Unto Zeor, Forever

by Jacqueline Lichtenberg

  Branoff turned to Hogan. “You two get somebody to cover for you and take a few hours off. I don’t want EW staff on duty in anything less than top condition.” He went toward the door, then paused and added as an afterthought, “But no more than three hours. I want you to recover your edge, not develop a phobia, understand?”

  “Yes, Doctor,” said Hogan for both of them.

  Digen let Hogan escort him out the front door of the pediatrics wing and across the grass of the rotunda toward the Sime Center. The sun was low in the sky, shadows long across the circular drive leading up to the emergency entrance.

  They were turning from the sidewalk onto the footpath between the hospital’s old building and the Sime Center before Digen realized they were not going to their room, but that Hogan was taking him to his own people to be treated for shock.

  At the Territory border guard’s kiosk, set just a few yards back from the street, Digen stopped short. “Joel, I don’t require any special assistance. I’d just like to get these retainers off for a while. There’s a little spot up on the hill there. No telephone, no page system. If I go into that Sime Center, it will be one thing after another, and I’ll never get out all night. What do you say?”

  Hogan eyed the lush trees. “Well, if you’re sure….”

  “Come on,” said Digen, and started off. Hogan caught up to him at the border marker, where Digen paused to shed his retainers. Hooking them together, he parked them on his belt. “Just up this path,” said Digen, taking the brick walk that curled up away from the Sime Center.

  Luck was with them. The little glade was deserted. Digen had half expected to find picnickers there, but it had rained earlier. There were still tumbled fragments of stormclouds in the sky, blotting out the sun from time to time.

  Digen dropped gratefully onto his own favorite spot and began to massage his tentacles. Hogan drifted over to look for fish in the brook. He wasn’t, Digen noticed, avoiding the sight of Digen’s tentacles. They had come a long, long way together since that first day.

  Hogan came over to where Digen was and hooked one leg over a nearby rock.

  “The hospital should have something like this.”

  “Yes, it is refreshing to get away from the—the pressure, the atmosphere of the hospital or the center. You see,” he said, holding out his hands, tentacles extended, “steady as a surgeon already.”

  Hogan worked his own hands against his thighs and then held them out, inspecting them critically. “I’m still shaking inside, but at least it doesn’t show. Digen, what happened while I was gone? How could she just—just die like that?”

  “Come here,” said Digen, indicating a place beside him the place where Im’ran used to sit. “I’ll tell you. If I can.”

  Hogan moved down beside Digen.

  Come on, damn you, match with me! But of course Hogan wasn’t able to respond to Digen’s field fluctuations. Their moment of resonance over the girl’s body had been a coincidence. I want something from him he’s not able to give. That’s dangerous.

  Digen recited exactly what had happened during the moments Hogan hadn’t been there. “So you see,” he ended bleakly, “it was my fault. I killed her. But it’s all so damn legal, nobody’s blaming me. That, I think, is what I can’t quite stand. I think—I think I brought you here because I want somebody to blame me. I want you to hate me for it. You cared—for her—as much as I did, more maybe because you knew her longer.”

  He got to his knees, taking Hogan by the shoulders, and said, “Joel, I was—I was….” Digen fumbled with the English, “primed to serve First Transfer. I was—you don’t know, you can’t know….” But somehow, if only for an instant, it seemed that Hogan did know.

  Digen gave in to the wrenching sobs that had been in him since the deathshock had hit him. “I didn’t ask to be born a channel!”

  It lasted just a few moments and then cleared, like a stormcloud passing the sun. Kneeling on the damp grass, his arms wrapped around himself, Digen looked up at Hogan, who was angrily scrubbing away a single tear. He can’t let himself cry.

  The out-Territory Gen culture held that crying was for children, and shameful for adults. It was one of the biggest barriers to out-Territory Gens aspiring to become Donors.

  “Joel, I just realized something. I am the duly constituted agent of a social order in which the most heinous crime known to humanity is not only legal—but heroic and admirable.”

  Hogan shook his head. “Digen, after what you’ve been through in your life, there’s no way you’ll ever be able to think rationally about attrition. Now, let it alone. There’s nothing to be gained by flagellating yourself.”

  “Isn’t there?” Digen felt he was onto something very significant.

  The retainer laws were the base and substance of the Sime~Gen union. They were made not for the convenience of the individual, but were there to give all Gens the confidence they had to have to associate with Simes. Eventually, this would make Territory borders—and retainers— disappear, and mankind would be reunited. One ill-considered act, such as saving a little girl’s life, could set humanity back from that goal a generation or more. The retainer laws were the absolute that the Gens could rely on. They had to be. Didn’t they?

  Weren’t retainers, and an occasional death like Didi’s, a small price to pay for all the progress the Tecton had made? What progress? Digen asked himself. He remembered Ilyana’s scorn when he had told her how nicely his changeover courses for teenagers were spreading in the Gen schools. Three new schools in twelve years. That’s not progress, that’s stagnation.

  How very desperately, thought Digen, this world requires surgery, or something like it, to blast it loose and get that progress going again—before it’s too late.

  He raised his head from his knees and looked at Joel Hogan. And he felt better instantly. Hogan was a living example of his real and immediate progress toward his personal goals. No Gen could be less suited to fraternizing with Simes, yet here Hogan sat, attending Digen as if he were a Companion born.

  “What are you thinking?” asked Digen.

  In the long silence they had each followed their own thoughts. Hogan said, “Trying to figure out what drives a person like Lankh. You once said that a channel has to risk his life for his patients. Doctors don’t, but they do risk a kind of pain—the pain of losing the battle against death. Maybe Lankh is battling changeover because to him it hurts worse than death.”

  “I’m not sure I follow that.”

  “A doctor has to accept death as the inevitable, as fate, and just stave it off as long as possible. But changeover isn’t inevitable. Only about a third of the kids are lost to it. And they are lost—gone in-Territory never to be heard from again even by their families. It’s worse than being dead—because they’re out there somewhere, cut off, alone and beyond all reach.”

  “But it’s not like that at all….”

  “To Lankh—to us—it is.”

  “They aren’t held incommunicado, you know. People can write or phone their families out-Territory. There’s a lot of traffic.”

  “But they don’t.”

  “The out-Territory kids cross a tremendous cultural gulf, often fighting every bit of conditioning their parents drummed into them over the years. I suppose they feel they have nothing in common with their parents after a few years. It’s more the parents fault, for not preparing the child more carefully for what he might have to face as a Sime.”

  “Well, that’s a fine attitude for the Sectuib in Zeor to take! ‘Look how the nasty Gens abuse us!’ No wonder the world is going to hell!”

  “I didn’t….” Digen cut off his retort, stunned. “But I did,” he said. “Look, Joel, don’t be angry with me. We have to learn to understand each other—better than we understand ourselves. We even have to learn to understand Lankh and his kind—or the Tecton will never make any real progress. I watched him when Didi tried to attack him. You would have run screaming from the room—no offense—”

&n
bsp; “It’s true. When I finally did get out of there, I thought I’d have to run and puke like some kind of lowly intern, but by the time I finished calling Branoff I felt better.”

  “Lankh didn’t react like that. He stood there as cool as if—I’d swear he’s never been touched by a Sime, has no conception of what it’s like, and he considers ordinary Gen fear beneath contempt. It’s not repressed fear with him. It’s something else, just as powerful, but I can’t name it. That bothers me. I wish I could have watched him without my retainers on.”

  “It must be terrible to go around half blind all the time.”

  “Turn off the sarcasm. I’m serious.”

  “Digen, you depend so much on—whatever you call it—that you don’t use your eyes or your brain. Lankh is as transparent as they come. He resents Sime superiority, only he refuses to admit you’re superior.”

  Digen was taken completely by surprise by that and let out a guffaw that startled Hogan. He laughed and laughed until Hogan was laughing at him for laughing like a hyena.

  When their laughter finally sputtered to a halt, Hogan said with some dignity, “I can’t imagine what I said that was so funny.”

  “It wasn’t what you said so much as how you said it. Dead earnest—’He resents Sime superiority, only he refuses to admit the fact that you’re superior!’ “

  “What’s so funny about that?”

  “Ooohhh, don’t start me off again,” said Digen, holding his sides. “The one prime requisite attitude for out-Territory Gens who want to become Technical Order Donors is exactly that—the refusal to admit that Simes are superior. You want to know why? Because, Joel, Simes are not superior—Gens are. And you just proved to me that I—the goddamned Sectuib in Zeor, for shen and for shame—am not entirely free of resentment of Gen superiority!”

  “Whew!”

  “You said it.”

  “But, Digen,” said Hogan a few minutes later, “you people are superior. You are everything everyone wants to be—graceful, dexterous, sure-footed, strong, fast, you can see in the dark or around corners or through things, you never have to carry a watch or a map—there’s nothing you can’t do better, faster, and longer than a Gen. You don’t even sleep like we do. How could any Sime resent a Gen?”

  “Because,” said Digen, and he was grave now, “for everything we are, we’re only tools in your hands. When your hands are skilled, we feel safe. But when your hands are not skilled, we are—terrified of you. Just what you said—I see it now in myself like I never saw it before. I—resent a Gen who holds such power over me yet doesn’t take the trouble to learn how to use me properly. It frightens me to be exposed to such a person. I have to work hard not to let him grab hold of my insides and turn me against myself. I know he wouldn’t do it on purpose—most people wouldn’t. But deep down I do consider such a person morally corrupt, and his laziness—well, consider a doctor lucky enough to own one of those microsurgical sets you were drooling over the other day, and he’s too lazy to read the instruction manual, so all the fine-honed edges get hopelessly pitted and bent. How do you think the set would feel if it were alive?”

  “But you’re not a tool, you’re a person!”

  “Yes, I’m a person, but I’m also a tool—that’s the nature of the Sime~Gen relationship. I wouldn’t have said so before I came to Westfield, though I’d certainly read it often enough. But here I’ve finally met someone who can handle me. It’s changed me an awful lot.”

  “Im’ran?”

  Digen started to say no, he hadn’t been thinking of Im’ran. But he realized he couldn’t talk about Ilyana to Hogan. However, Digen’s hesitation said it all for him, and Hogan sat up straighter. In the thickening dusk under the trees Digen could barely see him, but Hogan’s nager shone like fire to Digen’s Sime senses. “That’s wonderful, Digen! What’s her name?”

  Digen shook his head, but Hogan persisted, “Don’t worry, I won’t tell on you.”

  The celibacy rules of the medical profession were still in effect in conservative places like Westfield. It was the one rule Digen broke, when he could, without a qualm.

  “No, no, it’s not like that,” said Digen. “Actually, I prefer my women to be channels. This lady is a Donor. I’ve never even had transfer with her, but she handles me as if I were her glove, tailor-made. It’s a whole new experience for me. She doesn’t frighten me—and I’ve never met a Gen who affected me like that before.”

  “I don’t frighten you. You don’t resent me.”

  “You did at first. But I never resented your inabilities because—it just hit me, because you’re like me, crippled in a strange way that very few can understand. And you don’t frighten me anymore because you take seriously your responsibilities toward me. You’re not—never have been—lazy. You struggle against your handicap. You’re a good friend. I couldn’t ask for better.”

  Hogan said, “I like being a friend better than being a tool user. I’m sorry, but I just can’t buy that idea.”

  “Well,” said Digen, looking toward the tunnellike entrance to the glade, “I think it’s time we got back to the hospital.”

  “Someone coming? I didn’t hear anything.”

  “Couple of renSimes,” said Digen, as the man and woman stopped outside the screen of bushes.

  “It’s all right,” called Digen in Simelan, “we were just leaving.”

  He got to his feet and helped Hogan up as the couple came in with a picnic dinner and a small selyn-glow lamp.

  “Oh, Sectuib Farris!” said the man. “I’m sorry, we didn’t mean…”

  “No, no, really, we were just leaving.”

  Digen exchanged a few more words in Simelan with the couple, then escorted Hogan out onto the path. The Gen stumbled, unable to see in the dark, and Digen took his elbow to guide him, using the Gen’s nager to “see” by.

  When they paused by the border marker for Digen to put on his retainers, Hogan said, “I couldn’t see a thing but I got the impression that they were staring at me very oddly.”

  “Well, your nager is weird, to say the least, especially for a friend of a Farris channel. We confused the hell out of them. It should make some interesting gossip by tomorrow morning. I can hear it now: ‘Zeor adopts out-Territory tich.’ I didn’t want to spoil their fun by introducing you. Come to think of it, that might have added fuel to the fire! Next time, I may.”

  They went to work.

  CHAPTER NINE

  SURGERY

  The closing weeks of summer were difficult for Digen. He found himself drawing strength from his work at the hospital in order to endure his life at the Sime Center. As his first transfer since Im’ran left came nearer and nearer, he often found himself daydreaming about Ilyana, or even talking about her without consciously intending to. But they were now keeping him away from her very assiduously.

  He found himself tensing in dread anticipation of that transfer, and Ben Seloyan, his appointed Donor, was unable to help him relax. Seloyan, Digen found, was not so much less skilled than Im’ran as he was lacking in Im’ran’s sense of humor.

  The transfer itself turned out to be worse than he had expected. Even with both channels, Mora Dyen and Cloris Agar, monitoring, he thrashed through four aborts before they could get the transfer into him. When he returned to the hospital afterward, Hogan commented sourly, “You look like a terminal cancer patient with just moments to live.”

  Digen said, “Thanks,” in a gruff monotone and refused to discuss the matter for three days.

  The death committee met to review Didi Rill’s death and Lankh’s procedures. Digen, called to testify, waited outside the closed doors for three hours, then was told to go back to work. He never learned what politics went on above the director’s level, but Lankh was back in business a week later. Dr. Branoff went around tight-lipped and as foul tempered as Mickland for a good ten days after that.

  Digen brooded over it, still determined to stop Lankh, but he was powerless to do anything. Lankh, operating out-Ter
ritory, was not only within the law, he was viewed by many Gens as a savior of humanity and a genius. Digen made sure the Sime Center statisticians notified Mickland about it, with copies to the World Controller, and then just watched to see what would happen.

  Once or twice he saw Mickland coming or going to see Branoff. Always the Controller came into the hospital with two First Order Donors escorting him, shielding him from the hospital’s ambient nager. Seeing him on these occasions, Digen wondered if the man had some deep-rooted psychological problems. It wasn’t rational to be so terrified of contact with Gen pain.

  The hospital staff was now firmly divided into two warring camps—those for Digen and those against him. For the most part, none of this touched Digen personally. People were afraid to say anything about it to his face. Occasionally, work he’d done, such as filing X-rays, would be sabotaged. Several times, orders he had written or messages he had left disappeared mysteriously.

  But for every negative incident, somebody would do something nice to offset it. The stockroom ordered a shipment of surgical gloves styled with wider than usual cuffs so that they fitted neatly over his retainers. One of the nurses in pediatrics spearheaded a successful Donor drive and signed up twenty-five new General class Donors for the Sime Center’s out-Territory collectorium. (Digen didn’t have the heart to tell them that that wasn’t the kind of Donor shortage the newspapers had been talking about.)

  The hospital’s auxiliary volunteers circulated a petition to have a Final Donation Room opened in the hospital—where a Sime Center channel would collect selyn from the recently dead who wore the tag of the Final Donation Society. They got fifty-two signatures before a weekly newspaper wrote an article calling them ghouls and the hospital board forced them to quit. Shortly after that, as if in protest, the doctors lounge suddenly subscribed to a Simelan newspaper, which nobody but Digen could read.

  Digen continued to look in on Skip Cudney, bringing him puzzles and games from in-Territory. There were times when he was well enough to take an interest in things, but more often he was battling some new infection. The stench in his room was so bad that the rooms on both sides had to be vacated and extra fans installed by his windows. By timing his visits carefully, Digen was able to avoid Dr. Lankh. But he knew it couldn’t go on like that indefinitely.