Unto Zeor, Forever

by Jacqueline Lichtenberg

  As Hayashi placed Digen’s glass on the desk before him, he hovered a moment, scrutinizing the Sectuib. “If she’d slammed me with that one, I think I’d be nothing but a shattered heap of colored nager fragments you could sweep out with a broom.”

  “I’m all right,” said Digen with a wave of a tentacle. “There’s a certain truth to what she’s trying to say, even if she does overdo the vehemence a little.”

  “Digen!” said Mickland, offended.

  “Oh, I didn’t mean the name calling, but I think you can rise above that. Chalk it up to underdraw pathology.” But she’s right. He’s a coward of the worst sort. It’s what makes him a good politician. “She sees what we do without understanding yet why we do it. When she understands our motives—emotionally—which she can’t learn by being told—then she’ll pledge and qualify.”

  Hayashi paced to the middle of the floor. “The problem still remains. We’ve got to do something about Digen, no more fleckin around with one tentacle. Dee, you’ve got to drop everything and get Im’ back here—and—” he said, looking at Digen speculatively. “We’ve only got maybe—three weeks?—to do it in.”

  “Two and a half,” said Mickland. “Can’t be done.”

  “Don’t tell me that. You’ve spent your life building this political network of yours. You can do anything once you decide you’re going to. Call in some favors, pull some strings, make some trades, just get it done. It’s his right now—not a privilege. And it’s your duty to see he gets Im’ back—at least once.”

  “Well…,” temporized Mickland.

  Hayashi planted himself in front of the man and said, “He’s earned it, and you know it.”

  Digen got up from his desk chair, shaking his head. “No. No. Mickland can’t get Im’ back—nobody can. Im’ is working with that First who’s holding things together down in Alia—Rogzin is his name. Since that hurricane knocked out the Alia seaport, the area has been listed critical. I’m not even earning my own keep these days, let alone the sacrifice of half a continent for my convenience.”

  “It’s a little more than convenience—in my professional opinion, Hajene Farris,” said Hayashi. “And though you may not be earning your keep now, the Tecton trained you—made you into a First without even asking your consent. Now, even though you were injured—and, as I recall, it was in the line of duty—the Tecton has a certain obligation to you. We can’t let you die—or none of us will be able to live with the system.”

  “It’s still not worth sacrificing the economy of half a continent,” said Digen. “I can piece something out—maybe with a channel therapist or something. Rogzin is working; he requires Im’s services constantly. I don’t, because I’m not working. I’m only on maintenance to avoid entran.”

  “Your maintenance,” said Hayashi dryly, “is what most channels call overwork.”

  Digen laughed. Mickland said, “Digen does have a point. He takes us into the red about half his capacity every month, despite what he’s done for this department. The only thing keeping this Sime Center solvent is Ilyana’s contributions offsetting Digen’s losses.”

  “It’s not his fault. The Tecton developed him, and now the Tecton is responsible for his support. He’s entitled, or none of us are.”

  “Well, I agree with that, naturally,” said Mickland. “What channel wouldn’t? But—it’s just not possible.”

  “Well then,” said Hayashi, limping up and down in annoyance, “get Im’ran here next month, or the month after. Meanwhile, Digen—what do you think of Ilyana and I in tandem? We could—” Hayashi slipped into rapid jargon, embroidering creatively on some basic Zeor techniques not in the Tecton manuals.

  “Now wait a minute,” said Mickland. “I can’t authorize you two for—”

  “The shenning shay you can’t! Don’t you realize—”

  “Hold it,” said Digen.

  “You can’t object, either,” said Hayashi. “You’d have to accept from any Tecton channel, and that’s all I am, just a Tecton channel doing a job on another channel. First to First. Nothing more.”

  “She’s not a First,” said Digen. “When she is, I’ll consider it. Meanwhile, forget it. Or—no, don’t forget it. It’s brilliant. Write it up somewhere. Somebody may require it sometime.”

  “Well then, what are you going to do?” asked Hayashi.

  Digen had been thinking about just that, and he started talking with assurance before he was even aware of what he was going to say. “Controller Mickland, do you remember that Donor you got for me a while ago—Tchervain something—Rholle, I think his name was?”

  “Hmm. The fellow I almost got a permanent on. Kept him three weeks before Biderfeld stole him. He wasn’t bad.”

  “He was flaming good,” said Digen. “Functioning three-nine-six-four when he came—nine-six-seven or so when he left. Young. Lots of potential. I talked to him some, about qualifying four-plus. He’s game to give it a try. If you could get him back—put him on my list as a student, instead of me on his therapy list—”

  It was a subterfuge unworthy of the Sectuib in Zeor. Digen found himself glancing at the closed door, wondering whether Ilyana might have heard that. But—what other choice was left?

  Mickland leaned against one corner of the desk. “I might--I just might be able to get him, but it would take a few weeks. He’s been rephased. It would be expensive to crash phase him for you—he’d have to skip a transfer.”

  “Shenoni!” yelled Hayashi, flinging his arms in the air. “Will you ever learn when to count pennies and when not to? Get him, then, if he’s the only one Digen will accept. But get Im’ back too, just in case.”

  “Why, if Digen can qualify us another four-plus?”

  “Zhhh!” said Hayashi. “Look, I know the Farrises, and I know the Zeor mentality. Just get them both, unless you want to get mired down in a scandal that will last a hundred years.”

  Hayashi limped across to Digen, searching his face and his nager. In a kind of resignation he shook his head. “You and Wyner!” Briefly he laid one hand on Digen’s shoulder—a fatherly gesture that Digen bore without exactly knowing why he didn’t slap the man down. Hayashi said, “Digen, you’re a credit to Zeor and to your office. I just wish—oh, shen!”

  And Hayashi stalked out the back door, mumbling something about checking up on Ilyana before she got into more trouble.

  Digen looked at the half glass of tea in his hand. He wanted to squeeze it until it crushed into shards. Carefully, he put it down.

  “Controller Mickland, there still remains the problem of Hajene Hayashi’s experiments. According to the charts I’ve seen, and to what I know of Jesse and Dane, I think maybe you could pair them and let Rin study their interactions. It might work—and it ought to keep him busy until—well, until something is resolved with Ilyana, or Im’ gets back.”

  “Rizdel and Elkar? What gives you that idea?”

  “I’ve known Jesse since First Year camp. He has a lot of potential that doesn’t show. And Dane Rizdel—well, I watched his qualification. I tend to trust my instincts in something like that. He may not be quite ready yet for Jesse, but—Rin did a great job with Im’ran for me, he can probably do as well for Jesse with Dane.”

  Mickland picked up the glass of tea Hayashi had left on a file cabinet. He swirled it contemplatively.

  Digen said, “I don’t have time to kick it around with you. I’ve got a kid on the out-Territory ward with Noreen’s Syndrome, and another who’s been beaten. I’ve got to go check on them—and that woman is waiting downstairs— and some other things.”

  He stepped around Mickland and went out to discipline his receptionist for not being there when Skip got loose.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  FAITH DAY

  On the day of the worst snowstorm of the season, Jesse Elkar took a suicide abort off Dane Rizdel in Hayashi’s lab.

  Digen was giving a ronaplin smear for a shaking plague culture when he heard of Hayashi’s call to the Sime Center morgue. He
ran up the fifteen flights of stairs to Hayashi’s penthouse laboratory, seeing visions of Ilyana dead, in a lax heap on the floor.

  But, when he arrived, Ilyana was nowhere in sight, and Jesse Elkar’s body was laid out on a lounge, surrounded by humming and clicking machines. Off to the side, on a high table, Hayashi was coaxing Rizdel back to consciousness. Digen stared at Elkar’s body for a full minute before he realized that the man was dead. Then he brushed the morgue attendants aside and seized Elkar’s body up in his arms, desperately searching for any flicker of selyn movement a non-Farris might have missed.

  But there was none.

  He was beyond need.

  Jesse!

  Digen was suspended between shock and defeat, willing time itself to stop, thought to freeze, selyn to congeal. But he knew what he didn’t want to think, knew it without thinking it. The Tecton, with all its rules and regulations governing transfer, had killed Jesse Elkar. And Digen himself, as a First Order channel, and as Sectuib in Zeor, supporting the Tecton way of life, was morally responsible for Elkar’s death.

  Digen had always urged Elkar to fulfill his potential as a channel. But why? For what? To work night and day to the exclusion of all your other interests in life, only to have the Tecton deny you the fulfillment of your basic needs? If Elkar hadn’t strived so hard to become a First Order channel, he’d be only second order, but he’d be alive. There was no Second Order Donor shortage. In the Distect there were no Donors at all—and no overdeveloped channels whose bodies demanded more than humanity could supply.

  Hayashi’s hands gripped Digen’s shoulders, pulled him gently away from the corpse, up and out of his suspension. Digen turned on Hayashi, thrusting him roughly away. “What did you do to him? How could you have driven him to this!”

  Hayashi said, “Dane panicked in mid-commitment. He’s done that before, but I thought I had him over it—or I wouldn’t have risked him with Jesse. You know Jesse’d been treated too roughly for too long. He couldn’t manage an ordinary abort and chose suicide to avoid hurting Dane. Give him a hero’s burial—in Zeor.”

  Digen felt his tears coming then, the blessed release of frustration, rage at the universe, sorrow over all the things done and undone, said and unsaid. Seeing the cocoon of recorders and monitors clicking and blinking around the body of his friend he struck out at them to silence them, to destroy that which had destroyed Jesse Elkar.

  Hayashi spun him around in mid-blow, taking the impact of Digen’s fist on his own shoulder to protect his machines. “No! Digen, I’ve got the whole thing recorded—the first time in history we’ve been able to make such a record. We’ll learn so much—Digen, he didn’t die in vain. Don’t make him die in vain.”

  Struggling feebly, Digen choked out words that burned. “Why didn’t you stop it?”

  Hayashi let go of him. He was shaking too. “Don’t—don’t think I didn’t try. Please don’t think that.” He displayed his arms with angry burn stripes across the gnarled old flesh. “I lost him, and that record’s all that’s left.”

  Digen touched one of the burn marks, then met Hayashi’s eyes. Their grief met and merged and choked them both to silence.

  …Wreckage of human lives…souls bleeding to death in the streets…crippled….

  The Tecton is killing us all!

  Isolated and alone, victims of the loftiest ideals ever conceived by man, our souls are being bled to death and there’s not enough courage among the lot of us to call it wrong. We have to do something. Somebody has to do something—fast.

  Digen looked at the man who had been banned from the House of Zeor and pulled himself away from the nageric linkage, so very familiar, so very Zeor in texture. He could not offer sanction—not even now. Something had to remain unstained by the blood of souls. Something in life had to retain some meaning.

  Digen turned toward Rizdel, who was sitting up on the edge of the treatment table, groggy but alive. “It wasn’t your fault, Dane. You have to believe that. Jesse misjudged his limits, that’s all.” Mickland misjudged Jesse’s limit.

  Rizdel shook his head. “I killed him.”

  “No,” said Digen, trying to sound reassuring. “It’s always partly voluntary—the abort reflex has to be permitted to work, by an effort of will.”

  “He was protecting me. I—”

  “He was protecting the Tecton,” Digen heard himself say. “We don’t hurt our Gens—not ever. That’s our most sacred vow, and it’s an absolute, Dane, an absolute every Gen in all creation can trust. It has to be that way. It has to.” Doesn’t it? Doesn’t it?

  Of all the things that happened that winter, Elkar’s death hit Digen the hardest. For days afterward he held himself hard against thinking about it, but the knowledge thrummed vibrantly through every nerve, whether he let it come into words or not.

  He would sit at his desk in the Sime Center, signing routine papers, and the panic would hit him. He would be holding retractors for Thornton, and the surgeon’s lecturing voice would recede under a swelling cry of Doesn’t it? Or he’d be with Mora, and suddenly Im’ran would come into the conversation, and the overwhelming loneliness would paralyze him. He and Im’ran hadn’t been quite close enough for any danger of an orhuen, but Digen gradually began to suspect that their dependency had been something more than a simple one, because while the physical symptoms abated, the pain never diminished. And now it was worse than ever. But it has to be like this doesn’t it?

  He would be in the Sime Center screening lab, giving a routine ronaplin smear, and suddenly he’d remember Wyner or Vira, or Nigel, or his parents, dying to keep shaking plague from sweeping out-Territory and devastating the Gen towns. It has to be—doesn’t it?

  He’d be treating a changeover victim who had been beaten by his family and left for dead in a dirty alley, and it would hit him like a tidal wave: We’ve got to do something!

  He’d be sitting at the little desk in the surgical ward office, working through a stack of charts, entering post-operative notes or writing follow-up orders, and he’d curse Mickland’s injunction out loud, not caring who heard.

  He’d be going over Lankh’s progress with Mora Dyen, seeing the vast and unexplainable improvement in the man since Lankh had seen Skip that time in front of the elevators. He toyed with the idea of trying to get them together—hoping for a miracle—because despite Lankh’s physical recovery, psychologically he was a broken man. Indecisive for the first time in his career, Digen delayed returning Lankh to the Gens.

  Invariably these conferences over Lankh would end with Digen seeking refuge in the Memorial to the One Billion. More and more, as the winter passed, it became clear to him that he was living amid atrocities. He knew that things just exactly like these—Didi Rill, Lankh, Joel Hogan’s neglected injury, and Jesse’s—suicide—had gone on all about him all his life. He asked himself why they suddenly seemed to take on new significance. But he was afraid of the answer. Ilyana Dumas—the idea that there exists another way of life. And then one day in the memorial the question formed unbidden: What if—what if it doesn’t have to be that way?

  And he knew what had really killed Jesse Elkar. The Tecton’s fear—drilled into him since changeover—the Tecton’s abject terror of going junct. Digen had studied Hayashi’s recordings of the suicide abort, and he knew Jesse had been perfectly able to get out of it with only minor burns to Rizdel—provided he had kept his nerve. But Jesse had panicked—and now Digen knew why.

  Jesse Elkar had died because of the Tecton’s exaggerated fear that burning a Donor, even a bit, contributed to the desire to go junct. Gen pain can make you go junct. That was the attitude that had killed Jesse.

  But it just wasn’t true. Sime satisfaction didn’t depend on Gen terror. It was Sime fear that made a Sime attack a Gen who would deny him selyn—fear of attrition and death, fear of his own helplessness, fear of Gen superiority.

  As the weeks of winter passed, Digen came gradually through his grief and reached a new determination to see surgery t
ake a good bite out of the prevailing Tecton fears. Wasn’t his success under Thornton proof that it was Sime fear, not Gen pain, that drove Simes junct?

  Eventually Tchervain Rholle turned up to begin studying with Digen. This eased a lot of the pressure on Digen, giving him a good many hours with a fairly competent therapist. Tchervain was a taciturn man who worked steadily but contributed very little of himself to the Sime Center. He was, in a word, the ideal Tecton Donor.

  Digen admired him for that—the more so when his own doubts were raging in him—until one day Joel Hogan asked offhandedly, “What about Tchervain? Is his family out-Territory?”

  Digen felt blank for a moment, answering, “I—I don’t know. His accent is—odd. Could be out-Territory.”

  With Im’ran, Digen had felt he knew all he had to about the man merely from his Imil affiliation. Rholle wasn’t a householder, but still Digen hadn’t thought to ask, and Rholle hadn’t offered anything personal in their relationship.

  After that Digen began to feel more and more uncomfortable around Rholle, and the month that he would have been assigned to Digen to qualify four-plus, Digen let Mickland send Rholle away—for a while, they had said, but they all knew it would be a long while.

  Im’ran had been sent to the Orient, but Westfield’s claim on him had been gradually working its way to the top of the bidding list. Digen felt he could hang on that long. At least, he thought, now that Rholle has gone, I won’t be plagued by visions of Jesse’s body becoming my own. And then, Did the man really disgust me that much? And, Why should that make any difference?

  Even with Rholle gone, though, there was no way Digen could escape Jesse Elkar’s name. Some press syndicate picked up on Elkar’s suicide, playing it as a concrete example of how close to the brink of disaster the Tecton really was. Day after day, papers and magazines carried stories with Jesse’s picture featured beside Hayashi’s. Hayashi and his new Donor training method became a rallying point for those who felt the urgency of doing something about the shortage. Overnight, funding began to pour into Hayashi’s project, and the whole city bulged with the press, delegations of researchers, salesmen, inventors, and volunteers for Hayashi’s experiments.