RenSime

by Jacqueline Lichtenberg

  Yuan answered, “Discernment is one channel’s trick I’ll bet you, with your sensitivity, can do almost as well as a channel can—at least on anyone not a trained Donor.”

  Discernment, the art of detecting truth in a Gen’s nager, or diagnosing an ailment, was indeed one of Laneff’s talents. She nodded.

  “All you have to do is watch Polk’s nager as I interrogate him.”

  Bianka interrupted. “That man’s nager is vicious. I’d want to be there, too.”

  “Fine,” he said, looking to Nen, “if you’ll go along.”

  “Sure. I wouldn’t let Bianka go in there alone.”

  Laneff felt that Yuan’s nager alone would be enough to protect her and any army of renSimes from a non-Donor Gen, but she didn’t say anything.

  Yuan led the way through the infirmary offices and down a long narrow corridor lined with double insulated doors and shiny tile walls and floors. The door at the end of the hall opened to reveal a room not unlike the one where Laneff slept.

  It was plastered and painted in light pastels. The furniture was gypsy wickerwork. Polished aquamarine ceramic tile floors reflected it all, as if they were standing on water. On the hospital bed lay the pilot from the chopper, his head swathed in white bandage, one wrist chained to the bed frame. Over his lap, a standard bed tray held the remains of a meal.

  Bianka took the lead. “I see you’re eating at last,” she said in English.

  “Decided you wouldn’t try to poison me after all this, even if you don’t give me any real food,” he answered in a heavy out-Territory accent. Then his gaze centered on Laneff.

  The jangle of alarm in Polk’s nager at sight of Bianka’s tentacles rose to a shrill scream of panic at Laneff’s. Yuan was off to one side, behind Bianka, functioning in his working Donor’s mode and allowing her to zlin the prisoner. Jarmi at her side was comforting, but only the fact that Laneff wasn’t in need kept her from reacting to the Gen panic.

  Yuan said, “Hajene Farris, please zlin him carefully when he answers.” He moved as Bianka and Nen shifted position in a feat of professional field management that left a sheltered window for Laneff to zlin Polk without suffering the full brunt of his nager. It was, of course, lost on Polk.

  “What is this?” challenged the prisoner.

  “Consider it your trial,” replied Yuan evenly. “Do you know who I am?”

  “You’re the guy we figure runs this outfit.”

  Yuan glanced at Laneff, asking with his nager if the Gen spoke truth. She nodded as the prisoner considered Yuan from a different angle. “You’re the guy that hit me!”

  As if in reflex, he lunged up off the bed, swinging his right fist at Yuan’s nose. But the handcuff stopped the swing, sending a screaming pain through the Gen’s nerves.

  Without prompting, Jarmi seized Laneff’s hand and let the tentacles clutch her arm. Simultaneously, Bianka moved closer, fogging Laneff’s window with a selyn field that cut the intensity of the Gen’s emotions. With a free tentacle, Laneff signaled that she was all right, and everyone resumed their positions as Polk subsided to a sullen anger.

  “Distect traitor!” spat the prisoner.

  “Distect Loyalist,” corrected Yuan mildly. “Someday, if you’re reasonable about things, I’ll take you into the gym and give you a fair fight. I don’t like hitting a man unawares—but I don’t like dying even more. To business.”

  The Gen’s lips clamped shut, a look of grim determination on his face that didn’t match the fright in his nager.

  “How many Distect bases have your people identified?”

  Silence.

  Yuan consulted Laneff with a glance, and Laneff read Polk’s silence. “A few at least,” she said.

  Polk sat up straight, ignoring the renewed throbbing in his head. “She can read minds!”

  Laneff was shocked. She’d thought that stupidity had died out a hundred years ago. But Yuan let a secret smile play over his features as he asked, “Where are they located?”

  Again silence.

  “He’s afraid you’ll get it out of him,” supplied Laneff.

  “I will,” answered Yuan. “With drugs, if necessary.”

  “Just have that witch pluck it out of my mind!”

  “Nobody could do that, you idiot. She’s reading your nager. Any Farris channel could do as well.”

  “Farris,” repeated Polk eyeing her, fear crystallizing into belligerence. “You go tell that Mairis he’s not going to learn anything from me! You—and all his kind—are going to be stopped before you’ve made the whole world into a Genfarm!”

  Laneff hadn’t really believed Yuan’s sketch of Diet psychology until she heard that. She recovered as Yuan glanced at her. “It’s bravado,” she reported.

  “But how did he know?” asked Yuan, then rounded on the Gen. “How did you know Mairis sent her here!”

  A cagey reserve came over the prisoner. “We know a lot more than that about your operations!”

  Yuan turned on Bianka, his expression ferocious but his nager ringing with unsung laughter. “Did you tell him about Laneff?”

  Bianka feigned fear, shrinking from Yuan. “No, not me!”

  “We know all about Laneff!” claimed the prisoner.

  But he was lying, and Yuan didn’t require her to tell him that. He bore down on Nen. “I’m going to find the Diet spy who got in here and talked to him. You get me a list of every guard assigned to this room!”

  “Yes, Sosectu,” answered Nen wide-eyed.

  Then Yuan stalked over to Laneff. “You told me there was no chance of a leak at that Last Year House! You don’t expect me to send one of my Gens in there for Laneff if the place is swarming with Diet spies! You go back and tell Mairis—” He tossed a cautious glance over his shoulder at the prisoner. “Bianka, drug him. I don’t want any slipups. I’m going to have it all out of him—now.” Then to Laneff, he said with sweet deference, “Hajene Farris, would you please accompany me to my office?”

  Outside, Yuan was in high spirits. “You’re a great actor, Laneff. You should have been on the stage! That was glorious!”

  “Yuan, he fears those drugs. Perhaps he’s allergic—”

  “Don’t worry, Bianka’s checked that. He fears drugs because he knows he’ll babble out everything—and he’s one of their best pilots, so he probably knows the locations of every one of our places they’ve found. Ha! He knows the location of every one of theirs! And I’ll have them all!”

  “What will you do with the information?”

  “Set spies on them. Leak my knowledge to them and force them to abandon and move—just to keep them from accomplishing much. Oh, there’s lots to do with such information!”

  He spoke as if he’d been carrying on this war for years, right in the middle of civilization and the Tecton didn’t even know it. “Yuan, why do you hate the Diet so? They’re only frightened.”

  “I don’t hate them because they’re afraid! Look, they worm their way into a perfectly happy Gen community, and start sowing rumors that the Sime Center harbors a Pen full of Gens used for the kill. They start talking about certain channels who take donations from the community as being junct. Soon, the Gens of the area stop coming to donate selyn. They turn perfectly happy people into suspicious paranoids, and from each destroyed community they reap a few fanatics to join their suicide corps. There is no life form lower than a Gen who’d seduce a Sime into a kill!”

  “But I thought the Distect condoned junctedness?”

  “Condoned? No, Laneff. We stand for the right of each Sime and Gen to choose a mode of transfer that suits them, as long as nobody gets hurt.”

  There was so much vivid passion emanating from him that Laneff had to ask, “How did you get into all this?”

  “I was raised in a coastal island village that was one of the first the Diet took over. But I joined the Tecton’s Donor classes when I established. Maybe I halfway believed the lies. I was prepared to die on my first Qualification! I found out what Sime and G
en are really about—but too late to save my sister. She joined the Diet’s suicide squad, only she hadn’t established yet. She went through changeover instead, and they murdered her. The same kind of thing was happening in all the families in our village. I swore to stop it, Laneff!”

  “Swearing isn’t enough. The Tecton—”

  “Oh—I found some old books and began reading up on how the Tecton came about. It wasn’t always like this, you know. And Klyd Farris never did have much more than a bare majority when founding the Tecton. There were a number of Householdings that withdrew to form the original Distect, and a lot of other ideas about how the Tecton ought to be run. The time has come for the world to reconsider some of them.”

  In the narrow white corridor, Laneff looked up at the huge Gen, the powerful, hurtfully brilliant nager enfolding her. Wistfully, she recalled the scintillating tingle of Shanlun’s nager. But she would never see him again. Shanlun thinks I’m dead—and it’s better for him that way. He shouldn’t have to go through it all twice. “I wish I could believe in your way, Yuan.”

  He examined her face as if trying to zlin her nager. “I’d like a chance to show you all of it.” His hand came up to graze her jawline. “The way we finish a transfer between a man and a woman….”

  The pure maleness of him, from scent to the little tufts of hair on the backs of his fingers, penetrated her perceptions. She knew what he meant. In the Tecton, a man and woman who shared transfer were sexually forbidden to each other for that month. Another rule discarded.

  Jarmi had drifted down the corridor toward the exit into the infirmary proper, offering them privacy. Do I really want to do this? She had watched Yuan deliberately frightening a helpless prisoner, but with a peculiar measure of compassion. In his place, Shanlun might have done the same. “Are you really going to let him go?” she asked.

  “We don’t have any prison cells. I think—I’ll have him transported to another facility, and on the way, he’ll get an irresistible chance to escape. Then, the Diet won’t know exactly where he was. I don’t think they know about this place yet. But all that’s for tomorrow. For tonight…” He hesitated, awaiting her permission to touch her.

  “Life is a game to you, isn’t it?”

  “A very dangerous game.”

  “But it’s the danger you like, isn’t it?”

  “How is it you know me so well?”

  “Haven’t you ever known a Farris before?” she teased.

  “Only channels,” he murmured, distracted but still holding back his touch. His nager communicated his desire very clearly, but there was no hint of coercion in him.

  For all his Distect philosophy, she knew at core he was a Tecton Donor, and a nonHouseholder at that. He was inviting her for only one night, because he was attracted. If I’d met him before I met Shanlun, I wouldn’t have thought twice about saying yes. I have to try to live as if Shanlun never existed. And this man—is very special.

  “Yuan—”

  “It will be good for you, too. You’re not a channel. It wouldn’t hurt you to go a few months without sex. But, Laneff, you’re Sime, and that’s a wonderful thing to be. There’s no reason to make it less wonderful by ignoring the essence of your being.”

  An utterly spontaneous smile overcame her. “You make a very strong case, Sosectu ambrov Rior.”

  At her assent, he bent down and kissed her with delicate passion.

  Chapter Six

  DISTECT TRANSFER

  “I’ve always wondered what he’s like in bed,” said Jarmi wistfully, her eyes fixed on Laneff and her nager glowing with admiration.

  Laneff was sitting with Jarmi in the cafeteria. Over the last two days, she’d overheard a number of comments about how unusual it was for Yuan to take any member of Rior to bed. Most of the women were wondering what she had that they lacked, but Jarmi seemed to know. Laneff wished she knew, too.

  “He’s an expert,” replied Laneff, burying her nose in her trin tea glass. “I suppose, anyway.”

  “You mean after all that you didn’t—” Jarmi whispered.

  Suddenly reminding herself of her original suspicion that Jarmi had to be Yuan’s spy, Laneff asked, “Should we be gossiping about the Sosectu?”

  Jarmi took that rebuke meekly, but Laneff felt the burning curiosity eating at the Gen—as did every Sime in the room. “Jarmi, he’s practically in underdraw. He’s more interested in Simeness than sex right now.”

  That terse hint covered a night of frustration. As much as he’d wanted to, Yuan had been unable to show her the other side of Rior. And she, not being in need yet, had become urgently fascinated to learn that side. His fortitude in the face of their dual frustration had touched her heart as nothing else could have.

  She had responded by offering undemanding physical warmth, and in the morning they’d both felt stronger. Shanlun would have understood Yuan’s plight even sooner than she did, and being the consummate Tecton Donor he was, he’d have urged her to Yuan’s bed.

  As she dwelled on that, Laneff saw Yuan come in, going immediately to the serving line. His field seemed to have leveled off.

  Staring curiously at the Sosectu, Jarmi said, “I’ve often wondered what underdraw feels like.”

  Lost in her own thoughts, Laneff answered, “I much prefer need!”

  “No—I meant not wanting sex because you want transfer.”

  “Oh, it’s a little like being a child again. Sex just doesn’t exist for you, but—hunger does.”

  “Hard to imagine.” She was working enthusiastically on a mound of mashed potatoes and turnips heaped onto some kind of cheese pie.

  Yuan caught Laneff’s gaze and smiled. The beam of his attention lanced across the scattering of Simes and Gens and sent a warm thrill along Laneff’s nerves. He started to weave his way toward them.

  Jarmi weighed Yuan’s smile and Laneff’s response. “I’ve never seen him like that about anyone. Laneff, he’s falling in love with you. Be gentle with him.”

  Shocked by that thought, Laneff zlinned the Sosectu again as he was greeted by people. Jarmi could be right. There might be something personal in Yuan’s attitude. She’d known enough Tecton Donors to have learned not to expect anything personal in a sexual relationship. But with Shanlun, it had gone from the deeply intimate to the physical, and had always been personal first and professional afterward. For her, it wasn’t the same with Yuan. But for him?

  And he was looming over their table. “Well, and here I thought I’d have to eat alone,” he said, putting his tray down on the square table and seating himself between them. “You don’t mind, do you?”

  “No,” said Jarmi, glancing defiantly at Laneff. “We were just discussing the results we got today.”

  “Oh? Anything encouraging?”

  “We’ve synthesized all the starting materials for Laneff’s compound,” answered Jarmi, “and tested them all. Purity is good and the yields were phenomenal. We’re going to start the synthesis tomorrow.”

  “Tonight,” contradicted Laneff. “I’ll start while you get some sleep.” She’d never done it in any other lab before, and others who had tried had failed. If they were going to debug the procedure, they couldn’t afford to lose time.

  “Don’t push yourself too hard, Laneff,” said Yuan. And his concern was overpowering.

  “I want to get most of this tedious stuff done before my turnover,” said Laneff. “Need always slows me down.”

  Jarmi added, “Once Laneff has the K/A synthesized, I’ll start running the structural analyses she couldn’t do in her old lab for lack of funds and equipment. That will leave her free to sit and try to figure out what it all means.”

  “I’m going to require a number of expensive test materials,” said Laneff. “I’m designing an experiment that may tell us what went wrong when I gave K/A to Digen the last time. But I’m going to require a supply of lateral tentacles from cadavers—preferably channels.”

  Yuan went right on eating the cheese-and-fruit salad on
his tray, ignoring the steaming bean soup. “You’re right, cadavers don’t come cheap. But I know a supplier. Have Stores send your requisition to my office.”

  The clinical detachment was real, Laneff decided. For all his Rior airs, he was still a Tecton Donor. “Yuan, what were you going to do with the pilot before you decided to let him ‘escape’?”

  He stopped eating to examine her. “I was very depressed over that. He’s so deeply indoctrinated I had to get Bianka to take his field down while he was drugged. He’d have died of fright, or committed suicide otherwise. I don’t think we could ever have persuaded him to join us. So I’m glad we hit on this solution.”

  “Did the drugs do him any harm?” asked Laneff.

  “No. Bianka knows her job. We got a good set of map coordinates from him, too. Soon I’ll arrange his escape.”

  Later that night, Laneff completed one stage of the synthesis and left her product drying in the oven. She’d planned to read during this time, but a thought nagged her.

  Yuan’s attitude was both too soft for a general fighting a war and too callous to suit her Sat’htine ethics. He shouldn’t allow that pilot to escape able bodied enough to come back and fight again. Or he could have brainwashed him into gibbering helplessness. Suddenly, she had to see for herself what his condition was. She didn’t dare trust the Sosectu without concrete evidence.

  The infirmary was quiet three hours before dawn, the lights dimmed. A Gen was drowsing at the desk in the outer office. Laneff decided not to wake him and just walked on through to the hospital corridor. If everything was all right, there was no reason for Yuan ever to know she’d been checking on his word.

  The door at the end of the narrow, tiled corridor was bolted, but no security lock fastened to it. A sign on the door said, “TO BE OPENED ONLY IN THE PRESENCE OF A SIME.”

  She opened the door.

  The room was dark except for a dim glow of a night light set beside the door. Leaving the door open, she went in, zlinning. The Gen was asleep and seemed perfectly healthy. His selyn field was weak, though. She tried to judge whether Bianka had just taken the superficial levels, or had stripped him deeper than an ordinary volunteer would be stripped. But she was no channel, and couldn’t be sure.