The Farris Channel: Sime~Gen, Book Twelve

by Jacqueline Lichtenberg

  Currently, the nightshift workers were digging post holes on the opposite side of the Fort, and the loggers were working way out beyond the cemetery. Behind him, inside the Fort, the factory was bustling. The wainwright was building more wagons, Sian was at his loom turning out fine wool cloth for underwear while his weavers made blankets.

  The school building was inhabited by families, some three and four families to a school room, but the section of the building dedicated to laundry had three smoking chimneys. Laundry had become a round the clock endeavor.

  Rimon faced outwards toward the cemetery and the logging crews far up in the hills behind the cemetery. He zlinned the hills cupping the cemetery like a treasure, yielding up the tallest trees of the hardest woods.

  Will we all be buried in that cemetery? Will any of this ever have meaning?

  Before his eyes, the dark grew misty, smeared with dizzy whirls, then lightened.

  * * * * * * *

  He faced a huge amphitheater with rows of seats stretching to the sky and beyond, more people than could ever be alive in the world at once.

  He was standing behind a lectern holding a strangely bound book open in one hand. He saw Lexy, Aipensha, Benart, Garath, Bruce, his wife, his father, all his family and more he didn’t know how he knew.

  Behind him were arrayed a huge collection of great magical lanterns illuminating brightly colored, shining objects with what could only be selyn fields. Lanterns can’t do that. Except...these did.

  There was the symbol Slina, the legendary Pen Keeper who had befriended Fort Freedom, had woven into the quilt she’d made for Delri when he was born.

  He recognized the rock upon which the names of the martyrs of Fort Freedom had been inscribed, crumbled and broken but still familiar.

  He knew he was not on Earth.

  He knew he was about to declare Rimon Farris’s dream fully realized. He knew the long hard journey would finish not in triumph but in a success so absolute it wasn’t recognizable as success. Nobody here had ever zlinned or met a junct.

  He swallowed hard and began, as he somehow knew that thousands of parents for thousands of generations had begun.

  “This is the Ideal of Zeor.

  “This is the Heart of Zeor.

  “This is the Spirit of Zeor.

  “This is the Reality of Zeor.”

  He opened the great volume he had written with his own hand and began to read in a voice strangely not his own.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CONFESSIONS

  “Solamar, where’s Rimon?” asked Bruce’s wife, Dayyel, as she served honey cake all around.

  Solamar started to gesture east where Rimon spent so much time zlinning Fremir Pass, but Rimon wasn’t there. Then he found the immense Farris nager, and gestured northwest. “On the wall.” Rimon’s nager was dimmed, focused outwards.

  “Bruce,” she said, “why don’t you take him some cake. He may not want to eat any, but he’ll know we’re celebrating because of him.”

  Bruce was holding his new grandson on his lap, glowing with the joy of it all.

  Solamar said, “I was going to go outside anyway, so why don’t I take it to him? Kahleen, you should stay and eat. We have late shift tonight.” It was long past time he talked with Rimon about what he’d done to the Farris when they forced that transfer into Tuzhel.

  Kahleen, her mouth full, answered with a gentle nageric glow of gratitude.

  Solamar added, “Meet me at the Dispensary then.” He rose, gathered the cake, which Bruce’s wife wrapped in a cloth, and tickled the baby under the chin. The answering gurgle captured his heart for all time. Home. This is home. It was an astonishing discovery he’d been making three times a day since he arrived.

  Solamar wove through the sprawling party, saying hello to those he knew, accepting introductions to those he didn’t. There were only a few Tanhara people at this Fort Rimon event, but Solamar was amazed how many of Rimon’s people he already knew well.

  The happiness in this room is intoxicating. He made it to the back door into the storage area, the exit nearest the building that housed channels’ rooms attached to the infirmary. He crossed the narrow alley between buildings, went up past the room he shared with Rimon, on into the infirmary, past Rimon’s office and out the door by the new latrine next to the stair closest to Rimon.

  That was when he zlinned the anomaly. Well, no, not zlinned exactly. It was another sense entirely perceiving this. Where Rimon had been was only a vast whirling hole of non-energy, a holiday in existence, or a singularity where selyn stood still. It was the impossible made real.

  Oh, no! Energized by frantic guilt, Solamar flew up the stair and raced along the narrow catwalk, praying, “No, no, I can’t be the cause of this!”

  He skidded to a halt and knelt beside the prone form on the walkway, the thick cloak covering the Farris body, selyn frozen in mid-pulse in both the channel’s systems. Rimon wasn’t dead. The selyn was not dissipating as it would from a corpse, yet not pulsing and circulating as with a living being. For Rimon Farris, time had stopped.

  He knew it was an illusion caused by his point of view, but it seemed real. Closing his eyes, shutting down his own Sime senses, Solamar groped for the image of the world around him, limned in shimmering otherlight that was not energy or substance. He found it and the state of mind necessary to follow the thin silvery cable that still led from Rimon’s body through the anomaly to where he had gone.

  Solamar found himself in a huge amphitheater, filled with people listening to Rimon read. With all his training and experience in the realm of nowhere, Solamar still took far too long to realize Rimon had leaped into his own future self, reborn to a time when mankind spanned the stars.

  It’ll be all right, Solamar told himself, if he doesn’t remember this.

  Rimon raised his eyes and locked gazes with Solamar, recognition clear. Every other time Rimon had become aware of Solamar’s presence in a vision, the Farris had returned skittish and unstrung, obviously remembering it.

  Not daring to consider further, Solamar reached out with hands, tentacles and spirit, twisted Rimon’s shining tether around his hands and sought his own body, diving through time, space and otherwhere, dragging his disoriented and terrified passenger with him, tumbling, whirling, spinning down and down until he let go and....

  “Solamar! Solamar!”

  Gasping in a huge lungful of icy air, Solamar pushed himself off Rimon’s limp body. Selyn once again pulsed through both the channel’s systems. The heart beat.

  Bruce skidded along the catwalk shouting, “Solamar!”

  Solamar called, “He’s all right! Be careful!”

  The two renSime guards, approaching from either direction along the catwalk, halted at Solamar’s command, and Bruce slid to a stop, breathed, focused and approached with his fields in better order. “What happened?”

  “He’s coming around. You have to help me get him inside. He’s taken a bad chill.”

  That would not do for an answer, Solamar knew.

  At last Rimon gasped and began to struggle upright, projecting panic, terror and a bone shattering cold into the ambient. Solamar waved the renSime guards back and covered with his own showfield as best he could.

  Had Rimon not been in Need, he could never have overridden the nageric chaos the Farris was producing.

  It only lasted a few moments as Bruce offered a steady field, as if working to offset a psychospatial disorientation, inserting Rimon back to the here and now.

  Solamar let himself ride on Bruce’s wonderful field too, his head still whirling from the fall into his body.

  “What happened?” asked Rimon.

  “Let’s get you warm first,” said Solamar, “then we’ll compare notes.” They got Rimon to his feet. He was shaking so hard he could barely stand.

  They took Rimon to the room they shared in shifts, having BanSha build up the fire and fetch trin tea from the dining hall. They wrapped Rimon in the quilt off the bed, sat him on t
he edge of the bed and put his feet in a basin of warm water. Solamar was struck by the size of this man. The baby quilt center of the design barely covered both shoulder blades, but with the extension all around the original quilt, it wrapped all the way around him.

  All the while the channel shivered and shook, teeth chattering too hard for him to talk. Bruce sat on the floor beside Rimon, massaging his legs. Nobody said the word frostbite but Rimon’s hands and feet were white, the paleness extending to elbows and knees. The tepid water felt searingly hot to him.

  Rimon finished a glass of tea, sighed and stopped shaking. His eyes locked with Solamar’s seeking answers to the questions he couldn’t ask.

  Solamar nodded. “I left the party to bring you some of the luscious cake Dayyel made. When I came out the door of the infirmary I zlinned something wrong with your fields. So I ran up the stairs. I think I dropped the cake somewhere. You were unconscious on the catwalk.”

  Bruce was doing his best to be part of the furniture, his massive field oozing his own fears for Rimon. “I don’t know why I came out too. It was just that I suddenly had to see that you were all right.”

  “I wasn’t,” said Rimon hoarsely.

  Bruce asked, “I felt...I must have done something wrong. I felt I had to be with you, that maybe you Needed transfer right away. I couldn’t sit still. What happened?”

  Though he was zlinning his Companion, Rimon’s eyes were still locked to Solamar’s. “I don’t know, but something is wrong with me.”

  Solamar said into Bruce’s sense of horror, “Not wrong but new, a change. Rimon, I’ve seen things like this before. It can be dangerous, but there are ways to deal with it.”

  “What is it?” demanded Bruce.

  Rimon accused, “You are doing it to me!”

  Solamar dropped his showfield so Rimon could zlin his primary field clearly. “No, I’m not doing it to you. But I did do something to you that started this happening, and I think I know how to help you get control of it.”

  “And what exactly is it?” Bruce demanded again.

  “You haven’t told him?” asked Solamar.

  “Not yet,” admitted Rimon. “I meant to.”

  “Told me what?” fretted Bruce, his staid pose of being a piece of the wall deteriorating. Even the smallest deviation affected both channels harshly because the Gen was replete with selyn, ready for Rimon’s transfer.

  Solamar kept his attention away from Bruce. “I apologize. I’m very sorry this is happening and I should have said something a lot sooner, but I was hoping it would just subside on its own. Usually it does.”

  “What is it?” insisted Bruce, and this time the insistence was in his nager, filling the room with demand.

  Rimon turned his own attention inward, his showfield hardening to impenetrability.

  “Rimon has been losing touch with his body.”

  “What?” asked Bruce.

  “That’s a good description of what just happened,” allowed Rimon, “but it doesn’t cover it all. Bruce, I’ve been seeing ghosts. Like my father did. I saw Aipensha with my father at the funeral. She was out among the trees, standing there with hordes of our dead around her, trying to tell me her death wasn’t my fault. Only it was. I led her up out of the underground shelter.”

  “Ghosts....” repeated Bruce, worried.

  “I saw them too,” said Solamar. “I didn’t know who they were, but I saw and heard just what Rimon did. He was not hallucinating. He is not insane. He is not losing his mind. What happened to him is real. It has happened to other channels who went on to live long healthy lives.” Such as my father. How will I ever be able to tell him what I’ve done to Rimon Farris?

  Rimon shook his head. “When we were forcing a transfer into Tuzhel in the shelter, I felt my father standing over me, teaching me how to do it. When I was healing Sian, well that was different. You were there too, only you weren’t. You said you were asleep, so I must have wakened you by what I did to Sian. But how?

  “Then today when Wade was born, it was different. Solamar, I was a Gen doing something with metal, some kind of magic but I understood it! Then my father rebuked me, and I was someone else inventing a healing functional, and then you were there scolding me. I became a ghost, some time else! It happened again on the wall only worse, in some far future where there are no juncts at all and you were there too, watching me. What happened!”

  He’s rambling around in time, the future, our future. He could ruin everything because he remembers more than any untrained wanderer would.

  “Rimon, things like this started happening to me during First Year. I was just lucky. I was taught to control it. I can teach you. It doesn’t have to be something that happens to you. It can become something you do or not do as you choose.”

  “How could you have made this happen to me?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never heard of such a thing. On the other hand, I’ve never done anything like what you and I did on the wall during the battle. Maybe that started it, but when we worked on Tuzhel together in the shelter....”

  “My father was there, showing me how to do it. Solamar, my father is dead. But he was there. A ghost. And you were a ghost!”

  “I’m alive,” protested Solamar.

  “I’d have thought so,” said Rimon.

  Bruce blew the fields. “Rimon, your father....”

  Solamar damped the fields. “Bruce, Rimon’s not crazy. He’s wrestling with a new perception of the world, like he’s learning to zlin.”

  “I wish I could believe that,” Rimon, hugged his quilt around him.

  Solamar realized the quilt was a heavy ward. Inside it, Rimon felt safe from his new perception, and that could make him way too bold with it. What have I done?

  “If it were true, why would you be so afraid of me?”

  Solamar’s laugh exploded out of him, blowing off the tension. The Farris had misread his nager. “No, Rimon, not afraid of you, afraid for you. And guilty. I’ve never felt so guilty before. I’ve got to make things right with you.”

  At last, Bruce relaxed back into his imitation of the furniture. At the relief, both channels sighed, and Rimon said, “So I am going crazy and you want to save my sanity.”

  “Not crazy,” insisted Solamar. “But exploring this new ability randomly, could be fatal.” Not just for Rimon!

  “I’m not doing it on purpose.”

  “I can show you how to stay in your body.” Usually people worked hard to learn how to step out of their bodies, even for an instant, to prove that the Self isn’t the Body. He’d have to reverse the training, re-arrange the sequence in which skills were mastered to turn a wanderer into a wayfarer. He, himself, had never been such a great student, and certainly never a teacher.

  “But you don’t want to.”

  Wrong again? “No, I do want to, but Rimon you’re so strong, different from other channels, and I’m no expert at what I want to teach you. I can only hope that a clue or two may help you devise your own way of doing this.”

  Bruce’s nager fairly screamed, doing what??!!

  Solamar elaborated to Bruce, “Staying in his body. During transfer, he could go out there and not know how to get back. A body with no occupant is a corpse.”

  I shouldn’t have said that! thought Solamar, bracing and feeling Rimon bracing a half second before Bruce’s reaction filled the room.

  Rimon said to Bruce, “I think he’s right. This last time, on the wall. I think he’s saying it the way it felt, out of my body, and no way to get back. He came after me and brought me back.” He shifted to Solamar. “Didn’t you?”

  “Yes,” admitted Solamar, not mentioning that he hadn’t done an elegant job of it.

  “See, Bruce? He’s not going to harm me.”

  Bruce accepted it into his soul. He had to be feeling the burden of the selyn his body was carrying. His selyn production was locked into step with Rimon’s selyn consumption, letting the Farris relax in the confidence that life would be there for
him when he had to have it or die.

  With Bruce settled again, Rimon asked, “So what do I do to keep it from happening again?”

  In a burst of unexpected inspiration, Solamar remembered the belt he’d seen curled up in Rimon’s top drawer the first time he’d gone through it looking for socks.

  He went to the drawer and rummaged behind the stacks of thick wool socks. The drawer now supplied socks for three large men and a woman who occasionally slept here. He had to unload the drawer before he could extract the belt from where it had drifted to the back corner.

  It was a wide strip of polished black leather with a buckle in the form of a Starred Cross expertly carved of dark, satin finished rowan wood. The buckle was set with tiny chips of gemstones and there was a fine line of silver wire embedded inside the folded leather forming the belt.

  When he’d found it, that first time he’d slept in this room, he had been astonished. You couldn’t see that silver wire, and would barely notice it when zlinning, but Solamar’s other senses registered nascent power there. The belt had faded from Solamar’s mind among all the other exquisite treasures of Fort Rimon.

  Now, as he ran the supple leather through his hands and tentacles, he wondered how he could have dismissed such an article so easily. “This should do the job once you learn how to use it. Where did you get it?”

  Rimon shrugged. “I inherited it from my father.”

  Bruce added, “He always said he had run across a gypsy whose cart horse had died leaving the man stranded with a load of trade goods. He offered the man his pack horse, and was repaid with this belt. Remember Rimon?”

  “Yes, and he said that when he objected that the belt was worth far more than a horse, the gypsy just said he should wear it all the time. My father never did. As you can see, it’s like new.”

  Gypsy? Well. Solamar ran the belt through his hands again, twining his fingers through the weave of the belt’s design, the five pointed star, fifth point upwards for the human body and spirit welded onto the equal armed cross of Nature. His handling tentacles throbbed with the charge in the jewels kept alive by the pattern of the symbol.