant of paralyzed surprise, he made the lip-to-lip contact generally used only in transfer. At the same time, he slid his Need-moistened laterals into contact with the Gen’s skin, and at once his entire nervous system resonated to every detail of the Gen’s anatomy.

  He held position just long enough to get the readings he had to have, seeing the old transfer burn inside the Gen clearly. As Hogan began to struggle, Digen held him immobile just long enough to demonstrate that he could do it. Then he broke lip contact. “Joel, be still!”

  Hogan froze, and Digen said, “I’m going to break lateral contact now. If you move, you could hurt me. Can I trust you?”

  The surge of terror had peaked. Hogan now saw that he had not in fact been hurt. His nager fragmented into chaos again, but he nodded to Digen and held still as Digen drew his laterals across the Gen’s skin and sheathed them. Then he released his hold on the Gen.

  “You see? You did it,” said Digen. “Nothing to it.” Shakily, he collapsed on his bed.

  Hogan sank into his desk chair, dazed. He looked pale, and Digen was about to suggest he put his head down for a minute, but Hogan said, “Why—why did you do—that?”

  Digen sat up, rubbing the tension from his neck with all handling tentacles. “Joel, can you remember ever being so terrified in all your life?”

  Blankly Hogan shook his head.

  “That’s why I did it. To scare you, good and proper.” And suddenly the time had come, Digen knew, to live up to his promise in the hallway. An honest friendship. No deceptions. “You’re sure now, it’s not possible for you to be more frightened than you were just now?”

  “Yes, I’m sure about that!”

  “Good, because that was the only way to make my point. If I can withstand the very worst you can throw at me even now while I’m in such Need, then you have no reason ever to fear me again.”

  It took a moment for Hogan to absorb that. Then he sat bolt upright, staring at Digen with white showing all around his irises. “Need! But….”

  “There was a mishap. My Donor should be arriving day after tomorrow. Meanwhile, I wait—and not with a great deal of patience.”

  “Digen….”

  A skittish flutter of fear passed through the Gen’s nager. Digen said, “Look, you’ve been with me for hours, and you never guessed. If I’m that good, why should it bother you?” He got up, stretched languorously, and began putting his thing
s in the closet as he talked. “There’s absolutely no reason for you or anyone else in the hospital to be concerned.”

  “You’re not going to tell them?”

  “No. And I’m asking you not to, either. Remember, I said no deceptions between us. If you can’t accept knowledge of this kind and handle it as privileged information, then we can’t have that sort of relationship.” He paused in his movements. “It’s putting a burden on you, I know. Perhaps an unfair burden, at this point. I’m sorry, but it can’t be helped.”

  Digen closed the suitcase and shoved it into the storage niche at the back of the closet, seeing that everything was arranged according to the housekeeping regulations. He went over to Hogan’s side of the room and began on his closet, shoving the heavy record player under the bed.

  “Out there,” said Digen, as Hogan watched, “I deal with those people guardedly. I’m always on the alert, tensed for any unexpected move, so that even when I’m feeling like this, I can cope well enough. If they knew where I was in my Need cycle, it would only make them constantly afraid and make it harder—perhaps even impossible—for me to cope. Can you see that?”

  “I’d have to be some kind of idiot not to see it. Now. After what you did. But I’m still not sure how I feel about it. I’m not even sure if what you did to me was legal.”

  “Legal? Well, yes and no. Out-Territory, of course, it would be illegal. But that sign you put on our door makes this legally Sime Territory. I doubt if you’d find an in-Territory court that would question the judgment of the Sectuib in Zeor. It worked, didn’t it?”

  Hogan nodded.

  Tentacles and fingers spread around fifteen pairs of Hogan’s socks, Digen paused. “I can deal with them at arm’s length, Joel, but I’m only human. I can’t stay alert sixteen hours a day. I have to have someplace where I can go to unravel, unwind, and just be. That place is this room, and it’s your room too. You have the freedom to come and go as you choose. So I have to start teaching you how to behave around me at various points in my cycle.”