In Conquest Born, page 53
He clings to her, his only anchor in a universe gone mad. This is sensitivity as she once knew it, when the trauma of her father’s death opened her mind to every passing thought; he gave her this terror, and now she is returning the favor. This is the torment that the awakening telepath knows, a chaos so terrible that the mind would rather repress its inborn talent than experience it even for an instant. It is the birth of the True Mind, the telepath’s soul; it is his universe, and he fights to master it.
Order imposed upon anarchy: he focuses on his sense of self, separates it from the primal chaos which surrounds him, and builds walls which will keep the two distinct. How like the gods, he muses. The sea is quieting, the fire dying. The thoughts of the universe are a song, no more, a quiet ebb and flow of being that caresses his mind with wonder. This is what it means to be psychic; this is what it means to live.
Why have we denied this thing? Why have we feared it?
A whisper of thought, carried to him on a gentle breeze of the Voidmind:
You will see, she promises him.
Darkness parting, and the shimmer of a silver ocean. He raised his head, heard the wallfleece tinkle in response to his motion. It took him a moment to remember where he was. He looked for her, but she had left. He scanned the nearby region for her mental signature, received no response. Some time had passed, then, since the healing darkness had claimed him.
“Lord Zatar?”
He tried to sit upright, lacked the strength. Footsteps came from the suite’s entrance, echoed in the tinkling of the rug. A woman’s voice: L’resh? What was she doing here?
“My Lord?”
She came through the doorway and saw him, and in a moment was by his side. “What happened?” she asked breathlessly. “Are you all right?”
Her concern for him was too intense; he applied one of the many Disciplines that Feran had taught him, managed to lessen the sensation.
Think of the power! To have this special talent in his universe, which was not prepared to combat it. To be able to pick out the motives that prompted speech, to taste the plans of his enemies before they came to fruition. She had given him the ultimate tool and he, as a ruler, intended to use it. And if she thought that this would bring him suffering . . . well, she didn’t know him as well as he’d thought.
He tried to rise again, managed to raise himself up on one elbow. L’resh reached to help him, placing a gloved hand beneath his shoulder—
—and fire burned him through the contact, noxious emotions in painful profusion.
He pulled away from her, startled.
“What is it?” There was fear in her voice, in her foremind. “What happened?”
I don’t know. “Nothing. I’ll be all right.”
Will I?
He struggled to his feet. Something fell from his chest to the floor as he did so, but it took all his concentration just to stand, so he let it be for the moment.
Then he swayed, and she moved to help him, and she was pressed against his side
—and there was a female essence in her, but not like Anzha’s: not something to savor, but an unwholesome, unclean sensation, tainted with dark and terrible emotions that threatened to contaminate him. Weakness, there was terrible weakness; her mind could not focus properly on ‘self,’ was more concerned with his welfare than her own. Madness! And what was this ugliness, this clinging darkness that had moved her to risk her own life time and time again, bearing him children? Not a hunger for pleasure, no, but something darker, something that reeked of bondage and destruction. Was this what the enemy called ‘love’? He shuddered to discover it in one of his own kind—and he began to be truly afraid.
“My Lord, what—”
“How did you get here?” he interrupted. He pulled away from her. Better to keep her talking, to give him time to sort out his thoughts.
“You asked me to come. You sent for me—here, see?” She pulled a keyplate from her sash, set it on the table. Black on the mirrored surface: a cancer, like her emotions. “You invited me to join you, don’t you remember? What’s wrong, Zatar? I want to help.”
What’s wrong? I’m beginning to guess.
He held out his hand to her, bracing himself for the contact. Distinction Discipline, Integration Discipline, Touch Discipline: he ran the patterns through his mind as she reached out for him, and clung to them as she grasped his hand.
—And the world exploded in a burst of emotion too alien to contemplate. He drew back from her. His hand was trembling, and his mind . . . that was in turmoil, consumed now by fear as the full extent of the Starcommander’s vengeance became clear to him.
(. . . any contact we have will be tainted by my experience . . .)
Anzha!
“I’ll be all right.” A lie. He knew his fate for what it was, recognized the terrible isolation that awaited him. “Just give me a minute.” He had surrounded himself with women who would bond themselves to him; there was not one he could touch now, if touching them meant psychic contact. They were like a different race, even a different species, filled with disturbing emotions that had no counterpart in his own identity. And he could not afford to give those emotions a chance to take root in his psyche.
He had taken it for granted that what he’d experienced with the Starcommander was typical of telepathic rapport; now he acknowledged, for the very first time, how wrong he had been. Now he knew that she was unique, and that he might search a lifetime for another soul so well suited to his own. If there was another—which he doubted.
Until then, he was alone. More alone than any man had ever been; more alone than any woman—save one—could have endured.
“I need air,” he whispered. Outside, in the open spaces surrounding the palace, he could perhaps come to terms with this; in the confines of this room, any room, the tangle of emotions seemed too overwhelming.
What would it do to Braxi, to have an involuntary psychic for a ruler? What would it mean to that nation of hedonists that their figurehead denied himself sexual contact? And what would happen to his House, whose very structure was founded upon sexual intimacy?
Ni’en . . . he thought, but she was lost to him. They all were lost to him.
Your choice, Pri’tiera.
“Zatar?”
He forced himself back to the present. L’resh was radiating fear and compassion, and the mirror of her emotions showed him just how strangely he’d been acting.
He calmed himself. Feigned composure. Glanced down at the floor where a small, black item lay, and picked it up. His hand, he was pleased to note, was steady.
“What is it?” L’resh asked him.
He turned the crusted object over in his hand. It was a glove, torn across the palm and stiffened with blood: his blood, long since dried. He nodded, understanding.
“It’s nothing,” he said at last. He dropped it. “Nothing that matters.”
You have destroyed me, my enemy.
“Come,” he said softly. As he walked across the floor his foot fell upon the glove, crushing it.
He was careful not to touch her as they left the palace.
Viton: And then—say the Braxaná—Taz’hein turned on his Creator, and war came into being. The gods turned their men into warriors, pawn against pawn, brother against brother, and blood was spilled on the surface of the planet. Thus was man baptized by the treachery of the gods, to know the rich variety of conflict . And when Taz’hein was supreme in the Void he saw what men had become, and he withheld the hand of destruction which he had meant for them. “This is good,” he said, “and since you have truly learned to live, I will not take that life from you. But if you must seek guidance, look to the Void—for it is as likely as I to answer, or to care.”
EPILOGUE
(The following document was destroyed in Dyle’s landing, Year 1.)
I shall describe it all chronologically, Beyl-my-brother, and perhaps the information may be of use to our people some day. As for the rest, that is for your eyes alone. You will see.
There is no need to describe to you the scene when civil authorities pulled me from church in the middle of services. I have always found it of some significance that at the time we were reciting the Litany of Blessed Abstinence, which I suppose I accepted as much as anyone. We were not the first people to venerate sexual abstinence, although I do think we were the first to be encouraged to venerate it by another people. But these are things I recognize now, after Harkur; then I accepted it without question, as most of us did. What more bloodless genocide?
You were there, when they pulled me forcibly from my prayers and dragged me from the sanctuary. You all feared for me, but who dared act? Were we not all slaves in fact, though some of us were not so yet in name? Frenell life is cheap to the Mristi. Once in utmost secrecy, when I was a child, a playmate whispered to me that there had been only one race on Zeymour to start with. I didn’t believe it then. Just look at the differences—their pale skin and sharp features, the dusky brown of our coloring and our distinctly curvilinear faces—and all the cultural disparities, as well. But I believe it now. I have seen the beginning of a class system based on race, and I can now conceive of a planet where one race—or sub-race—gains such power that it becomes distinct from all other sub-races on the planet. But never have I seen, among the stars and the men that rule there, such a deliberate attempt to eradicate one particular racial type.
I was terrified at the time. I was not a rebel, as you were. I was, I see now, well conditioned. You know I had nearly turned you in when you harbored pregnant Elise in our home, that she might bear her child to term. I had nightmares for months, fully believing that for indulging in the grosser instincts Elise was damned, and that for keeping her from punishment I would be, too. No, I never questioned that the Mristi could enjoy such things while we were damned for it. They were different.
How many generations, I wonder, did it take them to perfect this training, geared toward our annihilation? What had we ever done to deserve such hostility—how long ago in history had we been merely a lesser caste, with a church under our control, a doctrine that allowed for the continuance of the species? No matter. They threw me in a shieldcar and drove me to the Discipline Center, nearly hitting two hotspots on the way. My terror was not lessened by the fact that there was a quakeling as I was pulled from the ’car. You can tell me all you like that there are an average of three quakelings a day in the City; it was a sign from God or I had never seen one.
I wondered if they knew of the conspiracy. Not from me, certainly, who only knew because I was your sister and you were involved. . . . I have never seen men frightened as they were when the quakeling struck. It was almost as if they knew to the number how many there would be before the destruction of Zeymour came at last, and were counting down.
I was taken to the office of the President of Disciplinary Action, Frenell Division. I was terrified; they had to half-carry me most of the way, my legs were so weak with fright. How many of our people had entered these halls, never to emerge again? There was a distant rumbling and my captors set themselves for another quakeling, but there was none.
The President was a large man, overweight and foul-smelling. The Mristi say that is because he deals so closely with the Frenell, while we have it that it is because he is a Mristi agent. But he was both Mristi officer and High Priest, and I trembled as I prostrated myself before him.
“What have we here?” he said. His voice was foul, everything about him was foul. If he was indeed God’s agent then I was sorry for the unkindness of the observation—but it came to me nonetheless, and stuck.
“Frenell crap,” one of my captors said. The room was heavily guarded. “We have her name in connection with the child-43 conspiracy.”
That was Elise’s child, I realized with a sinking heart. But why had they taken me, and not you?
The President raised an eyebrow. “Yes? Well, that’s over with, so there’s no point in interrogation.” Foul, foul, foul. He oozed it.
“What then for punishment, sir?”
The President went to a file and drew out a clipboard. It was of beaten gold and the clip was set with huge emeralds. He put the end of the garnet-tipped pen in his mouth and hemmed and hawed. “Awright,” he muttered past the pen, without removing it. “We need a Frenell piece for this expedition. That’ll settle the damnation, which’ll make a good example. Publicize it.”
My captor smiled his pleasure at the thought.
“Here are the papers.” The President handed him a folder. “Have her disinfected and indoctrinated at the Space Center. I’m sure our astronauts will take care of the rest.”
“Sterilized, sir?”
He laughed. It was an ugly sound.
“Naw. She wouldn’t dare get pregnant.”
They snickered as they pulled me from the room. I felt faint, not quite understanding the specifics of my fate but having a good grasp on the general idea. I was to serve my slaveterm on the Explorer, that experimental stellar ship about to be launched from Aringvil Hotspot. How ironic, I thought, that with you obsessed with the intra-stellar ships, I should be on the first inter-stellar ever launched. But it was with sinking heart that I knew it. For my fate was to endure rape by the astronauts waiting in the unknown dark of uncharted space, and through that to be damned beyond redemption forever.
I chanted the Litany of Abstention all night in my cell; it only depressed me more.
In the morning I was taken to the Space Center in Aringvil where I met the four astronauts. They stripped me and I had to stand motionless while the Mristini men subjected me to inspection. The shame of being naked was unbearable; the other shame, that of being touched, was something so alien that I could not even deal with it emotionally. God, forgive me, I had no way of stopping it. . . .
They approved of me and I was enrolled in a haphazard program designed to prepare me to survive the long months—years?—ahead. Often as I underwent tests and exercised I was aware of one of the four leering at me through the one-way visipanes which surrounded my quarters. I couldn’t sleep. Whenever I dozed, hell rose up to meet me, reminding me in tones of demonic laughter that soon, very soon I would be committed to the radioactive flames for the rest of eternity. By the end of a half-month I was a wreck, physically and emotionally.
They strapped me into a small section right by the cargo and off we went. No one had prepared me for the pain, the gut-wrenching agony of the special drive that would theoretically allow us to get from star to star in less than a generation. I heard one of the men crying out, but he had friends to comfort him. I had no escape and no comfort. I never even saw the astronauts until the third day, when we had completed the first acceleration-series and one of them freed himself from his mechanical life-support system to use the facilities—me. I fought him, but it was hard. They had companionship and pain-killers, and I had only fear; I was not fully recovered yet from the trip out. Still I fought, fought not only him but the damnation of my soul. I lost. I would have died then if mere self-neglect could have killed me, but they left me strapped in with the wires and hoses and the coldly efficient machines that kept me alive, despite my prayers. If hell there was, then hell I saw. My dreams were full of it and my waking hours also, for the men not only used me, but reveled in my pain and shame in other ways as well, having little other source of amusement in the small and sterile starship.
But enough of this, my brother. You see the point.
We had spent more than a month like this, and five times we endured that pain which permitted us to conquer the reaches of space that once man only dreamed of. It was a long journey and a wearing one, and they were lost in drunken oblivion when it happened. Evidently the navigational instruments had gone out of alignment sometime during our journey, and pinned senseless under their drunken stupor they failed to notice the error until it was too late. We came back into normal, painless space, and for a few minutes I heard their cries of fear and I knew, as they did, of their helplessness. I struggled to be free, but my bonds were too strong; to that I owe my life. We had come back into instrumented space too close to a planet to ignore its gravitic demands, and as we cut through the atmosphere they tried desperately to kill the momentum, to save themselves. They failed. And I . . . I only survived because the section that I was in, filled with instruments of more worth to the Mristi than the men of their own race, broke free of the doomed ship and managed a violent but infinitely more successful landing.
We crashed. Whether on land or in water I do not know. There was a jarring pain and the sound of tearing metal, and fire filled the air and scorched my lungs from the inside out. At last death came to embrace me and I welcomed the darkness that closed my smoke-injured eyes. Lastly there was the sensation of being lifted, but I knew that for death-spawned delusion and gladly accepted the black nonexistence that had finally come to free me.
I awoke in a panic, struggling to free myself from my bondage. Kind hands held me down, and voices called in a strange and musical language very close to me. I opened my eyes and saw with bleary sight men and women who were like us, but not so. At first I thought I was home, for where else would one find human life? And then, as I watched them, as I noted the differences, I knew the truth.
They nursed me to health, Beyl-my-brother, kindly and carefully. Although I saw more and more how alien they were in sound, form, and action, I never ceased to wonder at their perfectly human form.
