The Sisterhood

by Juanita Coulson

  Normal, soft white, interior light. No snow. No deadly, blooming clouds caused by bombs.

  Martil’s face swam into view in front of her. His features were taut with concern. He tugged gently at her arms. Renee glanced down. Chayo was slumped against her, and her hands were clasped tightly across his back. A near death grip. She let Martil pry her fingers apart, and Chayo fell away from her, his head cradled by the black-haired man. The young prince slid back onto the floor, sprawling across Renee’s knees, because she, too, was sitting on the floor.

  A floor! A nice, firm, ordinary floor! It looked and felt like fancy linoleum. And it was a wonderful relief, after so much bomb-blasted rubble and dirt.

  Renee turned from relishing that reality to anxiety for Chayo. He was ghostly pale. And the bruises and cuts he’d suffered during the bombardment didn’t help his appearance, either. Well, at least he was breathing; she could see his chest rise and fall.

  Tae moved into the picture from Renee’s right. He knelt beside Chayo and gathered the prince into his arms without effort, lifting him. Numbly, Renee watched the blond carry the smaller man to an oversize hassock. He laid Chayo down there, straightening his arms and legs, pulling off his shredded cloak. More than bombardment damage had taken its toll on Prince Chayo’s clothes; they were as tattered as Renee’s had been, when she’d first arrived on Niand. She wasn’t surprised to find that the marvelous garments supplied her by the matronly dressers in the palace had since evaporated.

  “Can you hear me now?” Martil squatted by her side, one arm around her shoulders.

  Renee shuddered and snuffled a few times, trying to bring up a tension-shattering laugh. She didn’t make it. “A few more like that, and none of us would have passed ‘Go.’”

  “I don’t know the exact reference, but I take your meaning. Relax. It’s all right now.”

  “Is Chayo …?”

  “Unconscious,” Martil said, a bit too quickly. “We don’t know much else, yet.”

  “Then you shouldn’t have moved him! He might have broken bones or internal injuries!”

  “No. Ka-Een essence transfer does not harm physically. Not in the way you fear. The damage, if it occurs, strikes deeper. Maybe there is no damage, this time.” Renee wiped away the blood trickling down Martil’s cheek from the cut on his face. He smiled at her encouragingly. “Chayo is most likely suffering from a form of psychic shock.”

  She got to her feet, groaning, grateful for Martil’s support, and walked to the hassock where Chayo lay. Tae was fussing over the prince like a mother hen, very solicitous.

  Then a gang of ten or so oddly assorted persons bustled up around the four. The newcomers were fat, thin, short, tall, and none of them precisely human-looking. For Renee, it was like watching an out-of-synch film, or a TV image badly distorted by “ghosts.” The strangers clustered near Chayo, and she, Martil, and Tae were forced to step back.

  “This — this transfer didn’t hurt me,” Renee said. “I don’t see why it hurt Chayo.”

  “It’s a highly individual thing,” Martil explained. He put his arm about her shoulders again and steered her to an adjacent hassock. He refused to let her focus all her attention on Chayo and the consultation of alien physicians. At least she hoped that’s what the out-of-synch people were. They certainly acted like it. Martil said, “You have a most unusual affinity with the Ka-Een, remember?”

  “Where are we?” she asked tiredly.

  “This world’s name wouldn’t mean anything to you. But it’s where we came from, most recently — Tae and I.”

  “Oh. The Arbiters’ world.”

  An eyebrow arched out of sight beneath Martil’s shaggy black bangs. He nodded. “Good approximation.” He added bitterly, “So we’re right back where we began.”

  Tae had followed them from Chayo’s hassock. Now he put out a big hand, gently touching Martil’s head. The blond’s close-set eyes were open wide, and he shook his mane vigorously, lending emphasis to the thoughts he was winging his partner’s way. It wasn’t tough to understand the silent conversation. Not tough at all. That fact surprised and pleased Renee. She’d come a long way in a big hurry from believing everything was a shock-induced illusion or a nightmare. Now she was even able to pick up telepathic overflow from Tae. “You — you’re going to use your super stop-the-whole-thing weapon you warned Vunj about?”

  Martil’s translucent skin paled still further. “No! No. Not yet. We haven’t begun to exhaust the options for working out the problems between Niand and the Green Union.”

  Renee was much comforted by that reassurance. “I’m glad. I don’t know what you guys have up your sleeves, but after hearing you psych out the general and those others, I don’t think I want to know.”

  “It’s — the weapon — our last resort. We never use it unless …”

  A couple of the out-of-synch people rustled to a halt in front of the trio. The intruders made noisy tsk tsk sounds. From their physical shapes, Renee made a guess that this pair were females. Both carried big tote bags, and the markings on those pouches were probably the Arbiters’ equivalent of Red Crosses; the fuzzy people looked that medical.

  One of them made a beeline for Tae. That puzzled Renee. Martil had this mess all over his face, and she was scraped up, and instead they wanted to treat good old strongman Tae. Then the big man obeyed a gesture from the female doctors and turned around. Renee gasped. Tae’s back was a wreck. His tunic was slashed and torn and seeping blood in a dozen places — a slightly foaming, pinkish blood. Suddenly, Renee remembered how many times the blond had shielded the others with his body, out there in the snow-covered rubble when the bombs were falling. It was only his stoic lack of reaction that had made her think he was indestructible.

  The second doctor moved toward Martil. She shimmered a bit as she shifted position. It hurt Renee’s eyes to watch these out-of-synch people. The doctor took an instrument resembling a miniature football out of her tote bag and rolled it down Martil’s cheek. Blood and the cut vanished.

  “They’ll take care of you next,” Martil told Renee. “In minor injuries, it goes by rank, severity of wounds.”

  “Mmm. Sort of a noncritical triage?”

  “Very good!” Martil squirmed, not appreciating the efficient repairs being carried out on his flesh. He looked resignedly annoyed, like a small boy submitting to having his ears washed.

  The medico — medica? — finished with Tae and began swabbing a tiny football over Renee’s abraded hands. Instantly, the oozing places were whole, though still slightly reddened. Before Renee could thank the alien woman, the little football was being applied to her foot, removing the beginnings of a nasty bruise there, caused when she’d stepped on that rock in those gray stone alleys.

  How long ago had that been?

  Actually, probably not very long. Four or five hours in the past? Things had happened with astonishing speed — an entire lifetime’s worth of dizzying and terrifying events, crammed into a minute space.

  “No! Not right now! We have too much to do!” Martil argued. Renee didn’t grasp what was bothering him. The out-of-synch doctor who’d been patching him up had pressed a sequin-decorated flashlight against his neck. Martil’s hazel eyes began to get glassy. He slumped. “Damn! I was afraid of this. Concentrate on the scratches while a galactic sector is in danger of annihilation.” Then he yawned hugely.

  Renee jerked away at the touch of something cold. The doctor going over her with a fine-toothed stethoscope had goosed her with one of those sequined flashlights, too. A dreamy lethargy swept over Renee. “Mmm, they’re knocking us out, huh? A sleeping pill in a flashlight. Neat.” She also broke off into an enormous yawn. Her words distorted, she complained, “’s not fair. Don’ even know if Chayo’s awright yet. Not fair …”

  “It never is,” Martil said, and Renee sank into what felt like tons of cotton batting.

  Visions danced in her head. A mixture of happily ridiculous and stark panic, compounded of recent experiences.
Unseen enemies bombing her. Faceless unknowns out to get her. Martil, his face sly, making acid comments on every new situation. Chayo alternating flowery compliments with equally glib straight-faced lies. Tae grinning, a beefy, blond humanoid frog. Caricature villains, swarming in at the four of them and intoning viciously, “You know what we mean, and you must be eliminated!” More faceless enemies threatening to torture Renee to extract information, to kill her, to do things too fierce to mention.

  After a very long time, the mists of the nightmares and dreams started to drift off. She hovered in a not-quite-awake stage where she could analyze the sleeping fantasies from a figurative distance. The nightmares had lost their effect. They lingered, but were balanced by the good portions of her drugged dreaming. In the latter, the unexpected occurred constantly, and it all seemed completely logical.

  Just like the reality she’d lived through with Martil and Tae.

  Faint, distant voices prodded their verbal snouts through the remnants of her sleep.

  Well, I have to wake up sometime, came the thought to her sleep-shrouded mind.

  Renee opened her eyes a crack and found the light outside was quite bearable. Slowly, she sat up. She was on one of those big hassocks. Someone had covered her with an exquisitely lightweight blanket and put a velvety pillow under her head.

  An animal sat on the hassock, too. A big animal, like a Siamese cat the size of a well-fed Saint Bernard. When she sat up, the cat sat up, too, and stared at her intently. It didn’t have normal, slitted cat eyes but many-faceted insect-like eyes. It wasn’t merely looking at her, either. She got the same sort of telepathic slopover she was learning to know well from being around Tae. The cat was checking her for damage, silently asking if she was all right. Silently, Renee replied that she was quite well. Satisfied, the immense cat slithered off the hassock and disappeared through a door that hadn’t been there a moment before and wasn’t there a moment later.

  Watch cat? Making sure the patient was in good shape? Interesting.

  And how did she feel, really? She felt great. Great! Top of the class and ready to take on anything.

  Renee stretched tentatively and discovered that she didn’t ache or hurt anywhere; not even a twinge. Marvelous. And astonishing, for somebody who normally woke up feeling like a soft-boiled egg that had been stepped on.

  She threw back the gossamer blanket. It was peculiar that she wasn’t cold after having done that, because she didn’t have a stitch on. Sleeping raw, even in a northern climate, could become popular if all rooms were as cozy-warm as this one.

  Her clothes were draped neatly over a nearby valet-rack. They were freshly cleaned and pressed — and reconstituted. When she had arrived … here … the stuff had been cheesecloth, just like her original clothes had been when she’d arrived on Niand. Now the body stocking and dashiki were together again, good as new. Or better. They felt different, silkier. She suspected the garments were clever organic copies of the clothes supplied by the palace’s dresser corps. Renee assembled herself and went looking for the distant voices.

  She traced them to a drapery at the end of a long corridor and timidly twitched the curtain aside to peek beyond. The curtain was good insulation; once she got her ears past it, the voices were normal to loud. One was Martil’s. He and Tae were sitting on a giant hassock, surrounded by other hassocks containing an assortment of the out-of-synch people. An argument was in progress. Very little of it made any sense to Renee. She touched her Ka-Een pendant chidingly. That was the only thing she’d been wearing when she woke up. But despite the fact that the words she was hearing were in English, Martil and the rest were referring to too many things that had no adequate translations.

  The argument was taking place in an enormous room — not the one she’d arrived in. This one was so large she expected the voices to echo, though they didn’t. Like most of the people in it, the room was out-of-synch. Were the walls and ceiling swathed in moving gauze? Or were they merely made out of several sheets of shifting, badly made glass? Or was the appearance distorted by something high-tech? Holograms? No way of telling, not from her limited background regarding such phenomena.

  One of the out-of-synchs pointed, and half the room’s walls went blank, then lighted, various spots twinkling. A gargantuan version of the matriarch’s war-room wall display.

  “Come in, Renamos,” Martil invited. Then he addressed the out-of-synchs. “Tae and the Ka-Een have informed you concerning Renamos and her unique adaptability and courage.”

  Did a red face go well with a yellow dashiki and body stocking? Renee hurried across the room and sat beside Martil. She was pleasantly embarrassed, and extremely grateful to see two friendly faces in this alien setting.

  Several unfamiliar faces crowded close, too. But apparently they weren’t interested in her. Tae was the focus of their attention. All of these pushy out-of-synchs circling the hassock were about Tae’s height, which Renee had estimated conservatively at a good six-four. As Tae stood up to confront them, he … flickered. For a split second he also went out-of-synch. Renee drew back, and found her retreat blocked by Martil’s arm.

  Very slowly, Tae turned and looked down at her. Yes, it was Tae. Same wide, froggy mouth and close-set blue eyes and butchered blond hair. But it wasn’t Tae. Something else glimmered behind those eyes. They were still blue, but beneath the surface they became brilliantly shiny and immense, much larger than any human pair of eyes ever had been.

  The pressure of Martil’s arm against her back reminded Renee of all the three of them had been through together. She could cope with a little anomaly like this new one, surely! Gulping, she sat up straight, telling herself to behave in a civilized fashion.

  Tae came back into full synch. He grinned, a dazzling display of teeth. Tae. The big guy she knew and rather liked.

  “All right?” Martil asked gently. As she nodded, he said, “You are being honored. Tae rarely reveals his original form to humanoids who have come to know him in this one. Generally, they become violently upset. He doesn’t want to alarm them.”

  “I’m not upset. Not any more. It — it was just a bit of a surprise, on top of a hell of a lot of surprises, as I hope you weirdos realize.”

  An utterly-without-reservations smile split Martil’s vulpine face. He rubbed noses with her and hugged her and said with a laugh, “Oh, yes! We weirdos realize that. Thoroughly!”

  “If I’m the joke, let me know what I’m doing wrong, huh?”

  Calming, Martil said, “No antagonism now. Your adaptability should enable you to overcome such touchiness. I blame some of your problems on cultural traumatization; your feminist affiliations have led to overcompensations. However, one must take the quirks, as it were, with the talents. No joke. Merely relief. You brought Prince Chayo through the essence transfer intact.”

  Renee felt guilty. “I’d completely forgotten about him. I’m terrible! How is he?”

  “Didn’t you hear me? He is well. Recuperating, as you were.”

  “Great! He’s not hurt?”

  One of the out-of-synchs was trying to butt into the conversation. Martil ignored him. “He was quite stunned, of course, but he’s very much alive. Your affinity with the Ka-Een protected him from fatal psychic shock. Without that, I doubt we’d still have an effective means of operation in the Niand-Green Union conflict. Chayo is our royal peacemaker and intermediary. If he had died, I don’t …” Finally acknowledging the buttinsky, Martil snapped, “All right. All right! We continue to have the authority you gave us, and we intend to exercise it.”

  “That could be revoked.”

  Renee understood those words. Sort of. The sound was that of many voices in action all at once, more or less on the same pitch, and with tons of vibrato. Totally inhuman, though it definitely wasn’t a mere machine talking. She assumed it was the out-of-synchs speaking in unison. Without moving their mouths, she’d noticed. Were she and Martil the only true speakers here? The buttinsky seemed to be a particular extension of the tele
pathic Many-Voice.

  “Do you revoke it?” Martil demanded. When there was no immediate answer, he gestured to the twinkling wall. “Consider. We have two subsectors affecting fourteen separate galactic units. And a no-person’s-land ten units wide between the main combatants. Numerous planets, hundreds of intelligent species. Innocents. Directly in the war’s path. This cannot go on, especially now that Niand and the Green Union both have the Bender Principle weapon. Their civilizations have displayed much potential for eventual mature and peaceful development. They must not be allowed to waste that potential, or destroy it, in a conflict that means extinction for both their races.”

  He was talking mass destruction — again. Renee shuddered. She remembered crouching in a concrete hidey-hole, bombs falling all around her. Bad enough. But they’d escaped. What if people died by the millions? Billions! In the dark ages of her own life, on one world, in rather small wars, comparatively, thousands of innocent people had been killed. Now Martil was discussing megagenocide, wiping out entire species, including small children and countless helpless animals who’d never have a chance even to express an opinion on the interstellar clash that was vaporizing them.

  “The Green Union.” That was the Many-Voice. “It must not be permitted, true. That is our duty.”

  “I know!” Martil flapped his hands in consternation. “Tae knows. Renamos knows.”

  “She is not a representative of the Arbiters …”

  “She is now.” Martil’s eyes narrowed challengingly. “Can you deny it? She has affinity with the Ka-Een no Arbiter has ever enjoyed. And her planet is intimately connected with this Niand-Green Union crisis.”

  “W-what?” Renee stammered.

  Martil waved again at the wall. A large area brightened to an ugly red. “That section, Renamos, is the one which was traversed by the Ka-Eens’ transfer beam …”

  “You must not divulge the coordinates of the Arbiter worlds,” Many-Voice protested.