The Farris Channel: Sime~Gen, Book Twelve

by Jacqueline Lichtenberg

  “Are you going to try to find him now?” asked Bruce.

  Only a few minutes had passed, though it had seemed like half a day. “I know how to get him back. I’ll use both the quilt and the belt, with only Bruce here with me. Even you, Kahleen, should leave, I’m sorry. So go see what you can do to help with Clire. She could be awake by now.”

  “Clire?”

  “Go!” Solamar rolled off the bed and stood to stretch.

  “I’ll go get the quilt,” said Lexy starting for the door.

  “No!” chorused Bruce, Garen, Solamar and Kahleen.

  She was out the door before anyone could stop her. It was true though that of them all, she could best mask her nageric presence to remain unnoticed by any attackers. They had to hold Garen back. His Gen nager would surely attract danger to her and the fight was still going on.

  When the door opened, Solamar zlinned distant combat, not inside the walls.

  He detached the buckle from the belt and wrapped Rimon’s hands around the jeweled Starred Cross while he planned. But it was hard to think under Garen’s frozen stare and Kahleen’s held breath. Bruce was furniture. He’d have been a better student of Rhodilan Grant than Solamar had ever been. Which gave Solamar an idea.

  Lexy flew into the room with the quilt over one shoulder. She was tall enough that it cleared the ground by a handspan front and back.

  “Bruce, help me sit him up. Get cushions to hold him. Let’s put this quilt around him so the dagger goes straight down his spine.” They struggled with the lanky body, dropping the belt buckle, getting the quilt caught, folding and refolding it, and then propping the lax knees up. Lexy balked at the cross-armed position Solamar was trying to achieve, but he just said, “I have my reasons.”

  Finally, with rolled blankets, pillows from other rooms, and even one horsehair mattress rolled up, they had Rimon propped into the position, the belt buckle against his chest resting on a box about the size of the coffer.

  Then Solamar sent everyone out of the room except Bruce. “Be ready to serve him transfer. He’s in hard Need, has been for days.”

  The Gen’s nageric answer left no doubt of his readiness.

  Solamar eased onto the bed and knelt behind Rimon, leaning his chest against the stylized dagger symbol in the center of the quilt. He extended his two right hand lateral tentacles and reached around to touch the center between Rimon’s eyebrows. With his left lateral tentacles, he probed at the center of Rimon’s chest, at the vriamic node, where the channel’s dual selyn transport systems joined. With both contacts secured, he prepared to ram selyn into the flaccid body in the emergency revival technique he had been taught but never actually executed before.

  I’ve zlinned it being done. I can do this.

  He found the cord that led toward Rimon’s true self, stretched tight and dissipating.

  We’re losing him.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  HEALING

  Solamar! screamed Rimon, knowing he was dying.

  And Solamar was there, reaching selyn rich tentacles toward him, offering strength and life.

  Though he’d been stationary in formless mist, Rimon was dizzy from images whirling around him. All the scenes had been the same, but different. There was always an audience of ghosts, flickering around a space where a young Farris channel stood before an older Farris channel.

  Sometimes they were dressed in colorful robes, sometimes strangely tight fitted garments, sometimes plain and sometimes richly embroidered but always with the same flowing blue capes. Always there was a question, an answer and the coffer with the jeweled Starred Cross on the lid opened before the younger one. It contained the dagger Rimon had charged with the essence of that final moment of total triumph of the nonjunct lifestyle.

  The younger Farris would gaze into the coffer, seeming to understand what it would be like in those days when nobody Killed. Usually the young Farris learned that the practice of excellence would lead to that moment. There was so much more in that little coffer that few could absorb.

  Every time he found himself among such a group, he strove to give the whole of the experience to the young person, but he couldn’t. The coffer he clutched had grown attached to his arm. Nothing he could do would let him give it away.

  Now, once again alone, aware that he was dying, he lowered his knees and stretched out his left arm with the coffer growing out of it where his ventral tentacles and left outside laterals should be and tried to give it to Solamar.

  Solamar backed away. “Solamar, take it. Please. This is for Lexy. Take it! Help me.”

  Solamar reached with both hands, tentacles spread to take the coffer. But his hands closed on Rimon’s upper arms. “I can’t. It won’t let me touch it. Rimon, you must come back with me. You must give this to Lexy yourself.”

  “How! It’s attached to me.” He tried to keep the dismay out of his nager, but failed. Panic twisted his guts.

  Solamar knelt back on his heels and nodded. “I zlin the problem. You must finish creating this object and separate yourself from it, then heal yourself. I will help you, but I can’t do this for you.”

  “How? How can I do that?”

  Solamar’s grip slid back toward the coffer, fingers and tentacles rippling over the blurry joint between Rimon’s flesh and the coffer. “Put more memories into the coffer, everything that’s happened here in the mists. Look closely at this side of the box here.”

  “It doesn’t have a side.”

  “It does. Look closely. See the side, see and zlin all the detail work where your experiences are recorded. It’s a beautiful box. See the exquisite artwork. Hold it away so your eyes can focus on it.”

  “I almost had it!” exclaimed Rimon as the coffer nearly separated from his arm. He had glimpsed the writing on the side, a list of all the ghosts he had encountered, all of them gazing raptly into the coffer.

  “Again. You’ll do better this time. Go on.”

  It took four tries, but at last Rimon detached the coffer and held it in his hands, glowing, sparkling, and somehow throbbing with selyn as if it were a living thing.

  “Good! Now, let’s stand up.”

  Rimon was suddenly standing, the blanket cascading off his shoulders into a pile on the oddly solid ground. Solamar’s hands came onto his shoulders urging him to turn.

  “No! I’ll get dizzy and lost again.” As panic rose, the coffer glued itself to his arm again.

  “Relax. Let’s get you ready to go back to your body.”

  Solamar’s hands and tentacles did something near his waist and Rimon recoiled at the invasive touch, turning away and turning again, dizzy. Solamar’s hands were there again, stopping him before he fell through another hole.

  “Good, all untangled. Doesn’t that feel better?”

  Oddly enough, it did. As he relaxed, the coffer became again a separate object he could relinquish.

  “So let’s put the coffer on a shelf.”

  “What shelf?” asked Rimon.

  “Here I’ll make one. Watch carefully.” He stepped up to the mist wall and raised his hands.

  A shelf slowly etched itself out of the mist wall. It was of dark red gleaming wood, supported by three ornately carved wedges. On one end stood a glass candelabra and on the other, two crystal bookends between which were three large books with blank spines. Above the shelf was a round picture frame of the same wood but it had no picture in it.

  “Do you like the shelf?” Solamar glanced at Rimon.

  “It’s beautiful, but shouldn’t there be a painting?”

  “You create the picture. Here, put the coffer right here in the middle. And put a picture of Lexy over it. She’ll know it’s for her when she finds it here.”

  “It’ll just stay here?” asked Rimon reaching up to lay the coffer on the shelf. He put it down and stepped back. Then he decided the shelf would be better if it were the mantle of a fireplace. With that, a brick hearth appeared under the shelf. With some fumbling, he added a pile of logs and f
lames licking up, emitting warmth and light.

  “Do you remember what Lexy looks like?”

  Rimon blinked and his daughter’s pregnant image appeared in the frame.

  “Beautiful!”

  There was a fervent warmth in Solamar’s admiration not for the image but for the woman herself.

  While Rimon contemplated that, Solamar had moved up behind him. “Let’s sit down before the fire here, together.” Rimon let Solamar guide him into the position he’d retreated into out of unreasoning terror. His knees came up almost to his nose, one arm rested atop his knees, and the other curled against his abdomen, though it no longer held the coffer. Solamar knelt behind him and made lateral contact on his forehead and his chest.

  “Now what does Bruce zlin like? You remember?”

  * * * * * * *

  The impenetrable Farris nager collapsed into the void of Hard Need but they remained in the mists. With his laterals touching Rimon’s forehead, Solamar zlinned the swelling in Rimon’s brain and the image of disrupted selyn flows in the image of Rimon that he held in his arms.

  “Rimon, when you fell from your horse, you hit your head and damaged your neck. You can’t go back to Bruce like this. First Heal yourself, then you can return to your body and take transfer. Just do what you did when you Healed Sian of his paralysis.”

  “A channel can’t Heal himself!”

  “Well...but I’ll help. We can reform the damaged tissues in your brain here, and then your body will reform healthy there just as Sian’s did.”

  His sense of Need meant that Rimon was receiving some feedback from his body. Untangling his cord had restored contact.

  Solamar brought up his showfield in his strongest Gen projection. “Come on, use my field, lean on me, just pretend I’m really Gen, and zlin yourself.”

  “Solamar, nobody can zlin themselves. You can zlin your own hand, but not...not like that!”

  “Just imagine. Come on, now, watch me zlin myself.”

  Solamar zlinned himself. He held his showfield Gen, then stood outside himself and regarding himself critically, noting how replete his primary selyn transport system was, and how strong that made his control of his secondary system which also carried a good amount of selyn.

  “Now you try it. Here the impossible is routine. Just forget about the limitations you normally live with.”

  He held on as Rimon fumbled to detach his awareness and look back on himself from outside.

  It took five repetitions before Rimon got the hang of it, but when he did, it became something far different from the simple training exercise Solamar had demonstrated.

  Rimon actually produced a whole separate image of himself, reached out tentacles and made a Healing contact.

  The tangled knots that represented Rimon’s injuries melted. Rimon’s uncharacteristic fear evaporated. The second Rimon image melted back into the original making it sharper, more vivid, more detailed. Right after that, Rimon’s fields went deep, complex and opaque, then back to his normal impenetrability.

  Solamar was sure his father wouldn’t believe it no matter how he reported it. “Good, now watch what I’m doing here. This is how to get back to your body.” Solamar took Rimon’s left hand and slid it around the cord that bound him to his body. “Feel that?”

  “Yes! What is it?”

  “It’s your connection to your body. All you have to do is follow it. Close your eyes. Focus on what you feel in your hand, push off and slide right down that line. Just think of Bruce.”

  Solamar narrowed his focus to his own cord which stretched up into the nothingness around them. They rose leaving the mantle and its precious coffer behind.

  Together they slid back into their bodies. There was none of the horrifying sensation of falling infinitely, none of the gasping shock.

  There was no time to think. Rimon was up and out of his grip, going for Bruce like a rampaging berserker.

  The disconnection sent shock up his exposed laterals.

  Bruce yelled, “Kahleen!” Selyn movement slammed through the room.

  Solamar’s body curled up fighting hot lateral spasms crawling up his arms and down into his chest to his vriamic node. Seconds later, Kahleen’s marvelous Gen hands came to his arms, Gen fields locked onto his, and purely Gen concern penetrated his awareness.

  Her body’s selyn creation pulses synchronized divinely with his body’s selyn consumption rhythm. The whiplash shock melted away. “Gen magic,” he gasped. “What a marvel!” He struggled to sit up.

  Rimon and Bruce were sitting on the floor off the end of the bed grinning at each other as the residual field pulses of their transfer dissipated. Bruce had filled Rimon’s primary system and had enough selyn left to partially fill his secondary system, and now the channel burst with joy.

  Rimon dismantled the contact. “Bruce, I thought I’d died without even being able to zlin you again!”

  “When did you have time to think that?”

  A puzzled expression flitted across Rimon’s face as he nager rippled with effort. “I don’t know.”

  “I would have come for you, but it seemed the best way to be sure I could give you transfer was to wait. It was terrible, but I’ve seen you do harder vigils, so I waited. Solamar said you weren’t dead but he couldn’t find you.”

  Rimon said, “The last thing I remember was riding with Tuzhel in front of me and then shoving him onto Jokim’s horse. Then...nothing, until now. How did I get...where is here? We can’t be here...the new underground shelter! They finished it!”

  Solamar heaved a sigh of blissful relief. Rimon had a headache which was only marginally worse than the ache in his whole body. He was madly hungry, and throbbing with Postsyndrome, but he wasn’t disoriented and had no memory of his adventures in time. His health and his sanity were safe. I did it! He thought with glee. I did it!

  Then Rimon’s nager reassembled itself into a new mysterious Farris presentation. This time it was like a deep, translucent marble fraught with dark crimson veins. The impenetrable Rimon Farris was back.

  Solamar suddenly remembered, “The battle!”

  “What battle?” asked Rimon.

  Kahleen, Bruce and Solamar gathered themselves to their feet all talking at once. Solamar untangled his feet from Rimon’s quilt and bent to retrieve Rimon’s belt buckle.

  Rimon began to draw his knees under himself to rise, and suddenly collapsed, shaking and totally astonished at his weakness. He tried again, and finally Kahleen and Bruce helped him up. He sagged between them, his legs unable to support him. Solamar was certain it was just the weakness. The head injury had cleared up.

  Thus supported and half carried, Rimon was first out the door. Solamar grabbed the leather belt and followed, attaching the buckle as he moved. Already people were shouting in the hall.

  Suddenly Lexy was there in front of them with Garen.

  Rimon stopped dead just outside the doorway and Bruce almost kept going as Rimon stared at Lexy and said to Bruce and Kahleen, “I’ve been, what? Unconscious? For a month? It really has been a month! Lexy, let me zlin you! The baby has grown so much!”

  Solamar felt Rimon adjusting to the impossible as people yelled up and down the corridor.

  “Rimon’s alive!”

  “Rimon’s all right!”

  “Solamar did it!”

  Although the ambient was total chaos around them with wounded and fast moving staffers intent on critical cases, Solamar couldn’t hear any more battle noise coming down the stairs at the end of the hall.

  The upper door to the outside stood wide open.

  * * * * * * *

  Rimon leaned on a cane, still very shaky on his feet, tiring easily. But he was once again standing on the flat topped rock at the cemetery. He squinted into the setting sun to survey the gathering crowd. He had to conduct yet another funeral, the third that day.

  First, in the morning, they had buried the Raiders who had come against the Fort. Mixed in with them there might have been some of
Shifron’s people or the Border Patrol who had come to oust the Freebanders.

  As the Freebanders had attacked the Fort, the Patrol had attacked their rear. Patrol scouts reported that Raiders who had escaped into Gen Territory had been taken by the Gens on the other side of the pass. All the Freeband Raiders, except Clire, were dead.

  At noon, the Fort had buried those few of the Fort who had given their lives in that battle.

  Now, separately because Rimon requested it, they would bury Tuzhel. The gathering crowd was just as thick as it had been at noon. This time, at his feet lay the painting of Fort Freedom that had always hung in his office, over his head, symbolizing his father’s mandate not to let the Forts die.

  Since the moment he’d wakened in Bruce’s transfer grip, he had known without knowing how he knew, that Fort Rimon had died the day he’d denied Clire transfer.

  For Rimon, the day had been full of shocks, horrifying news as people had told him of events while he’d been captive in Shifron, but with a few bright spots.

  Their old neighbors were back in charge of Shifron and had accepted the Fort’s offer of help rebuilding the town since the Fort had spent the winter training builders.

  Clire and her baby had survived, though she was still unconscious. Solamar had described her vicious hatred of him and the Fort in graphic detail.

  Lexy was fine. His grandchild was thriving. Definitely not a channel, and he was fairly sure not a renSime. She was more besotted with Solamar than ever. She couldn’t make a better choice.

  Bruce was a marvel beyond all belief. He had not done anything too stupid during this ordeal. Had their roles been reversed, he wouldn’t have performed as well.

  His Companion stood behind him now, supporting him as if he were about to perform some difficult functional. Bruce was wisely prepared to catch him if he fell over again. They had barely had time to talk about Rimon’s plans for the Fort, but his best friend was ready to follow him into anything.