The Farris Channel (44 page)

* * * * * * *

“Father!” blurted Solamar with a humiliating lack of maturity. “What are you doing here!” He had usually taken care to avoid his father when venturing out of his body, but in his haste to get to Rimon he’d forgotten caution.

The older man turned from surveying the thick mist around them and eyed Solamar with disapproval. “If you don’t hear
that
, then what are you doing here?”

The ambient throbbed like rhythmic rocking of a child worn by terror. The shape of the nageric noise vaguely resembled his own name. “Some Wayfarer’s calling me.”

His father’s eyebrows went up as he gestured lazily with one tentacle, just the posture he always displayed when teaching. “Wayfarer?” he prompted.

His father vanished.

Solamar identified the call as Rimon. What could possibly make the dynamic leader of Fort Rimon whimper like a baby? He followed the call to a tiny adobe room with a vertical slit for a window. On the wall was a weaving that spelled out,
Fort Intalace, Where Borders Don’t Separate
.

In the center of the room was a white box with a transparent top. It was about waist high and cubical.

Clire stood over the box gazing into it. As Solamar arrived, his father yanked her away.

Twisting out of the older man’s grip, Clire kicked at him. When that didn’t work, she grabbed the edge of the white box and blasted Rhodilan Grant with a nageric shockwave. The elder Grant ignored the channel’s tricks with his usual contempt for such untrained talents.

Rhodilan spun Clire around, breaking her grip on the white box. He grabbed her by the cord that connected her to her body. Solamar noted the care taken to avoid harming the tiny thread that anchored her fetus. Rhodilan drove a shaft of glittering selyn into the mother’s cord.

The cord contracted in a series of spasms, whipping her around the room until she was drawn out through a wall, screaming terror and rage.

“She’s insane,” commented his father in that low, calm, instructive, totally maddening voice. “You’ll have to deal with that. What will you do with your Farris...oh! She was holding the box!”

The white box expanded until its walls melted into the adobe walls around them revealing a miniaturized Rimon Farris huddled inside whimpering. Rimon’s figure expanded to normal size as the adobe walls began to dissipate. That left them surrounded by the formless mist again.

Before them sat Del Rimon Farris, curled in on himself, his baby quilt folded about him, positioned so the dagger image was a shield on his back. He clutched something to his stomach protecting it behind raised knees. He rested his forehead on his forearms.
I think I’d vomit if I tried that position!

Solamar knelt beside the huddled figure and reached out one hand, tentacles spread feeling the Farris showfield hardened into a crumbling granite wall. Waves of throbbing Need escaped through cracks. Rimon’s attention fixed on a spot not far away. Only, there was no Gen there.

Behind him, his father said, “That woman’s talent is projecting illusion. Solamar, she was torturing this poor soul with his greatest weakness, and taking real satisfaction from it. I’m not surprised. Trafficking in selyn!”

He glanced back at his father who waited for him to handle Rimon. He was not saying
Are you sure the fate of humanity should rest on the channels’ ability to traffic in selyn? Are you really sure you want to risk doing that to yourself?
Nevertheless, the oft-spoken words reverberated around them.

Solamar moved closer to Rimon, blocking out awareness of his father, reaching toward his friend. “Rimon, she’s gone. Let’s get you back to your body....”

Before Solamar could untangle the cord that was crisscrossed around Rimon’s torso and send him back to his body, Rimon’s form turned to wisps of smeared color, whirled around and poured through an invisible hole into nothing. A single word hung over them
Solamar!

Solamar tried to follow, but suddenly he and his father were floating free, suspended in formless mist without even a solid floor.

Feeling as if he were back in First Year again, having bollixed up some simple exercise, Solamar stood before his father, struggling to hold his feet oriented in the same direction as his father’s feet. He created a floor.

“So where did he go?” his father quizzed just as if Solamar were a First Year student flunking a basic lesson.

Solamar didn’t want to say,
I don’t know.
“I guess he’s wandering Time.” He told his father everything that had happened since he’d left home in such a cloud of acrimony that it had summoned his grandfather’s ghost to scold Rhodilan Grant on his child rearing skills.

Solamar finished the tale with, “Every moment through all of this I’ve been wishing I had paid more attention to your lessons and practiced them harder.”

“But you still think the Farris mutation is the key because they’re better at selyn trafficking than the others?”

“They’re different, father. They’re not just channels. I told you how Rimon became jarred loose from his body. There’s a lot more going on here than the obvious.”

His father digested that. Solamar gave himself points for having found something his father thought significant.

At length, his father nodded. “Well then you’ll have to find him and put him back into his body.”

“How?”

“If he keeps screaming like that, it shouldn’t be very hard.” Rhodilan Grant paused, then added with puzzlement, “Clearly he holds you in high regard,”

All right, there is no avoiding it. Rimon’s life is at stake here.
“Father, what would you do?”

“Well, since we haven’t been able to hold him from out here, I’d suggest working from his body’s side.”

We?! We haven’t been able to hold him?
That admission alone was worth everything Solamar had gone through since he left home. “What procedure would you suggest?” Solamar congratulated himself on making it seem like a consultation not a plea for help.

“I’d find something meaningful to him, set up resonances of similarities, connect with him through that which he reveres. Then pull him back into his body. If that can’t be done, then cut the cord and let him go.”

And with him all the hope that humanity will survive?

“I can get him back into his body,” said Solamar. He was fully adult, standing before his father eye to eye as an equal, a unique experience.

“You may have to Heal him, or better, get him to Heal himself. Psychically, he’s taken a terrible beating from that woman. Before you insert him into his body, be sure he doesn’t bring back more memory of all this than he can bear or you’ll have another Farris like that woman.” He turned to go, hesitated and said over his shoulder, “I
think
I got them both back into her body and locked them there long enough for the fetus to mature.”

My father admitting uncertainty?

For the first time, he noticed how gray the man’s hair was. He was no longer just slender for a Sime. He was too slender. Older than Rimon, he was still healthier, yet he wouldn’t always be there to fix what Solamar broke.

“I’ll monitor the baby carefully until Rimon can take over,” promised Solamar.

“It’s his child, you know. If anyone can give that kid life, Rimon can.”

“I understand.”

“I just wish you did. I have to go write this up in my journal before I forget any details. You just be sure Rimon forgets enough of it to protect his mind. These Farrises you want to stake the fate of humanity on are a hopeless failure of a mutation. There is no way they can carry this burden and succeed. They have power but no strength, endurance but more to endure than anyone else.” With that oft repeated opinion, his father misted away.

Solamar was convinced the right Companion could supply the strength to govern the channel’s power and heal the ravages of what had to be endured.

Solamar closed his eyes and followed his own cord back into his body. As always, it was like jumping off a cliff, but this time he didn’t get smashed to a bloody pulp on jagged rocks. This time it was like diving into deep water, slicing cleanly into cold black depths and coming back to the surface, erupting in a burst of selyn. He’d never done such a neatly controlled return before.

He jackknifed to a sitting position next to Rimon’s limp body, gasping and panting, sweat standing out on his face but not the least bit disoriented.

“Are you going to try to find him now?” asked Bruce.

Only a few minutes had passed, though it had seemed like half a day. “I know how to get him back. I’ll use both the quilt and the belt, with only Bruce here with me. Even you, Kahleen, should leave, I’m sorry. So go see what you can do to help with Clire. She could be awake by now.”

“Clire?”

“Go!” Solamar rolled off the bed and stood to stretch.

“I’ll go get the quilt,” said Lexy starting for the door.

“No!” chorused Bruce, Garen, Solamar and Kahleen.

She was out the door before anyone could stop her. It was true though that of them all, she could best mask her nageric presence to remain unnoticed by any attackers. They had to hold Garen back. His Gen nager would surely attract danger to her and the fight was still going on.

When the door opened, Solamar zlinned distant combat, not inside the walls.

He detached the buckle from the belt and wrapped Rimon’s hands around the jeweled Starred Cross while he planned. But it was hard to think under Garen’s frozen stare and Kahleen’s held breath. Bruce was furniture. He’d have been a better student of Rhodilan Grant than Solamar had ever been. Which gave Solamar an idea.

Lexy flew into the room with the quilt over one shoulder. She was tall enough that it cleared the ground by a handspan front and back.

“Bruce, help me sit him up. Get cushions to hold him. Let’s put this quilt around him so the dagger goes straight down his spine.” They struggled with the lanky body, dropping the belt buckle, getting the quilt caught, folding and refolding it, and then propping the lax knees up. Lexy balked at the cross-armed position Solamar was trying to achieve, but he just said, “I have my reasons.”

Finally, with rolled blankets, pillows from other rooms, and even one horsehair mattress rolled up, they had Rimon propped into the position, the belt buckle against his chest resting on a box about the size of the coffer.

Then Solamar sent everyone out of the room except Bruce. “Be ready to serve him transfer. He’s in hard Need, has been for days.”

The Gen’s nageric answer left no doubt of his readiness.

Solamar eased onto the bed and knelt behind Rimon, leaning his chest against the stylized dagger symbol in the center of the quilt. He extended his two right hand lateral tentacles and reached around to touch the center between Rimon’s eyebrows. With his left lateral tentacles, he probed at the center of Rimon’s chest, at the vriamic node, where the channel’s dual selyn transport systems joined. With both contacts secured, he prepared to ram selyn into the flaccid body in the emergency revival technique he had been taught but never actually executed before.

I’ve zlinned it being done. I can do this.

He found the cord that led toward Rimon’s true self, stretched tight and dissipating.

We’re losing him.