Another boom jolted them, and Yuan tilted them into a tight turn, righted, and then swept around a looming butte, skimming low to the rolling hills below.
“There they come!” said Laneff. “It’s no use.” ( He ran one finger over the gauges, tapped one triumphantly. “Those choppers won’t give up until they run out of selyn in their fuel cells, but we’ve got to lose them before they call in reinforcements.” He shot a frown back over his shoulder in the direction of their own fuel cells. “Another glorious irony!” The frown vanished into a grin of boyish delight. “The shen-be-dunked Diet depended on a selyn-powered chopper for their escape!”
“Terrorists don’t have to be sane. Their van was selyn-powered, too. After all, it’s cheapest.” Zlinning her death creeping up on her from behind, Laneff wondered how she could be so calm. Then she realized it was Yuan who was calm—tense like the eye of a storm, but nagerically still. “You act as if you do this every day. You’re not—not a terrorist, are you?” Or worse?
“No,” he answered as another rumble tossed them about.
He’s a great pilot for a Gen, she thought. Where would a Tecton Donor get such a skill?
“Shen!” swore the Gen. “I’ve lost track of the compass bearing. Laneff, you’ve got to guide us. Listen,” he said, his nager vibrating pure sincerity. “The Tecton and its Last Year Houses, murdering juncts on sight, isn’t all there is in the world. I know a place where you can live—and not kill. Eighteen months—maybe two years, or more, with your wits about you. Help get us there, and I promise you won’t regret it.”
The deck rocked under them again, and a tiny hole appeared in the bulkhead near Laneff’s knee, air whistling shrilly. No matter who he is, it’s a better chance than trying to surrender now!
For the next two hours, she talked at the Gen, spotting the pursuers and keeping them oriented as they dodged up and down canyons. Then she sensed a concentration of nageric fields that whispered into nonexistence as they approached. “As if a number of Gens had dived into a deep cave.”
“Diet hideout for sure! Knew it was here somewhere! There! That one?” When she nodded, his nager flared fiercely, and he gritted through compressed lips, “Hang on!”
He swooped high, turning so the pursuers got a fix on them, and then he dived straight toward that cave mouth until the Tecton craft had surely lost them from their instruments and their Sime spotters would be unable to zlin them through the intervening hills. At the very last second, he gunned the motors and pulled the chopper around into a low curve that set them skimming along the course of a stream, their downwash lashing the rain-swelled water to foam.
The river gorge twisted and turned, putting solid hills between them and the cave mouth—and the Tecton choppers. Yuan kept low, nearly on the water so the rising edges of the canyon hid them. “I don’t believe this; we’re really going to make it!”
The boyish delight glowed once again in his nager, as if life and death were all a game to him. Laneff began to like this crazy Gen who was always so surprised at his “good luck”—the result of incredible skill and daring. Zlinning behind, she said, “No trace of the Tecton choppers.”
“Unless Mairis himself was with them, we’ve lost them!”
“He wasn’t.” That nager, she’d always recognize. As the canyon turned, they both spotted a column of rich black smoke billowing into the breeze far behind them—too far for Laneff to zlin anything more than a dim haze of selyn field against the empty landscape.
“They’ve attacked the shenoni-be-dunked Diet hideout! Laneff– the Tecton owes you for that one. That base has been a launching pad for Diet escapades in Garby, Peroa, and Zyfhild. At least fifty people have been murdered just that I know of, from that rathole.”
“What are you? Some kind of antiterrorist task force?”
He laughed. It was a merry laugh, lacing his nager with sheer delight. “I guess some people might say so. But if so, you’re looking at one thoroughly lost task force!”
They had come out onto a valley floor, where spring flowers turned a meadow into a riot of color reminiscent of the Household Square decked out for Digen’s funeral. The stream widened into a shallow lake, a few shade trees overhanging it. Yuan worked at the controls until he produced a map on the screen in front of Laneff. “Can you place us on that?”
Map reading had never been one of Laneff’s strong points, but a graph was a graph. Matching her innate Sime sense of position with the Gen-drawn map, she said, “North of that section.”
He showed her how to scroll the display. They were still flying low but with reduced speed. Without looking at the gauge, Laneff knew the fuel cells were depleted. Her vast relief at their escape faded. It would be terrible to be left on foot in this wilderness.
“Here!” She set the autocursor onto their position and watched it track them.
Working with the compass, he veered onto a new heading. “We’ve got fuel enough to get pretty close!”
“Where?”
“Safety.”
His certainty made her bones believe it, and tension melted out of her. She buried her face in her hands, scrubbing her tentacles over her forehead and scalp, feeling the tremor in every muscle. And she just noticed she had to urinate.
“What kind of safety?” she asked miserably.
“From Gens who tempt Simes to kill; from Simes who’ll murder you for yielding to that temptation.” He reached over to grip her wrist, just around the tentacle orifices. He, too, was trembling from the prolonged strain, but his nager was steady. “First thing, I’ll give you the selyn you still need. Then, we’ll talk—make plans. By the day after tomorrow, you’ll be far from here—and you’ll have a lab you can stock and design yourself. I promise.”
Promises! But despite the painful cynicism, Laneff felt reassured. An hour passed in which they watched the dwindling fuel supply and the unconscious pilot. Laneff endured the backwash of shock and the lingering ache of unsatisfied need. She had been days away from her scheduled transfer. She kept telling herself she wasn’t really in need, j but it didn’t help. It wouldn’t take much to make her go for another ” kill. But Yuan steadied her with his nager.
And then the rotors chugged into a descending rhythm, each individual beat audible. “We’re going down!” said Yuan. “Not too bad, though.”
Before them was a highland meadow, thickly wooded except for a flat rock outcropping near a cliff face that blocked the eastern approach. They came in from the west and with the very last beats of the rotors bounced to a landing on the flat rock.
Gasping, they laughed together to have survived once more. Then Laneff noticed a wooden cabin built against the cliff. It was old, weathered to a bare gray, the roof beam swaybacked, but the windows were glazed, and new wood shone here and there. A curl of smoke rose from the chimney.
As they scrabbled out of the cockpit to open the cargo bay door, an elderly Sime emerged from the cabin, whipcord slender and tough, weathered to a leathery brown startling against white hair.
Yuan jumped down first and went to the Sime, yelling his greeting, “Callen! Callen! You’ve got company!” “What’s all this?” called the old man back. “Excitement—adventure—and challenge. We’re going to change the course of history!” As Yuan announced that, the two men met. Yuan scooped the smaller Sime into a quick embrace and walked him toward Laneff, who was sitting on the deck of the chopper, her legs dangling high above the ground. “Let me introduce Laneff Farris ambrov Sat’htine, the most important person in the world today.” “Ambrov Sat’htine?” The old man scrutinized her duoconsciously. “Ain’t no one sick here! But if Yuan says you’re welcome—then you’re welcome!” He turned to Yuan. “Back room is ready—like always. You go on in. I’ll fetch some more wood and find something for you to eat.” He gave her one more appraising glance.
He’d certainly perceived her junct condition. It was a nageric stigma that felt to Laneff like a deformity. But maybe he didn’t recognize it. How many people these d
ays had ever zlinned a junct up close? And there was something odd about his nager, too.
Yuan said, “A meal would be nice, but let’s get this chopper covered. And we’ve got to haul out the transmitter and arrange to get us out of here before the Tecton net closes on us. Maybe– Callen, maybe you should go with us?”
“Nope. This’s my place. Picked out my dyin’ spot already. Get you on inside before you freeze!”
A brisk wind was blowing dark clouds over the sun, and here the air was somehow thinner—colder than in the city. Flower-tipped ground cover whipped in the wind, and a pond at the far side of the meadow rippled with waves on which ducks and geese bobbed contentedly.
Yuan helped Laneff down, saying, “We’ve got a Diet prisoner inside. Unconscious. Probable concussion. Make him comfortable in the side room, and let me know when he comes to.”
“Leave it to me,” said the Sime, waving them away.
Again Laneff wondered what kind of people she’d fallen in with: people who casually harbored Tecton fugitives, took Diet prisoners, and maintained secret hideouts. But the wind gusted sharply and big pats of rain hammered into them. “Come on!” said Yuan, scooping her along in the crook of his arm.
They dashed under the roof of the wooden porch, and clattered inside. Here it was warm, with a cheery fire going in an open hearth in the center of the room. Nearby, some books were spread on a rough table, a pair of wire-frame glasses tossed on top of them. An oil lamp gave reading light. The walls were lined with shelves of books, making them almost a selyn-insulated density. She could barely zlin the outside.
One end of the room held a deep-red couch and a couple of high-backed chairs that could swallow a person whole. The other end was a kitchen, with a sink rigged with a hand pump for water, and a foam-and-plastic cooler chest. Herbs hung from the rafters in dry bundles, and racks held myriads of sacks and bottles. Near the hearth, a crockery teapot steamed trin aroma into the air.
Under Yuan’s touch, a section of bookcase swung out revealing a heavy door behind which opened a tunnel leading back into the living rock of the hillside; something one only read about in storybooks, a place Gens could hide from Simes come raiding. The cabin could be that old.
“Come on,” coaxed Yuan. He lit an oil lamp and closed both doors behind them. Then he stopped at a door on their left, went into a dark room sparsely appointed with rough-hewn furniture, and turned on a heater. “Callen will bring blankets to keep the prisoner warm. Come!”
At the end of the tunnel, a room opened—a natural cave that had been nicely wood-paneled and -floored. There were two large beds, a studio couch, and two chairs around a small table. A selyn-powered
heater started at Yuan’s touch, and then he had regular selyn-powered lights going. In one corner, an opulent antique transfer lounge was surrounded by a heavy drape of modern insulating fabric. The carved-wood scrollwork made it worth a fortune, but Laneff liked the sensuous emerald-velvet upholstery. “Like it?” asked Yuan, warming his hands at the heater. “You can’t zlin this from outside!” “Even Mairis couldn’t zlin us if he were right outside!” “But does it have facilities?”
“Of course, but not too glamorous.” He gestured to a door framed by knotty pine cabinetry, enough storage for five people.
She opened the door and found a short tunnel, chill with underground humidity. At the end, a door opened into a dank chamber lit by a bare lamp. The toilet was a raised platform with a hole in it, set over the wash of an underground stream. A pitcher and basin on a washstand and a bathtub ripped from some old hotel, rigged with a selyn-powered heater—fully charged.
When she returned to the room, flinging her grimy and tattered cloak over a chair, Yuan said, “Someday we’ll get around to decorating in there, too!”
“You like this place, don’t you?”
He was seated on the transfer lounge, one hand smoothing the soft velvet. He beckoned her. “It’s safe—and comfortable.” When she didn’t move, he added, “And necessary.”
The half-finished feeling she had fought down after the kill was returning. “Yuan—I have to know more about you.”
The relentless pull of his nager let up. “I did promise you transfer —as soon as we were safe. How could you trust my other promises if I renege on this one?”
Somehow, the very easing of that pull sent a renewed shiver of need through her. She couldn’t suppress a sound that verged on a whimper. “You mean—you meant everything?”
“Zlin me. I don’t promise rashly. We’re safe now—” “No. They’ll divert the agrosatellite to photosearch for the chopper. They’ll find us—”
“That’ll take time. We won’t be here by then.” “Where could we go? How?”
“First let’s complete what you started this morning. Then we’ll get something hot to eat and plan the future.” She still held back, and he added, “How can you make rational plans while your whole body is screaming in agony?”
“It isn’t that bad.”
“Fretting in misery?”
“Well …”
In a different tone, he suggested, “Yearning in hope.”
If it hadn’t been for the need he was coaxing to the surface in her, she’d have laughed at his search for the right inflection on the Simelan noun “need.” The tension had drained out of her– What harm could it do me now?
She joined him on the lounge. In a perfectly rehearsed maneuver, he had her reclining, her knees bent over the contoured rest and her shoulders raised comfortably against the back of the lounge. He sat at her side, on the curved projection, as if he were a channel about to give her transfer. But he was Gen. It was her most secret—and forbidden—dream come true. The future and the past fell away, and she gave herself to the moment.
His field narrowed to focus wholly on her. It wasn’t anything like Shanlun’s attention, yet it wakened echoes of the power she’d often felt in him. With firm control, he drew her hyperconscious. The Gen body hovering over her pulsed with an ever brighter selyn field as each cell in him produced selyn. It was a brightness that lit the room to her Sime senses. The furniture wisped into transparency, the clothes in the closets became perceptible and dissolved into nothing. They were encased in a private bubble of reality. She could not zlin outside, and so there was no world outside.
Her tentacles slid naturally into place on his bare arms, feeling each cord of muscle under the curly hair on his skin, outlined by the richly coursing selyn pulsing through his tissues. In a flash of peak need, she yanked the big Gen down until his weight was almost crushing her slight frame, and their lips met.
Brilliant selyn burst into the dark pockets of her brain. The first abundant gush choked off to a mere trickle. Suffocating, she struggled to draw selyn against that immense resistance. She could sense the limitless supply in him, but not the mechanism whereby he denied her. Furious at betrayal, she redoubled her effort and was rewarded with a tiny increase in flow rate.
But the Gen felt no pain, no fear. No killbliss promise was carried on that current of selyn. Yet the struggle itself was exhilarating. The knotting, cramping tensions of need melted. The sense of cold darkness within evaporated. Strength came back. He made it last long enough despite the shallowness of her need.
She came up out of it gasping, exultant, having won selyn from a Gen despite his resistance. She grinned up into his face, feeling now his body heat against her. “You never learned that from the Tecton!”
“Actually, Therapists sometimes have to do such things for channels in trouble.”
Shanlun. She remembered Shanlun working over Digen, coaxing and tempting him. And Digen lax against the fluffed white pillows, dead. All the grief she’d been unable to experience during the last few days welled up, choking her. In two breaths, she was sobbing against the sharp knives of loss and failure, of ending. Clutching Yuan’s huge shoulders, she sat up to bury her face in his chest. He gave a relieved sigh.
“So I got you post, anyway.” Between sobs, she gasped, “I
’ve never had it like this.”
Reaching into a drawer under the lounge, he produced a box of tissues. “Don’t resist. Cry it out.”
She could imagine him saying that to the channels he’d given transfer to, encouraging their posttransfer reactions. During need, a Sime was unable to experience the powerful personal emotions because of the interfering jangle of need gearing the whole organism to fight for life. Once need was assuaged, however, the human mind regurgitated all the suppressed emotions in a flood.
Laneff cried for Digen now, as she had not been able to before. And she wept for the life she had known when Digen was rallying strongly and all was well. But as she grieved over the death of that old self, buried that self in a tomb of false expectations, she found a new self emerging, fed on hope.
She wadded up the pile of soggy tissues. “I’m all right now.” “You’ve always been all right.”
She blinked burning eyes. “What a peculiar thing to say.” “Laneff, nothing you’ve done has been pathological. Any one of the renSimes in that box would have gone for that Gen if they weren’t wearing attenuators.”
“And why wasn’t I wearing mine?” She asked his unspoken question, but her voice crackled with a belligerence that shamed her.
“They told me only that you were suffering from prematurely raised intil, that you had a full five days until your transfer schedule. I assumed you’d taken them off because you felt better.”
“No. I took them off to feel better.” And she explained how the perfectly miraculous devices only made her feel sick. “I was afraid I’d actually vomit at the microphone.”
“I know something about the Farris channels, but that’s a new one on me. I didn’t have time to study up on you. All I know about you is what I’ve read in the papers.” “It wasn’t your fault.”
He shook his head. “If I’d thought it through, I’d have stayed by you as I was charged to.”
RenSime s-6 Page 4
