The Farris Channel (32 page)

“Bruce, fetch yourself and Kahleen something to eat, and some trin tea for us,” suggested Rimon. “We’ll fill Kahleen in on the details. After all that time as Clire’s Companion, Kahleen might be able to supply some insights. Solamar, I think Clire’s still alive.”

“Alive!” said Kahleen. “How could you know...?”

“Bruce?”

“Save the Clire’s alive part until I get back.”

“Don’t worry,” said Solamar pulling Kahleen down to sit on the bed next to him. They wrapped the blanket around the two of them. “This is a long story, so take your time.”

By the time Bruce returned followed by two kitchen staffers with trays, they had Kahleen well briefed on why Rimon had been wearing the jeweled Starred Cross belt.

Rimon cleared the small table and the dresser top by heaping all the personal items on the bed. The repast was laid out and the kitchen staff left. Bruce had brought enough for six Gens, probably hoping Rimon would eat something, and maybe Solamar would nibble.

As they ate, Rimon cradled a glass of tea in his icy cold hands and tentacles. He gave them every detail of what had just happened during Tuzhel’s transfer, finishing, “So Clire’s still alive. Or I hallucinated. Or maybe she’s dead and haunting me.”

Kahleen was having trouble taking all this in at once. “Delri, am I understanding this right? All the other times you wandered out of your body, Solamar was drawn into it too, if he was asleep at the time?”

“Yes, just about.”

“You were asleep this time. And weren’t drawn in?”

“Maybe I wasn’t asleep just then. All I can manage this close to transfer is a short nap here and there.”

“No nightmares, though?” asked Kahleen.

“You do good work, Kahleen. I’ve been able to sleep without unpleasantness. It could be significant that I wasn’t drawn into it this time. Rimon, if she’s alive and was affected by what we did during the battle as you were, then maybe she was out of her body and came to you.”

“You know how to just go outside your body at will?” Kahleen asked Solamar.

Solamar, seated beside her on the bed nibbling off her plate, nodded silently. He pulled back to watch her as if he expected her to run screaming from the room leaving him without a Companion to give him transfer.

Kahleen hitched a little closer to Solamar, blending her ripening Gen nager into his dimming center.
“Relax, Solamar.
I’m not going anywhere. I shouldn’t have asked about what you weren’t telling me.”

Bruce said, “No, he should’ve told you a long time ago. You have to know these things to do your job. I’m used to it. Delri’s spent his adult life coming up with new things he doesn’t tell me about until I mess him up by not knowing. Maybe this one’s not what we think it is. After what he did for Sian, though, I do halfway believe it .”

Solamar said, “Think of it this way. Rimon can imagine something, shape and hone it, create it in this other space where people don’t have solid bodies. He can take what he’s imagined and make it real. He healed Sian’s nerves not in Sian’s body itself but in the part of Sian that can move out of his physical body. And then he put Sian’s healed image back into his body and the body did heal.”

Is that what I did?

“Maybe,” continued Solamar, “he imagined Clire as a way to give Tuzhel the kind of transfer he Needed. And that became real to Tuzhel.”

“There’s more,” said Rimon heavily. He told them what Clire had said about the baby she carried, his baby, learning to give selyn in a scream of death and hatred.

Kahleen said, “Delri, that’s just insane. It’s the kind of nightmarish thing you’d expect when you’re in Need, and you gave that transfer right after your Turnover. I still can’t believe you let Tuzhel ride your Turnover with you! Clire would never have done anything that generous.”

Solamar said, “He’s still guilty over what happened to Clire.”

“Me, too. I was her Companion. I was supposed to get her down into the shelter! My conscience never lets up yammering about that. Your conscience is tormenting you, too. As Solamar said, you gave Tuzhel a great transfer using just your imagination.”

Bruce nodded, “You can’t control what you imagine?”

Rimon asked Kahleen, “Could Clire really hate me?”

“I doubt it. I don’t think she could possibly be alive.”

She was lying and Solamar zlinned that too.

“Rimon,” said Solamar, putting his arm around his Companion’s shoulders and holding her tight to his body. “Even if Clire’s alive, it isn’t the Clire you knew. Having the Council turn on her when she was guilty of nothing worse than an error in judgment, then feeling that you had betrayed her and your own child, she broke. Pregnant and in Need, I can’t imagine how I’d feel.”

“You’d hate me?”

“No.”

And that, strangely enough, was the whole truth. Here was a man who couldn’t hate if he tried. It just wasn’t in him. Rimon knew he himself wasn’t made so fine as that. He’d made worse mistakes than Clire had, and things had worked out well but only by sheer luck.

“Rimon, put the belt on again and keep it on. After my transfer, I’ll show you some of those exercises I keep promising you. Lexy’s on shift all by herself. You’d better get back out there before she tries something she shouldn’t.”

Since the boot problem had been solved, and most of the building had been completed, the channeling staff had been dealing with far fewer cases of frostbite and injuries. That reduced the workload to where they had a surplus capacity again, with the majority of a duty shift spent collecting and dispensing selyn. But there were always problem births, unexpected changeovers, and now in the depths of winter with the first harbingers of spring, illness.

Rimon got to his feet, piled the detritus from the meal back onto the trays. “You’re right, I want her to take it easy. She’s tiring quickly already.”

Rimon rummaged in the back of his drawer for the belt and put it on. “Let’s go see what Lexy’s up to and make sure Tuzhel talked to Dakin about his schedule.”

* * * * * * *

“Delri! Come quickly! The Council is hammering on Tuzhel and he’s about to break to pieces!” It was BanSha’s voice outside the door, the young channel’s nager identifiable through the insulation.

Rimon released Bruce’s arms from his transfer grip. The vast abundance of radiant selyn coursing through his whole body, warming his soul and bringing a wondrous peace, had barely had a minute to work its way into him. The anxiety and gloom that had gripped him during Need had just started to dissipate and already some dire emergency hammered at the door of the transfer room.

“I’ll get it,” said Bruce.

They both had had other plans for the next few hours.

Bruce opened the door and BanSha raced into the room, finally zlinned the state of the ambient. “Oh, sorry!”

Rimon began to protest but Bruce forestalled him. “No use telling a First Year channel not to overreact.”

“I overreacted?”

“Not by much.” Rimon injected approval into the ambient. “I was preoccupied. So what’s the problem?”

“Does preoccupied mean transfer?”

“No. Just not paying attention,” translated Bruce.

Enlightened, BanSha pulled wisdom over him like a cloak. “Oh. It’s Tuzhel! The Council! He’s almost at Turnover and they won’t listen to me. You have to come now! I’m supposed to be his escort until Solamar’s on duty, but I had to leave him with Rushi and Xanon is there. Maigrey is in despair over Xanon. He’s backing everything Alind gets the Council to say. You have to come.”

“The Council has Tuzhel? Why?” Rimon hauled his body into gear, gathering his warm vest and cloak. He was wearing the belt.
Tuzhel is near Turnover! Surely Xanon is not that irresponsible?
“Where are they?”

Once, after he’d objected to them trying to reclaim the old Council room from two families caring for orphans, he’d heard they stopped the looms to meet in the weaving area.

“I left when they started to move the meeting from the school to the dining hall because the crowd got too big.”

Of course. They couldn’t seem to do anything without an audience. “Let’s go,” said Rimon.

The dining hall was full. There were still a number of people trying to eat and get back to their work, ignoring the crowd filling three quarters of the space. The Councilors, with Alind in the middle, sat behind a row of tables facing their audience which included an inordinate number of Church of the Unity members.

At one end of the Council sat Xanon, attempting to manage the fields from that awkward location. His skills hadn’t progressed much beyond what Rimon had taught him while managing that meeting planning the election.

In a nagerically awkward array in front of the Council stood Tuzhel, with Maigrey behind Tuzhel on one end of the table, Bekka Esren and her parents, Jor and Shaddyr, in the middle, and a cluster of Church of the Unity members at the far end. Tuzhel was indeed too near Turnover to be here.

A few off-duty channels who were supposed to be eating had drifted over to manage the fields for the group but they were too few for the size of the disturbed crowd.

BanSha and Rimon joined their effort, countering Xanon’s clumsiness. People felt Rimon’s touch on the ambient and opened a gap in the crowd. Silence spread.

Bruce, conspicuously low field, followed in Rimon’s wake. That focused all the attention in the room on them.

Rimon walked to Tuzhel’s side, noticing the youth had grown since he’d first arrived. He had probably reached his full adult height now. Rimon wrapped Tuzhel in a nageric shield, agreeing with BanSha that the renSime had been about to crack. The youth was bewildered, and scared, and probably dwelling on his dread of Turnover.

With one tentacle, Rimon signalled Bruce that he didn’t have to work. Now, he couldn’t influence the ambient much, so Rimon wanted him to absorb as much of the sense of things as he could.

Alind, seated in the middle of the long Council table, said, “I suppose you expect us to stop and explain this proceeding to you.”

Rimon zlinned Xanon who was striving to level the field gradient around the Council from his awkward position at the end of the table. He was making a hash of the complex fields. “I admit I’m curious about why the Council would call on one of my patients, especially when he’s so close to Turnover. I can just ask someone else, later.”

Xanon started to reply but Alind cut him off. “According to our witnesses,” Alind said gesturing to the Church group at the far right, “you’ve sanctioned this Raider’s unpardonable behavior despite the ruling we handed down last month. Your complicity makes you as guilty as he is.”

Raider?
Rimon felt Tuzhel react, nerves raw, as if expecting a death sentence. “What unpardonable behavior?”
Ruling?
Tuzhel hadn’t Killed, that was clear from his fields.
What could he possibly have done?

“It isn’t his fault!” cried Bekka Esren, her voice husky from crying or screaming. She lunged forward. Her parents grabbed her shoulders and drew her back against them. Rimon felt the bruising tentacle grip the two renSimes had on their Gen daughter.

Bekka had begun to develop an adult Gen’s selyn production and she was as upset as Tuzhel, her adolescent rage fracturing the ambient. Since her field was still so pale, her Sime parents, though non-junct, were too embroiled in their own anger to notice what they were doing to their daughter or she to the room full of people

Rimon pulled BanSha forward. He had Bruce step in closer to Tuzhel on one side and Maigrey on the other, then said to BanSha, “With me now.”

He walked toward Bekka but spoke to the Council, “Whatever is, or perhaps is not, Tuzhel’s fault we’re not going to resolve the matter while embedded in a nageric stew so thick nobody can think straight.”

He reached the Esrens and said, “Bekka, come here. Jor and Shaddyr, you should stand back a little.” Her parents noticed what they’d been doing. They moved with alacrity, their chagrin evident.

Rimon placed Bekka in BanSha’s nageric care with a brief instruction, then positioned them near Tuzhel. Since he couldn’t move the Council members he moved a few Church members to balance things out.

Zlinning what he was up to, the other channels in the crowd repositioned themselves and reworked the crowd’s fields into a coherent ambient nager. Soon the renSimes grasped the pattern Rimon was creating and shifted to help smooth it out. The Gens reshuffled themselves.

Even Xanon’s work smoothed out when Rimon motioned him to stand behind Alind. Rimon was certain the Fort Butte channel had no idea what had just happened, but now the few channels available could manage the ambient. The tension abated especially among those trying to eat a meal without getting involved.

Rimon zlinned his handiwork. The anger was still there. “So Bekka, tell me what is not Tuzhel’s fault?”

“He was kissing me. I didn’t like it. I knew he’d have stopped if I’d asked him to. I told him to kiss me. There’s nobody else I’d ever let do that, and I wanted to see what it felt like! Then they,” she gestured to the witnesses, “they saw us and said, well terrible things!”