Tuzhel was sleeping in the shallow napping pattern of the pre-crisis candidate. Both channels and Companions in the room were vigilant. Lexy zlinned the youth carefully, not waking him, and left instructions with his guardians.
Then the Gens caught up with them.
Bruce tried to insist that he would provide Lexy with her extra transfer to support the pregnancy, but she finally lost all control, screamed at him in the middle of the infirmary hallway, “He’s not dead!” then turned to run.
Solamar stopped her and the Gens closed around with Companion nagers, firm, insistent, irresistible. Lexy muttered, “I’m not hysterical,” and to prove it marched herself to her on-duty sleeping quarters. She started to close the door, then reached back and pulled Solamar in, leaving Garen outside. “So bring dinner up. I’m not going into that dining hall today.”
As she closed the door, Bruce said, “I don’t want him to be dead either, but he’d want you to take whatever you Need from me.”
“Later, Bruce,” gritted Lexy. She collapsed into Solamar’s arms and he felt her love of him spill out of the cracks in her showfield. He was irrationally certain it was her genuine feeling, not just another Farris perceptual trick.
“I love you,” he confessed aloud for the first time in just that special, unequivocal and matter of fact way. “I’ve known I was falling in love with you, but I hadn’t realized how much I already loved you before I fell in love.”
“I know. I felt it. It’s so insane. I think I’m falling in love with you, but there’s just so much grief in me, I can’t be sure. I’m numb with it all. I don’t know who I am anymore. I just have to rescue my father. I should have started that hours ago but I’ve failed.”
She pulled restlessly at him, but he hung on. “They’ll be back with food soon. Some hot soup with crusty hot bread. Things will look better after we eat.”
The thought sent her stomach roiling. He altered that, “Well, maybe some tea and flatbread.” He went to build up the fire so they could reheat whatever the Gens brought. “Want Garen in here instead of me?”
“No. I’m not in Need or sick. I’m just tired. Scared. Miserable. I’d rather Garen didn’t see me like this. You still love me if I’m incompetent, confused, scared?”
“Oh, yes. No doubt about that.” He set his showfield to project Gen, multi-layered like a Companion’s complex and deep fields and absurdly cheerful the way Gens usually seemed when a Sime was in Need.
She laughed. His pride surged at his success and his heart melted. Her laugh didn’t last long though before it transmuted to tears. She flung herself onto the bed, prone, bunched the pillow up and sobbed.
The room was well enough insulated that she could let go of her fields and just wash the place in her anguish. He pulled in on himself and let her ride it out while he put the wash pitcher on the hearth to warm and arrange the table for the food their Companions would bring.
When the ambient shifted slightly to the arrival of the Gens, she held her breath and he slipped outside to accept the trays and explain. As he spoke, a renSime came by to light the hall sconces. It was getting very late.
Garen said, “Take good care of her. I’ll be in the recovery room if she wants me later.” He started away then turned back. “And I mean good care!”
“I will. I think you should go home and get some sleep though.” He related what Val had said.
He nodded. “I’d just rather not participate in this farce funeral the Council is putting on. If that’s what Lexy wants, though, then that’s what we’ll do.”
“Maybe she’ll change her mind tomorrow,” said Solamar. “Right now she’s too exhausted to think straight and too keyed up to sleep.” The heat of the dishes was soaking through the heavily wrapped trays stacked in his arms. “Whatever happens, she’ll be depending on you to be rested. Take care of yourself.”
Kahleen opened the door for him and Bruce closed it behind him. The insulation was so good that even the three Companions nageric disturbance barely registered. He put the trays on the hearth. Lexy had dozed off, her body tense but her mind ceasing its whirling fury.
Even sleeping, she was Farris opaque. He was just minutes before Turnover himself, and knew his wan appetite would vanish after that point. So he set his wet boots by the fire, and propped his feet up to bask in the heat while he nibbled at the enormous repast on one of the trays.
As Lexy’s sleep deepened, he pulled her boots off, dried her feet and wrapped her in wool blankets, letting his nager sing her body a lullaby of Gen steadiness. He knew, even asleep, she was zlinning right through his showfield, but whatever she found inside him, it didn’t disturb her.
Then she was crying in her sleep. Her nager clearly indicated she was deeply asleep, beneath the level of out of body wandering or dreams. Her breath came in little gasps and her eyes overflowed with tears and she shivered uncontrollably.
He built up the fire again, but seeing and zlinning no pathology but the impossible weight of emotion, he didn’t know what to do. So he followed his heart. He stripped off his own clothes, wriggled under the covers with her and freed her icy body of her own damp clothing.
Skin to skin, in the now familiar embrace they’d shared right after transfer, she stopped shivering but it took longer for the hiccupping sobs to abate. Then he realized she was awake. His time sense told him it had been nearly three hours since she’d cried herself to sleep.
Her head was nestled on his shoulder, fitted right beneath his collarbone. Unbelievably, he was responding to the wondrous feel of her in his arms, of his tentacles caressing her back, of her legs bent around his. His response cultivated a welcoming reaction in her.
They’d had sex before. It had been wonderful, but really just sex. This was something else. This was coming to them both from above the body’s yearning. Solamar decided his soul was aroused.
He surrendered, opening and relaxing into it, letting it take him to some place he’d never been before. Senses he’d never known existed came alive and drove him into a reality where he saw himself as one soul in two bodies, one heart with two minds.
Release came to them both as a long, sweet, gentle wave of warmth culminating in little aching spasms of completion. Physical awareness emerged when he felt Lexy’s uterine spasms working out against his abdomen.
It hadn’t been anything like the hard, driving passion and flaring bodily orgasm normal to Postsyndrome. When it was over, he held her close and whispered, “I don’t think I ever had sex while totally hyperconscious before.”
“Me neither. Solamar?” She struggled free and leaned up on one elbow to look down at him. “Solamar! That was Turnover for you! You had sex with me when you were in Turnover! I don’t believe it!”
A quick inventory of his own condition told him Need now ate at his vitals, thrumming that muted panic through mind, body and soul.
She flopped down, sprawled over his chest and ran her fingers through his hair, then laid her face against his chest again. “Let’s try to do that again sometime. I’d like to know how it feels from the other side.”
“Any time you like,” he said fighting an overwhelming desire to sleep.
“You should move in here. It’d be handier.”
“It would. I will.” Feeling like the most special man in the universe, he fell asleep twining her thick hair around his tentacles while cradling the back of her head in the palm of his hand. She drifted away with him.
He woke late the next morning having slept nearly six hours straight through. He sat bolt upright alone in Lexy’s bed, jolted awake with a gasp, or maybe a voiceless scream.
He knew that falling sensation. He’d returned to his body. He remembered grayness swirling around the fiery gemstone pattern of Rimon’s belt. The belt was curled tightly in on itself, buckle inwards, and surrounded with a haze that might have been cloth. The image, however, carried an unmistakable vibrancy.
He’s alive! The stones would not produce that searing glow if Rimon were dead.
They would glow like that even if he weren’t wearing the belt. So if he wasn’t wearing the belt, why wasn’t he wandering around out of his body and easily findable? I’ll never understand Rimon Farris.
Against odds, Rimon Farris had survived what would have buried any other channel. Against all reason, Solamar had experienced Turnover while in orgasm with a pregnant Farris channel and something truly odd had happened to him. Against everything Solamar knew about the ability to leave the body, Rimon Farris had acquired the ability just from joining nagerically with him to create an illusion strong enough to stop Freeband Raiders in mid-battle. Then, without any tutelage, Rimon had spontaneously summoned other entities, maybe ghosts, manipulated the fabric of the non-material body to heal the physical body, and had even traversed the infinite.
The two Farris channels he knew functioned in ways no other channel he’d ever heard of did. Everyone else who could do any of these things had acquired the skills only after decades of concerted effort. They were so rare, many people were skeptical that such things ever did or could happen, though Solamar had personally witnessed all this.
With that realization, all that he’d observed of Rimon and Lexy came together for him into a new pattern. The Farrises aren’t just a family of outstanding channels. The Farris is a totally different kind of person, as different from channels as Simes are from Gens.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
GRAVE ROBBING
Rimon’s funeral was a disaster.
The rain was frigid and incessant, the ground was soft mud, the grave hole collapsed on itself taking the grave monument with it, the clouds were so thick the sun seemed to have set a good half hour early, and the Council could barely read their speeches in the dark to a soggy crowd of less than a third of the Fort’s residents.
Alind was halfway through his speech when the people at the lower end of the area noticed they were suddenly ankle deep in water and fled uphill to the Fort’s cemetery gate, quickly followed by everyone else.
At that time, Solamar was ensconced in the channels’ recovery room letting Kahleen eat dinner from the buffet while he expounded his new theory about Farris channels. Val, BanSha, Fengal who still wasn’t back for duty, a couple of channels from Fort Unity and one from Fort Veritt and their Companions all listened with rapt attention.
During his impassioned explanation, Xanon and Maigrey arrived, drenched, muddy to the ankles and walking in their socks. Kahleen handed them glasses of hot trin tea, without even asking what had happened at the funeral. Oddly, Xanon listened as Solamar paced and embroidered on his theme. Maigrey nursed her tea and nodded.
Others came in to dry out by the fire and fell silent to listen. Solamar realized he’d found the explanation for the observations that irked people. Pleased, he fell silent. People started talking at once. Then they took turns dredging up incidents that confirmed his theory that there were Gens, Simes, channels and Farrises.
The Companions debated whether that meant Companions would then be recognizably different.
Consensus grew that if you didn’t count the Farris channels as just channels, then things began to make sense; the killingly intense pre-natal selyn draw that set the Farris channels apart, the incredible sensitivity to selyn fields, the precision control of any ambient around them, the vast Need that could be handled only by a few Companions, but most especially that totally impenetrable Farris nager.
BanSha said to the Council supporters who’d clustered by the fire, “If it’s not a trick to keep people from zlinning the truth, if they can’t help being impenetrable, then maybe they aren’t always hiding something. How would you feel if people who can’t zlin you always thought you were lying?”
Argument erupted all over the now full room. Everyone was explaining Solamar’s theory to newcomers, and not exactly getting it the way Solamar had explained.
They were, however, talking to each other, and for the first time he could remember, certain of these channels were not dismissing Rimon and Lexy as merely fearful of losing the power grip they’d always had on Fort Rimon. They were actually thinking like channeling staffers, and so distracted by it that they forgot how wet and muddy they were.
Solamar sat and propped his feet up to the fire, marveling at how Xanon listened to those who had agreed with him now questioning the core of his premise.
Eventually though the cleared time in the schedule was over and Val shooed people off to get cleaned up and get to work. The story of what had happened at the staged funeral was told and retold and grew in the telling.
Solamar, worked to a frazzle, retreated to Rimon’s favorite spot on the walls at sunrise and found that the flood that had cut Rimon’s funeral short had grown. Water now surrounded the Fort’s hill, knee to hip deep, and still poured over the banks of the river. Rimon had chosen the right place for his Fort.
The flood lasted six days. The first few hours, while Solamar had been working, others had gathered the livestock into the Fort in makeshift corrals. Then they sat around the dining hall telling stories of previous floods.
Solamar talked with the renSimes who came to him for transfer, and was informed that this happened every year for two or three days. However, as days passed with no way to send rescuers after Rimon, even Fort Rimon natives began to worry.
Kaires, the tracker who’d found the Gen captive’s note, commented, after her transfer, “Just imagine how bad this flood would be if the Gens had burned off the hills around us! That could happen naturally some year. Be glad we’re up this high.”
Solamar reported every development to Tuzhel, visiting him with Lexy and on his own three or four times a day. They had moved him to a room with three little slits for windows, up high near the ceiling. Pacing, fretting and miserable with approaching crisis, Tuzhel’s only distraction seemed to be tales of the Council’s doings. So Solamar always brought plenty of news to report or discuss.
One afternoon, when Tuzhel was glum, Solamar offered, “Now I see why Rimon fought the Council so hard to keep the yard free of houses! He wasn’t being unreasonable or meddling outside his area of authority.”
He sketched on a slate to show Tuzhel how deep the water was around the Fort and how cramped the animal pens were even with the yard area expanded. Now the yard was filled with split log fences, penning the animals that had wintered on the flat below. The chickens, geese, and rabbits had makeshift huts. The noise and smell was bothersome, especially to the pregnant women, but the wealth of the Fort was preserved without hazard to their health.
Not only that, but the animal waste was used to fertilize the two garden plots, one next to the dining hall and the other nestled in the L made by the Dispensary and Collectorium buildings. They even created a new garden plot on the side of the Dispensary facing the Fort’s wall to give those windows and the infirmary windows a nice view and help feed their increased Gen population.
The adventures of those caring for the animals almost brought a smile to the Need-crazed ex-Raider’s lips.
Rimon had wanted fruit trees planted inside the Fort, for food and shade. Sketching where the trees should go kept Tuzhel occupied for nearly an hour. Turned out he especially liked watching wild deer eating windfall pears because of the silly, blissful expressions the animals wore. Seeing that again was something to live for.
Lexy and Solamar brought Tuzhel a sketch by Bekka of what the Fort would look like with fruit trees in bloom. They hung it on the wall of his bleak little room.
During the flood, sheep shearing continued, buildings were finished, carding and dyeing of the wool began though most of the idle labor force gathered in groups to talk politics. Usually, they flew apart in disagreement when there wasn’t a channel to manage the fields. As Sime tempers heated, many Gens began avoiding public places when they were high field.
Jhiti held three alert drills to drain off some of that nervous energy. Solamar and Lexy had the duty of escorting Tuzhel to the underground shelter and controlling him.
Lexy followed her f
ather’s routine during the flood days of stepping up the Collectorium schedule to take down the fields of the Gens before they became a serious irritant, thus spurring their selyn production for next month but providing all the renSimes some relief from Gen nerves.
So all the channels were working hard and holding too much selyn in their secondary systems, causing fatigue. And that meant they spent more time than usual sitting around just talking.
At one of their visits to Tuzhel, Lexy and Solamar described the ebb and flow of discontent in the Fort. More and more were chafing at the Council’s edict to abandon Rimon while some plotted rescue. Jhiti still had not agreed to send the Fort Guard to Shifron.
For those six days of flood, Tuzhel’s room often became the site of a bull session between the channels and Companions about Solamar’s Farris theory. Tuzhel inserted comments about BanSha’s awesome zlinning ability.
The fourth day of the flood when observers reported the waters had begun to subside, Val and her Companion Merie were on duty with Tuzhel along with Fengal and Aislinn. Lexy and Solamar made one of their frequent short stops. Solamar used these visits as an excuse to get her off her feet and to send Kahleen and Garen to eat.
Often Bruce accompanied them but not on this visit. He was working with Benart and Sian to engineer a new Council election without telling the current Council about it until the very last moment.
Lexy pointed out to Val that as soon as the ground firmed, teams would be plowing the existing fields and pulling stumps in the expansion zone, tending the vines and trin bushes on the terraces, burning selyn profligately day and night and taking extra transfers.
Tuzhel loved the idea of augmenting and getting extra transfers. Lexy informed him that it would be years before Rimon could safely let him do that.
“Rimon doesn’t rule here anymore,” he replied sullenly. “And neither do you!”
The Farris Channel Page 28
