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~~Part Three~~
Looking around me, I saw that it was over. The campground was littered with bodies. It was not quite as bad as it looked, because some of those on the ground were still alive.
Then I realized that the end of one kind of battle only signified the beginning of a different one. I ran to the side of the most serious nonfatal injury I could zlin, a Gen who was bleeding heavily from a cut high on his leg. He'd had the sense to clamp both hands over the wound and he looked up at me blankly as I approached, as if unsure about whether I had come to help or to finish him off.
"You'll have to move your hands so I can work." I applied pressure with one of my own hands, working my laterals into the cut to seek out the artery that was pumping his life away at such a rapid rate. I healed that first, and once I had repaired the wall of the blood vessel, the bleeding slowed to a trickle.
It was a relief to absorb myself in healing at its most basic, encouraging cells to divide and to repair a gap in living tissue. I probably spent more time on the wound than would have been necessary merely to assure his survival.
When I roused myself from the near-trace that I slip into when doing a deep healing, Tayv was standing nearby, and asked, "Can you come over and check something for me?"
I nodded, and told my patient, "Don't try to walk home. Someone will have to carry you. You'll have to keep warm and have plenty of fluids for awhile, but you'll be all right."
"My wife, Mari." Panic spiked through his nager, disrupting the healing process I had begun. "Have you seen her?"
I passed my eyes over the campground, littered with dead and injured people. I did not even know his wife by sight. "I'll try to find her for you, but you must stay here and rest. Let me get you a blanket." I pulled one from a bedroll near the charred remains of a campfire , and wrapped it around the Gen.
"You're hurt," Tayv observed.
"It's not serious." She'd missed my lateral by a full finger's width. Might as well have been the distance from here to Varnirr. I clenched my fist in an effort to stop my arm from shaking, and tried to retract my tentacles, but the ones on top didn't want to cooperate. In fact, one of them felt like it was going to rip in two if I kept trying.
"Here, let me help." He did something to my arm, and my dorsal tentacles retracted without much additional pain. "Those will need to be healed if you're going to retain the full use of them. That can wait. But we'll have to do something so that you can work."
"It's really not that bad."
He led me over to a Sime whose belly had been cut open. "Take a look and see if I've missed anything before I close her up, Meechi."
He hadn't. I could tell that the patient's intestines had been recently repaired, but they looked to be in good shape now, with little lines of new tissue holding them together almost seamlessly. "She'll be fine… your name isn't Mari, by any chance, is it?"
"No." Tayv's patient, quite lucid, zlinned around the campground, and then pointed. "That's her over there, in the red shirt. Looks like one of those Wilder Gens got her."
Merely unconscious. There were those more seriously injured, but I thought I should revive her so that she could care for her husband. Tayv still had his hand on my arm, and as nice as it felt, I decided it would be more efficient for us to work separately. With some regret, I gently removed his hand from my forearm—and almost fell to my knees from the agony that suddenly shot through my dorsal sheathes.
"Meechi, take it easy." To my great relief, Tayv put his hand back where it had been before. The pain vanished. "Omrey! Over here."
Omrey stood clutching her mayhem stick, both ends of which were splattered with blood. She wore a stunned expression but I was pleased to see that her only injury was to one hand, where the knuckles were badly bruised but not broken. She came over as Tayv had asked her to, and when he took the stick from her hands, she did not object. He tucked into her belt rather than tossing it to the ground, as anyone but a mountain Gen might have done at that point.
He took her uninjured hand and placed it on my arm. "Meechi has been hurt, and needs to concentrate so that he can heal. Help him with that, will you?"
She nodded. Having a task made some of the animation come back into her eyes. When Tayv took his own hand away to finish with his patient, I could feel the pain of my injured tentacles, but not as bad as before. The pain receded as she made an effort to project healing energy, as Tayv had begun teaching her to do. Then the relief lessened as something distracted her momentarily. I could live with it.
Staying in step with Omrey as if we were partners in some formal dance, I walked over and woke Mari, who had taken a moderately hard field slam. Some fosebine would go far toward putting her right. Other than that, she was not hurt. When she zlinned her husband, she ran over to him and stood wringing her tentacles over his injury, while he threw his arms around her legs and wept with relief. She bent to put her own arms around him, but I had to interrupt to give her instructions for his care. In addition to carrying him home, she would have to find some other transfer arrangement that month, and after a nerve-shock like the one she'd experienced that would be the last thing she would want to do. But she listened to me without protesting. I told her to wait a bit and I would get them both some fosebine. Tayv had brought plenty, and had put Shayla to work distributing it among those who were in pain.
Which was almost everyone. Only a few had escaped injury. We treated cuts and broken bones. We did what we could for injuries that we could not truly repair, such as severed fingers and handling tentacles, and a woman who had lost an eye and would carry an ugly scar over the place where it had been. One man had the side of his head caved in by some hard object and lay unconscious, with shards of bone buried deep in his brain. He was Sime, so there was no question of moving him, and our efforts at healing him merely caused him to go into convulsions. When I tried to fish one of the sharp bits of bone out of the wound with a handling tentacle, he died.
By the time we had finished with what healing we could do, I was exhausted, not so much because of the work I'd done as from enduring all of that death and pain and fear and rage. Omrey was tired too, and her hand on my injured arm was not helping as much as it had been. It felt as if hot coals had been shoved deep inside my dorsal sheathes. I went over to where to Shayla was crouching beside Tayv's herb bag. "Give me a couple of those tablets, love."
"Your poor arm." She handed me the medication along with a cup of water, then laid her hand on top of Omrey's, stroking the Gen's wrist provocatively with her tentacles. The pain in my arm lessened dramatically. I would never have thought of doing a thing like that; unable to mimic a Gen's field as a channel could have done, Shayla had made use of the actual Gen who was there, stimulating Omrey's cells with her own field in order to enhance the healing effect for me. Omrey looked at Shayla quizzically, as if not quite sure what to make of this development.
'That feels much better," I said, to remind Omrey that she was supposed to be helping me.
I stood looking over the scene of all that mayhem. People were starting to remove their dead and their injured. Bodies still littered the ground, mostly those of Velte's group. There were no survivors; the townspeople had finished all of them off, once they were down.
Among our own dead, I saw Dee, lying with a knife buried in her chest up to the hilt. It had pierced both the heart and the vriamic node. Nearby, I zlinned a very faint pulse of selyn consumption, unsteady as a campfire in the rain. I went to investigate and was relieved to see that it was one of our own. Had it been one of the others, I would not have been sure what to do. Moving slowly so that Omrey would stay with me, I knelt and put my uninjured hand on the man's back, trying to strengthen the feeble hold life had on him.
"Is he still alive, Meechi?" Shayla bent and extended her own laterals, apparently unable to pick up the faint life-pulse. "I saw what happened to him. It wasn't the Wilders that did this. He got confused and attacked Betta Garreth, and she knocked him cold."
I forced lateral contact with the unconscious Sime. Part of the reason he had initially escaped our notice was that he was very low field. A Sime so close to need, in a situation so full of pain and strong emotion—it was little wonder he'd forgotten he was there to fight other Simes and had attacked the nearest Gen instead.
I tried to project a tempting Gen field, but my concentration was poor, and he didn't respond. His field carried the signature of the true junct, and if Shayla had not been there, I might have used what I'd zlinned when Lurah had killed—which was still horrifyingly clear in my memory. But I could not do that in front of her.
I recognized the Sime, Perrin, as one of my more vociferous detractors. What would he say if I forced him into a transfer he considered unnatural, and saved his life in the process? I smiled at this thought, and found the strength to increase my efforts, but he still did not respond. His field continued to flicker uncertainly.
Tayv walked over and sat down near Perrin, putting one hand on either side of the unconscious Sime's head. His life processes steadied immediately. As Tayv's hands roamed over his skull and the back of his head, he began to come around. I sat back to let him work.
Perrin sat up rather suddenly, and entertained the thought of attacking Tayv for a fraction of a second. Then he calmed down in a hurry, and sat there letting Tayv do his thing. He wasn't entirely conscious at that point, and Tayv was controlling him almost completely.
"Is he as low-field as I think he is, Meechi?"
"He'll have to have transfer before we turn him loose. Otherwise he's just going to keep attacking people."
"That's about what I thought. Back me up here, will you?" He released his control just enough to allow Perrin's tentacles to lash around his arms, which was what they wanted to do anyway.
I wasn't sure quite what he wanted from me. I'd never heard of a Gen asking nageric support from a channel, and had not been trained in how to provide it. I zlinned as deeply as I could without actually making contact, so that I would be right there if he did require some assistance, and also out of curiosity. I had never gotten to observe Tayv giving a transfer.
It was what I would have expected, and more. And it served as an antidote to the poison still in my system from zlinning that kill so closely—though I would use my memory of those sensations, like any other raw material. Valuable data, that, for serving junct Simes—but nothing compared to the value of what Tayv was showing me.
As far as I could tell, Tayv was providing complete satisfaction to Perrin's junct nerves—but without any hint of simulated fear or pain. He had a quality at the core of his nager that I had caught a glimpse of once or twice before, a kind of wild joy, and that came out fully in the transfer. I'd heard that said about mountain Gens, that their transfers had a quality that could substitute for killing even though it bore no resemblance to the kill. Of course, this approach held a degree of danger for nonjunct Simes.
When he broke contact, the diminishment in Tayv's own field was barely noticeable, but the glow of post-syndrome in his nager was unmistakable. Many high-capacity Gens feel little or nothing at giving transfer to a renSime, and of course it does very little for the Sime in that case. In the lowlands, what he'd just done was called Gen channeling, though that was something of a misnomer.
Perrin leaped to his feet and scuttled away, regarding Tayv with an odd mixture of worship and utter horror. Tayv lost interest in him almost immediately.
He put his hand back on my injured arm, not where the more superficial cut had laid open the tentacle sheathes, but higher up on my arm. The tentacles themselves had taken the worst of the damage. I could feel tears of relief trickling down my face when he banished the pain once again.
"You've got some swelling in there." This was not news to me. As he worked, I could feel a furious itching in the injured tissue, which was a big improvement over the pain. I could zlin how tired he was as well, and made an effort to lend him what little strength I had left, arguably for the most selfish of reasons.
I was vaguely aware that Omrey had gone and gathered the remaining villagers, stepping into the position of leadership vacated by Mor's death. She was exhorting them to get together some uninjured people who had not been involved in the fight, and put them to work carrying the bodies of Velte and her people to a certain cliff and tossing them off. Her voice seemed to be coming from a long way off.
As my arm began to feel better, I was acutely aware of Tayv's hands, each of which rested partially on top of one of my sheathed laterals as he worked. And I also realized that I'd augmented myself into the fringes of turnover.
I controlled my breathing, focusing my own mind on the injury he was healing—and the far worse, fatal one I had narrowly escaped—in the hope of controlling my intil. It wasn't helping much. But I was not going to ask again. He always got this patient, slightly exasperated tone to his nager when I did. And he always said no.
Instead, I decided to try to entice him into offering. I'd almost forgotten how. I did use a related technique with my paid Donors down in Varnirr, to enhance the experience for them and for me. But that wasn't quite the same thing, in a situation where it was already understood that transfer would take place.
The technique for coaxing a Gen into agreeing to it in the first place was subtly different, and I was out of practice, but I was doing my best. I was getting some kind of response, but his nager had such a different character than lowland Gens that I couldn't tell if he were on the verge of giving in to temptation or on the brink of slamming me unconscious.
"Try extending the tentacles. You'll have to work the stiffness out of them before they heal completely, or they'll never fully recover."
I was hesitant to try it, but pushed the two dorsals out of their sheathes a little way, because he had asked it. They resisted moving at first, but I could feel that most of the damage was healed. I retracted them and tried again.
"That's it. You'll have to keep doing that, even though there will be some pain. Don't try to use them for anything, but move them around a bit."
I extended them farther this time. My laterals on that side, which I'd been working so hard to keep retracted, escaped and licked at Tayv's wrists. I hadn't meant to do that, but I could tell he didn't mind. In fact, a momentary flicker of enjoyment ran through his nager.
Shayla was still crouching nearby, watching, and her own tentacles began lashing angrily as she stared at the ground. The primitive part of my mind wrestled with my more civilized nature; part of me wanted to go put my arms around her and offer comfort, but other instincts were urging me to hit her with something so that she would just go away. I hadn't expected her to be jealous. She'd known for a long time how I felt about Tayv, and it had never bothered her before, nor did she treat Kora-ki and Alye-ki as competitors.
Tayv glanced up at her. "Shayla, maybe you should go see if anyone else wants any more medicine."
She got up, nager dull with hurt, leaving the herb bag behind. Off at a distance, she went to sit behind a large free-standing rock so that I could no longer zlin her.
My laterals retracted of their own accord. "I'd better go talk to her. She's been through a lot. We all have. Or maybe it would help more if you went to her."
"I'm not done with you yet." He ran his palm along the top of my arm and all six tentacles on that side came darting out of their sheathes, whipping around his wrist and establishing a kind of one-sided transfer grip. My face turned red with embarrassment. An amused smile crept onto his face, and glimmered at the edges of his nager.
"You're doing this to me on purpose!"
"You started it, Meechi." With his free hand, he continued healing my injured dorsals.
I tried to let go of him, and could not. "I wish I'd had the foresight to get knocked unconscious while in hard need," I said before I could think better of it.
He let out an exasperated sigh. "All right, all right. I'll give you transfer this month, okay? Are you happy now? At this rate, I'm likely to run out completely before much longer." This was not really true, but mountain Gens like to keep a considerable reserve of the stuff at all times. He was projecting an air of weary resignation about the whole matter, but I was not fooled. And I knew that he would not go back on his word. "I think your tentacles will be all right now. Keep exercising them, and let me have another look at them sometime tomorrow."
He released my tentacles, and I rubbed the area he'd been healing. There was still some soreness and a certain amount of tingling, but it felt much better. "I will. Thank you."
He nodded absently. "I'm going to see if Omrey wants any help over there."
And off he went. Still rubbing my arm, I walked slowly over to where Shayla was sitting. I paused a few steps away, not certain if she would want anything to do with me just then. Her entire system had developed kind of a tremor, and her face was wet with tears, but she wasn't exactly crying. Just sitting there staring off into the distance. She zlinned to me as if she were in shock. I thought it was partly a reaction to all the people who had died. But it had to do with Tayv, as well, and I felt more able to address that part of it.
"Shayla, love, he has more than enough selyn for both of us. I'm not trying to take him away from you."
"It has nothing to do with you. Didn't you hear the way he spoke to me? Shayla, he called me. Just my name." Her nager took on a frightening quality of emptiness. I sank down and took her into my arms, and she held me close instead of pushing me away as I'd feared she might do. "I may have to take you up on that offer of transfer after all—if you're still willing to do it."
"Of course. I'm more than happy to." But her mood didn't brighten at all. She still radiated desperation, and despair.
"I disobeyed him, Meechi-ki. He told me not to fight. He told me not to kill anyone—not in any sense of the word, he said."
"Is that what this is about—you think he'll refuse you transfer? I don't think he would do that, love. And Velte didn't die because you stabbed her. I think I choked her to death, and Hran put a spear into her back at about the same moment, but all you did was distract her." Her timing had been good, but it had been a rather ineffectual use of the weapon. I didn't think this was the right moment to point that out.
"I stabbed some other people, too. He saw me. I couldn't just stand there and watch. But, I'm not even one of his regular Simes. He just lets me follow him around."
I did the only thing I could think of to alleviate that terrible darkness of spirit, which was to project the most tempting Gen field I could manage. Tired as I was, I found I could make the effort, for Shayla. When she'd asked me if I would give her transfer, the request came of sheer desperation, without a shred of intil. I didn't really think Tayv would turn her away, but she knew him better than I did. And for the moment, all that really mattered was that she thought he would. Perhaps I could help her see that it would not be the end of the world for her even if he did.
Several weary Simes carrying dead bodies on makeshift stretchers walked by, in easy zlinning range, but I ignored them. Let them be scandalized. It mattered very little to me.
I was not actually trying to seduce Shayla into transfer then and there, of course. She was over a week early, and was far too wise to follow the mountain-Sime tradition of early transfers that probably went far to explain their short life-spans. But I wanted to show her that it was possible, and was something she might enjoy.
I've always found a special satisfaction in offering transfer to a renSime that I truly care about. But I knew I was facing some problems if I really did end up providing Shayla with her next transfer. I would probably be dealing with some degree of dependency, perhaps focused on Tayv specifically, or possibly a more general addiction to mountain Gen characteristics. I would have to work with her pretty intensively in the meantime. Fortunately, that would be no hardship.
In crafting a Gen show field I thought would appeal to her, I started out by using Tayv's field as a model, but I knew better than to try and produce and exact imitation. Instead, I transmuted my perceptions of his field by mixing them with other nageric impressions I'd stored away over the years, and used to good effect in the past. And a certain amount of it was just me—as I would have been if I'd been born Gen. Some channels find that a bizarre idea. Perhaps you have to have it drummed into your head by a humorless aunt while you're still in first year. For Shayla, I put more of myself into it than I would normally would have done, using Tayv as a template to imagine what I would have been like if I were a Gen who was born and raised in the high reaches. I still wasn't getting any intil from her in response, but she was considerably comforted by my efforts. This, too, was a kind of healing. And it went both ways.
Our moments of peace ended when a Sime with a dead body over one shoulder walked rather close to where we were sitting. He zlinned what I was doing and reacted with a sharp burst of amusement. Shayla scrambled to her feet, watching his retreating back with anger.
"How can he be in such a good mood? He is carrying a corpse. How can he think any of this is funny?"
"Apparently that's his reaction to the idea of one Sime giving transfer to another. Let him go ahead and laugh. I don't care, and you shouldn't either."
"I can't stay here anymore. I'm going up to your cave. I'll wait there until you finish with whatever you have to do here." Without waiting for an answer, she kissed me on the mouth and sped away, going out of her way to avoid the man carrying the body. She was augmenting, and I hoped that meant her insecurities about her next transfer were eased.
Like Tayv, Shayla never had any worries about the fact that I lived in a cave. Many lowlanders avoided such places, because it was thought to be a likely habitat for the Daimon. But Shayla had spent the early part of her adult life zlinning them on a daily basis. And neither of us had ever sensed a trace of them in my own cave. That wasn't the reason she spent only a few hours each month with me there. She just could never bear to be apart from Tayv for long. I wondered if things were about to change in that regard, and had to admit to myself that I would like it very much if Shayla started spending more time with me. But I had a hard time believing Tayv would really banish her for failing to follow his orders.
I walked back to the scene of the carnage. I stood there just zlinning Tayv from a distance for awhile as he stood talking to Omrey, but then I noticed Lurah, who was wandering around with the body of the Gen she'd killed cradled in her arms. She went up to a pair of local Gens and said something to them. I could not hear what was said, but their nagers bespoke a polite regret and a certain amount of wariness. Her own field was placid and marked by a certain quiet determination. I found myself wondering if she had lost her mind. I saw Hran watching her, and went over to speak to him.
"Hajene, I know she—"
"Don't call me that, Hran." He's from the lowlands originally, and sometimes slips into old habits. I looked around to make sure nobody had overheard. If the local people thought I was demanding special privileges or titles, I wouldn't hear the end of it for months, if ever.
"Sorry… Meechi. Look, I know she somehow got the idea that you were responsible for what happened. I'm going to tell her the truth just as soon as we get home."
"Maybe it's best if you don't. It might be easier for her if she blames me."
"No, I can't lie to her about this. It was my decision." I wondered how far in advance he had planned the whole thing, but I wasn't going to ask. "She'll be upset, but she'll see that it was necessary. She's got to."
Maybe she would. "Watch that she doesn't try to hurt herself, Hran."
"She won't." I was bothered by his certainty. It would leave him ill-prepared to deal with the possibility, and I'd been told it was not uncommon behavior for Simes who try to stop killing and fail. But my responsibility to Lurah had limits. I was more concerned about Shayla, who was not likely to be suicidal, but who I loved dearly and who was probably in no mood to be alone. "What is she doing, Hran? Why is she carrying the body around like that?"
"She's asking people if they knew his name."
This reassured me a little. I had been entertaining dismal thoughts about the prospect of attempting to disjunct a Sime who'd gone mad. But what she was doing made a kind of sense to me, now that Hran had explained. "Put away all the disjunction drugs just as soon as you get home. Don't let her take another drop, even though she's going to want to. But don't throw them away. We'll be needing them later on."
From the faint impatience in his nager as I spoke, I knew I wasn't saying anything he hadn't thought of already. "Do you think she has a chance now?"
"A chance, yes. A lot of it will depend on her." It occurred to me how poorly qualified I was to answer such a question, but she did seem stronger than she had since I'd known her. What remained to be seen was her reaction to what Hran meant to tell her—and I could tell he was serious in his intent to do so. It would have been hard to say which of them was the more stubborn. Perhaps that quality would carry her through. "I'll be by tomorrow to check on her, Hran."
I went over to where Tayv stood, holding Omrey close and rubbing her back. I did not want to interrupt, but I truly wanted to know where Shayla stood with him. I'd learned that getting a straight answer from a mountain Gen was not always easy, but I felt I had to try before heading back to the cave.
Omrey saw me approach and moved away from Tayv a bit. "How is your arm, Meechi?"
"It's fine." I extended the dorsals on that side and retracted them, to show her. "Let me see that hand. I didn't get the chance before."
"It doesn't hurt." She flexed it and winced. "Much."
"Here." I took her hand and began trying to project concentrated need to stimulate her Gen cells. I had trouble concentrating at first, and could only manage a decent gradient after focusing on Tayv's field for inspiration.
He felt me doing it and lent me strength for the healing, though his way of doing so was very different than what I was accustomed to from Gens from a more conventional background. "One of these days, Meechi, I'm going to figure out how to do that."
Before I met Tayv, I would have laughed at the idea of any Gen producing a credible imitation of a Sime's field. But I wouldn't be entirely surprised if he managed it, someday.
I was not able to do as much for Omrey's hand as I normally might have, but I was able to help a little before fatigue forced me to give it up for the moment. She flexed it experimentally. "Better, thanks. Meechi, what is that woman doing?"
She was looking at Lurah, who still carried the Gen's body. The men she was speaking to were shaking their heads, and she walked over to another group. "She wants to know the name of that dead Gen. One of the—ones who were camping here."
"The tall man, the one who was always with Velte? They called him Giesel."
"I think she might like to know that. Perhaps you could tell her, later on."
"I can't imagine why she'd care. Being Gen didn't make him any different than the rest of that crowd. It's funny, the only one of them who I ever caught acting halfway civilized was the boy who started all this by killing Te Candus… but if she wants to know, I'll go over and tell her right now." Tayv's hands were still on her shoulders, and she reached up and squeezed one of them before walking away.
Tayv took my arm and began inspecting it the way Shayla might do with a nearly-finished carving. Remembering what he had promised me, I could not suppress a shiver at his touch. "Tayv, I have to ask you about something… Shayla thinks you are very angry with her. She asked if I would give her transfer."
"I don't mind if you do that, Meechi." It hadn't even occurred to me that I might be risking Gen jealousy by making such an offer. "She's probably curious. We don't have channels in the mountains… not in the lowlander sense of the word."
"She asked because thinks you'll turn her away, because she picked up a knife and joined in the fighting after you told her not to."
"She truly believes that? I'm used to telling Simes what to do… and equally used to being disobeyed the moment I take my eyes off them. I mean no offense, Meechi. You know what Alye-ki and Kora-ki are like. Perhaps I shouldn't have tried to make the decision for her. She's not like the others. Meechi, I hope you don't think that our transfer arrangement means I'm going to try and tell you what to do."
This was a relief to me, and I wasn't going to tell him just how prepared I had been to follow his orders, if he'd required that of me. "So you're still willing to give her transfer this month, then." He nodded, and despite the delightful sensations his fingers were still producing along the length of my arm, my spirits sank with disappointment.
He looked around. "It seems I should talk to her. Where did she go?"
"Back to my cave. She said she would wait for me there. I'll tell her what you said." All of a sudden, I wanted to be with her.
Omrey had finished her conversation with Lurah and was heading our way. Tayv let go of my arm. "Send her home. I'll be heading there myself in a bit."
Heading back to the cave, I tried to cheer myself by remembering that Tayv had promised me transfer. But now that I could no longer zlin him, I was not able to take much comfort in that. I just wanted to go to Shayla and hold her for a little while before Tayv lured her away from me again. I began to fear that she would not be there when I got home, and I began to augment in my haste to reach her, although I told myself it was just a case of turnover-induced nerves.
When I came within zlinning range, it was a profound relief to me to observe that she was sitting at the table near the mouth of the cave and drinking a big glass of beer. Something in her nager suggested it wasn't her first one. She smiled and poured one for me, and I took it from her, caressing her handling tentacles with my own.
"If I help with the brewing, can I stay here with you?"
"Shayla. Come here, love." I took her in my arms and went back to projecting the Gen field she'd been responding to before, not making any effort to hide the sadness I felt. I could tell this puzzled her a little. I let myself enjoy her response for just a few moments more before I told her. "He says you're welcome to come home. In fact, he told me to send you there, so that you could hear directly from him that he has no intention of refusing you transfer. But he won't be back there for a bit. Stay with me for a little while, at least."
She didn't respond the way I'd expected. I'd thought she would be overjoyed—and that her response to my efforts would fade like the memory of a face seen in a dream. Instead, she snuggled closer, and I began to pick up a hint of real intil from her. "Maybe I should let you do it anyway, Meechi. I can't get too used to Tayv. He talks about going back into the mountains sometimes, and I couldn't, I just couldn't. Not if there was any choice for me. And you want to, don't you? I can't imagine what that would be like, to be able to give transfer to other Simes, as if you were part Gen. I can tell you want to. Is it kind of like intil? Or what Gens feel when they're high-field?"
I could barely understand what she was saying. She could not have had time for more than two beers, three at the most, while I was talking to Tayv and Omrey. But I think they had hit her harder than usual, with all that had happened that day.
"Not exactly, no. I'll show you." I have a good memory for emotion and sensation, and I did my best to let her zlin the way a channel feels about giving transfer. I may have exaggerated a little. But I wanted her to understand how much it would mean to me.
'That's lovely." Her voice was barely audible. "I hope Tayv won't mind. I want to let you do that for me." Regardless of how much beer she'd actually consumed, she was drunk, and I couldn't expect to hold her to that promise. But it was a comfort to me all the same.
~~~~
The next day, as promised, I went down to see Lurah.
As I made my way down the mountain, I was filled with a quiet dread. I was afraid I would find her dead, or that I would zlin something in her that would make the whole situation seem completely hopeless... or that she would simply not be willing to speak to me, regardless of what her husband had told her.
When I approached the house, I saw a fresh grave, but Lurah was working in the large garden nearby. She was in better spirits than I had expected, and the sight of me did not dampen her mood. Her husband and stepson were nowhere in sight, but she had her two small children and Rikka with her. As she weeded, Lurah kept the three of them out of mischief by distracting them with the occasional ripe tomato to eat or a pretty flower to admire.
When Rikka saw me she held her arms out hopefully, because Lurah was in the habit of rewarding the pen Gen with a sweet after I took her selyn. Looking at Rikka, I saw a problem. She could not remain here as Lurah moved closer to disjunction crisis. And truly, it might be better if Lurah were confined somewhere. Because Rikka was not the only potential problem. There might be other local Gens, like Te Candus, who were not as prepared to handle a full-out attack as they might like to imagine. And from what I had read on the subject, Lurah was likely to reach a point where no Gen in her vicinity was safe from such an attack—regardless of her moral principles or her good intentions.
But I had nowhere to keep her, no place from which she might not escape if I were distracted for a moment. I decided to go down to Varnirr and ask my consultant, Hajene Corin, if he had any ideas on the subject. I had been thinking of talking with him again in any event. My own lack of competence and experience in the field of disjunction had not worried me overmuch, when I could think of Lurah's case as hopeless. Now that she had some real chance to succeed, I was paralyzed with feelings of inadequacy.
Lurah plucked a quen-root from the ground, rinsed it off in a bucket of water, and offered it to me with a smile. "If I can do this, Meechi... do you think Hran and I could have another child? Is it possible for my health to be good enough for that again?" She held her hand over her abdomen protectively, as if she were already pregnant. To my relief, I could zlin that she was not—she knew better than that, of course.
"It's possible," I said cautiously.
The expression in her eyes was distant and dreamy. "I think Giesel would be a good name for either a boy or a girl." She put her hand on the head of her daughter, the elder of her two children and not quite waist-high.
I didn't answer; what was there to say?
Her attention flickered to the nearby grave. As if replying to some question I had not asked, she added, "He would have slashed my arms, if he could—the way that woman did to Mor. I can't say that what I did was right, but it's not the same as if I did such a thing to Rikka, who is innocent and did nothing to deserve it." With honest affection in her nager, she glanced down at the ungainly young Gen, who was sitting in the dirt playing with a rock.
Just then, Lurah seemed so healthy that it was hard for me to remember how bad it would get for her. But I was happy to see that she was starting out with an optimistic attitude, at least. She seemed to be waiting for some response to what she'd just said, so I gave a nageric assent, and told her, "No matter what you'd done or not done, the other villagers would never have permitted any of the Wilders to survive that day—Sime or Gen." I did not let her zlin any hint of doubt in my field.
As I climbed back to my cave, I felt better about Lurah's situation. Her optimism had proven contagious. It occurred to me, not for the first time, how often it is that the worst-case scenarios our minds insist on creating end up dissipating like a low cloud on a windy day.
~~~~
I had been looking forward to spending the rest of the day relaxing and recuperating back at my familiar cave, but when I got there, it no longer seemed like home. It had never bothered me before, living out of zlinning range of other people, but it suddenly seemed to me that Simes were not meant to live in isolation like this. I kept conjuring up horrific fantasies wherein all the other people in the area had vanished, somehow, leaving me all alone. Finally I gave up and headed for Tayv's place, because of course he was the one I wanted to see. My Gen, for this month at least.
I couldn't help hoping that maybe I could talk him into some ongoing arrangement. Tayv was already TN-qualified, in a sense, but I didn't think he'd ever actually given transfer to a channel before. And I did have certain tricks that renSimes seldom, if ever, mastered. With most Gens, I could maintain enough control to put their satisfaction first—and of course this was no sacrifice for me, since it made for a better transfer all around. Whether I could remember to do this when exposed to the full power of Tayv's nager remained to be seen, but I meant to try.
Shayla met me halfway up the trail, and I was almost as glad to zlin her as I would have been if Tayv had come to greet me, especially given the intil she was directing at me. I redirected my thoughts from fantasies of taking Tayv in transfer, to one of being the mountain Gen, and wrapped this nageric enticement around Shayla like an embrace. She responded by putting her arms around me and leaking some ronaplin onto my shoulder. No channel could ask for a nicer compliment than that.
I locked into her field, encouraging her response to me but at the same time, slowing her metabolism just a bit to postpone the advent of hard need. She was a little ahead of me in her cycle, partly because hers was a little shorter than mine and partly because she'd had transfer before our trip to Varnirr. At the same time I sped up my own consumption just a fraction, sustaining a low level of augmentation which came naturally since I was exerting effort to work on her field. I wanted to be very close to my own transfer when I served her. At the moment, the existence of post-syndrome was something I had to take on faith and memory, but I've always believed in thinking ahead.
"Meechi, stay with us for awhile, won't you? I'm so tired of sleeping alone half the month." In fact, she seldom spent the whole night with me, though she often drifted off to sleep in my arms during the earlier part of our cycles.
"I would like that... as long as it's all right with Tayv, of course."
"I'm sure it will be." Keeping one arm around my shoulders, she led me back to the collection of low stone buildings, where Tayv was hard at work weeding, much as Lurah had been doing. He did not look up, but his field reached out to encompass both of us seductively. I forgot all about projecting a Gen field for Shayla, but I could zlin that she didn't really mind. We walked closer, and I began to pull up weeds alongside him. He radiated approval.
"Tayv, you won't mind if Meechi stays here with us for awhile, will you? I've invited him to stay in the loft with me, but he won't unless you approve." Once again, she focused her intil on me, and I thought it a very good sign that she would do that with Tayv standing right in front of us. But since he was there, I felt torn between instinct and training. Training won, this time... of course, I was only a day past turnover. Kora-ki, playing nearly, looked at me oddly and extended her laterals in bafflement as I meshed my field with Shayla's.
Tayv hesitated a long time before answering, long enough to worry me. I began to wonder if he'd even heard Shayla's question, because he continued weeding his garden exactly as if he had not. I kept working, too. It was really quite relaxing, and of course I was hoping it would impress on him that I could make myself useful. Fortunately, he'd taught me enough about the herbs to know which plants to leave.
"I once knew a woman who had nine Simes," he finally said. "Nine of them. I don't know quite how she managed." I wasn't sure if he meant the selyn requirements, or the general confusion that might have ensued if they were all like Kora-ki and Alye-ki, but my heart gave a little leap at the implications of the remark.
Of course, there might be complications. Two out of three of his Simes were technically junct, and I was afraid to ask if he'd been responsible for this condition in Shayla and in Alye-ki. He might not know the answer anyway. If I ended up like that, it would close a great many doors in my face. And even if I managed to avoid that, a bond with Tayv would make it impossible for me to go down to some nice little town and open up a channeling practice there, as I'd always half-imagined I would do someday. Even if I could convince Tayv and Shayla to move down to the lowlands with me, Kora-ki and Alye-ki would simply not be accepted in such a place.
I decided I didn't care about that, not any of it. I'd always assumed that eventually I would settle down to a life not much different than my aunt Petra's, with a few dozen channeling clients and a Gen assistant trained in someplace like Quissa. But if that was what I really wanted, then I probably wouldn't be here—in Borderville.
~~~~