Starfire Saga, page 17
I wanted to leave, but it was not possible. I wanted him to go away, but that wasn’t going to happen, either, and I knew it. Over and around it all, I did desire him. The part of me that was him, poured into me two days before, was being drawn more and more strongly back to him. He waited, watching me.
“Jemeret, I’m not very good at this,” I said at last.
“I agree with that.”
I almost laughed, but it was all too serious for laughter. “I don’t understand how you can love me. I haven’t even been here for a tenday.”
“Love isn’t a time-bound phenomenon. It’s a choice,” he said. “I have been inside your mind, and I felt at home there. You have agreed to join my tribe, and you are beautiful and strong. Of course I love you.”
His calm confidence gusted past my senses and left me once again in awe at his strength. Even knowing as I did that he had held my mind entirely in his, that he had read my spirit and knew it, I marveled at him and could not believe I would ever be capable of such risk-taking.
“I’m very confused.”
“Confusion is often a sign of growth,” he said. “Why don’t you try to sleep now? Things will look clearer in the morning.”
Suspicion bloomed inside me, and he saw it and gently shook his head. “I won’t try to influence you while you sleep,” he said. “I don’t do that.”
“I used to,” I said. “I used to have that talent. We called it the sting, and I used it a lot. The government trained me to use it.”
He looked away from me and began to undress, saying only, “I can’t answer for your government.”
I took off my tunic, but left on the leggings to hold the camenia cloths in place. I curled against the side of the tent under the blanket as he blew out the lamp. Despite the confusion and the uneasiness and the fear, despite my recognition of the need, despite any doubts I might have had, I was glad that we were going home in the morning. I didn’t understand love. I’d seen too little of it for it to have become controllable.
A Class A had to have people to practice on. Class C talents practiced on themselves, and Class B talents practiced on things, but a Class A learned on people or not at all. Mortel John, Coney, and Kray were my targets as a child, most readily available. As I developed some scruples—never enough, I fear—I wanted to practice on them less and less. It never got to the point of unwilling subjects—that is, I don’t think it did. And I actually got to do some good.
There is a time I remember like a shining jewel out of the grayness of adolescent schoolwork. Mortel John was called out of the classroom in which I was studying the physiology of the human brain. I was the only one of the three of us who had to study neurology, because a living brain has no path, and I was the only one who would have to find my way around the landscape of the mind.
That day, I was memorizing connectors through the corpus callosum when Mortel John came back and said, “Ronica McBride, you’re needed at the hospital near Government House. Come with me, please.”
I rose and followed him, excited by being needed, and excited, too, because I rarely got to go anywhere without Coney and Kray. “What is it?” I asked him. “What am I going to have to do?”
“The ambassador from Auburnese is visiting here with her husband and daughter,” he said as we made for the floater garage. “The little girl has contracted therios fever.”
“Wasn’t she inoculated?” I was truly horrified. Therios fever was an ancient ailment, causing unbearable burning and frightening delirium. But it was relatively easy to guard against, and it usually cropped up only in someone who had been shamefully, deliberately infected.
“There was an inoculation,” Mortel John said shortly, and I guessed that there was some intrigue to it that I didn’t know and wasn’t about to be told. We got into the floater and lifted off immediately. By that, I knew that we had top clearance, and all other floaters had been grounded to keep them out of our way.
I had been to the hospital on a day tour to see the facilities and observe the workings of physiology in vivo, but I had never come to visit anyone; the people I knew never got sick. Now I felt a thud of excitement that I was going to get to work, not just do childish influence experiments on people who mattered little in the scheme of things.
We got to the hospital faster than I would have believed we could, but then this was the first time I’d ever been through the city on a priority clearance. Someone was waiting to take the floater as we alighted, and the staff of physicians was waiting just inside the entrance, along with some government personnel. The respect everyone showed me was a little awesome and entirely gratifying. I smiled through the introductions without actually listening to any names, until I got to the Honorable Letitia Ver Lenghy and her husband, Mockin Ebisco. The ambassador was close to tears and clasped my hands as if I were her savior. Her husband was grim-faced, trying to comfort her and regain control of himself simultaneously. Their fear and anguish were so apparent that I didn’t have to read them, but I did anyway. To my surprise, I discovered that in spite of the undeniable genuineness of the emotions they were radiating, what they were really feeling, down at their most basic levels, was love.
The people on whom a Class A practices rarely feel any love during the sessions, and the depth and color of this particular emotion as I read it seared me. I stared at them, and with a completeness I cannot even now explain, I envied that little girl with therios fever—I, who had always been the envied, never the envier. At the same time that I recognized the envy, I vowed I would save the child’s life for these two strangers who cared so much for her.
“Come this way, Ronica McBride,” Mortel John said in a tone that made me believe he had said it once before without getting any response from me.
I followed him down a hall, with the child’s parents and the assorted government officials behind me. The room we entered was divided into two by a clear lead-base acrylicine, and the child was in a bed beyond the wall. I guessed her age at almost seven. Her straw-colored hair was plastered to her head with sweat, and she writhed and tore against the restraining shield that held her to the bed.
Letitia Ver Lenghy gave an involuntary cry, quickly stifled. The girl was worse since she had last seen her.
“The inner section is very close to the freezing point,” Mortel John said to me. “You’ll have to adjust before you go in.” He indicated a sphincter door in the side wall in our part of the room.
I looked at the ambassador. “What’s her name?” I asked. I believe it was the first thing I’d said since I entered the hospital.
It was her husband who answered, his voice breaking. “Lanya.”
I turned, pressed open the sphincter door, and stepped into the tunnel connecting it with the inner part of the room. Each step I took made the cold worse, and I adjusted my body temperature upward to compensate almost automatically. By the time I had crossed over the acrylicine barrier, I began to encounter the terrible power of the delusions—not the delusions themselves, but the brutal results of them on Lanya. The emanations—confusion, horror, rage—were so horrific that I bent my head to push forward through them as though a strong wind were blowing in the room. I could not shut them out and hope to reach the child, for if I did not share her pain, I could not reduce it. With as much of my strength as I could spare, I reached backward along the narrow tunnel and recontacted the outpouring of love from Ver Lenghy and Ebisco, gathering with it to give myself the will to continue.
If the battering was intense for me, I could barely imagine what it would be like for the tiny girl. Once inside the room, I had to control myself to walk steadily to the bed, still holding firmly to the thin line of love leading back through the tunnel to the other side of the clear wall. My pride would not allow me to stumble where the watching people could see it.
I rested my hand on the child’s forehead and had to adjust the temperature of my palm rapidly downward to avoid being scorched by my own heat combined with hers. It took all my courage to slip through the curtain of pain and into Lanya’s turbulent mind. The fever nearly knocked me off my feet. I gathered with every bit of strength I had or could draw from her parents and began calling her name, searching through the whirling storm of hate and rage for the nugget that was still the little girl.
I don’t know how long it took until I found the spark and carefully surrounded it with my own being to protect it from the delusions. Lanya’s body relaxed into the restraints with such suddenness that the people watching from the other half of the room must have thought she had died. Fear flooded in along the connection, and I hastily withdrew from the ambassador and her husband, signaling Mortel John to tell them what I had done.
I could barely see in the real world; all my vision was now grayness shot with discordant colors of madness. Slowly I worked my way along the girl’s synapses and nerve endings, driving the fever’s chemical matrices back out of the brain centimeter by centimeter. It seemed to take forever, but then I became aware, as Lanya did, that the room was very cold, and the haze of roiling delusions began to subside.
The brightness of the room startled me as my sight returned. My reserves were low, but not untenable. And the fever was back down in the child’s body, at a level that could be treated. I looked over at Mortel John and saw him say something, at which the ambassador, her husband, and the medical personnel rushed through the sphincter door into the inner section of the room.
Letitia Ver Lenghy threw herself at the now sleeping child. I drew out of the little girl’s mind and opened myself wide to drink in the beautiful, intense outpouring of love, even though it wasn’t aimed at me.
As I lay beside Jemeret in the darkened tent among the Genda, I remembered what that had felt like. Coney’s love for me had been a different thing, always constrained by who we were. Kray’s love had been angry, possessive. Jemeret was the first person in my life with the potential to help me produce what I had felt in that hospital, and I so wanted to believe that he would. Sandalari had helped me to admit to myself—if not to her—that I, too, needed something. It was a desire I could not destroy, because just then I had no Class C ability available to me. I was forced to be—until I recovered—not just a person without Class A talent, but a person without any talent at all.
I must have made a sound, because Jemeret looked over at me. “Ronica?”
I honestly had no idea that I was going to say the words until they were out of me. “Make love to me.”
“I want to,” he said, “but I will wait until you can use your power again.”
I wanted to say that I would never get all my power back, but it seemed too likely to shatter a moment I wanted to keep.
He reached out and drew me in against his side, my head on his shoulder, and I rested comfortably there for the first time. He stroked my hair and soothed me gently to sleep.
The delight shown by Gundever and Variel, and Shenefta’s open joy at my return, made me conscious that I had made friends here to whom my presence or absence made a difference.
According to the laws of the tribe, once I had agreed to become a Boru, the ceremony could be scheduled for a tenday in the future, and I was to spend that time—in the words Venacrona quoted to me—in rites of purification and in learning the history and the laws of the tribe I was to join.
I learned a great deal about the Boru in that period of time—tribal rules, customs, songs, dances, history. Venacrona’s assistant, the priestess, whose name was Mardalita, worked with me. It was the first time I’d ever taken instruction from a woman, and I discovered something that intrigued me. Mardalita took her tasks very seriously, but she did it with an amazing sense of fun. Mortel John had never seemed to think anything he was teaching us could be considered humorous. Mardalita found many things absurd, but liked them anyway.
During the tenday I spent mostly with the priestess, I saw very little of Jemeret, except that we still slept side by side on the rugs. There was no sexual threat from him, however, because I knew he would not touch me until my reflexes were healed. And on the day that I became a Boru, my convalescence ended, and I could gather again without pain. I suspect that Jemeret arranged it that way, though at the time I deceived myself into thinking it was a coincidence.
The Genda had camped next to us, and the Elden and the Dibel had arrived and camped beyond them. The Dibel were musicians, singers, dancers, minstrels, and showfolk, according to what I’d been told. While I hungered to get into their camp to search for a nomidar, or what passed for one here, my time was completely filled with the rituals of preparation. By the time I was to be embraced into the Boru, three more tribes had arrived: the Nedi, the Paj, and the Resni.
The embrace was scheduled, as were many Boru ceremonies, at last light. All day I had been kept with Mardalita, though Variel came in once to bring me my talma for the ceremony. The priestess fed me, bathed me, oiled my body, dressed me, fixed my hair in the series of braids coiled to make a shining crown that I’d first worn at the Lewannee stonehouse, and talked with me about incidents in her childhood, leading up to her own embrace into the tribe. “I was too young to understand,” she said with some real regret, “even though I had been bleeding for two years by the Convalee of my embrace. I was originally a Nedi.” She was decorating the shoulders of my silvery talma with midnight-blue rosettes. “I envy you, really. You are old enough to understand and young enough to still grow with us.”
I didn’t respond much. I had been conscious in the morning that my talent was accessible to me again—though of course the sting was still gone—and aware at a lower level of my being that Jemeret was also conscious of it, and that he had said he would make love to me when I had my power back. So, though I didn’t try to concentrate on it, I was feeling ripples of excitement most of the day, sometimes seeming to emerge as uneasiness and sometimes as downright hunger.
By twilight I tried gathering to suppress the undercurrents, and it worked as well as it ever had. I felt a swell of gratitude and relief, but promptly put the excitement down and helped Mardalita set the silver-spangled veil over my head. We walked slowly to the sacred spring, and as we made our way through the silent camp, I asked Mardalita, “Why is it that this ceremony didn’t wait until Convalee?”
She smiled gently. “I am acting at the command of my Lord Jemeret, as are we all. You had best ask him.”
There was a crowd at the spring, as before when Jemeret and I had come here, but this one was smaller, more intimate.
I picked out no individual faces in the dusk, and didn’t iris my eyes to make it easier. Jemeret and Venacrona were standing by the head of the spring, and despite my gathering, my heart jumped at the way the new starlight highlighted the smooth planes of his face. Then I was swept up in the ritual.
Venacrona raised his hands, palms outward, and began the short series of ritual questions. Mardalita had explained to me that, if I’d been a baby of this tribe, my parents would have answered for me, but as I was grown, I would be able to make my own replies.
“From whence do you come?” the priest asked.
“From the stars,” I said, as someone would have said for a newborn, only in my case it was true. Most new Boru of my age would have declared a past tribal affiliation but, of course, I had none.
“What do you seek?”
“The family of the Boru.” I’d practiced saying it, but I wasn’t prepared for the warm ripple that washed through me when the words were actually out.
“What are you prepared to swear?”
“Loyalty to my people, obedience to the tribal laws”—My voice trembled slightly now, in spite of my attempt to control it—”submission to my Lord Jemeret—” I forced the words to be firm. “—and an existence as part of the people of the stars.”
“Who of the Boru will speak for this supplicant?”
Mardalita had told me that no one would be ordered to speak for me, and if no one spoke for me, I would be rejected. But almost before Venacrona had finished the question, Shenefta bounced to her feet, and Variel and Gundever rose almost immediately thereafter. Morien stood next, sinuously graceful, and then Urichen, Wendagash, and Numima, which I learned was astonishing, for she had never before spoken publicly.
Under the glittering veil, I looked quickly sideways at Jemeret, but he was holding his face sternly impassive.
One by one each of the tribe members who had risen spoke, saying things about their interaction with me, some of which I’d never realized they felt. It was touching, moving. Darkness set in as they talked, and when Numima was done, Venacrona spoke as well, and that I knew was unusual from the reactions of everyone else. When he was done, he added, “The speaking of the Boru is acceptable. Now the seeker may speak for herself.”
This was the only part of the ceremony that Mardalita had not talked to me about. She had told me that I could not even ask her if what I wanted to say would be acceptable; I would just have to say it. I had thought long and hard about what I might say, almost wishing I had been an infant, so someone else could speak for me. I sensed that this would be important to everyone, and I didn’t want to disappoint them by saying the wrong thing. Even now, I hesitate—I didn’t want to disappoint Jemeret.
But the job of a Class A, really, is to create alternate scenarios and try to see which would work out best. So I’d tried out all kinds of replies on myself, guessing which would be likely to please the Boru most.
I took a deep lungful of air, observing that Jemeret seemed to be holding his own breath, waiting. I am the Class A, I said to myself, ignoring the verb tense, and I can do this. I said clearly, “A part of me was missing, and I did not know it until the Boru filled the emptiness.”
