Unto Zeor, Forever

by Jacqueline Lichtenberg

  Digen resisted. He knew, as Hogan didn’t, that those sticks were not strong enough to hold against a Sime’s jaw muscles, and he had no desire to have a surgeon pick splinters out of his tongue.

  Then, suddenly, pain like he’d never felt before in his life flashed through every fiber of his body, and the world went black.

  He came to moments later, the entran broken yet still lurking as an undefined tension gathering at the base of his neck. “Digen?”

  “Joel, listen.…” But he couldn’t find the strength to finish the sentence.

  “I’ll go get help. Just hang on—”

  “No! No time.” Digen gathered himself, realizing that he was in serious trouble and might as well be on the moon for all the help the Sime Center could be. “Must get the retainers off before next seizure. Then—I think—you can help me stop them.”

  “Digen, you should have a Donor—”

  “No time. This one is sudden death.” He couldn’t explain vriamic fibrillation or how a simple thing like entran could induce vriamic malfunctions in the Farris mutation strain. “The retainers—the laterals—that’s why I fainted. Got to get them off, Joel.”

  Hogan looked at the door, lips tight. It had a lock. He went toward it decisively. “If they catch us, it’s your career. But if you’re dead, who cares about a career!”

  Hogan snapped the lock home and returned to help Digen divest himself of the retainers. It was a slow, painful process that further disrupted his selyn flows. When it was over, he pulled Hogan down to sit beside him on the bed.

  Hypoconsciousness had disappeared under the slamming torture of entran. “Quick course in doing entran outfunctions, Joel. Ready?”

  “I guess,” said the Gen.

  “I’m going to use your—selyn field—you don’t know what that is. Well, you have a—a force about you that I can push against to regain control of my internal flows. You’re going to—provide me with—traction, internal traction, understand?”

  It was badly stated, but Digen didn’t usually train out-Territory Donors, and he had no other analogies ready. “All you have to do, is—well, just what we’ve talked about so much—just be a doctor who cares. You won’t feel any selyn movement—”

  With the next seizure gathering like a dark cloud, Digen slid into lateral contact. At first Hogan flinched, and Digen paused, saying, “I have to have a full contact to make this work—your field is so weak. I’ll let you initiate the lip contact when you’re rea-dy!” The last syllable exploded out of him as the next spasm claimed him.

  Hogan steeled himself inwardly and completed the lip contact. That was the moment, Digen realized later, when he should have broken off, recognizing that Hogan’s defensive courage was operating again—a courage used to suppress fear, not banish it. But Digen was involved in a life-or-death struggle against a strange sort of entran seizure, and Hogan was offering a Donor’s empathy despite the fear curled within him.

  For quite a while it seemed to be working all right. But for Digen it was something like dying of pulmonary edema and trying not to wheeze. He succeeded up to a point—and then reflex took over.

  The first two or three times it happened, Digen managed to keep the vibrations in the fields between them from inducing perceptible currents in Hogan’s system. But then, at the highest crest of the entran seizure, Digen was locked against himself and helpless. His show field oscillated uncontrollably. To Hogan it felt like a transfer draw, though no selyn was exchanged between them, and the Gen panicked.

  The fear lanced through Digen like a spear of white fire. In one instant, the shock wiped away the entran and the postsyndrome, leaving him cold level. The entran he could gladly live without. But the loss of the last trace of the postsyndrome, the newly awakened hope of banishing the stubborn dependency on Im’ran, which was causing him abort after abort on his transfers, was more than he could stand.

  In a last ditch effort to save it, he reached out to Hogan, blindly groping for that oh-so-vital sensation. Instantly Gen panic struck through them both.

  By an act of will, before his conditioning could even engage. Digen brought about an abort—taking the entire backlash from the suddenly broken contact into himself, protecting the Gen from all but the most minor selyn flux.

  It was almost as bad as the entran attack, leaving him convulsing, senseless, for minutes. When it was over, with only a dull thudding ache left somewhere in the region of his vriamic node, Digen found himself alone in the room with Amanso. The door was unlocked, standing slightly ajar.

  Hastily Digen slipped on his retainers, looking toward his patient as he did so. The severe perturbation in the room’s ambient nager had not damaged her at all, but then Amanso wasn’t a terribly sensitive Donor like Ilyana. Digen dragged himself off the bed and peered out into the hall.

  At the nurses’ station, several of the women nurses were gossiping, watching their signal boards with half their attention. A couple of interns headed for the stairs, shoulder to shoulder. There was no sign of Hogan.

  Digen went to the house phone beside Amanso’s bed and punched his own room number. He let the phone ring for three minutes, then quit. Where has he gone? I’ve got to find him—now—before he does something foolish. But I can’t leave here. I can’t.

  CHAPTER TEN

  INJUNCTION

  For twenty-four hours Digen kept vigil beside Ditana Amanso. Twice Thornton’s resident checked her, and once Thornton himself came and stood over her chart, shaking his head and muttering his bewilderment at her stubborn clinging to life. He left, saying, “Maybe you’re a good luck charm or something, Dr. Farris. If so, you’ll do wonders for our mortality rate.”

  Digen got another intern to cover for Hogan, and then sat expecting a Sime Center pickup team to descend on him with a warrant for his arrest. During the first hours he hovered over his patient, frantically nursing the spark of life in her with his nager, and praying that he wouldn’t be taken away before she regained consciousness. Time and again he played the scene over in his mind—they would come bursting into the room and he would refuse, on channel’s privilege, to go anywhere until she opened her eyes and released him.

  Sometimes, in his imagination, he got away with it. Sometimes, though, they tore him away from her, insisting that his act of defilement had lost him all channel’s rights.

  The hours went by and nobody came. Gradually the scenario in Digen’s mind changed. He began to see the incident through Hogan’s eyes, and he began to understand that Hogan would not—could not—press charges against him. Betrayed by his closest friend, disturbed to the very core of his being, where lay hidden memories too horrible to face, Hogan would walk the streets, torn up inside, too groggy from transfer shock—however mild—to think it all through. He’d be easy prey for any thug who came along.

  Time and again Digen picked up the phone to call EW receiving—but he couldn’t ask if Hogan were a patient.

  He wouldn’t commit suicide—not over something like this—he’s not the type.

  Eventually Digen’s ordeal ended as Amanso’s eyelids fluttered open and she whispered, “Hajene—” Digen held her hand, fingertips brushing her face reassuringly. There wasn’t much else he could do without lateral contact. But somehow it was enough.

  “Thank you,” she said. She managed to swallow, flexing her throat muscles well. Pleased, Digen logged it all down in her chart, checking her IV and writing up the orders for the rest of the day. Then, released from his vigil, he went directly to his room and checked for signs that Hogan had been there, but there were none. He then headed for the Sime Center’s out-Territory emergency receiving unit, where all the out-Territory Gens who survived berserker attacks were treated.

  It was an ultramodern three bed facility, much larger than Westfield actually required. As soon as Digen walked in the door, Cloris Agar stepped out of one of the cubicles partitioned off by heavy insulating drapes. Digen said, “Hajene Agar, have—”

  She cut him off with a w
ave of a tentacle, saying briskly, in Simelan, “Hajene Farris—we have a patient here who claims transfer shock. Our Thirds and Seconds couldn’t find any trace, and we called Hajene Mickland. He found an old burn scar, but nothing recent, and called me. I can’t find anything either, but the patient insists—it’s probably delusions and hysteria, we get enough of that, but since you’re here, I thought.…”

  Digen listened with a growing sickness in the pit of his stomach. He knew who was behind that curtain. Nodding absently, he stepped around the drape and stopped, not at all surprised to find Hogan sitting up on the bed, searching frantically for his shoes, as if to flee.

  Their eyes met for a long, searching moment.

  Without retainers blocking his perceptions, Digen could feel Hogan’s throbbing, bursting headache—the kind that seeped down the spinal column to nestle, burningly, in the lower back. The transfer shock headache.

  I didn’t hurt him that badly.

  Behind Digen, the door swung open to admit Mickland, who came up beside Agar, saying, “Where have you been all day, Hajene Farris? I have a patient here who claims he’s been—Oh, I see you’ve met.”

  The tense silence between Digen and Hogan finally penetrated to Mickland. He switched to his thickly accented English, addressing Hogan: “You must not be frightened. This is Hajene Farris, our best channel. He will examine you just as the rest of us have, and—”

  Hogan’s emotional nager spiked terror all through the three channels. Mickland turned, wide-eyed, to Digen, grasping that he was the focus of Hogan’s fear—while none of the others had roused quite that much reaction from the Simephobe. The implication was at once obvious and absurd.

  Over his shoulder, Digen said to Mickland, but in English, a dull monotone, “I don’t have to examine him. I already know the precise nature of his injury—and its cause.”

  Hogan, tense with conflicting emotions, forced himself to accept Digen’s touch passively. “Digen, you—I never said a word. You—didn’t have to—I would never have told them….”

  Digen took Hogan by the shoulders and shook him once, roughly. “You fool. You should have told them. They were ready to lock you in the psych ward for the night.”

  Letting his hands slide down Hogan’s arms, Digen turned to Mickland, carefully staying in English as he said, “I was using him for an entran outfunction shunting field, when he hit me with a panic and I took an abort.” Digen gave Mickland the exact figures on selyn movement, saying, “What shock he may be experiencing is so minor, I doubt that even I could find it under the sympathetic awakening of the old injury.”

  Mickland frowned, considering that, while Digen moved to draw a glass of fosebine from a fountain tap labeled, in Simelan, eight per cent. “Drink this down, Joel. It tastes awful but will make the headache vanish.”

  “Digen—” Hogan was still immobilized by conflicting fear of Digen and fear for Digen.

  Digen held the glass out with a tentacle, just as he had that first day in their room, and said, “You trust me that much, don’t you?”

  Hogan made himself take the glass, deliberately lingering to touch Digen firmly. “I failed you. How can—”

  “Just drink it,” said Digen impatiently, “Drink it all down before we go out of our minds with your headache!”

  Hogan drank, and Mickland said to Digen, “You aren’t training him, are you?”

  “No,” said Digen. “That’s obviously impossible. We’re—friends, that’s all.”

  Mickland looked at Digen in astonishment, and Digen could imagine him thinking, Friends, with a nerve-injured Simephobe from out-Territory?

  “Tell me, Hajene Farris,” said Agar, “how did it happen that you were caught out-Territory by an entran attack?”

  Digen wanted to say, flippantly, “Don’t ask me, ask my Controller.” But Mickland said, “Yes, and how is it that an abort pulled you out of it?”

  Digen looked to Hogan. “Perhaps we should discuss this upstairs,” he said to Mickland. “Joel, you’ll have to sleep here, where the channels can monitor you.”

  Hogan shook his head. “I feel better already.”

  “The fosebine is acting now as an analgesic. The underlying condition still exists, though you don’t feel it so sharply. I want my Thirds to keep tabs—it isn’t wise to ignore even the slightest symptoms in your case. I have some business to conduct, but I’ll be back to—”

  “You’re not going anywhere, Hajene,” said Mickland, “until I get a straight answer. I’m not giving you time to—”

  “Controller Mickland,” said Digen softly.

  Mickland dropped into Simelan, saying, with a deadly nager, “His system wouldn’t react to an attritional death shock at two inches, so we can’t possibly be doing him any harm. Now answer the question.”

  Digen paced out of the cubicle, squaring off against Mickland. “I can’t document this—I doubt if you’ll even believe it—but, near as I can figure, it was a primary-system entran complicated by all the transfer aborts I’ve been having lately.”

  “Primary?” said Agar, shaking her head.

  “Subjective impression,” said Digen, “but that’s what I come up with. I—”

  “What triggered it?” asked Mickland, shrewdly.

  “I think it had been coming on for a long time.”

  “If you had that much warning, what were you doing out-Territory?”

  “Name me two other channels who’d recognize the warning signs of primary entran,” countered Digen.

  Agar suppressed a smile, but Mickland brushed that aside. “I’m not falling for any of your legalistic diversions this time. I want to know what you did that triggered an entran attack.”

  “What difference does it make? It’s gone now.”

  “Hajene Farris, if you don’t come up with a straight answer right now, I’m going to suspend you pending test.”

  That could be a long suspension, without anyone like Im’ran to play target. “I took the abort, so obviously my conditioning—”

  “Obviously nothing! Answer the question.”

  Digen sighed. Mickland knew. Undoubtedly reports of Ditana Amanso had come to him almost immediately. So he told Mickland about the operation, leaving out the odd perceptual oscillations he had experienced—primary entran was enough for the man to swallow in one gulp. If Digen added a story about postsyndrome and wholly unknown sensations, he’d not be believed at all, or, worse, he’d be locked away as having completely lost his mind. Besides, now that it was over, Digen himself wasn’t sure that it really had happened.

  “So, surgery made you burn this Gen,” said Mickland.

  “He’s not burned, just—bruised a little on an old wound. And he saved my life. He’s a good friend.”

  But Mickland wasn’t listening. “I knew it! We’ve all known it all along! Surgery! By shen and by shid, it always comes back to that. I won’t have it—not in my district I won’t!”

  “You have no choice, Controller Mickland. I hold a dispensation from the World Controller to pursue a surgical education in the Gen hospital.”

  Mickland, eyes blazing, rounded on Digen. “But I’m Controller in this district, and I’m serving notice right now, Hajene Farris, that you are under my personal injunction against performing any sort of—surgical—procedure on any citizen of our Territories—whether you find them in- or out-Territory. If I could, I’d pull you out of that hospital so fast—”

  “But you can’t,” said Digen. “I’m free to—”

  “Not in my district and not on my people, you’re not! You’ll be served with my official papers in the morning, and you know what will happen if you violate an official Controller’s injunction!”

  Mickland swung around and stalked out of the room, oblivious to the little knot of attendants gathered at the side of the room, watching it all. It wasn’t every day the staff was treated to a full-blown confrontation between the Sectuib in Zeor and a district Controller.

  Digen stood, staring after Mickland,
unable to assimilate the Controller’s attitude. The man was too hysterical even to examine the facts. Finally Hogan said, “Digen, what was that all about?”

  Digen realized that it had all been in Simelan. He went to sit beside Hogan, to monitor his nervous system, more as something routine to do, something real and concrete to grapple with to get himself moving. He said, “Near as I can make it, it’s Mickland’s turnover day. He’s always a little more irritable than usual when going into Need. Maybe he’ll get over it by morning.”

  Digen sat with Hogan, talking softly for a while, trying to regain his trust—and discovering that he’d never actually lost it. Hogan’s fear was nothing but the last gasp of an old reflex triggered by the familiar headache. During the night Digen left to attend to his departments but came back at every spare moment. Hogan, unable to sleep, talked and talked until at last he got Digen to tell him of Mickland’s injunction. “And what will they do to you if you violate the Controller’s injunction?”

  “Joel, you have to understand the original purpose of the Controller’s injunction—as a legal document. Under the First Contract between the Territories, the Tecton is responsible for controlling the—asocial behavior of all our Simes. Considering that Simes are only human, that can be a tall order.”

  “Yeah but surgery isn’t my idea of an asocial act, so what will they do to you if you do surgery on an in-Territory citizen?”

  “The penalty for violation of any Controller’s injunction is—death—by attrition—publicly.”

  Hogan blanched, his shock alerting half the room. Hogan knew Digen’s exaggerated sensitivity to attrition, and most of his shock was sympathetic reaction to what he imagined Digen felt. Digen waved the Third Order channels away, saying to Hogan, “I have no intention of violating any Controller’s directive—let alone an injunction. But I doubt if Mickland will actually do it.”

  Digen was wrong. The papers were served on him while he was signing Hogan out of the Sime Center treatment facility. Digen stood numbly staring at the little folded packet of papers with the official Westfield seal, while the messenger, a Gen, turned to Hogan and said, “You’re Dr. Joel Hogan?”