The Farris Channel (18 page)

Rimon stopped her with a tentacle gesture while he said to Iriela’s mother, “Dayyel, I know you just got word and want to stay and support Rella, but....”

“Say no more,” assured Dayyel. “Rella, just do what Rimon says like we talked about yesterday.”

Iriela started to answer, but drew breath as another contraction clamped down. Bruce stepped toward her, but Rimon caught him with a tentacle. “Bruce, go take care of Dayyel and your family until I call you. Guard the corridor. Maigrey, you work with me for a few hours so Bruce can do the grandfather’s job in peace.”

Bruce got the message even if most of the others in the room didn’t. Their transfer was just too close now, so Bruce was too high field to be of use to his renSime daughter, especially when he was constantly blowing the fields to smithereens with spikes of joy while she was fighting what felt like death.

Bruce scooped his wife and son-in-law out of the room, saying “Fengal, you and Aislinn can find something to occupy Xanon while Maigrey does my job for me.”

Rushi led the way out cheerfully remanding her patient to the channel for delivery and everyone trooped after her ready to start partying.

Suddenly the room was empty except for Rimon, Maigrey and Iriela. As the door closed Rimon brought his whole attention to focus on Iriela.

Maigrey, Iriela’s lifelong friend, wanted to hold her hand and mop her forehead, but Rimon gestured her back to her Companion’s duties. She couldn’t do much for Rimon, but she was in better emotional shape than Bruce and much lower field so she wasn’t raising Iriela’s Need.

Rimon took the channel’s stool next to Iriela and brought her contractions under his control, smoothing out here, balancing the muscular effort, encouraging selyn to flow there, examining for bleeding.

Then he captured her attention and directed her mind away from the effort her body was making. It was her first child, but she had been thoroughly prepared. Though she’d only been in labor for a few hours, her waters had broken and she was dilating easily. This is going to be fast.

Maigrey hitched herself up onto the tall stool behind the chair and focused on Rimon, firm, supportive, confident.

For Rimon it was all in his showfield. Inside he just wasn’t all that sure. Outside the Forts, for a renSime or most Gens to give birth to a channel usually resulted in the mother’s death because, unlike Gens and renSimes, channels drew huge amounts of selyn from the mother at birth.

No other children had a clue about whether they would become Sime or Gen at maturity. But channels knew their destiny. Certainly, Iriela’s boy was going to be a terrific channel if his selyn draw was any indication.

Rimon’s secondary selyn system was replete from his recent stint in the Collectorium. But would he be fast and smooth enough to get this much selyn into a renSime without the selyn energy burning her? Bruce’s daughter.

During the hours that followed, he reviewed his successes and his failures. His own father hadn’t been able to teach him much. He’d invented most of it by trial and error. Every time he fed Iriela more selyn, not transfer but just providing a sustained trickle of selyn, he worried.

Iriela’s confidence grew as his waned. By the time they had her installed on the birthing couch, her upper body and arms strapped down so she couldn’t move to try to satisfy any sudden spikes of true Need, Rimon knew this baby would need more selyn than his mother’s renSime nerves could carry in the moments before birth.

This child had a top Companion for a grandfather and a channel for a father. He would be a very strong channel, if he lived. Rimon knew he would have to get his tentacles onto the fetus before birth and infuse selyn into the child directly without burning the mother. He also knew all the times that technique had failed with renSime women.

“Maigrey, you’ve done a splendid job here. Now you’re starting to tire. Go get Bruce for me.”

Maigrey stepped back, wearily sweeping her attention away from Rimon.

“Go on,” said Iriela. “Father would want to be....” The rest was taken by a low, open throated grunt that turned to a moaning groan.

“And send Rushi in,” added Rimon.

Moments later Bruce and Rushi replaced Maigrey who very reluctantly closed the door behind them. Bruce’s whole family was waiting in that hall.

Rimon briefed Bruce in clipped tones and half sentences. His Companion wrapped Rimon in his solid field. Rushi didn’t have enough of a field to penetrate Bruce’s nager, and Iriela was a selyn depleted renSime with her baby a pinpoint of concentrated selyn at her center.

Rimon had long since educated Iriela on what would happen if he had to use this procedure. She threw her head back gasping, “Do it, Delri. I’m fi....” and again her words dissolved into a groaning push.

Rimon cleansed his hands and tentacles in the basin Rushi provided, then worked his hands up around the baby’s head. He felt his laterals slide through the hot blood and mucus, finally contact the baby’s skin. He closed his eyes and focused wholly on his Sime senses.

Bruce’s hold on him was so strong, he felt as if his body and all his Need with it were separated from his work with the fields now. He found the contact points, and met the baby’s Need with a diffuse cloud of selyn, soaking the mucous with the energy of life.

The mother’s body was consuming selyn voraciously, bleeding selyn and blood, pluming gouts of selyn out with every contraction, burning selyn at augmented rates in the huge muscular contractions.

Thrashing wildly against the restraints, unconscious of her actions as her body went deep into selyn Attrition, Iriela was drawing selyn out of her own baby as Rimon infused the fetus with the energy of life. It wasn’t enough selyn for her and her draw was burning the fetus’s nervous system. He hadn’t expected her to be able to reverse the normal birthing selyn flow. Sometimes a channel would Kill her unborn child to save herself, but not a renSime.

As the contraction eased into death, he withdrew his hands and, moved up to grab Iriela’s forearms in a transfer grip, making the fifth contact lip to lip. He drove selyn through the mother’s spasm-locked body and into the baby.

Iriela’s heart started again, and the final contraction began. The baby’s selyn draw peaked. Rimon felt the baby then, as he often felt his patients, not just as a body madly sucking selyn out of his secondary system, but a whole person wanting to live.

He fell into a rhythm, feeding first one then the other. He lost touch with the outside world, zlinning only the inward selyn flows.

* * * * * * *

He was standing before an odd brick edifice, radiating a powerful heat. He was a large, muscular Gen male in the prime of life. He knew metal was melting inside this huge furnace, and he knew this batch would come out to be the purest steel seen in a thousand years.

But even more exciting than that, he anticipated his wife’s surge of glee after their next transfer. He was Companion to the most wonderful channel who ever lived, whose determination and unfailing optimism had rebuilt his House and the junct town around them. This new steel he was making would give her an invulnerable feeling and she would make all their dreams come true.

* * * * * * *

Delri! Delri, come back.

“I’m not going anywhere.”
Delri said to his father while he strained for the memory of steel making. The concept was so powerful, filled with solutions to problems, exquisitely simple and marvelously complex at once.

You are here and now. It is the child who will be then, long, long from now. You are not the child and you are not to be who the child will become. You are Del Rimon Farris. You are the hope for that future to be, but you must save this child in this now.

* * * * * * *

He was standing in a small, comfortably appointed house, gazing out at a lovely, neat row of houses. The area was surrounded with a high wall. It was a Fort, but like no other he had seen. The small houses were surrounded by whitewashed fences and neat rows of whitewashed stones. There were chickens, dogs, children, and a flock of geese. These strange people had lived there longer than he’d been alive, but they had welcomed him.

In this warm, welcoming living room, he was struggling to demonstrate a channel’s functional to another channel. Delri recognized what he was trying to do, but also that the effort was crude and clumsy, badly executed. The other channel could not follow his field manipulation, no matter how patiently and slowly he repeated it.

“Rimon,” said an elderly renSime who was watching them, “you can do this. I know you can. It is part of God’s plan for us. You will not let us down.”

And he knew he was Rimon Farris. He was himself, and he was his own grandfather, all at the same time.

* * * * * * *

“Rimon!”
It was Solamar Grant, speaking silently in his mind again.
“Come back to the present now. Iriela Needs you. Her child is coming. Now, Rimon!

Rimon fought the nightmare sensation, struggled to detach himself from Grant’s attention and squirmed away, twisting and turning, and coming up in the dimly lit room, a few hours before dawn, safely in Fort Rimon’s birthing chamber, firmly protected by Bruce’s rock steady field.

As his awareness surfaced, he dismantled his transfer grip on Iriela. Bruce’s grip relaxed in a vast, trembling relief. Quickly, he edged Rushi aside and moved to receive the baby, laving the half-born infant with an abundance of selyn. His mind, though, was somewhere in the distant past. Or was it the future? Nothing made any sense. Bruce encouraged Iriela to push now, push hard, just once more.

The squirming, slippery infant lay safe, alive in the cradle of Rimon’s hands and tentacles. With one tentacle, he cleared the newborn’s air passages, and with two others he encouraged him to start breathing.

He swaddled the baby in the warmed blanket Rushi handed him. He tucked the little body up on the mother’s stomach to await the afterbirth. Iriela had barely caught her breath by the time Rimon finished the well practiced move.

Then Bruce and his daughter were gasping and laughing. Bruce’s nageric spike of relief and happiness penetrated even the massive shielding of this room, and Maigrey and the whole family crowded in before the afterbirth was cleared.

Their pure joy vibrated the walls, rumbled through the earth, shook the distant tombstones in the cemetery, stirring Rimon’s ghosts, thrashed through the trees, and Rimon saw the grape arbor spring into full bloom in seconds.

Bruce looked at him oddly. This was not a moment Rimon could bear to spoil for his Companion. He drew his showfield tight around himself, and gave everyone a warm, happy smile that was perfectly genuine.

“Rushi, you finish up. No complications evident at all with the afterbirth. Iriela, you and Fengal have a fine, strapping healthy baby boy to raise into a channel this Fort will love. What’s his name to be?”

“We told you,” said Fengal, doing his best to help Rimon work the fields in the overcrowded room. “He’ll be Wade, after Bruce’s great-grandfather.”

Rimon couldn’t imagine how he’d forgotten. This was to be the family’s long planned tribute to Bruce’s family’s out-Territory origin. Only it seemed wrong somehow. This boy should have a name starting with an S.

“Good, I’ll tell Benart to enter him in our Record,” he said, looking at his hands. “After I clean up, that is.”

Rushi started for another basin of water and soap laid by for this purpose, but Maigrey opened the door for him, and they watched him flee the scene with vast puzzlement. Their bewilderment grew when he sternly gestured Bruce back into the room and kicked the door shut behind him.

It happened again.
And this time he wasn’t seeing ghosts, he was becoming ghosts and returning convinced he was someone other than himself.
I have to tell Bruce, but not now. Oh, not now. Let him have this moment.

He went about his duties for the rest of that morning, trying to drown the memory in more urgent affairs, trying to convince himself he could perform any channel’s functional and not drift off into some insane vision.

When Bruce tried to join him, Rimon waved him off to attend his family. They would talk soon enough. That awful confession would preempt Bruce’s happiness.

Rimon worked until noon, then took one of his now habitual breaks to pace the walls and zlin Fremir Pass. First, he spent a few minutes watching the younger children playing in the yard. They were supervised by adults from different Forts; the children were mixed too. The youngest were marching and chanting a vocabulary song, spelling out difficult words. Another group was playing the popular ring-toss game called
Zeor
. You’d never know they were from different Forts.

Then he spotted the third pair of guards to arrive. They carried a long report from Lexy. It was only two days before Rimon’s scheduled transfer, and his concentration was not what it should have been. He read the report three times before he understood it.

Lexy detailed what had happened to Fort Hope, most of which everyone knew from the scouts’ story. After the last of Fort Hope’s Farris channels had died, a series of decisions went wrong and a harvest came in very short. In desperation, they had sent a party to trade with the out-Territory Gens, relatives of Simes who had arrived at Fort Hope after changing over out-Territory. Traditionally, the Forts had always kept ties with Gen towns across the borders near them. This time, that policy had backfired.

A nearby Sime town had housed a garrison of Licensed Raiders, Sime government sanctioned troops that harvested Gens out-Territory. Licensed Raiders carefully limited their take of Gens to avoid depleting the local supply or triggering a Gen army action against the Territory.

The Licensed Raiders got word of Fort Hope’s illegally trading in their hunting ground and organized an all out attack on the Fort, razed all the buildings, murdered a third of the Simes and carried off a few dozen Gens. The ones who were not Companions would eventually make Choice Kills to be sold at auction.

The survivors set out for Fort Rimon, expecting to acquire another Farris channel, and re-found their Fort in a safer place. Only Fort Rimon was no longer where it should be. It had moved.

Following directions the locals gave them, they had to destroy some diseased horses, fight off Freebanders, and survive a tornado. They found another abandoned Fort, but there they lost people to a fever.

Setting off following yet more vague advice, they encountered some out-Territory Gen merchants who had strayed across the border with four wagons loaded with corn, oats, wheat and beans. Suddenly they found themselves in a pitched battle.

The Gens, not realizing they were in Sime Territory, not comprehending that Simes could truly intend to help them find their way back to Gen Territory, turned on the Fort Hope people as if they were Raiders and fought to the death. The last three of the Gens raced their horses over a cliff instead of risking being Killed by marauder Simes.