The Farris Channel (14 page)

Rimon had no answer for that. His own behavior had edged into the unconscionable and here his Companion, his dearest friend, was making excuses for him. Gens often did that. He met Solamar’s gaze, exchanged Sime-to-Sime shrugs and Bruce chuckled.

At the end of the hall, a cart came squeaking into view, steaming lovely food aromas into the early morning air. Rimon, despite Need clamping down on his guts, found that he was hungry.
No, Bruce is hungry. I could eat.

BanSha and one of the older girls named Bekka stopped the cart and began distributing trays to the patients still bed bound. Bekka was a sturdy child with brown hair and eyes and a soft gentle smile, always ready to help.

Rimon said, “Bruce, you’re hungry. And Solamar, you’re on shift now while I’m supposed to go rest.” As he spoke another channel and her Companion came down the hall toward them with purposeful strides. “Isn’t that one of your Tanhara channels?” asked Rimon, reminding himself he had a lot of people he had to get to know.

“Yes. I’ll brief her on Sian and Tuzhel’s progress and then see what Val has on the schedule for me, probably Collectorium duty this morning, Dispensary this afternoon.”

Solamar strode toward the channel Rimon didn’t know, grateful to escape. Rimon could zlin the fatigue Solamar was hiding well. He was keenly aware that he’d surprised Solamar by actually taking a transfer from him, even if it had been only half the selyn a renSime would demand.
Maybe I shouldn’t have done that.

But it had worked beyond Rimon’s wildest hopes. Tuzhel wanted to join the Fort now. Later, when disjunction became arduous, it might be a different story.

“Come on, Bruce, I’ll answer your questions over breakfast.” He nerved himself up to telling his Companion about seeing ghosts and then imagining Solamar. Everyone knew Rimon’s father Zeth had died ranting insanely about ghosts. Bruce would never look at him the same again. It has to be done, he told himself grimly.

He paused to offer a few words of praise to BanSha and zlin the boy carefully for signs of Changeover. There was nothing yet, so he led Bruce downstairs and out through the channels’ on-duty sleeping quarters. They grabbed cloaks from the stand by the door, and using the exit at the far end of the wing, they made the short dash across the open in howling winds and blinding snow.

They entered the Dining Hall through the hot, steamy and bustling kitchen. Running around the clock, they served breakfast, dinner, snacks all the time.

As soon as they settled at a table in the corner of the dining hall, Benart came over with an armload of reports, chattering at top speed.

Inventories had been completed, and though they had a good selyn supply, they were going to run short of food before spring crops came in. Water and sanitation was already a problem but progress had been made on the latrines despite the snow.

Parties had been out cutting new logs for the larger wall, as well as firewood. Every hearth was now ablaze against the intense chill that had set in, yet most rooms were cold. Some of the new post holes had been dug before the heavy snow arrived. During the blizzard, the carpenters focused on carving new nails and bolts from the hardest woods, training the older children in the art. Wool they had intended to trade was being spun for winter cloaks, gloves, socks and blankets.

Space was a very serious problem. You could not keep so many renSimes packed so close to so many Gens without expecting an incident at some point.

Management decisions would have to be made, and enforced, and that meant a duly elected Council.

“Xanon has been talking to his Fort Butte followers,” said Benart glumly. “You’d have thought that your healing Sian after Xanon gave up on him would count for something. Sian is going to walk again, isn’t he?”

Rimon speared Bruce with a glare. “That remains to be seen. He’s definitely recovering. He clearly wasn’t as badly injured as it first seemed, as usual with nerve injuries.”

Benart raised his eyebrows at Bruce.

Bruce said, “We’ll see better tomorrow, but I think he’s going to be able to weave again.”

“May take some retraining, possibly some rebuilding of the looms, but I do expect he’ll be able to weave if not walk, and might still be able to play the shiltpron,” said Rimon. He thought it would come out better than that.
I have no idea what I did or how!

Now it would be hours, maybe days until he could corner Solamar and get some answers, if the Fort Tanhara channel even had any answers.

“Well, Delri, even with Sian improving, the Butte people are listening to Xanon and talking to everyone. They even have some Fort Unity and Fort Veritt people agreeing. Now Xanon is saying that because you are such a good channel, you think you’re good at everything and can tell everyone what to do about everything.

“Lots of people are assuming the food shortfall means we can’t all survive, so this Fort has to decide how to deploy our resources. They don’t trust Fort Rimon people to make decisions because we think you, Lexy and...well you two should have the final say. So they want a new Council without any of us, or our Church of the Unity people, on it. The Unity folks are behind you like a solid wall no matter which Fort they come from. But there’s no Church left in Butte, hasn’t been for a generation.”

Bruce said, “I don’t like this “Butte People” “Unity People,” “Veritt People” versus “us.” We can’t survive in factions.”

Rimon nodded. “True, but we will survive. I don’t know why Xanon can’t see that while the other Forts have failed, Fort Rimon has not only survived, but prospered. We’re strained right now with the influx of all these people, but we were on track to manage the winter just fine until Tanhara arrived.”

Rimon knew he had made a fateful error when he let a judgment call come down to a vote, a political decision about whether a fact was true or not.
You can’t vote on facts.
If Clire had gotten the transfer he’d wanted her to have, when he wanted her to have it, she wouldn’t have Killed during that raid. With her, their chances of surviving would have been excellent. “What’s Garen saying? Clire is carrying his child.”
Not mine. It won’t be mine.

“Garen hasn’t been talking,” laughed Benart. “He’s been working with Lexy until he’s cross-eyed tired.” He shifted his attention to Bruce. “...and you know how a Companion is when working. They never say a word, don’t even acknowledge your presence. You’d think they were part of the furniture without personality or opinion!”

Bruce passed a hand over his face and hung his head at this characterization. “It isn’t an easy job you know!”

“He’s just teasing,” said Rimon. “Eat your stew. You still have dessert to finish.” Rimon had eaten his fill of the beans, grains and roots in a few bites and was picking at a cracker, trying to look busy.

“Bruce is probably just as tired as Garen,” said Benart. “Garen fell asleep in his soup right at this very table last night and Lexy had to wake him and find someplace for him to sleep.”

Bruce said, “He’s avoiding grieving, avoiding even thinking about Clire. He never wanted to get her pregnant, knowing how Farris women die in childbirth. He’s in love with Clire, even now she’s junct if not dead.”

Rimon said, “He is, and Clire was falling for him.” Garen had been all she talked about the one night Rimon was with her. “Clire’s child is the only Farris of the next generation, so far.”

“If she’s still alive,” said Bruce.

“There hasn’t been any word?”

“Search party blew in an hour ago,” reported Benart. “There’s a major blizzard coming. They said they went as far as Shifron and zlinned her in the town. So she’s there, a prisoner. Is there still time to save her baby?”

“Maybe.” Wind howled. The storm had closed in, keeping the sky dark at dawn. “We have to get her back first. She knows she’s going to die. I don’t know what she feels about the baby, but she’s got to be hating me.”

“As soon as the storm’s over, we’ll send a team to bring her back,” said Benart. “I’ve got volunteers already and Jhiti’s sorting them.”

The dining hall’s outer door opened and a dozen snow crusted Simes left shovels and stomped into the entry, apparently one last work party that finally gave up digging the new latrine pits. It took two of them to push the outer door shut again while the others stood picks and shovels against the wall in the entry and pulled open the inner door to the dining hall.

For a few seconds, both inner and outer doors were open. The cold air blasted all the way to Rimon’s corner and Bruce shivered, rippling the ambient with powerful Gen discomfort. Rimon joined with several other channels scattered through the huge room to blend the ambient nager around the newcomers and smooth out the goosebumps propagating through the ambient.

One of the workers noticed Rimon handling the fields and approached. He said respectfully to Rimon, “Jhiti wants you up on the walls.” He gestured toward the stables. “They’ve zlinned something on top of the east ridge, and they don’t know what to make of it.”

“On my way,” answered Rimon, rising as he flicked a tentacle at Bruce in a
stay
gesture, explaining, “It’s cold outside and that’s a long way to zlin. Eat.”

On the way out the front door, he grabbed another cloak off the public hooks and pulled it tight as he slogged across the knee deep drifts to the stair near the stables.

There wasn’t a Gen out here now, which made it hard to zlin anything. He almost crashed into the well housing. Even the donkey was off duty.

Zlinning to his left, he noted the school and all the family houses were filled with three times the number of people they were built for. They even had people housed in the factory building to his right. Ahead of him the stables held twenty people crowded among the animals.

It was too early in the year for such a storm, which boded ill for winter. They had to build more housing, and that meant building the new wall. He had rebuilt Fort Rimon in four different locations and knew what a mistake it was to put residences at the perimeter. They would have to build a bigger underground shelter and drill everyone in how to get to their combat stations. He, himself, would have to follow the rules next time, no matter what.

Jhiti zlinned him coming and sent two renSimes down kicking snow off the steps and holding out hands to help him up the icy treads until he could reach the guide rope.

He climbed to the walk, following Jhiti to the vantage point. “Delri, you’re tired.”

“We all are. There’ll be time to rest come winter.”

“I guess. Brisk fall weather, wouldn’t you say?”

Rimon chuckled. “Should we consider moving?”

“Not again! We’ve got too much invested here.”

“I wasn’t serious!” protested Rimon fighting the wind’s efforts to sweep him off the catwalk.

“I should hope not!”

Jhiti had helped rebuild Fort Rimon every time. If they hadn’t moved so far into the mountains, the other Forts would have found them faster. More refugees would have survived.

“Delri, when was the last time you slept?”

“I got a couple hours yesterday. Bruce takes good care of me.”

“Glad you didn’t bring him out here,” said Jhiti as he brought them around to face due east across the valley. He had to hold the hood on his cloak closed until he got his back to the wind. “I’m going to rotate shifts in one hour increments all night. It’s just too cold.”

“Good. Even half-hour shifts for those not used to these storms. Are there enough dry socks and gloves?”

“Zedros is still hobbling around from his leg wound, but he’s got people working round the clock in the laundry.”

Rimon had delivered the young renSime at his birth and watched Zedros grow into a fine manager. “So where is this mystery you want investigated?”

“Zlin Fremir Peak. Now follow the ridge down to the pass. If someone was coming through that pass when the storm closed, think where they’d camp? Zlin there. Am I imagining ghosts?”

It was a long way to zlin without a Gen anywhere out there and Rimon wasn’t deep enough into Need yet to make it easy. “Give me some space, and I’ll see.”

The renSime backed off a few steps and focused his attention on his patrols, his back to Rimon.

Rimon closed his eyes, and went hyperconscious, letting go of all his physical senses to zlin the far distance. He made out the ragged side of Fremir Peak and knew how the pass snaked around it. With imagination he traced the path a traveler would follow through known landmarks and came to the shadow of a shadow that Jhiti had spotted.

The renSime had zlinned this only because there was nothing in the valley except the livestock huddled under the snow and some trees, plants and wild animals that didn’t have a perceptible selyn signature. On the mountains edging the valley there was no life, except...
whatever that is.

There was something there. Rimon studied the haze until it resolved for him. Then he studied it some more.

He scuffed over to Jhiti and reported, “Just a haze of selyn fields blurring around some boulders. I make it three renSimes, in bad shape, very low on selyn. No Gens. Maybe a horse or two. I don’t think they’re very healthy.”

“Raiders?”

Rimon thought about that hard. He shrugged.

“Juncts from the town?”

“Why would they be coming down into the valley now?”

“Going up, out of the valley? Last refugees from Shifron?”

“Possible.” He zlinned the distance again. “What I’m zlinning would also be consistent with three renSimes freezing to death.”