The Farris Channel (19 page)

The battle did so much damage to the Fort’s wagons and horses, that, figuring they had to be very close to their goal, they cached most of their own food supplies as well as all that survived on the Gens’ wagons, in a cave and continued searching for Fort Rimon.

When the trail petered out, the terrain provided no clue to where a group might settle, and there were no more towns. So they camped and sent scouts in every direction looking for clues to where Fort Rimon might be. Then the early winter storm hit the open camp with devastating force.

All of that confirmed what the scouts had told everyone, but Lexy had made a new decision.

Since the Fort was already short of food, and the Fort Hope people had a large number of Gens who would have to be fed through spring, it was imperative to bring in that cached food from the cave before winter closed in. The Fort Hope people were from the southern plains and had no idea what the mountain winter would be like, or how long it would be until a crop could be brought in.

Lexy was sending the majority of the Fort Hope members, starting with the most injured or disabled, to Fort Rimon along the trail established by Jhiti’s Guard detail. Those who could ride would be mounted, and a few wagons would be used for the injured and the Fort’s possessions.

The empty wagons would go with Lexy, Garen, Jhiti, his Guard troop, and some Fort Hope renSimes, to where they had cached the food. It might take a couple of weeks, but they’d bring the food that Fort Rimon now had to have.

Moving wagons over the ice crusted snow would be slow, maybe impossible over the Fremir Pass. Lexy asked Rimon to send help to get the people over the pass even if the wagons had to wait for spring to be brought over.

This time there was nothing in Lexy’s letter except business, everything from details on patients she was sending him to an inventory of skills and resources that Fort Hope was bringing them. Her plan was a good one. She was doing exactly as he’d have done in her place.

It never occurred to him to share Lexy’s report with the newly elected Council before showing it to Oberin who took immediate action.

Hours after Oberin’s guards were dispatched, Xanon, Alind and several others stormed into Rimon’s office bursting with outrage. “You had no right to authorize this scheme of Lexy’s!” roared Alind, head of the new Council.

But it was Xanon whose outrage filled Rimon’s office. “...and certainly not to withhold her report until we heard about it from that Raider you’re trying to educate.”

“I didn’t authorize anything, and he’s not a Raider anymore. Tuzhel has chosen disjunction,” corrected Rimon.

Alind insisted, “You shouldn’t have replied. That was for the Council to do, and we’ve voted against her idiotic scheme. There’s too much risk of getting snowed in way off there. We can’t risk her that way.”

Everyone’s afraid,
Rimon summoned patience. “She wasn’t waiting for authorization. By the time my reply gets to her, Lexy will be on her way back with the wagon loads of food. The guard carrying my reply will take four more days to get back to the camp, then several more days along Hope’s backtrail before she reaches Lexy.”

They wasted another hour of Rimon’s time berating him for not handing the message over to the Council immediately, then tried to take the report away with them.

Rimon argued that it contained the details on the patients who would arrive starting possibly as early as tomorrow. He wanted channeling staff to read it.

After he let them all read the message, even Xanon could see his point. Alind went to order Oberin not to show messages to Rimon anymore, but to bring them directly to the Council.

It was almost midnight by the time Rimon had finished briefing and mobilizing the channeling staff to receive patients. Oberin reported that the advance party of Fort Hope had topped the pass on foot. Fort Rimon wagons were waiting for their sick and wounded at the bottom of the trail down from the pass with people there to help.

Benart had the redeployment of resources well in hand, though they were desperately short of blankets and winter clothing. Rimon had contributed the blankets from his bed and taken down the old quilt from the wall over the bed. It was as warm as three blankets and would do until they could make more. All over the Fort, other people were taking down treasured old quilts and loaning out blankets. They would all manage.

Once again, Rimon found himself pacing the catwalk around the walls, noting the progress of the incoming refugees. Having memorized Lexy’s message, he was distantly aware he was obsessing on Lexy because he missed Aipensha.
Because I’m afraid.

He knew after his next transfer with Bruce, he’d have to cope with a surge of grief such as he hadn’t experienced since his wife had died. He could feel that welling bubble of agonizing, lonely grief lurking deep inside him, but walled away by the insistent pounding of growing Need.

At my age,
he thought morosely,
I should be used to Need walling me away from my feelings. Only I’m not.
The moment his transfer was over, all that deferred emotion would sweep through him. He knew it would happen, and he also knew he’d be utterly surprised by it. He always was, and this time would probably be the worst of a lifetime.
Postsyndrome,
he thought,
isn’t always filled with grief. So why are the grievings the ones I remember so clearly?

He faced the grim truth. He was old. He’d lived a full life, loved a fine woman passionately, shared fabulous Postsyndrome times with her, had wonderful children who fulfilled all his wildest expectations, avoided terrible disasters, saved many, many lives, worked with one of the greatest Companions who ever lived, and enjoyed grand good health...until now.

But he was old. Too old to be leading the rescue Lexy was leading. Too old to fight every day and all night too. He wanted rest, security, grandchildren like Bruce’s. He wanted to sit back and enjoy the Fort he’d built, and rebuilt so many times. And what was he getting? His mind was deteriorating like his father’s had. There was a good reason people didn’t trust him with their lives anymore.

Intellectually, he knew that was just Need talking. Need left any Sime depressed, anxious, short tempered, a walking gloom factory haunted by nightmares and without appetite for anything except selyn.

Need aside, he also knew he was losing his mind. He had to tell Bruce. Soon. Lexy had to take over. She knew it already. She was out there doing his job.

Aipensha!

The surge of grief had none of the piercing, shattering stridency he knew would come after transfer. That it could reach him now showed just how bad this was going to be. He had to talk to Bruce and he only had two days to do it. He’d put it off now for eleven days and he was out of time.

That was made abundantly clear by the incident this morning at Wade’s birth. He didn’t want to think about what had happened.
I have to tell Bruce. I have to.

At this very moment, his Companion, nagerically the brightest Gen in the Fort, was clearly zlinnable in the dining hall with his wife, children, cousins, in-laws, celebrating the birth while Rimon paced the wall. Bruce hadn’t had much good time with his family since Clire arrived with the Fort Intalace survivors and Fort Butte right behind them. The Gen deserved his celebration.

He could zlin Bruce so clearly from where he was that he really didn’t feel abandoned by his Companion. Their selyn fields were locked in step. His subconscious felt secure. He had no personal or professional reason to interrupt the festivities.

Bruce’s family didn’t deserve to have this time spoiled by his self-pitying gloom and he just didn’t have the necessary will to go in there and pretend to the joy he knew he would feel...one day soon.

Everyone in this Fort has a grief riding them,
he told himself.
I delivered Bruce’s grandchild this morning. I should be happy.

Disgusted with himself, Rimon turned away from zlinning Fremir pass and deliberately walked around the wall to stand facing the cemetery, rubbing his own nose in how many other people had losses to mourn.

In the cloudy, cold, moonless dark, the cemetery was black on black shadow. The livestock had all been rounded up and fenced into shelters, the hen house enlarged.

Currently, the nightshift workers were digging post holes on the opposite side of the Fort, and the loggers were working way out beyond the cemetery. Behind him, inside the Fort, the factory was bustling. The wainwright was building more wagons, Sian was at his loom turning out fine wool cloth for underwear while his weavers made blankets.

The school building was inhabited by families, some three and four families to a school room, but the section of the building dedicated to laundry had three smoking chimneys. Laundry had become a round the clock endeavor.

Rimon faced outwards toward the cemetery and the logging crews far up in the hills behind the cemetery. He zlinned the hills cupping the cemetery like a treasure, yielding up the tallest trees of the hardest woods.

Will we all be buried in that cemetery? Will any of this ever have meaning?

Before his eyes, the dark grew misty, smeared with dizzy whirls, then lightened.

* * * * * * *

He faced a huge amphitheater with rows of seats stretching to the sky and beyond, more people than could ever be alive in the world at once.

He was standing behind a lectern holding a strangely bound book open in one hand. He saw Lexy, Aipensha, Benart, Garath, Bruce, his wife, his father, all his family and more he didn’t know how he knew.

Behind him were arrayed a huge collection of great magical lanterns illuminating brightly colored, shining objects with what could only be selyn fields.
Lanterns can’t do that.
Except...these did.

There was the symbol Slina, the legendary Pen Keeper who had befriended Fort Freedom, had woven into the quilt she’d made for Delri when he was born.

He recognized the rock upon which the names of the martyrs of Fort Freedom had been inscribed, crumbled and broken but still familiar.

He knew he was not on Earth.

He knew he was about to declare Rimon Farris’s dream fully realized. He knew the long hard journey would finish not in triumph but in a success so absolute it wasn’t recognizable as success. Nobody here had ever zlinned or met a junct.

He swallowed hard and began, as he somehow knew that thousands of parents for thousands of generations had begun.

“This is the Ideal of Zeor.

“This is the Heart of Zeor.

“This is the Spirit of Zeor.

“This is the Reality of Zeor.”

He opened the great volume he had written with his own hand and began to read in a voice strangely not his own.

That was when he zlinned the anomaly. Well, no, not zlinned exactly. It was another sense entirely perceiving this. Where Rimon had been was only a vast whirling hole of non-energy, a holiday in existence, or a singularity where selyn stood still. It was the impossible made real.

Oh, no!
Energized by frantic guilt, Solamar flew up the stair and raced along the narrow catwalk, praying, “No, no, I can’t be the cause of this!”

He skidded to a halt and knelt beside the prone form on the walkway, the thick cloak covering the Farris body, selyn frozen in mid-pulse in both the channel’s systems. Rimon wasn’t dead. The selyn was not dissipating as it would from a corpse, yet not pulsing and circulating as with a living being. For Rimon Farris, time had stopped.

He knew it was an illusion caused by his point of view, but it seemed real. Closing his eyes, shutting down his own Sime senses, Solamar groped for the image of the world around him, limned in shimmering otherlight that was not energy or substance. He found it and the state of mind necessary to follow the thin silvery cable that still led from Rimon’s body through the anomaly to where he had gone.

Solamar found himself in a huge amphitheater, filled with people listening to Rimon read. With all his training and experience in the realm of nowhere, Solamar still took far too long to realize Rimon had leaped into his own future self, reborn to a time when mankind spanned the stars.

It’ll be all right,
Solamar told himself,
if he doesn’t remember this.

Rimon raised his eyes and locked gazes with Solamar, recognition clear. Every other time Rimon had become aware of Solamar’s presence in a vision, the Farris had returned skittish and unstrung, obviously remembering it.