The Farris Channel (43 page)

“We might save the baby if we can save Rimon. Just delay the birth until Rimon can deal with it.”

She looked him in the eye. “Rimon’s not junct?”

“No!” he said positively, though even the comatose Farris nager had not been so clear. “So let’s get to work.”

“All right, I’m with you,” she said and planted her attention firmly on Solamar.

By the time they got to Clire’s room, the stretcher bearers had moved her onto the bed and left. Rushi was seated on the bed probing the distended uterus gingerly, no doubt hyperaware that Clire was junct as well as Farris.

“What have we got?” asked Solamar of the Gen midwife as he positioned BanSha and set him holding fields.

The young woman reported, “No contractions. No vaginal bleeding. The baby is low, and moving. She’s six months at least. Not in labor. Yet.”

Solamar gestured Marliss away from Clire, giving himself room to study the Farris. “BanSha?”

“Me?” BanSha reported what he zlinned. “No broken bones, but plenty of tissue damage and I think concussion but who could zlin her that well except Rimon, or Lexy? I don’t know why she’s still unconscious. I can’t even assess her state of Need except that her ronaplin glands seem swollen, but maybe it’s just she’s so thin.”

“Good. Hold the fields tight,” coached Solamar. He moved in to take over from Rushi. BanSha swept the fields into a steady, coherent beat. “She’s in Need, but then Raiders always are and no Kill could ever satisfy her. The injuries are voiding selyn, zlin that, BanSha?”

“Yes, but I’ve zlinned much worse. That baby is voracious, too. Lexy’s baby isn’t like that.”

“True, but a Farris channel should be voiding more profusely than this. Not enough selyn in her secondary system. She’s severely unbalanced. It’ll be bad if she comes to.” She wouldn’t. Her Self had wandered far away. “Get the restraints on her. Marliss, don’t try a transfer yet.”

The room had extra strong padded restraints anchored to the bed, fitted to the upper arms, torso and thighs, and the bed frames had been anchored to the floor for disoriented patients waking suddenly. They cleaned and healed the wounds to stop bleeding, repaired the swelling and the strain in the neck. The skin burn from the whip didn’t fade much though, and she didn’t regain consciousness.

Solamar let Marliss near the bed and coached BanSha and Rushi until they could hold the fields even when Marliss moved. “Good, now Marliss is in charge here. You two do what he says. Kahleen and I will help Lexy with Rimon.”

Solamar noted how BanSha restrained himself from asking if Rimon would be all right.
I’m going to hold that kid tight all through Tuzhel’s funeral.

He waited until BanSha fell into the rhythm of maintaining the ambient for Marliss, then Solamar excised himself and Kahleen from the selyn field matrix.

They crossed the hall to Rimon’s door, a solid hardwood laminated around a selyn diffractive sand core. The air was damp, the ambient nager equally blunted.

Solamar noticed the sounds of battle drifting down with the smell of blood and death. Kahleen distracted him. “Lexy is probably tiring by now,” she said. “Despite that, she expects to be able to work non-stop all night.”

Solamar focused his attention through the door. “Every once in a while she remembers she’s pregnant.”

Insulation or no, Lexy noticed him. A moment later, Garen opened the door. “He’s alive,” he whispered.

Lexy and Bruce bent over Rimon, visibly thinner, nagerically haggard, and again with the Self absent.

Solamar closed the door behind Kahleen. “He’s not dying,” said Solamar in a normal voice. “He’s simply not in his body and hasn’t been for way too long....” It struck him.
Clire! They’re both out of their bodies!

Rimon had confessed he’d dreamed of Clire.

Solamar waded through the ambient to Rimon’s side. “Lexy, let me. Bruce, stand back.”

Bruce had been trying to coax Rimon’s flaccid tentacles into a transfer grip. He paused, searching Solamar’s face. “He hasn’t responded at all.”

“I think I may know why. Clire’s still unconscious and shouldn’t be. If Clire has found him, she may be trying to prevent him from returning to his body.”

“Is that possible?” blurted Lexy over Bruce’s shock.

Without looking at her, he said, “Yes. And you should sit down. Garen, don’t let her back muscles go into spasm or I’ll have to ask her to leave.”

Garen scooped her into the second chair in the room.

“Kahleen?” She had been staring at Rimon. Now she took a deep breath, closed her eyes and with a ragged sigh shifted her nager back to a working stance. “Good.”

Solamar hadn’t had time to teach her how to guard him when he was out of his body, so he said, “I’m going to lie beside Rimon and I may seem to be asleep. Hold the fields as tightly as you can. Lexy, if you can’t stay clear of me go on over to the recovery room. Bruce, stay focused on Rimon. He may be able to find his body by finding you.”

He gestured the Companion to the end of the bed. Bruce moved without rippling the fields even as he wrapped himself in a quilt, settled at the end of the bed, leaned against the wall, and rested his hand on Rimon’s foot. His massive nager filled the room with confidence.

Solamar stretched out beside Rimon. Kahleen flipped a quilt over them both. It took him much too long to slide out of his body and search for Rimon again.

* * * * * * *

Everything whirled around and around. He felt queasy. Cold panic shot through him like psychospatial disorientation. Since he had no body, that was impossible.

Sick and dizzy, Rimon clutched the small, sparkling coffer to himself, tucked his head down and shrieked into the mists, “Solamar!”

I’m not dead. Solamar said I’m not dead. The dead can’t experience psychospatial disorientation so maybe he’s right. I have to get back, get oriented again. I’m not dead.
“Solamar! Help! Help me! Here I am, Solamar. Here!”

Without transition, he was in a Fort. He was sprawled in the yard of the Fort, clutching the coffer. He sat up. It was a strange Fort. The walls were some kind of mud brick. The buildings were dull tan mud brick. Funny looking roofs were made of some kind of half-tubes that glinted in the sun. It was hotter than he could ever remember feeling.

A woman said behind him, “It was you!”

He turned. “Clire! What’re you doing here? Where is here!”

“Someone called for help! It was you.”

Clire’s sharp features were contorted into malice. Streaks of searing hatred shattered her nager. Rimon had never thought a nager could zlin like that, but then there was no zlinning in this place. Or there hadn’t been until now. He zlinned her emaciated body six months pregnant, the baby draining selyn.
Does a woman stay pregnant after she dies? Are we both dead?

“Clire, where are we?”

“You want help? I’ll help you like you helped me!”

Her tentacles snared his hair. She yanked him around. He fell prone to a hard-packed dirt floor, cold against his cheek, the coffer hard under his chest.

The door slammed before he knew there was a door. Clire’s spite filled the ambient. “Stay there until you die of Attrition or Kill!”

There was a narrow vertical slit for a window, and he sensed Clire lurking outside, zlinning him avidly.

Then he became aware of a Gen nager in the small, unfurnished room. A moment before it hadn’t been there. Now, another person was huddled in the corner, Gen arms wrapped around a brown haired head. Her sobs ripped into him and a Need he’d never known erupted. Attrition.

The person looked up, stifling sobs. It was Bekka Esren, but an odd Bekka Esren. She was still a child in appearance though her nager crackled and pulsed with selyn.

This isn’t real,
he told himself. Clire never saw Bekka mature.
This is Clire’s imagination. Somehow I’m trapped in Clire’s imagination.

Solamar had hinted at the skills that could let him traverse this realm safely, sanely. He’d accepted a few lessons but hadn’t practiced what Solamar tried to teach him. If he were still alive, if his body lived somewhere, then his only way out was to get back to his body just like Solamar had taught him.
But I’ve lost my body!

Without volition, his mouth opened and a cry of sheer unadulterated terror ripped from his lips. “Solamar!”

“Shen you, who is Solamar!” demanded Clire. She was standing in the room, screaming at him. “Whoever it is, he’s not going to help you! You’re dependent on me and you will get the help you gave me! Kill your precious little Bekka Esren and then we’ll see how the Fort worships you.”

I am not dead. So Clire’s not dead. We can get out of this.
“Solamar!”

“I said stop that!”

Suddenly Rimon was inside a white box. His cries echoed deafeningly. He was sealed in with his desperation.

Tucking the coffer under his left arm, he circled the featureless box, running his right hand, tentacles and fingers spread, over the surface. It felt as smooth as it looked, but there seemed to be an effulgent nageric haze.

The Gen was in the box with him. She hadn’t been there before. She curled on her side in one corner, crying softly. It was Bekka Esren.

A peculiar, empty echo of Need verging on Attrition seized his body. He staggered into the opposite corner from the Gen and slid down to sit with knees bent, the coffer braced between stomach and thighs. He clutched it with his left arm. With his right hand, he shielded his eyes.

She isn’t there. This isn’t real. It’s only two weeks since that fabulous transfer with Bruce.

He knew it but that didn’t matter. He felt it as real. And Clire somehow watched from outside the white box.

He set himself to endure this torment as he had so many others in his long life.
I’m too old for this.

Or maybe he’d never yet been old enough, mature enough, to face the consequences of his own mistakes.

Unbidden, the endless list of mistakes flowed through his mind, each accompanied by an ugly image.

One ill considered moment, and he had fathered a child on a Farris woman. There was a good chance Clire was a descendent of his grandfather, making it worse. In irrational weakness, he’d let a popular opinion overrule his good sense and let them vote to delay Clire’s transfer. Then because he knew he’d done wrong, he’d been so furious with himself that he couldn’t sit still in the underground shelter and let Jhiti’s Guard deal with the Raiders and rescue the Fort Tanhara refugees.

The result of his childish fury was Clire’s Kill and Aipensha’s death and the loss of the Council that had held the Fort together even though the refugees far outnumbered the Fort Rimon natives.

He had tried to help with the combat by grabbing the strange channel who had just arrived, and using him in a moronic scheme for chasing the Raiders away. The results of that, admittedly awesome, field work on the battle’s ambient were a series of disasters.

If he had let Jhiti’s guards slaughter the Freebanders, perhaps Shifron’s citizens could have fought off the rest of the Band. Instead, they had overrun Shifron and Clire was using the Freebanders to destroy Fort Rimon.

Meanwhile, his crazy stunt with Solamar on the wall and his even crazier attempt to save Tuzhel had dislodged him from his body, and he had begun seeing ghosts, even perhaps traveling with them while he slept. Maybe both he and Clire were dead. And his new baby.

He’d learned to Heal the part of another person that could leave the body, then put that person back into their body, Healing the body as well. He could imagine things and they would become real. The potential was staggering, but when Solamar had given him the chance to learn to control it, Rimon had nodded, and accepted, learned the bare minimum and then neglected to practice.

He pulled his knees up, letting his thighs and chest be dented by the edges of the coffer so near his vriamic node.

He folded his forearms on top of the coffer, his left outer lateral cruelly pressed against the jewels in the Starred Cross image, his right arm resting on top of his left. His forehead sank to rest on his right forearm’s inner lateral.

The dizzying pain of that position cut off most of his awareness of the Gen and distracted him from the immediate do-something, do-something, pounding of escalating Need.

He had sat like this often when he was a child, knees braced up, arms folded against himself, his quilt wrapped around and folded over his head. In those days, the position hadn’t hurt, hadn’t spun his senses into nauseating loops.

Now, he could only imagine his quilt wrapped around him, folding him in his parents’ love. The coffer was solid against his body, against his lateral, against his vriamic node where his primary and secondary selyn circulatory systems joined. He focused his attention on the coffer as if he were doing a complex channeling functional.

Inside the coffer was the knowledge that, no matter how many dire mistakes he had made, if he didn’t give up the striving toward that moment he’d sealed into the coffer, if he always excelled his previous mark, Sime and Gen would be united. Humanity would survive. Non-junct.

I will not Kill Bekka. No matter how or when I die, I will be born again. I will make mistakes, some worse than misplacing my body because I lost the respect of some frightened people who didn’t believe me when I told them a woman was pregnant before anyone else could possibly know. I will do better next time. Solamar!