Viradel cut him off with a contemptuous comment on Krinata’s modesty and disrobed, urging the others to comply. Krinata stripped, then gritted her teeth, closed her eyes, suppressed the memory of nearly being gang-raped before the Emperor’s court—and the image of Desdinda being led off to be raped by the Emperor in private—and waited for the rustlemas’s touch. It came only as a whisper of air against her breast and again at her crotch hairs. She shuddered.
“He understands this discomforts you and apologizes,” said Jindigar. “You can get dressed now.”
But at that moment the attack began.
Alarm ripped through the hive, furred warriors scrambling through the central chamber. Then there was a low hum and a whump that shook the air. Chinchee crumpled, screaming in shock. He’d seen one hive destroyed starting just this way and had barely overcome the horror. She moved to comfort him—then the fire went out.
Jindigar’s voice cut over the general racket. “They’ve closed the ventilation channels and extinguished all fires. The furred ones are preparing a sortie, and the shelled ones– yes, that’s it, the shelled ones control the mind grouping! They’re calling the hive to defend—”
That was the last Krinata heard, for everyone began screaming. The children, who had gravitated to her when darkness fell, now squirmed and kicked with their sharp chain-edged hands, forcing Krinata to let them go. She stood, sweeping her arms about, calling, “Shorwh! Find your brothers! Shorwh!” She nudged a piol with her foot, and it bit her shoe, howled, and scratched at her bare leg.
A sudden image flashed across her eyes—a wild beast eating her leg while she still lived. Revolted, she kicked free and ran, smashed into a sled’s cargo, slid around it, and ran into the dark, smashing at whatever touched her.
It was one of her worst nightmares come true. Images screamed into her mind, seared her inner vision, and she couldn’t elude them by running. It became harder to move. Panting, retching, she dragged herself along. Somewhere aside from the chaos in her mind, she felt cold air on her face, laced with the stench of burning machinery.
Scrubbing at her eyes, she peered through the mental images, as if fighting off a drug, seeing double, swallowing panic, and finding reality more horrible than nightmare. She lay prone at the head of the down ramp. Beyond, the door closing the entry tunnel had been smashed, and from outside came a dazzling blue-white light. Against this, Imperial troops advanced into the hive, their armor protected by thin-film energy fields, clothing them in shimmering rainbows, brighter than the light.
But these marvels of technology were not winning. Rustlebirds swooped in the tunnel, dropping their corrosive excrement on the intruders. After several direct hits the armor field shorted out in a plume of sparks, leaving the gray surface exposed to the corrosive, which quickly ate through to flesh beneath.
Such victims were writhing and screaming on the floor when Krinata first saw them. As she watched, their comrades broke ranks and turned their weapons on each other. The tunnel became an inferno from which she began to retreat.
A trooper fell close to her, wrenching off his helmet, which had been eaten through. She was riveted in place.
Before her lay Desdinda, face twisted in madness—unmistakable in her hatred. No. It’s a hallucination.
The knowledge didn’t help, even when another tortured, dead trooper turned into Desdinda before her eyes and seemed to rise, an animated corpse closing on her. No!
In panic, she lost control, and the images roiling at the bottom of her mind swamped her reason. She was sur– rounded by Desdinda, chased by Desdinda, possessed by Desdinda, and worse yet, Desdinda was perfectly correct.
How could she have missed this obvious truth? She ran, blinded by the searing light, into blackest dark, pursued by grotesque horror, and became the very horror that pursued her. No! part of her screamed, but was swamped by the power of focused nightmare made real.
Then, before her loomed the huge indigo shadow-form she knew so well. He thought he was such a righteous priest of Aliom, but he was just a dirty Invert. That hadn’t mattered until he tricked Grisnilter into surrendering his Archive to him. Now she knew he was out to destroy the Dushau species.
Jindigar! Madman! Predator! Fiend!
For all that was good and clean in life, for her children and their children, she attacked, willing to expend her life, her very existence, to remove this ultimate threat. Enraged, she fought with all her strength.
But all of her strength was as nothing before his might. He held her at bay easily, toying with her. She was no threat to him. She was helpless in his grasp.
Helpless. Falling helpless into void. Desdinda’s snarling face spun before her eyes, an ethereal mask depicting the gutted ruin of a soul, a reflection of her own visage. She clawed at her face. It’s not me! Not me! The helplessness! The helplessness! / hate it!
Krinata squirmed and turned to beat at the Desdinda image, bent on destroying it, but feeling every blow on her own face and body—as if she were both of them.
“Krinata!” Jindigar’s voice.
A spear of bright sanity lanced through her. Her eyes saw Jindigar standing before her, clutching her arms in his big hands, holding her bloody fingernails away from herself. His bulging eyes were glistening in the white floodlights from behind her. His lips were moving, but it was a while until she heard his words, as if his voice came from lightyears away. “Form in triad with us! It’s the hive doing this to you. Form with us! They won’t touch another group-mind!”
She fought that seductive lure, knowing he meant only to destroy. Then she thrust aside that absurdity and reached for the fulfillment of triad. Oh, yes, it’s been so long!
The familiar triune consciousness blossomed, and for a moment, the multiple images of Desdinda, whirling about her head and chattering in madness, faded away.
Peripherally she felt Frey shivering under multiple stresses, Jindigar calming him, while the war was fought in the tunnel, the troopers still pouring in from the carriers landing outside, the ferocious attack on the rustlebird hive, the birds in the tunnel being slaughtered. She felt other hives mobilizing around them, large carnivores, small insects, marching in the unnaturally lit darkness to an ally’s aid. “Jindigar, we’ve got to help the hive!”
“We can’t—”
“Traitor!” Desdinda rose. “We can too!” Sick to death of helplessness, ignoring Frey’s keening wail of pain, she possessed the triad and Inverted. ,«
Frey screamed, voice and mind echoing hollowly as she used him to channel the power of her imagination against the Imperials, visualizing their armor losing power, becoming ashen gray, useless against their own weapons’ energy splashing wantonly about the tunnel.
Krinata, no! Jindigar shattered her focus. Again he’d rendered her helpless. How could you strike back at someone who gutted you of all power over your own life? You could only hate—and deny. This isn’t me. It’s Desdinda!
Frey’s ragged, tortured scream seared through her mind and body, flowers of his pain blossoming within like sonic bombs. / can’t, I can’t! Let me go! I can’t! But she couldn’t let him go. His scream lasted forever, and when it was over, there was only blackness. Void. Falling. Out of control. Beyond help. Hopeless. Dissolution/death.
Down and down, world spinning into blurring nightmare, she tumbled out of control, clinging to Jindigar, pursued by a tall black scouring funnel of a tornado vortex, Desdinda’s face formed out of its angry whorls and knots. Flinging her arms and legs out, grabbing at the insubstantial blackness, at Jindigar, she was unable to slow or deflect them.
The whirlwind took them. It stretched their bodies to a transparent blur, wrapping them around and around its own core, smearing them until their substance mixed and became Desdinda. They’d been triad, one had died, and still they were triad. Mad, warped, dying amid Jindigar’s terrified screams. “No! Oh, no! I can’t. No! I won’t!”
She came to, snug and warm, cozy, happy, safe in the infirmary bed Arlai always a
llotted to her aboard Truth. So many times now she’d succeeded in saving Jindigar’s life but nearly killed herself, and Arlai healed her. Those were always the best times, and she looked forward to it now.
Lazing back into dream, she found herself in a hive nursery snoozing amid a pile of other infants—a hard carapace digging into her back, powderpuff fur against her cheek, soft rustleplates tickling her toes. Her skin was stark white against the nest pebbles. Young as she was, she was already roaming through the hive, peeping through the eyes of her fellow crafters, watching the rustlemen trying to teach mind-gatherers to coordinate warriors in battle lust.
The freedom to wander the hive, be a rustleman producing mortar to repair a wall, or be a warrior training hard to defeat onnoolloo, or hunt bloodmeat for the young, be a mind-gatherer learning to sing mindtunes, or spur the mothers to procreation, was such luxury. She’d become a herald and share this with every hive. One wasn’t enough for her. So she’d have to endure the long, lonely treks between hives. But it would be worth it.
Her attention was grabbed by her trainer, a rustlemother who held the Whole Memory. If she was to herald, she must absorb the Whole Memory of her hive first. It would be hard. What came naturally to rustles was agony to whites– but rustles couldn’t herald. It was her bred-for duty.
Steeling herself, she reached for the Whole Memory.
Her mind stretched like a flexible ship-to-ship access tube inflated in space and about to burst. She looked down that long tunnel to infinity. Terrified, she searched through the walls and found only infinity massed with stars that swirled as if a tornado wind had scooped them up. And she was falling—into infinity.
Twice in space she’d felt this; the first time in a perfectly safe access tunnel, the second in a malfunctioning spacesuit cut loose from its safety cable. The terror had become a phobia, and now it paralyzed her mind and body.j|
And there was Jindigar. She grabbed, and they slammed into one another. Suddenly there was the hive, and there was herself, and they weren’t the same thing anymore. This was the hive’s tunnel, its history painted on its sides in morality plays, murals, and craft diagrams. It lanced Jindigar with terror, and she could not see why, except that the hive memory stretched back eons—perhaps as long as Jindigar had lived.
Images flew by, history blurring, incomprehensible as seen through an eternal mind that wasn’t an individual. They passed juncture after juncture where new hives had swarmed off older ones. They spun around the walls, marveling at the images of Dushau and others exploring their world. Jindigar rode this corkscrew toboggan chute, perceptions squeezed tight against it all, muscles locked, mind paralyzed in the hard clutch of denial.
Now we’re all helpless! How do you like it, Invert!
The Desdinda voice, mixed sonorously with Krinata’s, brought Jindigar’s eyes open. She shouted into their paralyzed minds, You’ll never win! I’ll never let you win!
With a thrust Desdinda propelled them head over heels into a cavernous void. Infinitely deep. But where the tunnel had been walled with shallow murals, or chained concepts of a linear group memory, here an n-dimensional space archived events, Dushau ideas, Dushau problems, incomprehensible Dushau solutions. Events jammed on top of ideas, within problems, overlapping solutions, integrating other events, associated, interpenetrating, twisting, crazed with reference lines, broken into shapes, transforming, churning, tilting, compacted into a tesseract, then folded around yet another dimension, wrapped around with walls to contain and shape it, isolated from personal memory by a great, gaping void.
In panic she flailed about for something familiar–and she landed on Ephemeral Truth, Arlai’s Dushau simulacrum bowing graciously before her Outreach. “Takora’s Oliat is most welcome and will be properly served.”
Jindigar was standing behind her, in the Office of Protector of her Oliat, but Arlai knew better than to speak to him while the Oliat was balanced. In fact, his ship was so beautifully designed, she was going to order a copy made for herself. Perhaps she’d name it Eternal Truth. Yes, that was a good name. She could travel now that her Oliat career was ended by successfully Centering.
When they arrived at Dushaun, Arlai obligingly tendered a copy of Truth’s plans, but by then she knew she was terminally ill. It began with weakness in the limbs and spread to a weakness of the mind—blurring memory, inability to reason without being caught by reminiscences, and a loosening grip on the Oliat. She’d experienced four Renewals and knew that, though she was in pre-Renewal instability, this was not normal.
It hadn’t been until Dushaun was in their scopes that Arlai’s tests isolated the problem—senile dementia. An organism she’d fought off on their last planetfall had altered her metabolism beyond repair.
Her last memory was the hospital bed, her Oliat about her, Grisnilter hovering in the background to retrieve her memories for his Archive. All her Officers were in Renewal, even young Jindigar, so earnest in his priesthood, so inquisitive and easy to delight, a point of bright, burning enthusiasm that could light her days through Renewal, if only she could make him understand that’s what she wanted. But, though she knew she’d fascinated him, it often seemed everyone else did too. He was so undiscriminating. But she could live with that for one Renewal—it’d be his fourth. He should mature quite a bit.
A bright new thought occurred to her, and she couldn’t understand why it hadn’t come before. It’s time to Dissolve this Oliat. If any of them were actually in Renewal, Dissolving now could kill someone. Why have I waited so long?
Yet, as the thought formed, it drifted away into the blurring daze of no-time that gripped her. With a little puff of despair she knew she was drawing them all with her into premature death—helpless to Dissolve. Grisnilter was right. I shouldn’t have tried the Oliat.
She had no strength to impart this insight before it drifted away. Darkness encroached. She stopped breathing. Her chest ached, but it was too hard to draw air. They couldn’t prevent themselves dying with her. Dissolution/death, a bottomless void.
She felt Jindigar’s panicked sense of helplessness as on-rushing darkness swallowed them all. Without warning his strength flooded upward, wrenching, ripping the Oliat from her grasp, relegating her to Protector. A twist, and he Inverted the entire Oliat. Spinning, bruised, stunned, personally violated, she watched as he shifted to another Office and Dissolved. It was a desperate scramble for life that left them all pummeled, bruised, mindblood oozing from every thought, cutting her loose to drift alone into nothing.
Krinata/Takora felt his hands on her face, wet with her tears, cold as death. He was lying half on top of her, a gray armored body pinning his legs as he’d protected her. She felt no stir of breath in him. Her hair stank, blaster-singed where her scalp hurt. Behind her eyes, occluding the shadowed scene around her, Desdinda’s features shimmered, a grotesque mask of hate.
Jindigar’s panic in the moment of Takora-death saturated her nerves, the same feeling as when she/Krinata had stolen -the triad from Jindigar’s control and Inverted to help the hive fight the Troopers. She’d meant only to save innocent lives as he had saved her Oliat, helpless through no fault of their own.
Jindigar had said it. My decisions limit your options; your decisions limit mine, Grisnilter had wanted him—and Takora–to avoid that. Each renders the other helpless.
A hard knotted ball of emotions inside her melted away, leaving relaxation where she hadn’t known there was tension. She was consumed with a vast sorrow that she hadn’t had the fortitude to Dissolve her Oliat properly so they wouldn’t die with her. Knowing her guilt and her weakness, she forgave him and became him, the walls of identity blurred beyond repair. Tears flowed softly from her eyes, and her breath came in little spurts halfway between laughter and sobs. Before Krinata’s eyes the visage of Desdinda evaporated to mist, swirling away into limbo. Gladly Krinata followed Takora into dissolution/death, sure her life was over.
There was cool air on her naked skin. The pink dawn tinged the grayne
ss. The beaten earth was tufted with grass under her bare back. Her legs lay across cold, dew-damp, napped skin. Ignoring the searing throb in her head, she pulled herself up to look. In the gray dimness of predawn she saw Jindigar’s slack face, felt his toneless muscles, frigid skin, utter stillness where there should be breath, and remembered accepting his death—and her own—but was that a memory of a dream or a memory of reality?|
Mind swimming, she was mildly surprised to find her” skin to be pale white and almost hairless, her hands too small, her vision too limited. But she was also Krinata Zavaronne, sitting naked on a ravaged battlefield amid a hostile plain, staring at the body of the one she valued most in life.
Her future rang with emptiness, the present hollow and black. A sharp cleaver had divided her life into before and after Jindigar, and from the cut end flowed all the warmth, spirit, laughter, and tears that gave life true meaning.
She knew now why she’d rescued him, throwing away career and even life itself, to keep him from the Emperor’s hands. And she’d do it again, in a second. But it was too late.
Her heart opened up, ruptured with the pressure of emotions that choked her. Oh, Jindigar, I forgive you for everything you never told me. Raichmat’s did right, protecting this world. I’d have done the same. I’d never have understood before–
Paralyzed with flooding memory of the horrors the hive had evoked, she sat over Jindigar, transfixed by images, unable to blame the natives for what they’d done. It was a while before she realized it was only memory—devoid of emotional impact. Desdinda’s face was just as horrible as ever, but not horrifying. She felt only a great sorrow for a valiant woman who’d died for what she believed in, which only added to the intolerable grief at loss of Jindigar.
Her diaphragm unknotted and heaved, squeezing a great sob out of her wide-open throat. She didn’t recognize the groaning voice as her own, even when it came again and again. She knew only that this was Dushau grief for that which will never be again. She had been riven in two by loss of a part of herself. There could be no healing, for no scar could fill the rift. She needed the mercy of death.
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