The Farris Channel (20 page)

Not daring to consider further, Solamar reached out with hands, tentacles and spirit, twisted Rimon’s shining tether around his hands and sought his own body, diving through time, space and otherwhere, dragging his disoriented and terrified passenger with him, tumbling, whirling, spinning down and down until he let go and....

“Solamar! Solamar!”

Gasping in a huge lungful of icy air, Solamar pushed himself off Rimon’s limp body. Selyn once again pulsed through both the channel’s systems. The heart beat.

Bruce skidded along the catwalk shouting, “Solamar!”

Solamar called, “He’s all right! Be careful!”

The two renSime guards, approaching from either direction along the catwalk, halted at Solamar’s command, and Bruce slid to a stop, breathed, focused and approached with his fields in better order. “What happened?”

“He’s coming around. You have to help me get him inside. He’s taken a bad chill.”

That would not do for an answer, Solamar knew.

At last Rimon gasped and began to struggle upright, projecting panic, terror and a bone shattering cold into the ambient. Solamar waved the renSime guards back and covered with his own showfield as best he could.

Had Rimon not been in Need, he could never have overridden the nageric chaos the Farris was producing.

It only lasted a few moments as Bruce offered a steady field, as if working to offset a psychospatial disorientation, inserting Rimon back to the here and now.

Solamar let himself ride on Bruce’s wonderful field too, his head still whirling from the fall into his body.

“What happened?” asked Rimon.

“Let’s get you warm first,” said Solamar, “then we’ll compare notes.” They got Rimon to his feet. He was shaking so hard he could barely stand.

They took Rimon to the room they shared in shifts, having BanSha build up the fire and fetch trin tea from the dining hall. They wrapped Rimon in the quilt off the bed, sat him on the edge of the bed and put his feet in a basin of warm water. Solamar was struck by the size of this man. The baby quilt center of the design barely covered both shoulder blades, but with the extension all around the original quilt, it wrapped all the way around him.

All the while the channel shivered and shook, teeth chattering too hard for him to talk. Bruce sat on the floor beside Rimon, massaging his legs. Nobody said the word
frostbite
but Rimon’s hands and feet were white, the paleness extending to elbows and knees. The tepid water felt searingly hot to him.

Rimon finished a glass of tea, sighed and stopped shaking. His eyes locked with Solamar’s seeking answers to the questions he couldn’t ask.

Solamar nodded. “I left the party to bring you some of the luscious cake Dayyel made. When I came out the door of the infirmary I zlinned something wrong with your fields. So I ran up the stairs. I think I dropped the cake somewhere. You were unconscious on the catwalk.”

Bruce was doing his best to be part of the furniture, his massive field oozing his own fears for Rimon. “I don’t know why I came out too. It was just that I suddenly had to see that you were all right.”

“I wasn’t,” said Rimon hoarsely.

Bruce asked, “I felt...I must have done something wrong. I felt I had to be with you, that maybe you Needed transfer right away. I couldn’t sit still. What happened?”

Though he was zlinning his Companion, Rimon’s eyes were still locked to Solamar’s. “I don’t know, but something is wrong with me.”

Solamar said into Bruce’s sense of horror, “Not wrong but new, a change. Rimon, I’ve seen things like this before. It can be dangerous, but there are ways to deal with it.”

“What is
it
?” demanded Bruce.

Rimon accused, “You are doing
it
to me!”

Solamar dropped his showfield so Rimon could zlin his primary field clearly. “No, I’m not doing it to you. But I did do something to you that started this happening, and I think I know how to help you get control of it.”

“And what exactly is
it
?” Bruce demanded again.

“You haven’t told him?” asked Solamar.

“Not yet,” admitted Rimon. “I meant to.”

“Told me what?” fretted Bruce, his staid pose of being a piece of the wall deteriorating. Even the smallest deviation affected both channels harshly because the Gen was replete with selyn, ready for Rimon’s transfer.

Solamar kept his attention away from Bruce. “I apologize. I’m very sorry this is happening and I should have said something a lot sooner, but I was hoping it would just subside on its own. Usually it does.”

“What is
it
?” insisted Bruce, and this time the insistence was in his nager, filling the room with demand.

Rimon turned his own attention inward, his showfield hardening to impenetrability.

“Rimon has been losing touch with his body.”

“What?” asked Bruce.

“That’s a good description of what just happened,” allowed Rimon, “but it doesn’t cover it all. Bruce, I’ve been seeing ghosts. Like my father did. I saw Aipensha with my father at the funeral. She was out among the trees, standing there with hordes of our dead around her, trying to tell me her death wasn’t my fault. Only it was. I led her up out of the underground shelter.”

“Ghosts....” repeated Bruce, worried.

“I saw them too,” said Solamar. “I didn’t know who they were, but I saw and heard just what Rimon did. He was not hallucinating. He is not insane. He is not losing his mind. What happened to him is real. It has happened to other channels who went on to live long healthy lives.”
Such as my father. How will I ever be able to tell him what I’ve done to Rimon Farris?

Rimon shook his head. “When we were forcing a transfer into Tuzhel in the shelter, I felt my father standing over me, teaching me how to do it. When I was healing Sian, well that was different. You were there too, only you weren’t. You said you were asleep, so I must have wakened you by what I did to Sian. But how?

“Then today when Wade was born, it was different. Solamar, I was a Gen doing something with metal, some kind of magic but I understood it! Then my father rebuked me, and I was someone else inventing a healing functional, and then you were there scolding me. I became a ghost, some
time
else! It happened again on the wall only worse, in some far future where there are no juncts at all and you were there too, watching me. What happened!”

He’s rambling around in time, the future, our future. He could ruin everything because he remembers more than any untrained wanderer would.

“Rimon, things like this started happening to me during First Year. I was just lucky. I was taught to control it. I can teach you. It doesn’t have to be something that happens to you. It can become something you do or not do as you choose.”

“How could you have made this happen to me?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never heard of such a thing. On the other hand, I’ve never done anything like what you and I did on the wall during the battle. Maybe that started it, but when we worked on Tuzhel together in the shelter....”

“My father was there, showing me how to do it. Solamar, my father is dead. But he was there. A ghost. And you were a ghost!”

“I’m alive,” protested Solamar.

“I’d have thought so,” said Rimon.

Bruce blew the fields. “Rimon, your father....”

Solamar damped the fields. “Bruce, Rimon’s not crazy. He’s wrestling with a new perception of the world, like he’s learning to zlin.”

“I wish I could believe that,” Rimon, hugged his quilt around him.

Solamar realized the quilt was a heavy ward. Inside it, Rimon felt safe from his new perception, and that could make him way too bold with it. What have I done?

“If it were true, why would you be so afraid of me?”

Solamar’s laugh exploded out of him, blowing off the tension. The Farris had misread his nager. “No, Rimon, not afraid of you, afraid for you. And guilty. I’ve never felt so guilty before. I’ve got to make things right with you.”

At last, Bruce relaxed back into his imitation of the furniture. At the relief, both channels sighed, and Rimon said, “So I am going crazy and you want to save my sanity.”

“Not crazy,” insisted Solamar. “But exploring this new ability randomly, could be fatal.”
Not just for Rimon!

“I’m not doing it on purpose.”

“I can show you how to stay in your body.” Usually people worked hard to learn how to step out of their bodies, even for an instant, to prove that the Self isn’t the Body. He’d have to reverse the training, re-arrange the sequence in which skills were mastered to turn a wanderer into a wayfarer. He, himself, had never been such a great student, and certainly never a teacher.

“But you don’t want to.”

Wrong again?
“No, I do want to, but Rimon you’re so strong, different from other channels, and I’m no expert at what I want to teach you. I can only hope that a clue or two may help you devise your own way of doing this.”

Bruce’s nager fairly screamed,
doing what??!!

Solamar elaborated to Bruce, “Staying in his body. During transfer, he could go out there and not know how to get back. A body with no occupant is a corpse.”

I shouldn’t have said that!
thought Solamar, bracing and feeling Rimon bracing a half second before Bruce’s reaction filled the room.

Rimon said to Bruce, “I think he’s right. This last time, on the wall. I think he’s saying it the way it felt, out of my body, and no way to get back. He came after me and brought me back.” He shifted to Solamar. “Didn’t you?”

“Yes,” admitted Solamar, not mentioning that he hadn’t done an elegant job of it.

“See, Bruce? He’s not going to harm me.”

Bruce accepted it into his soul. He had to be feeling the burden of the selyn his body was carrying. His selyn production was locked into step with Rimon’s selyn consumption, letting the Farris relax in the confidence that life would be there for him when he had to have it or die.

With Bruce settled again, Rimon asked, “So what do I do to keep it from happening again?”

In a burst of unexpected inspiration, Solamar remembered the belt he’d seen curled up in Rimon’s top drawer the first time he’d gone through it looking for socks.

He went to the drawer and rummaged behind the stacks of thick wool socks. The drawer now supplied socks for three large men and a woman who occasionally slept here. He had to unload the drawer before he could extract the belt from where it had drifted to the back corner.

It was a wide strip of polished black leather with a buckle in the form of a Starred Cross expertly carved of dark, satin finished rowan wood. The buckle was set with tiny chips of gemstones and there was a fine line of silver wire embedded inside the folded leather forming the belt.

When he’d found it, that first time he’d slept in this room, he had been astonished. You couldn’t see that silver wire, and would barely notice it when zlinning, but Solamar’s other senses registered nascent power there. The belt had faded from Solamar’s mind among all the other exquisite treasures of Fort Rimon.

Now, as he ran the supple leather through his hands and tentacles, he wondered how he could have dismissed such an article so easily. “This should do the job once you learn how to use it. Where did you get it?”

Rimon shrugged. “I inherited it from my father.”

Bruce added, “He always said he had run across a gypsy whose cart horse had died leaving the man stranded with a load of trade goods. He offered the man his pack horse, and was repaid with this belt. Remember Rimon?”

“Yes, and he said that when he objected that the belt was worth far more than a horse, the gypsy just said he should wear it all the time. My father never did. As you can see, it’s like new.”

Gypsy? Well.
Solamar ran the belt through his hands again, twining his fingers through the weave of the belt’s design, the five pointed star, fifth point upwards for the human body and spirit welded onto the equal armed cross of Nature. His handling tentacles throbbed with the charge in the jewels kept alive by the pattern of the symbol.

Mentally, he filled in the pattern between the jeweled points. With touch and sight, he traced the symbols and visualized them brightly glowing against the wood.

He couldn’t see that glow with his eyes, but he felt it with his handling tentacles, a localized sizzle of power. He smiled, “This should do very nicely, then. Here put it on.”

Rimon shucked the quilt spreading it so the odd symbol was squarely in the middle of the bed. Then he pulled on dry clothes and looped the belt around his waist.

Solamar adjusted the buckle to align with Rimon’s navel. “There, that should do it. Always wear it like that. Now let me show you how this works. Try the same functional you were doing when feeding the baby selyn this morning. Here, I’ll be the unborn fetus.”

Warily, Rimon held out his hands to cup the other channel’s hands and tentacles and supply a diffuse field gradient as he had with the fetus.

Solamar soaked up the ambient selyn, as a fetus would, and selyn began to move through that protected space. Solamar noted Rimon start to separate from his body, then meet the barrier of the charged Starred Cross bouncing back to align with his physical body.

“I felt something,” said Solamar, dismantling the contact. “Didn’t you?”