The Farris Channel (13 page)

Tuzhel sat up and ran both hands and his handling tentacles over his shaved head, shaking and not just from the pain in his half-healed tendons.

Solamar thought,
Rimon is making a big mistake here.
At the same moment, Tuzhel whispered, “BanSha says channels can do anything. I didn’t believe him. But he’s right. He says he’s going to be one. I want to be one too.”

Rimon pried the clutching hands loose and nudged the youth’s chin up, meeting his eyes, gently engaging his nager. “A person is born a channel, or not a channel. It’s not something you can choose. You can choose to stay with us, to learn a trade, to live among Gens and never Kill again. No Sime in this Fort is allowed to Kill. It’s a hard choice that only the bravest among us can make, especially after what you’ve been through the first few days of your life as an adult Sime. That would make the choice much harder. But if you really want it, we’ll help you choose not to Kill.”

Solamar heard Rimon’s unspoken,
and maybe even survive it.
Disjunction for this youth would take at least six to eight months, and the last few months would be horrible agony until he broke the addictive craving for the Kill.

Eyes narrowed, the junct accused in a heavily accented, mixed patois, “This Fort a-gonna be smashed flat in the next raid, ain’it?”

“I doubt that,” answered Rimon honestly. “Though many of us may die by violence before the town folks return to exterminate the Raiders. But that’s only one reason Raiders don’t live long. To Kill so frequently, you give up all the best years of your life. To gain some of them back, you must face the risks.”

“Tuzhel,” said Solamar, “BanSha didn’t tell you about what happens when a Sime who has survived by Killing tries to live by taking selyn from a channel?”

Rimon eyed Solamar but zlinned Tuzhel’s reaction. Clearly the youth was as ignorant of disjunction as he must have been of changeover before it hit him and he matured into a Sime almost overnight after growing up expecting to be Gen like his parents.

Rimon turned back to their patient. “If we let you go and you return to the Raider band you were with, you will be dead within five years at the most. Probably you will die within two years. Isn’t it true that the Raiders you have met are young? Have they ever told you of someone they knew who was more than six years past changeover?”

Tuzhel’s eyes were fixed on Rimon now, and he was thinking hard. His head moved in a silent negative.

“How old do you think I am?” asked Rimon.

“Old. Older tha’ I cn count.”

Rimon held out both hands, with all eight handling tentacles extended. “Here’s how many years since I was born.” He closed his hands and retracted tentacles, then opened them again, then closed them and opened his right hand with handling tentacles extended. Closed that and held out three tentacles. “Do you know how many years that is?”

“Count tentacles too?”

“Well, yes, that’s how we count.”

After some cogitation, he said a number in Genlan that Solamar didn’t know, but it seemed the youth could count, just not in Simelan. “That’s older than my Da....”

The ambient shattered, but Solamar held the fields in the room rock steady, still braced against any unexpected move the Farris might make. Rimon controlled the ambient effortlessly while Solamar marveled at the recovery the man had made in just a few minutes after hurling all his strength into healing Sian.
Apparent recovery,
he reminded himself. He knew he couldn’t zlin what was really going on inside a Farris, and Rimon was better than most at using his showfield to mask his inner turmoil.

“You Killed your father when you changed over?” prompted Rimon, knowing the answer.

Great, welling shame, horror filled the room and Rimon let it billow uncontrolled. Solamar followed his lead, not understanding, but sure that this junct would never choose the Fort lifestyle after being treated like this.

Bruce came forward and grabbed the scrawny, completely shaven young man and swept him into a warm embrace filled with Gen love. “Oh, that must have been horrible,” he muttered, but his voice and nager carried immense sympathy. “It wasn’t your fault, Tuzhel. We understand how these things happen by accident.”

He held him, rocking back and forth as sobs burst from the young throat. “Weren’ no accident. H-he, he hit me with a shovel. He wanna kill me...I...I...I didn’t want to die! I should-a, but I couldn’ wanna....”

Nobody in the room was about to correct his Simelan. He’d learn soon enough the difference between the Kill and murder.

Bruce murmured all the right things, then said, “Here you will never have to want to die, Tuzhel. Here you can survive, do good and be glad to live. There are a number of people here who had similar experiences. We’re always ready to take in young people who get to us in time. And you are in time, Tuzhel. You can live.”

That was more the message Solamar thought might work with a young junct. But the youth was having none of it. “I want to Kill you!” He squirmed trying to get a transfer grip on the Gen, but Bruce and Rimon manipulated the fields to create the illusion of shifting, moving contact points that kept eluding the junct until he gave up.

Bruce hugged him again. “No, you don’t want to Kill me. You just want to satisfy your selyn Need,” he contradicted, then looked over the youth’s head at Rimon. “Nothing I could do would provide that for you. Besides, right now you’re not in Need.” He rose and backed away now that the storm of grief had abated in the typical First Year Sime’s way of rapid adjustments.

Circling back to his position behind Rimon, he muttered a quick apology and returned to his primary job of keeping his attention on Rimon, letting the channel use his Gen selyn fields to work the ambient.

Rimon was eyeing Solamar again, speculation rife in that gaze but barely zlinnable in the ambient. “You up for a little demonstration, Solamar?”

Not sure what Rimon wanted, Solamar grinned confidently. Rimon zlinned his uncertainty and returned a serene confidence in Solamar’s abilities. To the renSime youth, the ambient nager was a steady, evenly glowing field punctuated lightly by Bruce’s throbbing glow.

As any Sime during the first year after changeover, the youth was easily distracted into studying selyn fields. Obviously, Rimon intended to use that trait for instructional purposes, but Solamar couldn’t follow his thinking. What could you say to a Raider who knew his compatriots would be back soon, that nothing could be gained by the struggle to disjunct except an ugly death at Raider hands?

Rimon moved away from the bed with an air of judicious consideration then rounded on Solamar with a devilish grin and spoke looking directly into Solamar’s eyes. “Tuzhel, zlin our fields closely now. I’ll pretend to be you, at the final moments of the disjunction process. Bruce will be a Gen that you’d want very much to Kill. Solamar will be the channel who is ready to give you transfer, and in the end, he will give you transfer.”

I will?
Solamar thought very quietly to himself as he returned the confident grin of the Farris channel who wasn’t fooled for a second.
This can’t possibly work. What kid would choose to go through such agony for nothing?
Nevertheless, he nodded and took a position apart from Bruce as the Farris shifted the fields in the room totally captivating the First Year renSime’s attention.

Smoothly, Rimon’s showfield began to mimic a junct renSime in Need, voracious Need for Killbliss not just selyn, a Need unsatisfied for months.

Cooperatively, Bruce put all his attention on Rimon’s imitation renSime and began to offer him transfer, as if he were ready to serve his channel’s Need. Solamar brought his showfield up to create the impression of a Gen offering transfer to that imitation-renSime as any channel would prepare to serve a real renSime’s Need.

Rimon responded by precisely mimicking the rising intil, the sharp, voracious intensity of a junct in Need hunting a Kill. Bruce’s fields far out-shone Solamar’s, even though Bruce and Rimon were more than ten days from transfer. Still from the renSime’s perspective, Bruce must have seemed as if he contained all the selyn in the world.

To play his part in this charade, Solamar had to remain the lesser enticement, offering a mere channel’s transfer, not a true Gen Kill.

Rimon upped the power and Bruce followed his lead with that amazing talent sometimes displayed by the Companions of the truly powerful channels. Solamar held steady while Rimon demonstrated the agonizing moment of decision that every disjuncting renSime had to go through.

Disjunction was not so much contained in the months of increasing, agonizing dissatisfaction with channel’s transfer, the intensifying lust for the Kill, but in that final moment of choice at the end of all that suffering. Rimon had obviously taken many juncts through that moment and knew its every nuance.

Tuzhel, wholly lost in the selyn fields, moved closer, kneeling on the bed, pushing toward the scenario unfolding before him, attention flicking back and forth between Bruce and Solamar in time with Rimon’s enactment.

Rimon moved toward Bruce, letting his very genuine Need for this particular Gen show through, but giving it a distinctive twist, the Need for Gen pain, agony and final deathscream, for the pure egobliss of the Kill.

Rimon reached for Bruce who offered his arms for the Sime’s transfer grip, letting his deep-seated yearning for that transfer slowly turn to horror, revulsion and then terror as Rimon’s tentacles touched him. It was just the response a junct craved from a Gen.

Solamar, aware the Raider could lunge for Bruce at any moment, did nothing but hold steady, being the channel he had never been raised to be, never been trained to be. That was a secret he had to keep from Rimon Farris, somehow, despite all the rest he’d have to tell him. So he threw himself into his role, dismissing his entire personal identity and becoming the channel Rimon thought him to be.

Rimon’s attention flicked over Solamar, zlinning his fields. Then he lunged two steps toward Bruce, hesitated, then threw himself at Solamar.

Solamar braced one foot behind him, brought selyn up just as if giving a transfer and took Rimon’s weight as their lateral tentacles entwined and Rimon went for the fifth transfer point, lip to lip. As the two of them went over backwards, Rimon actually drew selyn, his showfield projecting a relaxed, beautiful satisfaction, not Killbliss at all, but something better. The transfer completed before Solamar’s shoulders hit the floor and Lexy flew into the room blowing the faked fields to smithereens.

“Dad!”

Rimon laughed, a free jolly laugh, throaty and relaxed, just as a newly disjuncted renSime might laugh. He looked up at Lexy and swept the fields back into the neutral wall of opalescence it had been before the demonstration.

Tuzhel sat back on his heels amidst the blankets, duoconscious again, staring at Rimon. “That wasn’t real.”

“No, it wasn’t,” said Rimon. “It was just very close. That’s what it would be like, Tuzhel, hard, and very much a free choice that you and you alone would have to make.”

Bruce pulled Rimon to his feet, shifting his own fields and attention to help Rimon adjust his fields, and Solamar rested the back of his head on the rug wishing Kahleen were there but feasting his eyes on Lexy from this odd perspective, zlinning her take it all in and adjust to the lack of a real emergency.
There is one gorgeous woman with a spirit like solar fire.

He rolled over and got to his feet reassuring her, “Rimon decided to demonstrate disjunction crisis for Tuzhel.” He turned to the youth. “Did a pretty good job being you, don’t you think?” He held his breath.

Tuzhel nodded, “I wouldn’ never have to Kill? I wouldn’ feel like I have to?”

Rimon said with relentless honesty, “Maybe sometimes for a few minutes you might have that feeling. It would go away in the time you could hold your breath. Need just wouldn’t ordinarily feel the same as it does to you now. But I’m not going to lie to you. Disjunction is a hard thing, maybe the hardest thing a Sime can do. If you were a few months older, you wouldn’t be able to survive it. So you must choose now.”

Tuzhel looked at Garen who had come in behind Lexy and closed the door. Even with Tuzhel kneeling on the narrow bed, the room was crowded. Tuzhel slowly nodded. He was scared, but he was game. “Yes.” Something fundamental had changed in this lost youth. It wasn’t a logical decision. It was more like a leap of faith.

More than a little amazed, Solamar let his genuine pleasure show.
The Farrises are just not like any other kind of channel.
He’d known that but he’d never actually
known
it. What he’d inadvertently done to Rimon while trying to get a transfer into Tuzhel the first time might have done irreversible damage to the Farris.
He’s seeing ghosts, he’s starting to work on the non-material body of his patients, and now he’s struck this boy’s soul. What next?