The Farris Channel (37 page)

They’d had sex before. It had been wonderful, but really just sex. This was something else. This was coming to them both from above the body’s yearning. Solamar decided his soul was aroused.

He surrendered, opening and relaxing into it, letting it take him to some place he’d never been before. Senses he’d never known existed came alive and drove him into a reality where he saw himself as one soul in two bodies, one heart with two minds.

Release came to them both as a long, sweet, gentle wave of warmth culminating in little aching spasms of completion. Physical awareness emerged when he felt Lexy’s uterine spasms working out against his abdomen.

It hadn’t been anything like the hard, driving passion and flaring bodily orgasm normal to Postsyndrome. When it was over, he held her close and whispered, “I don’t think I ever had sex while totally hyperconscious before.”

“Me neither. Solamar?” She struggled free and leaned up on one elbow to look down at him. “Solamar! That was Turnover for you! You had sex with me when you were in Turnover! I don’t believe it!”

A quick inventory of his own condition told him Need now ate at his vitals, thrumming that muted panic through mind, body and soul.

She flopped down, sprawled over his chest and ran her fingers through his hair, then laid her face against his chest again. “Let’s try to do that again sometime. I’d like to know how it feels from the other side.”

“Any time you like,” he said fighting an overwhelming desire to sleep.

“You should move in here. It’d be handier.”

“It would. I will.” Feeling like the most special man in the universe, he fell asleep twining her thick hair around his tentacles while cradling the back of her head in the palm of his hand. She drifted away with him.

He woke late the next morning having slept nearly six hours straight through. He sat bolt upright alone in Lexy’s bed, jolted awake with a gasp, or maybe a voiceless scream.

He knew that falling sensation. He’d returned to his body. He remembered grayness swirling around the fiery gemstone pattern of Rimon’s belt. The belt was curled tightly in on itself, buckle inwards, and surrounded with a haze that might have been cloth. The image, however, carried an unmistakable vibrancy.

He’s alive!
The stones would not produce that searing glow if Rimon were dead. They would glow like that even if he weren’t wearing the belt. So if he wasn’t wearing the belt, why wasn’t he wandering around out of his body and easily findable?
I’ll never understand Rimon Farris.

Against odds, Rimon Farris had survived what would have buried any other channel. Against all reason, Solamar had experienced Turnover while in orgasm with a pregnant Farris channel and something truly odd had happened to him. Against everything Solamar knew about the ability to leave the body, Rimon Farris had acquired the ability just from joining nagerically with him to create an illusion strong enough to stop Freeband Raiders in mid-battle. Then, without any tutelage, Rimon had spontaneously summoned other entities, maybe ghosts, manipulated the fabric of the non-material body to heal the physical body, and had even traversed the infinite.

The two Farris channels he knew functioned in ways no other channel he’d ever heard of did. Everyone else who could do any of these things had acquired the skills only after decades of concerted effort. They were so rare, many people were skeptical that such things ever did or could happen, though Solamar had personally witnessed all this.

With that realization, all that he’d observed of Rimon and Lexy came together for him into a new pattern.
The Farrises aren’t just a family of outstanding channels. The Farris is a totally different kind of person, as different from channels as Simes are from Gens.

Consensus grew that if you didn’t count the Farris channels as just channels, then things began to make sense; the killingly intense pre-natal selyn draw that set the Farris channels apart, the incredible sensitivity to selyn fields, the precision control of any ambient around them, the vast Need that could be handled only by a few Companions, but most especially that totally impenetrable Farris nager.

BanSha said to the Council supporters who’d clustered by the fire, “If it’s not a trick to keep people from zlinning the truth, if they can’t help being impenetrable, then maybe they aren’t always hiding something. How would you feel if people who can’t zlin you always thought you were lying?”

Argument erupted all over the now full room. Everyone was explaining Solamar’s theory to newcomers, and not exactly getting it the way Solamar had explained.

They were, however, talking to each other, and for the first time he could remember, certain of these channels were not dismissing Rimon and Lexy as merely fearful of losing the power grip they’d always had on Fort Rimon. They were actually thinking like channeling staffers, and so distracted by it that they forgot how wet and muddy they were.

Solamar sat and propped his feet up to the fire, marveling at how Xanon listened to those who had agreed with him now questioning the core of his premise.

Eventually though the cleared time in the schedule was over and Val shooed people off to get cleaned up and get to work. The story of what had happened at the staged funeral was told and retold and grew in the telling.

Solamar, worked to a frazzle, retreated to Rimon’s favorite spot on the walls at sunrise and found that the flood that had cut Rimon’s funeral short had grown. Water now surrounded the Fort’s hill, knee to hip deep, and still poured over the banks of the river. Rimon had chosen the right place for his Fort.

The flood lasted six days. The first few hours, while Solamar had been working, others had gathered the livestock into the Fort in makeshift corrals. Then they sat around the dining hall telling stories of previous floods.

Solamar talked with the renSimes who came to him for transfer, and was informed that this happened every year for two or three days. However, as days passed with no way to send rescuers after Rimon, even Fort Rimon natives began to worry.

Kaires, the tracker who’d found the Gen captive’s note, commented, after her transfer, “Just imagine how bad this flood would be if the Gens had burned off the hills around us! That could happen naturally some year. Be glad we’re up this high.”

Solamar reported every development to Tuzhel, visiting him with Lexy and on his own three or four times a day. They had moved him to a room with three little slits for windows, up high near the ceiling. Pacing, fretting and miserable with approaching crisis, Tuzhel’s only distraction seemed to be tales of the Council’s doings. So Solamar always brought plenty of news to report or discuss.

One afternoon, when Tuzhel was glum, Solamar offered, “Now I see why Rimon fought the Council so hard to keep the yard free of houses! He wasn’t being unreasonable or meddling outside his area of authority.”

He sketched on a slate to show Tuzhel how deep the water was around the Fort and how cramped the animal pens were even with the yard area expanded. Now the yard was filled with split log fences, penning the animals that had wintered on the flat below. The chickens, geese, and rabbits had makeshift huts. The noise and smell was bothersome, especially to the pregnant women, but the wealth of the Fort was preserved without hazard to their health.

Not only that, but the animal waste was used to fertilize the two garden plots, one next to the dining hall and the other nestled in the L made by the Dispensary and Collectorium buildings. They even created a new garden plot on the side of the Dispensary facing the Fort’s wall to give those windows and the infirmary windows a nice view and help feed their increased Gen population.

The adventures of those caring for the animals almost brought a smile to the Need-crazed ex-Raider’s lips.

Rimon had wanted fruit trees planted inside the Fort, for food and shade. Sketching where the trees should go kept Tuzhel occupied for nearly an hour. Turned out he especially liked watching wild deer eating windfall pears because of the silly, blissful expressions the animals wore. Seeing that again was something to live for.

Lexy and Solamar brought Tuzhel a sketch by Bekka of what the Fort would look like with fruit trees in bloom. They hung it on the wall of his bleak little room.

During the flood, sheep shearing continued, buildings were finished, carding and dyeing of the wool began though most of the idle labor force gathered in groups to talk politics. Usually, they flew apart in disagreement when there wasn’t a channel to manage the fields. As Sime tempers heated, many Gens began avoiding public places when they were high field.

Jhiti held three alert drills to drain off some of that nervous energy. Solamar and Lexy had the duty of escorting Tuzhel to the underground shelter and controlling him.

Lexy followed her father’s routine during the flood days of stepping up the Collectorium schedule to take down the fields of the Gens before they became a serious irritant, thus spurring their selyn production for next month but providing all the renSimes some relief from Gen nerves.

So all the channels were working hard and holding too much selyn in their secondary systems, causing fatigue. And that meant they spent more time than usual sitting around just talking.

At one of their visits to Tuzhel, Lexy and Solamar described the ebb and flow of discontent in the Fort. More and more were chafing at the Council’s edict to abandon Rimon while some plotted rescue. Jhiti still had not agreed to send the Fort Guard to Shifron.

For those six days of flood, Tuzhel’s room often became the site of a bull session between the channels and Companions about Solamar’s Farris theory. Tuzhel inserted comments about BanSha’s awesome zlinning ability.

The fourth day of the flood when observers reported the waters had begun to subside, Val and her Companion Merie were on duty with Tuzhel along with Fengal and Aislinn. Lexy and Solamar made one of their frequent short stops. Solamar used these visits as an excuse to get her off her feet and to send Kahleen and Garen to eat.

Often Bruce accompanied them but not on this visit. He was working with Benart and Sian to engineer a new Council election without telling the current Council about it until the very last moment.

Lexy pointed out to Val that as soon as the ground firmed, teams would be plowing the existing fields and pulling stumps in the expansion zone, tending the vines and trin bushes on the terraces, burning selyn profligately day and night and taking extra transfers.

Tuzhel loved the idea of augmenting and getting extra transfers. Lexy informed him that it would be years before Rimon could safely let him do that.

“Rimon doesn’t rule here anymore,” he replied sullenly. “And neither do you!”

“We’re going to get him back,” insisted Lexy, with an untoward edge in her voice and nager. Solamar, Fengal and Val reinforced her conviction nagerically.

Tuzhel shook his head. “Everything you promised. Everything he promised! None of it is ever going to happen! Not for me. Not ever! The Council will throw me out and I’ll end up Raiding again. Why didn’t he just let me go! I’ll never have Bekka, I’ll never have anyone!”

Tuzhel leaped up and began stalking the room again, panting with the effort to wail out his inner cry of despair.

The four channels wafted serenity into the ambient of the heavily insulated room weaving Gen nager into a peaceful zephyr breeze. It was an artistic masterpiece.

The moment Tuzhel subsided, Solamar and Lexy zlinned for signs of crisis. He screamed, “Don’t do that!”