Mairis waved that aside. “My fault. I hadn’t realized just how much of a strain you were under.” He glanced at Laneff. “Your personal relationship doesn’t make it any easier.”
Zeor doesn ‘t marry out of Zeor. The words echoed in Laneff’s mind as Shanlun stood with balanced poise under the scrutiny of his Sectuib. Here was the only man who’d understood what she was doing and who, from the first moment they’d met, had truly believed she could do it. Taking her moments of despair in stride, he had grown to cherish her as she loved him. Yet now, he didn’t dare even look at her. If I had any sense, I’d cut him out of my life. But I can’t. She didn’t think she could walk away from Shanlun now, even if she didn’t have to work with his Sectuib. How can I tell Mairis I dare not stand with him and Shanlun today?
Catching Mairis’s attention, Shanlun said, “There is another consideration. All the other Householding cloaks on that podium this morning will be Zeor. The other Householdings might be jealous if you favor Sat’htine with the entire world watching.”
“I hadn’t thought of that!” said Mairis.
“You’re going to offer to lead the world into a step as big as Klyd’s Unity Proposal or the signing of the First Contract between Sime and Gen governments. Either Zeor leads—alone—or all Householdings lead together,” said Shanlun.
Mairis nodded. “And even Klyd could never get them all to agree.” He was zlinning Laneff carefully.
“I wouldn’t want to create jealousy among the Householdings,” said Laneff. “Certainly not now, when we are trying to create a Unity.” It really would be best if I weren’t there.
As if echoing her very thought, Shanlun said, “It really would be best if Laneff could speak from some other location.”
“It might be more dramatically effective—more visually interesting if Laneff is in the guest box. There will be all kinds of Householding colors among the guests, and there is a low-field zone established there for the renSimes in need. I’ll have them rig a microphone. Get Kadi to let the camera crews know they’ll have a reason to cover that area closely—but don’t tell them what it is.”
Mairis was off making plans, mentally rewriting his speech and shaping his campaign. Laneff felt a weight lift from her spirit. She could accomplish everything she had to in order to get the funding for her project—and not suffer.
As Mairis talked, Laneff noticed that out on the rotunda floor the small knot of gypsies had reached the bier, directly in the beam of the brightest lights, and at a point closest to where she was standing. Four gypsy Gens and a gypsy channel created a hole in the ambient nager, a pale hole of ghostly stillness that shimmered. Despite the lack of similarity to Shanlun’s fluorescent effect, there seemed some indefinable kinship there.
As she watched, the gypsy channel paused over Digen’s casket and gazed fixedly at Shanlun. Shanlun had his back turned to the bier, but he raised one eyebrow as if he’d heard a curious noise, and then he turned.
The gypsy channel was an old man with startlingly dark blond hair, abundant and cut short and stiff. A thin weatherbeaten face, bushy eyebrows, long vertical laugh lines, and no frown lines bespoke an innate good humor.
Mairis followed Shanlun’s gaze. “Someone you know? Come greet them. We must get back there now, anyway.”
The gypsy channel’s attention seemed to be calling to Shanlun, and he wavered. Laneff felt that call, while at the same time a wash of cold needles raised the hairs all over her body. Despite that warning, though, she knew she’d fight to get assigned to that channel for a transfer. But gypsies aren’t on the rotation rolls.
Shanlun turned back to Mairis, wrapping himself again in the impenetrable cloak of his nager. “I—have no business with them.”
As he said that, the gypsies turned and left, but Laneff sensed a throbbing of regret in them—and in Shanlun.
Mairis assigned Laneff a security guard and told them where to wait as he and Shanlun were escorted back to the bier. Laneff had to put the attenuator rings back on when the powerful channel and Donor left her. Before long, there was a booming clang as temporary barricades cut off the flow of mourners. The end of the line snaked toward the bier.
She had seen Digen die and knew in her heart that he was gone. But she was impelled to grab this last chance—before it was too late. She drew her hood up around her face, trying to become just another Householder, and, trailed by the guard, she joined the end of the line beside the glass case of the Unity Proposal. Only if we know which children will be Sime can we bring Klyd’s–and Digen’s– dream into reality.
She had known that in her very bones ever since she’d visited the prematurely erected Monument to the Last Berserker during her first year after changeover. She’d cried during the ceremony when her name had been added to the end of the list carved there and a prayer had been said that she should indeed be the Last Berserker– the last child to go through changeover unexpectedly and kill in First
Need. Silently, she’d vowed to be the one to put an end to berserkers. But Digen Farris had to die under her care to make it possible for her to succeed.
Ridiculous.
Yet as she gazed into Digen’s face, young in repose, she recalled all he’d suffered to bring the world this far. As she drank in the last moments of the sight of his face, they lowered the coffin lid.
In some odd way, under the hushed shadows and echoing vaults of the Unity Gate, it really seemed to her that he’d sacrificed his life to give her the chance to keep her vow. The weight of that responsibility came over her, and her heart cried, lean do it, Digen. I can give up anything I have to, even Shanlun. We’re going to make your dream come true.
CHAPTER 2
FUNERAL
From her vantage in the visitors’ box, Laneff watched Simes and Gens throng into Householding Square. Most of them, men and women both, wore formal capes displaying their Householding colors. All around the edges of the square, the banners of the Houses were on display, flapping in the brisk spring wind, illumined by the rising sun.
The riotous splashes of colors divided around the granite statue of the legendary Rimon Farris, mounted on his horse. For this occasion, a Zeor-blue cloak had been draped around his shoulders and over the flanks of the horse. Rimon, as father of the first Householdings, was claimed as member by all Houses, so no one was offended by the blue today.
Laneff’s place was to the right of the podium which barred the gate to the old Householding Cemetery. Elaborate displays of flowers hid the raw wood of the stage. Mairis and Shanlun were already taking their place at the center of the podium, surrounded by blue-cloaked dignitaries of the House of Zeor, those who ran the vast corporate network of businesses owned by Zeor, those who administered the education of Zeor’s children, and those who held rank by virtue of skill as channels or Donors.
Across from Laneff, on the other side of the podium, a roped-off area held the children and attending members of Zeor, a blindingly brilliant field of blue cloaks. Beside and behind Laneff, there was a sprinkling of blue, renSimes who were members of Zeor but now in need.
The guards stationed at short intervals around Laneff s end of the visitors’ box were all high-order Donors or channels, most of them members of Zeor. But one Gen in particular, who seemed intent on Laneff alone, was not wearing any Householding affiliation. He paced and paused with an awkward self-consciousness before the front-center seat that had been assigned to Laneff.
When Digen’s coffin was brought through the Gate behind the Zeor member’s box and solemnly installed among the flowers on the podium, Laneff had to adjust the attenuators she wore to maximum, despite the horrid sensory distortion. Again, she was glad she hadn’t eaten. Her peculiarly sensitive nervous system never would be able to accept the attenuators. The renSimes on either side of her were wearing attenuator rings tuned to maximum and seemed perfectly comfortable.
At last Mairis was handed a microphone wand and took his place beside a table on which various items were laid out. The pu
blic address system came to life with a drum roll, and the bell-like twang of a shiltpron plucked in the call to mourn. The crowd silenced, but the nager intensified with gut-wrenching bereavement. Many of them had known Digen personally, taken transfer from him when he was channeling, or worked with him when he was World Controller. We were all sure he’d recover this time, too. He seemed immortal.
Mairis, braced by Shanlun’s nager, spoke calmly into the microphone. “Digen Ryan Farris, Sectuib in Zeor for the last one hundred sixteen years, is dead.”
The inchoate emotions focused to a piercing sense of permanent loss. Ihate funerals! thought Laneff, struggling to keep her awareness hypoconscious, to block out her Sime senses so she wouldn’t drown in the emotions of others when her own tears were blocked by the deadening pall of need.
“My great grandfather,” said Mairis, his voice low and intimate, “who held the office of World Controller a record six times in his life, is dead. An era has come to an end.”
Beyond the far end of the podium, ranks of television cameras scanned the crowd for grieving faces. She knew some of them would be focusing on her, and she fought not to let her rising nausea distort her expression. The renSimes beside her sensed her discomfort and edged as far away as they could to give her breathing room.
She tried to concentrate on the nager of the Donor who paced before her. Prom the massive pull of his nager, she deduced he had to be a First Order Donor like Shanlun, but he was otherwise un-remarkable. Reddish-blond hair framed his unweathered face. Gingery eyebrows and mustache matched his pale freckles. He wore a floppy-brimmed hat as sun protection, and a serviceable gray suit.
As he turned, his ever wandering eyes chanced to meet hers, and he smiled. His face lit and his nager glowed with an instant friendliness that wiped all trace of self-consciousness away. She inched forward in her chair and said, “Could you stop pacing? It’s making me nauseated.”
Chagrined, he nodded and planted his feet firmly, positioning himself between Laneff and her neighbor, a woman wearing a Householding Frihill cloak.
With the rippling in the fields tamed, Laneff turned her attention back to Mairis.”… and in the last hundred years, under the leadership of Digen Farris, the world has started to move once again toward the dream of our ancestors who founded the Householdings, the union of the two halves of the human race, Sime and Gen. Never again will there be a nation in which only Simes are citizens and Gens are bred and raised in pens like cattle.”
On the periphery of Laneff s awareness, to her right and out in the sea of now-still bodies, there was a movement. A large silver-painted van with a broadcast camera on its roof was creeping toward the visitors’ box, parting the crowd by inexorable force. Two Gens on the roof wrestled with a huge old camera, panning the long snout of a sunshade from Mairis to where Laneff sat. Why aren ‘t they confined to the press zone? Most of the cameras in the press zone which was carved out of the crowd in front of the statue were aimed at Mairis now.
“Seven hundred years ago,” Mairis continued, “Rimon Farris discovered he could take selyn from any Gen and give it to a Sime in need so the Sime didn’t have to kill to live. He became the first channel. Two hundred thirty-two years ago, Klyd Farris founded the Modern Tecton, built on the foundations provided by the Householdings and their channels and Companions, but designed to encompass every living Sime. That was a mere beginning. Over the last century, the face of civilization has changed.
“When Digen Farris was a child, the world controllership was just being created. When he took over as Sectuib in Zeor, nobody could place a telephone call across a Territory border. He was the first Sime ever to go to school out-Territory. When he was a young man, all the Tecton’s Donors were trained by channels, a method so inefficient it caused the infamous Donor Shortage.
“That was in the year one thirty-two, a full century ago. Is there anyone here who remembers that time?”
The anguish of the crowd began to give way to a sense of wonder at all that had been accomplished during one man’s lifetime. The blond Gen guard, too, was caught up in it, and that drew Laneff duoconscious, aware of the full range of Sime senses as well as her ordinary senses. The blond Gen’s nager paled to insignificance beside Shanlun’s pyrotechnic vibrancy, a shell of positive energy that Shanlun threw around Mairis to protect him from the ambient of the crowd.
Mairis put one arm around Shanlun’s shoulders. Despite attenuators and the wall of trained Donors who surrounded the low-field box with protection, she perceived how the two nagers blended in harmony. She tried to force herself to breathe evenly. But even from this distance, every nerve in her body remembered that moment in the rotunda and resonated to the barest hint of it that seeped through to her now, activating need again.
It wasn’t the magnitude of Shanlun’s nager that was his strongest attraction to her. It was the quality. I’d love that man even if he was Sime.”… and channels still depend on our Donors. But now there are enough such Donors. It’s a profession entered not just by Companions from the Householdings but by many children raised by Simes in-Territory, and also by Gens raised by Gens out-Territory.”
Mairis continued guiding the crowd through history and up to an awareness of how Digen Farris had molded their world. Laneff swallowed against throat muscles and diaphragm that insisted she was about to vomit. She scanned the crowd, knowing she couldn’t speak to them feeling like this. If she tried to articulate, she knew she’d double over and retch.
Off to one side, and nearly level with the visitors’ box, the silver van was still creeping through the crowd. She could make out the expressions on the faces of the camera crew. One of them, a redheaded Gen woman who seemed as young as Laneff herself, leaned over the edge of the van roof to call something to the driver, a dark-brown-skinned Gen with kinky black hair. Laneff felt the Simes in proximity to the van tense, preparing for the shock if the Gen should fall off that roof and be hurt. Gen pain could trigger a Sime to kill, even against the Sime’s own will.
Two or three Gens glanced up at the van, noting the tension in the Simes around them. In the general movement to get out of the van’s way, the Gens rearranged themselves to protect the renSimes in the crowd. The slow creep of the van seemed to arrow toward Laneff. And the shuffling movement of the crowd only added to her nausea. Her skin was crawling with a prickling sensation, and she couldn’t breathe. The other Simes about her, protected by their attenuators, never noticed.
But the blond Gen turned as a muted gasp escaped her. “You’re right,” he muttered, “that van could be trouble.” And he moved closer to her, firmly planting a good segment of his attention on her as if she were a channel to be supported in some channeling effort. It should have felt good, but instead it only increased her nausea.
In desperation, Laneff tuned her attenuators down to minimum. The ambient nager blasted through her nerves, raising the throbbing of need to a new height, but relieving the paralyzing sense of imminent nausea.
As the silver van crawled toward them, the redheaded Gen woman on top of it held her balance by a very precarious hold on the camera rigging and gestured to her assistant with her free hand. Another Gen—a Donor wearing a Keon red cape—began to climb up onto the van’s roof, but the driver opened his door and yelled at the intruder, meanwhile letting the van creep ahead into the crowd. Laneff couldn’t hear his words, but his anger came through the spellbound collective nager of the crowd. The Keon Gen desisted and went to warn Simes away.
Now the van was close enough that Laneff could read something of the redheaded Gen’s nager, and she didn’t like it. It was as if that woman were aiming shafts of calculated malice directly at Laneff. Nonsense! Need-inspired paranoia!
The tall blond Gen guarding her leaned down to say, “That’s an out-Territory station. I hope there isn’t going to be an incident.”
Laneff replied softly, “Those Gens are nervous, and the redhead is tense, even grim. I doubt if any of them have worked in-Territory before.”
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He eyed her attenuator rings, unable to discern the setting she was using, of course. “They told me you were extraordinarily sensitive. Just relax and listen to the speech.” He intensified the shaft of his attention relegated to her, working to her as if she were a channel and he a Donor fully prepared to give her transfer. She melted into the luxury, stealing a moment to bask in the spice of its sheer potency.
She opened her mouth to tell him that she was too far into need for this to be safe, but at that moment the audience fell into a rapt silence.
Mairis was holding up an object he’d taken from the table beside him.”… feel this is the most suitable tribute to the achievements of Digen Farris. I know you can’t all see it, so let me describe it. It’s a steel coin with the right profile of my great grandfather on one side and the epitaph that will appear on his memorial, ‘Born from Death, he lived for Unity!’ The obverse shows the starred-cross shape of the Monument to the Last Berserker.
“This is the very first one struck. It was delivered to me only hours ago. Soon the coin will be in general circulation, the first coin accepted at face value both in– and out-Territory, all over the world. I wish Digen had lived to see it.”
For the first time emotion choked Mairis’s voice and he paused. Shanlun took a step closer to his Sectuib, and it was as if Mairis disappeared into Shanlun’s nager, so massive a nager that he seemed painted onto the background of the podium in glowing iridescent colors.
Meanwhile, the silver van had reached a point so close that Laneff could smell the heat of oil and paint and feel the screech of tense Gen nerves. She, too, was tense, knowing that her cue to speak would come soon, and despite having tuned the attenuators to minimum, she still felt queasy at every shift in the nageric fields about her.
A woman in dun-colored coveralls squatted next to the microphone that had been set up near Laneff. Its snout poked over the rope pedestals that marked the box, and the technician began testing it. Seeing this, Mairis waved Shanlun back with a negligent tentacle gesture. The Gens on the silver van reacted as out-Territory Gens usually did to the sight of a Sime’s tentacles; a spark of nageric paralysis. Their tension increased, and Laneff again fought nausea. Shen these shidoni attenuators! She wrenched the offending instruments off, knowing that she’d only double over in a fit of retching if she tried to walk to the microphone while wearing them. The worse her need, the more offensive the things became. Why couldn ‘t I have been born normal!
RenSime s-6 Page 2
