The Farris Channel: Sime~Gen, Book Twelve

by Jacqueline Lichtenberg

  Rimon had confessed he’d dreamed of Clire.

  Solamar waded through the ambient to Rimon’s side. “Lexy, let me. Bruce, stand back.”

  Bruce had been trying to coax Rimon’s flaccid tentacles into a transfer grip. He paused, searching Solamar’s face. “He hasn’t responded at all.”

  “I think I may know why. Clire’s still unconscious and shouldn’t be. If Clire has found him, she may be trying to prevent him from returning to his body.”

  “Is that possible?” blurted Lexy over Bruce’s shock.

  Without looking at her, he said, “Yes. And you should sit down. Garen, don’t let her back muscles go into spasm or I’ll have to ask her to leave.”

  Garen scooped her into the second chair in the room.

  “Kahleen?” She had been staring at Rimon. Now she took a deep breath, closed her eyes and with a ragged sigh shifted her nager back to a working stance. “Good.”

  Solamar hadn’t had time to teach her how to guard him when he was out of his body, so he said, “I’m going to lie beside Rimon and I may seem to be asleep. Hold the fields as tightly as you can. Lexy, if you can’t stay clear of me go on over to the recovery room. Bruce, stay focused on Rimon. He may be able to find his body by finding you.”

  He gestured the Companion to the end of the bed. Bruce moved without rippling the fields even as he wrapped himself in a quilt, settled at the end of the bed, leaned against the wall, and rested his hand on Rimon’s foot. His massive nager filled the room with confidence.

  Solamar stretched out beside Rimon. Kahleen flipped a quilt over them both. It took him much too long to slide out of his body and search for Rimon again.

  * * * * * * *

  Everything whirled around and around. He felt queasy. Cold panic shot through him like psychospatial disorientation. Since he had no body, that was impossible.

  Sick and dizzy, Rimon clutched the small, sparkling coffer to himself, tucked his head down and shrieked into the mists, “Solamar!”

  I’m not dead. Solamar said I’m not dead. The dead can’t experience psychospatial disorientation so maybe he’s right. I have to get back, get oriented again. I’m not dead. “Solamar! Help! Help me! Here I am, Solamar. Here!”

  Without transition, he was in a Fort. He was sprawled in the yard of the Fort, clutching the coffer. He sat up. It was a strange Fort. The walls were some kind of mud brick. The buildings were dull tan mud brick. Funny looking roofs were made of some kind of half-tubes that glinted in the sun. It was hotter than he could ever remember feeling.

  A woman said behind him, “It was you!”

  He turned. “Clire! What’re you doing here? Where is here!”

  “Someone called for help! It was you.”

  Clire’s sharp features were contorted into malice. Streaks of searing hatred shattered her nager. Rimon had never thought a nager could zlin like that, but then there was no zlinning in this place. Or there hadn’t been until now. He zlinned her emaciated body six months pregnant, the baby draining selyn. Does a woman stay pregnant after she dies? Are we both dead?

  “Clire, where are we?”

  “You want help? I’ll help you like you helped me!”

  Her tentacles snared his hair. She yanked him around. He fell prone to a hard-packed dirt floor, cold against his cheek, the coffer hard under his chest.

  The door slammed before he knew there was a door. Clire’s spite filled the ambient. “Stay there until you die of Attrition or Kill!”

  There was a narrow vertical slit for a window, and he sensed Clire lurking outside, zlinning him avidly.

  Then he became aware of a Gen nager in the small, unfurnished room. A moment before it hadn’t been there. Now, another person was huddled in the corner, Gen arms wrapped around a brown haired head. Her sobs ripped into him and a Need he’d never known erupted. Attrition.

  The person looked up, stifling sobs. It was Bekka Esren, but an odd Bekka Esren. She was still a child in appearance though her nager crackled and pulsed with selyn.

  This isn’t real, he told himself. Clire never saw Bekka mature. This is Clire’s imagination. Somehow I’m trapped in Clire’s imagination.

  Solamar had hinted at the skills that could let him traverse this realm safely, sanely. He’d accepted a few lessons but hadn’t practiced what Solamar tried to teach him. If he were still alive, if his body lived somewhere, then his only way out was to get back to his body just like Solamar had taught him. But I’ve lost my body!

  Without volition, his mouth opened and a cry of sheer unadulterated terror ripped from his lips. “Solamar!”

  “Shen you, who is Solamar!” demanded Clire. She was standing in the room, screaming at him. “Whoever it is, he’s not going to help you! You’re dependent on me and you will get the help you gave me! Kill your precious little Bekka Esren and then we’ll see how the Fort worships you.”

  I am not dead. So Clire’s not dead. We can get out of this. “Solamar!”

  “I said stop that!”

  Suddenly Rimon was inside a white box. His cries echoed deafeningly. He was sealed in with his desperation.

  Tucking the coffer under his left arm, he circled the featureless box, running his right hand, tentacles and fingers spread, over the surface. It felt as smooth as it looked, but there seemed to be an effulgent nageric haze.

  The Gen was in the box with him. She hadn’t been there before. She curled on her side in one corner, crying softly. It was Bekka Esren.

  A peculiar, empty echo of Need verging on Attrition seized his body. He staggered into the opposite corner from the Gen and slid down to sit with knees bent, the coffer braced between stomach and thighs. He clutched it with his left arm. With his right hand, he shielded his eyes.

  She isn’t there. This isn’t real. It’s only two weeks since that fabulous transfer with Bruce.

  He knew it but that didn’t matter. He felt it as real. And Clire somehow watched from outside the white box.

  He set himself to endure this torment as he had so many others in his long life. I’m too old for this.

  Or maybe he’d never yet been old enough, mature enough, to face the consequences of his own mistakes.

  Unbidden, the endless list of mistakes flowed through his mind, each accompanied by an ugly image.

  One ill considered moment, and he had fathered a child on a Farris woman. There was a good chance Clire was a descendent of his grandfather, making it worse. In irrational weakness, he’d let a popular opinion overrule his good sense and let them vote to delay Clire’s transfer. Then because he knew he’d done wrong, he’d been so furious with himself that he couldn’t sit still in the underground shelter and let Jhiti’s Guard deal with the Raiders and rescue the Fort Tanhara refugees.

  The result of his childish fury was Clire’s Kill and Aipensha’s death and the loss of the Council that had held the Fort together even though the refugees far outnumbered the Fort Rimon natives.

  He had tried to help with the combat by grabbing the strange channel who had just arrived, and using him in a moronic scheme for chasing the Raiders away. The results of that, admittedly awesome, field work on the battle’s ambient were a series of disasters.

  If he had let Jhiti’s guards slaughter the Freebanders, perhaps Shifron’s citizens could have fought off the rest of the Band. Instead, they had overrun Shifron and Clire was using the Freebanders to destroy Fort Rimon.

  Meanwhile, his crazy stunt with Solamar on the wall and his even crazier attempt to save Tuzhel had dislodged him from his body, and he had begun seeing ghosts, even perhaps traveling with them while he slept. Maybe both he and Clire were dead. And his new baby.

  He’d learned to Heal the part of another person that could leave the body, then put that person back into their body, Healing the body as well. He could imagine things and they would become real. The potential was staggering, but when Solamar had given him the chance to learn to control it, Rimon had nodded, and accepted, learned the bare minimum and then neglected
to practice.

  He pulled his knees up, letting his thighs and chest be dented by the edges of the coffer so near his vriamic node.

  He folded his forearms on top of the coffer, his left outer lateral cruelly pressed against the jewels in the Starred Cross image, his right arm resting on top of his left. His forehead sank to rest on his right forearm’s inner lateral.

  The dizzying pain of that position cut off most of his awareness of the Gen and distracted him from the immediate do-something, do-something, pounding of escalating Need.

  He had sat like this often when he was a child, knees braced up, arms folded against himself, his quilt wrapped around and folded over his head. In those days, the position hadn’t hurt, hadn’t spun his senses into nauseating loops.

  Now, he could only imagine his quilt wrapped around him, folding him in his parents’ love. The coffer was solid against his body, against his lateral, against his vriamic node where his primary and secondary selyn circulatory systems joined. He focused his attention on the coffer as if he were doing a complex channeling functional.

  Inside the coffer was the knowledge that, no matter how many dire mistakes he had made, if he didn’t give up the striving toward that moment he’d sealed into the coffer, if he always excelled his previous mark, Sime and Gen would be united. Humanity would survive. Non-junct.

  I will not Kill Bekka. No matter how or when I die, I will be born again. I will make mistakes, some worse than misplacing my body because I lost the respect of some frightened people who didn’t believe me when I told them a woman was pregnant before anyone else could possibly know. I will do better next time. Solamar!

  * * * * * * *

  “Father!” blurted Solamar with a humiliating lack of maturity. “What are you doing here!” He had usually taken care to avoid his father when venturing out of his body, but in his haste to get to Rimon he’d forgotten caution.

  The older man turned from surveying the thick mist around them and eyed Solamar with disapproval. “If you don’t hear that, then what are you doing here?”

  The ambient throbbed like rhythmic rocking of a child worn by terror. The shape of the nageric noise vaguely resembled his own name. “Some Wayfarer’s calling me.”

  His father’s eyebrows went up as he gestured lazily with one tentacle, just the posture he always displayed when teaching. “Wayfarer?” he prompted.

  His father vanished.

  Solamar identified the call as Rimon. What could possibly make the dynamic leader of Fort Rimon whimper like a baby? He followed the call to a tiny adobe room with a vertical slit for a window. On the wall was a weaving that spelled out, Fort Intalace, Where Borders Don’t Separate.

  In the center of the room was a white box with a transparent top. It was about waist high and cubical.

  Clire stood over the box gazing into it. As Solamar arrived, his father yanked her away.

  Twisting out of the older man’s grip, Clire kicked at him. When that didn’t work, she grabbed the edge of the white box and blasted Rhodilan Grant with a nageric shockwave. The elder Grant ignored the channel’s tricks with his usual contempt for such untrained talents.

  Rhodilan spun Clire around, breaking her grip on the white box. He grabbed her by the cord that connected her to her body. Solamar noted the care taken to avoid harming the tiny thread that anchored her fetus. Rhodilan drove a shaft of glittering selyn into the mother’s cord.

  The cord contracted in a series of spasms, whipping her around the room until she was drawn out through a wall, screaming terror and rage.

  “She’s insane,” commented his father in that low, calm, instructive, totally maddening voice. “You’ll have to deal with that. What will you do with your Farris...oh! She was holding the box!”

  The white box expanded until its walls melted into the adobe walls around them revealing a miniaturized Rimon Farris huddled inside whimpering. Rimon’s figure expanded to normal size as the adobe walls began to dissipate. That left them surrounded by the formless mist again.

  Before them sat Del Rimon Farris, curled in on himself, his baby quilt folded about him, positioned so the dagger image was a shield on his back. He clutched something to his stomach protecting it behind raised knees. He rested his forehead on his forearms. I think I’d vomit if I tried that position!

  Solamar knelt beside the huddled figure and reached out one hand, tentacles spread feeling the Farris showfield hardened into a crumbling granite wall. Waves of throbbing Need escaped through cracks. Rimon’s attention fixed on a spot not far away. Only, there was no Gen there.

  Behind him, his father said, “That woman’s talent is projecting illusion. Solamar, she was torturing this poor soul with his greatest weakness, and taking real satisfaction from it. I’m not surprised. Trafficking in selyn!”

  He glanced back at his father who waited for him to handle Rimon. He was not saying Are you sure the fate of humanity should rest on the channels’ ability to traffic in selyn? Are you really sure you want to risk doing that to yourself? Nevertheless, the oft-spoken words reverberated around them.

  Solamar moved closer to Rimon, blocking out awareness of his father, reaching toward his friend. “Rimon, she’s gone. Let’s get you back to your body....”

  Before Solamar could untangle the cord that was crisscrossed around Rimon’s torso and send him back to his body, Rimon’s form turned to wisps of smeared color, whirled around and poured through an invisible hole into nothing. A single word hung over them Solamar!

  Solamar tried to follow, but suddenly he and his father were floating free, suspended in formless mist without even a solid floor.

  Feeling as if he were back in First Year again, having bollixed up some simple exercise, Solamar stood before his father, struggling to hold his feet oriented in the same direction as his father’s feet. He created a floor.

  “So where did he go?” his father quizzed just as if Solamar were a First Year student flunking a basic lesson.

  Solamar didn’t want to say, I don’t know. “I guess he’s wandering Time.” He told his father everything that had happened since he’d left home in such a cloud of acrimony that it had summoned his grandfather’s ghost to scold Rhodilan Grant on his child rearing skills.

  Solamar finished the tale with, “Every moment through all of this I’ve been wishing I had paid more attention to your lessons and practiced them harder.”

  “But you still think the Farris mutation is the key because they’re better at selyn trafficking than the others?”

  “They’re different, father. They’re not just channels. I told you how Rimon became jarred loose from his body. There’s a lot more going on here than the obvious.”

  His father digested that. Solamar gave himself points for having found something his father thought significant.

  At length, his father nodded. “Well then you’ll have to find him and put him back into his body.”

  “How?”

  “If he keeps screaming like that, it shouldn’t be very hard.” Rhodilan Grant paused, then added with puzzlement, “Clearly he holds you in high regard,”

  All right, there is no avoiding it. Rimon’s life is at stake here. “Father, what would you do?”

  “Well, since we haven’t been able to hold him from out here, I’d suggest working from his body’s side.”

  We?! We haven’t been able to hold him? That admission alone was worth everything Solamar had gone through since he left home. “What procedure would you suggest?” Solamar congratulated himself on making it seem like a consultation not a plea for help.

  “I’d find something meaningful to him, set up resonances of similarities, connect with him through that which he reveres. Then pull him back into his body. If that can’t be done, then cut the cord and let him go.”

  And with him all the hope that humanity will survive?

  “I can get him back into his body,” said Solamar. He was fully adult, standing before his father eye to eye as an equal, a unique experience.
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br />   “You may have to Heal him, or better, get him to Heal himself. Psychically, he’s taken a terrible beating from that woman. Before you insert him into his body, be sure he doesn’t bring back more memory of all this than he can bear or you’ll have another Farris like that woman.” He turned to go, hesitated and said over his shoulder, “I think I got them both back into her body and locked them there long enough for the fetus to mature.”

  My father admitting uncertainty?

  For the first time, he noticed how gray the man’s hair was. He was no longer just slender for a Sime. He was too slender. Older than Rimon, he was still healthier, yet he wouldn’t always be there to fix what Solamar broke.

  “I’ll monitor the baby carefully until Rimon can take over,” promised Solamar.

  “It’s his child, you know. If anyone can give that kid life, Rimon can.”

  “I understand.”

  “I just wish you did. I have to go write this up in my journal before I forget any details. You just be sure Rimon forgets enough of it to protect his mind. These Farrises you want to stake the fate of humanity on are a hopeless failure of a mutation. There is no way they can carry this burden and succeed. They have power but no strength, endurance but more to endure than anyone else.” With that oft repeated opinion, his father misted away.

  Solamar was convinced the right Companion could supply the strength to govern the channel’s power and heal the ravages of what had to be endured.

  Solamar closed his eyes and followed his own cord back into his body. As always, it was like jumping off a cliff, but this time he didn’t get smashed to a bloody pulp on jagged rocks. This time it was like diving into deep water, slicing cleanly into cold black depths and coming back to the surface, erupting in a burst of selyn. He’d never done such a neatly controlled return before.

  He jackknifed to a sitting position next to Rimon’s limp body, gasping and panting, sweat standing out on his face but not the least bit disoriented.