To the Stars -- And Beyond

by Robert Reginald

  Edith leaned back. “No doubt,” she said.

  THE CHANNEL’S EXEMPTION:

  A SIME~GEN STORY

  by Jacqueline Lichtenberg

  Look at you! Yone Farris berated himself. You can’t even take your eyes off her!

  To his left and a few strides ahead marched Livya Jeter, her ponytail bobbing over the tantalizing swell of her hips. You’ve got a full scale Imprintation if ever I saw one!

  For the last three months, Yone Farris had guided the band of shipwrecked Gens, his mutant Sime senses unfailingly alert. But now, he no longer noticed the sun-speckled forest around them, or the ominous cracking roar that grew ahead of them. Stop dramatizing! he told himself. It’s simply Coital Deprivation.

  The column of ordinary humans, the Gens, depending on Yone’s far-reaching Sime senses, followed him right up under the falling tree while he argued with himself.

  So why don’t any of the other women do this to you? Well...but if it’s Imprintation, there’s only one thing to do. Right! Explain it to her and get it over with. Can’t. She’s a Sime-phobe like her mother. Dozen reasons why she’s untouchable. Face it! You’ve got the CD’s and an Imprintation too. Plead Channel’s Exemption and just take her! It doesn’t apply. She’s underage. She doesn’t have to consent. You’re a channel. You’re exempt. There isn’t a planet under Earth’s dominion where you can be tried for rape! You can do it right this minute. No! Few more months and we’ll be back in civilization. I can hold out that long.

  Yone tried to quell the voice of temptation by moving closer to Brian Inikar, one of the Gens walking point, off to his right. But the argument continued in his mind, absorbing his whole attention.

  Imprintation is the channel’s affliction, he scolded himself. You were born a channel, a special kind of Sime with special problems. You can’t help what you are! I can always help it! I am what I choose to be! You can’t always choose. What if she just brushed against you now? It’s not like selyn Need. I can control it. Yeah. You can control yourself right into an early grave and everybody else here right along with you!

  At that point Yone finally saw the shadow blotting out the alien sun, and simultaneously the Gens around him also looked up to see the wall of living wood majestically descending. Behind him, shrill cries erupted from the children; women’s screams joined them, and the deeper male voices rose over the panic yelling, “Scatter!”

  Without thinking, Yone grabbed Brian Inikar and pushed him toward the column of Gens. “Move them to the right!”

  Then Yone braced his feet wide apart and raised his arms as if to take the entire weight of the tree on his bare hands.

  Yone was built like the typical Sime, spare-framed, delicate looking, but incredibly tough. Yet no mere human flesh and bone, however mutated, could stop that tree. He had to draw on the one thing that differentiated him from the Gens, and he was the only Sime among them, the only one with tentacles to do this job.

  From the orifices at each wrist, he extended the six tentacles that usually lay sheathed along each of his forearms from elbow to wrist. Flexing them, he touched the tips of his fingers with each of the dorsal and ventral pairs. Then the two slender laterals at the sides of each arm stiffened as he threw selyn—the very energy of life itself—into his secondary nervous system and out through the four nerve-rich lateral tentacles.

  It felt as if he were focusing four beams of psychokinetic power through those delicate laterals. And for an instant, the tree actually slowed in its fall and hung over their heads. He could see the deep, regular expansion cracks in the bark, the festoons of dirty cobwebs, the trails of insects, the runnels of dripping pink sap. It was a wall that filled the universe.

  His feet sank into the matted forest floor as if it were loose sand. He strengthened his body by consuming selyn at one hundred times his basal metabolic rate, a “tenth-level Augmentation,” and he knew he couldn’t maintain it for more than a few seconds.

  In one final burst of determination, Yone thrust the majestic tree to the left of their path as far as he could—only a few degrees—and prayed the others would be clear by the time the tree landed. Then he turned to sprint, with the last burst of augmentation left in him, out from under the trunk.

  He had gone three steps before his racing brain told him that Livya Jeter was standing hypnotized in the path of the tree. Skidding wildly, he turned and raced back for her, caught her up over his shoulder, and raced again to get clear.

  Amid a final crescendo, the tree settled to the floor of the forest, taking many lesser growths with it. One of the upper branches, as thick as a man’s upper arm, slapped across Yone’s backside and sent him rolling with his burden into a tangle of leaves and twigs around a lower branch.

  They came to rest between two of the giant’s fallen limbs, buried in musty-smelling, bruised leaves, and for a moment both lay stunned senseless.

  Then Yone became acutely aware of the soft Gen body lying on his chest, of his arms encircling the hips he had so ached to touch. The scent of her hair overpowered the staleness of crushed leaves. The warmth of her beat through him deliciously reviving his seared nerves with that peculiar power only the Gen had. Only the Gen body could generate selyn, and even though Livya had never donated selyn, as she lay there senseless from shock, her body throbbed with the life of it.

  Yone was not in personal Need of selyn, but he had just expended nearly the entire reserve he’d gathered painstakingly from the forty-four general class donors among the survivors. The pulse of newly created selyn he sensed in her body was balm to sorely scorched nerves. He let his lips touch her cheek, seek her lips. His laterals, usually used only in drawing selyn from the Gen body, caressed her skin through several large rents in her clothing.

  The Sime empathic faculty opened her body to him, and he could sense not only the reviving throb of selyn production, but each and every ache, strained muscle, cut, and bruised organ. He knew that by direct-sensing that made Sime physicians supreme diagnosticians, that she was unhurt by the fall and would soon wake. He also knew that she was physically and emotionally a virgin.

  The touch of his lips on hers changed from the coolly impersonal Sime contact. It became a kiss that rose from his loins and flowed inward from his limbs. His whole body was responding to the total presence of her, and he was already growing and searching with the urgency that flooded him. Now!

  She was still only semi-conscious. He could tell by the total lack of response to what he was doing. There was no feedback, as there must be for a channel to accomplish this purpose. When she wakes, I’ll get her to cooperate. It will only take a moment.

  He heard his thought and suddenly it wrenched a moan from him. No! It’s not right! It must be her will!

  He shook with the negation that coursed down from his mind, ramming into the upward surging culmination of desire.

  No! I am a Farris. I am a channel. I swore to obey the Tecton’s Principles of Action.

  He had taken the channel’s oath to the Tecton, and he would not let his body violate that oath. My body is mine! I control!

  Painfully, he forced himself back from the brink of instant release, accepting the anguish of frustration and making his peace with it. And he was not enraged when she refused to accept his heroic deed graciously.

  She came to her senses to find herself gripped by his rock-tense but tender embrace, to find herself being kissed deep and hard as she had never been kissed before. Her soft, yielding body stiffened. Her peculiarly Gen fear lanced through Yone’s unshielded laterals, hit him in the pit of the stomach.

  And Yone was Sime. The reflex her fear touched off was even more deep-seated than the one he had just conquered. Aggression they called it, Sime Aggression. The Sime mutation was nature’s most perfectly equipped predator, and the prey was the Gen. But Yone was also a channel, the one type of Sime able to control that aggression. He forced his shaking arms apart and rolled her, squirming and flailing, onto the carpet of leaves.

  But eve
n being a channel, he had to get away from the fear emanating from her or succumb to it and strip her of her selyn. His last inner resources were depleted.

  Half rising, he plunged over the next lower limb of the fallen tree, wavered a few more steps, stumbled and fetched up hard against a greater limb. Stunned, he lay gasping, sweat soaking through his trail-worn Astrogator’s uniform, unaware that he was shaking from head to toe with one spasmodic fit after another.

  I did it. I got away from her. It’s going to be all right now. I did it. Nothing worse can possibly happen. I did it.

  By the time some other Gen reached Yone’s side, the channel was oblivious to all but that one saving thought. I did it.

  Yone was unaware that he was being tended by a Gen whose expert fingers and analytical eyes had been trained by Distect Simes, conspirators dedicated to destroying the Tecton. He knew only that it was a male Gen near him, and so he was safe from that awful temptation that still lived in him. The Gen who worked on him now knew no fear, so he was safe from that reflex too. This Gen soothed his raw nerves with an emotional nager of compassion, concern, and perhaps a tart bit of criticism, which was as it should be. Yone knew he’d behaved abominably.

  It was close to an hour before Yone was able to grip the memory that, here on this forsaken Beacon Planet, on this long trek across uncharted wilderness toward an emergency call beacon that might not even function, there was no Tecton-trained Gen Donor, no First Order Donor schooled to serve First Order channels such as Yone Farris.

  His only Donor was Valyu Alamain, an earnest young man barely half-trained to serve the lowest order channels, and no match for Yone’s needs. Then who was this Gen?

  No sooner had he asked that question than, to his utter horror, he could answer it.

  Brian Inikar. Convict. Being transported with his wife and child to the planet of exile where the Tecton sent all Distect conspirators. In the press of minute-to-minute survival after the crash, such social distinctions had lost importance. The six convicts had saved many lives, lent aid where needed, but always had the prudence to keep strictly away from the one and only Sime among the survivors. Too many of the Tecton’s most loyal channels had succumbed to the mysterious lure of the Distect after a brief encounter with a Distect Gen. Nobody knew why.

  As if rising from the depths of the blackest ocean, Yone fought his way toward full consciousness, warding off the aid he had been so gratefully accepting. He knew that Brian’s Distect-trained empathic touch had already saved his life. The Gen’s whole nervous system had slipped into perfect resonance with Yone’s, bespeaking a level of skill Yone had not been exposed to for more than four months.

  On the edge of full consciousness, Yone fell back, spent. I’d forgotten how good it can be!

  The Sime uses selyn; the Gen creates it. Without the Gens to supply that energy, the Sime faces the bleak cold death of Attrition. During those days when Need grew and his system ached to function, even the channels who store vast quantities of extra selyn look into that cold abyss and know deep-diving terrors beyond Gen comprehension. At that time in their physiologic cycle, the Simes’ libido is totally paralyzed, but instantly when Need is satisfied, that paralyzed sensitivity blooms again, the more intense for the hiatus. The cycle is most pronounced in the higher level channels such as Yone Farris.

  Even under Alamain’s care, Yone had been ruled by it. Now he looked into a future of alternating tortures—two weeks of the CD’s within arm’s reach of Livya Jeter, then two weeks of increasing Need within reach of Brian Inikar. But maybe, thought Yone, there’s still time to break the hold he’s got on me.

  Meanwhile, Livya Jeter dragged herself away from the limb over which Yone had half-fallen, and white with shock, she managed to struggle to her feet. Then Cheryl Inikar, Brian’s wife, reached her side, made her sit for a time with her head between her knees.

  As Livya’s color returned to its normal, healthy brown, Cheryl encouraged her to talk. “Tell it, honey, tell it all. You’ll feel better to get it out.” The Inikars were from In Brim, while Livya and her mother were from Port Alon, but they all sprang from the same Terran stock—Sime and Gen alike shared the same mind, the mind of Man. The cultural differences were vast, but Cheryl might have been for those moments Livya’s big sister as she held her and listened to her stuttering tale.

  “I was so frightened! You’ve no idea how strong a Sime is! He could have crushed my ribs to powder! And I could feel his tentacles all over my back, and his tongue...uhh!”

  “Easy Livya, it’s over now. Calm down and think. You’re a woman, you ought to be able to tell. You just described how he was kissing you. Honey, that’s not a transfer contact kind of kiss. He wasn’t looking to take selyn from you! He wanted you to feel that what he was doing was good, but when you responded with fear, you undid him. But, Baby, listen, the next time he—”

  Livya rose, knees still shaky but forced to lock her upright. The realization of Cheryl’s meaning struck a new note of horror. “Ther...there isn’t going to be a next time. What do you think I am, some sort of prostitute? So maybe he can claim the Channel’s Exemption, but there’s no court of law anywhere that could make me! He has no rights over me!”

  “He asks no more of you than you have stolen from him!”

  “Stolen! You’re the one who’s the convicted criminal, not me. You’re the one who sells your body to any Sime who asks for it! Why don’t you go play with him!”

  Before Cheryl could deny that rumored Distect behavior, Livya caught her breath and went on, cold and fiercely brutal. “If that Sime tries to rape me again, so help me I’ll kill him.”

  Cheryl drew breath for a scathing retort, but then let it out wearily. “You won’t have to. He’s Tecton and Farris. He’ll kill himself to keep from touching you against your will. That’s what your precious Tecton stands for, the sacrifice of the noblest channels to the whim of the non-Donors.”

  A new voice joined them. “Distect whore!” They both turned to find Evelyn Jeter picking her way through the branches toward them. “Get away from my daughter, or I’ll do the killing shoulda been done to you a year ago!”

  Mrs. Jeter wasn’t old enough to be called spry, but she still retained the lean, wiry build of her vanished youth. At first, Cheryl stood her ground, drawn to her full height as if to launch thunderbolts of rage. But then she gathered a cool self-control around her, and retreated toward the knot of people gathering and counting themselves beside the top of the tree.

  “Mother!” Livya greeted suddenly when they were alone. Apparently, it had just now occurred to her that her mother had been in danger too.

  “What’s this about rape, Liv? Did that Sime get his slimy tentacles on you?”

  “They’re...,” she started, and then tossed a thoughtful glance toward the screen of leaves that cut her off from the channel. “They’re not slimy, Mother.” She let herself drop onto the leaves.

  Lost now in a calmer reliving of the incident, Livya just stared round-eyed at the barrier of leaves. What she had learned of Simes in school was sparse, but she did know that channels were a secondary mutation from the Sime type, and required a lot of special handling. That was the province of the highly trained Technical Class Donors.

  “I’m no Donor, Mother, but—”

  “Well, I certainly hope not! Those professional donors are little better than prostitutes!”

  “Mother, this is no time for hysteria. I have to think!” She rose and took a step toward the wall of leaves, hands clasped together at her waist, face contorted with the effort to overcome her shock and think coherently. “I’m no Donor, but he kept himself from hurting me.”

  “Well, that’s a relief! Then he didn’t actually do it?”

  “He almost did, but he stopped himself. I couldn’t break loose, he let me go. Mama,” she said, eyes fixed on the wall between her and Yone. “Are all channels like...him?”

  Mrs. Jeter got to her feet and went around in front of Livya to take her shoul
ders and shake her gently, “Oh, Liv, baby, what has he done to you? The Channel’s Exemption is law, so we can’t sue that filthy beast for trying to do that. But we can hate him for it. The Simes can’t endure hate. If you hate them enough, they’ll stay away from you.”

  “Hate? Mama, he could have done with me whatever he wanted, and he had the legal right to do it, but he did not. He let me go by an act of will over—” She groped for a word. “—over want. How can I hate a man with that kind of strength?”

  “There’s not much else to do, Liv. It’s your only protection.”

  Livya twisted free and backed up. “Maybe there’s nothing else you could do, but what do you think he would do in the same situation? Just sit in a hole paralyzed with fear and hatred?”

  “He’s a Sime. What has he got to fear? Or hate?”

  “He’s a Man, an incredibly powerful human being. He chose not to do what he wanted to do. I don’t know his reason, but I’m sure he had a reason, and he followed it even though it hurt him. I’ve never known you to do anything like that.”

  Mrs. Jeter shook her head wearily. Livya still looked a little pale around the lips, and her fingers were cold. “I don’t know what’s gotten into you, Liv, but I’m going to ask Mr. Flick for protection. That Sime won’t be able to get near you alone.”

  “That’s what you always do, run and hide behind somebody’s ‘protection.’ I don’t need anybody to protect me, least of all from a man like Yone Farris!”

  “From a man, maybe not, but from a slimy snake of a—”

  “Once and for all, Mother, I’m telling you that I felt them and they...ARE...NOT...SLIMY!” Her words came out a fierce whisper though she wanted to shout. She’d been told so often that the Sime tentacles were slimy that, at first, she had felt slime. Only later had she been able to calm down and analyze the sensation. Her choking anger was in part at her mother for the untruth, and in part at herself for being fooled by it.