RenSime s-6

by Jacqueline Lichtenberg

  Jarmi’s relish for the experience eased Laneff’s misgivings, letting her need progress smoothly. With each passing day, Jarmi took increasing delight in the advancing symptoms of need, patiently wanting the transfer, and thus making Laneff want it, too.

  But, after the killbliss she’d had at the kill, she found the grinding ache of need slower in onset. She realized she hadn’t known what she was getting into when she accepted Jarmi’s offer of transfer. True, she couldn’t choose channel’s transfer here because Bianka, their best channel, was just too infernally slow for Laneff. That one taste of Bianka’s touch was all Laneff thought she could tolerate. But she could have asked Yuan.

  Perhaps it would be better if I brought him my full need? Yet the memory of the infinite depths of his nager told her that even if she were in attrition, she couldn’t scratch the outermost layer of his selyn pattern. And it was the core of that pattern that she craved.

  Struggling to keep at least some of the momentum of the lab work going, Laneff took to snacking and sleeping in the lab while nursing the various procedures they had in progress. In need, she could hardly sleep, but would rest on the surface of sleep, skimming shallowly into dream and nightmare.

  Once, when she lay down to wait for solvent to wash out a chromatography column, she dove into a most familiar need nightmare.

  The desert heat blazed down on the high-walled compound. White-painted adobe buildings with red-tile roofs and barred windows baked under the noon sun. Heat shimmered off the surface of the swimming pool and ball courts, barely shadowed by the trees. Two tall palms waved fronds in a slight breeze so high it was unfelt on the ground. Not a person moved on the grounds of the Rialite disjunction compound, Teeren.

  Laneff drew the heavy drapery across her window, shutting out the hot sun and depressing scene. She turned the air conditioner up a notch. The frigid breeze chilled her, making her body want to burn selyn faster just to keep warm. Need blazed brighter than the outdoor sun.

  She paced, fighting the obsession, her hands shaking. She tried the breathing exercises they’d taught her to calm the jangle of tension, but they only made her gasp breathlessly, her heart pounding even faster. She wished she could cry, but need blocked that release, too. Need would accept only one kind of release.

  Time crawled as her body raced to its death with herself as a helpless passenger, until at last, two hours before her scheduled transfer with the channel, she ripped open the door to her room, and leaving it hanging by one hinge, she went in search of a Gen.

  Because of what she was, there were many Gens in the compound she could kill. Even a few of the channels might be vulnerable to her if she caught them by surprise, as she had her first kill. By the time she reached the main lobby of her building, she was hyperconscious, zlinning hard for the whisper of a replete selyn field. Only the tiniest part of her mind was aware of what she was doing: giving up on her chance to disjunct and live a normal life.

  In nightmare, she relived over and over again that frantic search for life, the corridors of adobe and polished tile stretching before her endlessly. In reality, it had taken only seconds to traverse the length of the building. In nightmare, it was days during which every turn led back to her room, every hall was lined with a gallery of staring faces—channels of her Householding; people from ages past who had died disjuncting rather than live on the kill.

  Intense shame overcame her, but still her feet fled through the halls. In reality, the building was full of Gens. In nightmare, the world was devoid of selyn nager.

  Bright fog of selyn nager suffused the insulated brick. It was a warm Gen pulse that grabbed at her body just below her neck, between her breasts. She burst through a door, and there, spread out and waiting for her were two selyn fields, two Gens beckoning tantalizingly.

  In her gut, she knew one would deliver the satisfaction she craved. The other would not. Which? Choose! they commanded. But which?

  Equally intense, two ruddy gold hearth fires vied for her favor. One was pure Genness laced with familiar overtones that told her of an understanding of her need. The other was like the Donors here, throbbing with compassion verging on pity. Pure Gen knew what was being asked of her, and was confident she could do it. The other, groping blind, only hoped.

  A viciousness that shamed her rose. I could make Groping Blind pity himself! I could make him give me egobliss!

  She looked at the viciousness pouring up into her, knew it for a part of herself she had never acknowledged before, and thought, I don’t have to be this way.

  PureGen knew that about her, as he knew it about himself. She chose to let the lifeline of PureGen pull her into a full contact. She took the selyn offered, clumsy with greedy haste, laving her insides with warmth and life. It came fast as she could desire, sensitive and clean, washing through her with bright delight as only a Gen could experience it. Each dynopter of selyn pulsing through her carried that bottomless Gen attitude toward life modulated by ineffable relief from the strain of need.

  That modulation soaked into her own nerves, and the shrieking alarm of need was stilled, the jangle of urgencies faded and was gone.

  She found herself lip to lip with warm flesh. Her tentacles were held securely by matching tentacles. Channel! As it came to her that PureGen was in fact a channel, a Sime not a Gen, the woman released her, dismantling the contact gently while a ferocious grin transformed her face. A Farris face. A Farris channel she hadn’t met before.

  Blinking in the bright light, stunned by what had happened, Laneff heard the woman introduce herself and her Donor, the GropingBlind she had rejected. “Congratulations on your disjunction. You’ll never need for a Gen again.”

  The horror of the nightmare returned full force as she woke, the taste of satisfaction still on her nerves and the emptiness of need cramping her guts. The dreamed satisfaction only raised intil, leaving her sweating and shaking as she remembered the lab, the Distect, and her last-ditch effort to make her life’s work mean something.

  She rolled on her side, curling up against the familiar craving for killbliss, wiping out the easing channel’s touch had once given her. In mourning that loss, all she could produce was a sort of coughing bark halfway between a laugh and a sob. The pain of wanting to cry and being unable to swamped out the need for selyn just long enough for her to sit up and calm herself with the breathing techniques she had thought forgotten.

  Jarmi arrived at dawn while Laneff was once again going over her notebook to make sure nothing had been left out. “What are you doing?” asked Jarmi. “Got a new idea?”

  Laneff closed the cloth-bound book, clasped it to her chest. “Jarmi, I’ve got to have transfer now. I’m dangerous like this.”

  The smile transformed! the rather plain woman’s face. “At last! I thought you’d never be ready!”

  She went with Jarmi back to the room they shared now. Laneff had been there so seldom she hardly knew the way. She paid no attention to the twists and turns, for her mind was busy reviewing her decision. Her only other choice was Yuan, and now that she’d had a new taste of the sort of need she’d suffered during disjunction and then been protected from all these years, she knew that with the infinitely imperturbable field of the higher-order Donor, she would not achieve enough satisfaction to keep her from yearning after every other passing Gen. With Jarmi, match-on to herself, there was a good chance. This way, I’ll be safe for a month.

  Her decision made finally, Laneff looked around Jarmi’s room as if she’d never seen it before. Years of accumulated clutter gave the place character. Woven reed matting, as everywhere else in the installation, provided padding from the tile floors. Handmade needlework adorned the walls. Wicker shelves held books, heaps of file folders, speakers for her sound system, and an assortment of personal-care items. Between the beds, a double pad of mats was cleared and equipped for weightlifting and exercise.

  Laneff took a shower while Jarmi tidied up and gathered the laundry. In her bathrobe, Laneff came out, toweling he
r hair. “I had a pair of pink slacks and an ivory shirt.”

  “You wore that four days ago, remember? It got splashed with tomato soup.”

  Laneff remembered, and the realization she had nothing to wear was overwhelming. She dropped onto the bed she used, despairing.

  “Never mind,” said Jarmi cheerfully. “I can rinse out your cream-and-maroon skirt, and you can wear it with the ivory shirt.”

  “Shuven! I’d look like somebody from Householding Juanatec!”

  “Nonsense. They don’t have any Farrises!” chided Jarmi.

  “The point is I don’t have anything to go out in now!” With overcrowding, they had rationed laundry, too.

  “Go out?” asked Jarmi, bewildered.

  Exasperation lent an edge to her voice, and Laneff let herself shout, “To wherever they do transfer around here!”

  “There’s no transfer suite here. Anyway, what’s wrong with right here? I don’t have a transfer lounge like your room did. But people did without for centuries …”

  With that, she moved to Laneff’s side and, grabbing pillows from the other bed, she edged onto the bed. The bed sagged under the plump Gen’s weight. With a few deft moves, the Gen had Laneff propped against a heap of pillows, one pillow under her knees to simulate the contours of a proper lounge for complete relaxation..

  By some alchemy, Jarmi seized as firm control of the selyn fields as she had done of their physical situation. She laid her hands about Laneff’s wrists very lightly.

  The wrist orifices, Sensitized by ronaplin, seemed to feel every pore in the Gen’s skin. Her tentacles ached, licking at the orifices, searching for the Gen skin. Laneff gasped, unable to deny the raging intil that seized her. But Jarmi firmly denied them emergence, with both field and grip.

  Laneff hung at the peaking wave of need until Jarmi stroked Laneff’s forearms, her fingers massaging the ronaplin glands that lay just under the lateral tentacles and fed the selyn-conducting hormone into the lateral sheaths. Tenderly, Jarmi massaged those four glands, sending ineffable sensation throughout Laneff’s body, relaxation and intil together in wave after wave.

  Laneff heard her own whispered groans, felt saliva flood her mouth, ronaplin oozing from her lateral orifices. In moments, Jarmi had Laneff’s ronaplin smeared all over her arms.

  Hyperconscious, zlinning only, in the Sime’s hunting mode which conferred strength and speed beyond imagining, Laneff was keenly aware of everything about her, a predator primed for the kill. Yet the imperturbable Gen nager held her in thrall. Her will to take was swamped out by the Gen’s self-absorption in pleasure.

  Totally helpless, Laneff tried to convince her rioting glands that she wasn’t about to die in attrition this moment. Unsuccessful, she had to wait in mounting terror of death while Jarmi slowly secured the fifth contact point. For one stretched instant, Jarmi held back the selyn flow, and Laneff had time to think in shock, She’s got my ronaplin on her lips!

  Then selyn was pouring into her at need-slaking speed. She struggled to take control, to draw selyn herself, but Jarmi wouldn’t permit it. The Gen forced selyn into Laneff, selyn full of bright, bubbling laughter, sheer joy in the discovery of life. The ebullient spirit of the Gen impressed the selyn with her personality.

  Irrepressible delight coursed through Laneff, warring with the roused predator’s instinct that commanded, Take life! The riptide of emotion lasted only an instant. With so little selyn to transfer, and such a high speed, the experience was abnormally brief, abnormally intense.

  Laneff came up out of it to find the sparkling Gen nager reflected in the bright grin on Jarmi’s round face. “Oh, Laneff, you’re magnificent! Better than anybody, ever!”

  With Jarmi’s selyn soaking into the roots of her being, Laneff couldn’t find it in herself to spoil the moment for the Gen. She summoned a smile to cover a grimace of tears. “You’ve made your love of life a part of me. I’ve never experienced anything like it before.” But her selyn is all one color.

  Suddenly, the remembered feel of Shanlun’s nager was with her, a tangible thing: the whirling colored texture spinning brightly into one throbbing sunlike golden glow. She relived the moment when Shanlun had been offering Digen transfer. It wouldn ‘t have been like that. She didn’t know how it would have been, but she knew the difference. It wouldn’t even have been like Yuan.

  Suddenly, she was crying, a wail of loss and abandonment that she shaped into Shanlun’s name. Jarmi was there, quietly proud that she’d induced post syndrome in Laneff, and Laneff didn’t disabuse her of that notion, for in a way it was true. She mourned for the life she knew she must give up forever, for the work she would leave undone in a bare six months from now. Her need was slaked, for the present, she was indeed post, but she had felt no whisper of killbliss. That craving would blast back through her nerves redoubled all too soon. If she couldn’t satisfy it, she would go into disjunction crisis. She would either kill or die.

  Eventually, exhausted, she fell into a light doze as Jarmi relaxed into deep sleep. Dreams flickered through Laneff’s consciousness, inconsequential pleasures that turned to mild nightmare from which she struggled to wake.

  After three hours of this, she rose leaving Jarmi sound asleep. As she made her toilet, she found herself full of energy, driven to accomplish the most she could before her time ran out. She took a notebook into the bathroom and scribbled down ideas for streamlining her experiments and reordering priorities. Six months. It can be done!

  Finished, she was all for going to the lab right then. But she remembered the fretful dreams, and was aware of her jangled state of nerves. She also knew the cure from long experience as an adult Sime. If she went to the lab now, she knew she wouldn’t accomplish a thing, and would probably just break glassware and ruin experiments through inattention.

  Yuan would understand. He’d be willing to help. She remembered the way he’d come into the lab to wish her a satisfying transfer. There had been a wistful invitation in his nager, though he wouldn’t ask her outright since he’d failed before. He’s still feeling underdraw.

  But as far as she was concerned, there were no other men in the installation. And, from her own observations, she was sure Yuan’s field had leveled off. The worst symptoms of underdraw might be over for him, though he might still be sterile from it.

  It was only just after midnight. She took one of Jarmi’s floppy sweaters and a paint-smeared pair of pants she’d torn while they were setting up the lab. Dressed like a beachcomber, her Sat’htine signet on a chain around her neck but hidden beneath the sweater, she ventured into the corridors.

  The lights were dimmed, but people bustled everywhere, excited by something. She wended her way toward the branch tunnel where Yuan lived and worked, a branch just off the entrance from the farmhouse. Here the lights were on full strength. Armed men were stationed three deep, rigidly alert.

  A whole platoon guarded the stair down from the farmhouse. She was answering another in an endless sequence of challenges, trying to gain entrance to Yuan’s hallway, when the door to the stair flew open admitting a puff of damp outside air.

  Booted feet tromped down those stairs, revealing knees, and then torsos. Laneff had no trouble identifying Yuan’s nager before his red-blond hair appeared. His field filled the entryway, then cleared it as he stepped into the corridor intersection. He surveyed the ranked troops, barked, “At ease!” and then saw Laneff. “What—!”

  Simultaneously, Laneff recognized the next nager coming down the stairs. Fluorescent confetti whirled out of that stairwell like a particolored snowstorm. Laneff flung herself at the man she’d thought never to see again.

  “Shanlun!”

  CHAPTER 7 TEMPTATION

  Uncontrolled sobs poured from Laneff as she clung desperately to the apparition of Shanlun, trying to convince herself he was indeed real. Wrapped in the glowing core of his nager, she felt him echoing the same maelstrom of emotions, magnifying them for her, until her overloaded nerves screamed for surceas
e.

  Then an odd thing happened. His nager shrank within her grip to a darkened point, a nonexistence, as if he’d died and pulled her along with him.

  Her innards went hollow. Duoconscious, she heard herself making strangling noises. A fractional second later, the particolored snowstorm was whirling about her, isolating her within the suddenly calm core nager. She found her feet dangling in midair, Shanlun’s hard, muscular arms wrapped about the small of her back, and his lips searching her own.

  Peripherally, she was aware of the growing audience behind her, of Yuan’s astonishment, and of a strange and powerful channel who had come down the stairs behind Shanlun. As everything in her answered to Shanlun’s sudden physical hunger for her, she heard Yuan dismissing his troops, setting guards, and then marshaling all of them into his own private office. Shanlun wanted to carry her, but she squirmed down and went on her own feet, clinging with both arms to his waist as curiosity surged into her consciousness.

  She hardly had patience with the formal trin tea ritual. But the warm tea helped calm her. Shanlun drew her to a wicker bench with seat cushions in crushed green velvet and sat with one arm around her shoulders. Yuan watched from behind his own reed-and-wicker desk with its milk-white ceramic top. His smile was tight—a hint of jealousy?

  Laneff straightened away from Shanlun, feeling for Yuan in a rising tide of confusion. She dropped her gaze to the woven floor mats, here dyed a shadow purple with threads of gold and white. “Shanlun was the last person in the world I expected to find here!” offered Laneff by way of apology.