Starfire Saga, page 34
“Privately,” he cautioned. “I’d rather the tribe didn’t know you knew each other before if we can avoid it.”
My question was out before I realized I was going to ask it. “Jemeret, does the starfire know?”
He seemed as surprised by the question as I was. “I think the starfire knows everything,” he said at last.
I digested that for a very long time. “When the starfire touches you, what do you feel?”
He reached out and took my hand, rubbing his thumb across its back as he had rubbed my cheekbone. “Almost the same kind of joy I feel when I make love with you. What did you feel when it engulfed you?”
“As if nothing could ever hurt me.” I lowered my head, watching the steady, even movement on my hand. “But things do.” It came out as a hiss.
“Yes, they do,” he agreed. “That’s part of living, getting hurt and going on.”
“And paying for it.” It was as if someone else was speaking with my hushed voice, but I knew it wasn’t him. I knew it was a part of me somehow coming to the surface of speech without reaching the surface of consciousness.
He squeezed my hand hard, making me suddenly look up at him. His gray eyes seemed to bore into me. “You have it mixed up,” he said firmly. “You don’t pay for getting hurt, Ronica. You only need to pay for hurting.”
I stared at him, somehow bewildered by the concept. To me, being hurt meant that I had been too weak to keep from being hurt, and the Com had spent my entire life training me not to be weak. “But I feel as if I’m responsible,” I said, trying to explain, perhaps choosing the wrong words.
His eyes glittered suddenly, and he took my hand in both of his. I realized—once again surprised by it—that something very important was going on. “Listen to me,” he said, the tension in him so monumental that I felt it clearly even though I didn’t think he was deliberately projecting it at me. “Responsibility is not fault. Do you understand the difference?”
I said I did. I think I do now. I didn’t that night, and he must have known that I didn’t, but he let it go.
After we finished the little we ate of Numima’s meal, we went back to the bedroom and Jemeret tested my ability to control the shields. When he saw that I did not have much trouble holding them partially extended, even while he was stimulating me, he began to vary and increase the physical sources of stimulation, and to add more of his formidable power to the sting. Slowly, that night, I learned I could increase the extension of the shields, using just as much shield power as I needed to match him and no more, and then yielding to him when we were both ready.
From the first Jemeret had been, I think, secretly amused by my eagerness to experience the overwhelming pleasure of our sexuality. But that night he showed me that the sex and the shields could work together, and he told me he would become my teacher in ways I had never dreamed. I knew he was right. While I was studying with Mortel John, my training had been almost entirely mental—only the Class C work required physical exercise, and that was about eleven percent of the total. This training would begin physically, with the genitals, and grow to the mind along paths I had only previously guessed at.
My new schoolroom would be the wide, berugged bed in the dim bedroom in our home. My new teacher would help me not to be uncomfortable at whatever role I took sexually, passive or aggressive. He would, he said, teach me how to give him pleasure, putting more and more of the initiative, the direction of our lovemaking, in my hands or my mouth. I was looking forward to the lessons.
Coney’s Class C talent and training in self-defense—the same as my training had been—qualified him for a fax as a warrior, and the day after his arrival, he joined us on the practice field. Unexpectedly, Jemeret came, too. He almost never practiced with his warriors, and I had never seen him fight with weapons—only with the sting—so I was fascinated at being shown his power with the physical implements of combat, as well as with the unarmed techniques.
Coney and I were still awkward with one another in the morning. I watched as he met Gundever and Wendagash and began to familiarize himself with the weaponry. I got to listen as a newcomer was weighed and discussed by the members of the tribe, who accepted me now as if I had not been the last person so weighed and discussed. I was fascinated by the depth and perception of the judgments made. Because I had known Coney for all but the few past, missing years, I knew that the observations of his personality the tribe made were much more accurate than not, even on only a momentary acquaintance.
That accuracy caused a bewildering suspicion in me that everyone in the Boru had some low level of Class A talent. It created a situation that I had not previously thought possible—indeed, that Mortel John had said was not possible: that there might be people with neither full Class A talent nor fluctuant Class A talent, but rather with minor Class A talent. In small amounts, Class A talent was supposed to be wild, renegade, undependable, even warping to its holder. And yet I thought I was watching it now, and it was both useful and controlled.
I felt stupid that such a possibility had never occurred to me, for just as everyone was thought to have some extent of Class C ability, and Class B’s were graded because their talent levels differed from one another, it was utterly logical to think that Class A talent might exist in differing amounts, and that some of it might be stable. It was just that Mortel John had always said such a thing was impossible, and I had believed him.
I wasn’t concentrating at all on my halfhearted sparring with Gundever, and he noticed it. He evaded a defensive move of mine, dropped his sword, and smacked me, open-handed, on the hip. We grinned at one another. “My mind is not on this,” I said unnecessarily, and he nodded.
“You might want to sit down for a while,” he suggested. “Or pick out a wrestling partner, so you won’t get hurt.”
I withdrew to the edge of the practice area, folding my cloak and sitting on it, automatically seeking out first Coney—working slowly, weaponlessly, with Wendagash—then Jemeret, holding his longsword two-handedly and moving more and more rapidly through the series of exercises called the Ladder of the Warrior. The exercises could be done unarmed—Climb 1—or armed—Climb 2. They grew increasingly complex and more demanding of concentration as the practitioner moved up the Ladder.
Even as I watched him, admiring his prowess, his strength, Gundever’s casual caution kept resonating through me. His last words—”so you won’t get hurt”—seemed to echo and reecho through my consciousness, consuming more and more of it. I frowned, trying to smother it, and instead I started hearing Jemeret’s voice from the night before, saying, “You only need to pay for hurting.”
Suddenly I could barely breathe, and tears were refusing to heed my command not to flow.
Jemeret must have been reading me, for he spun instantly out of Climb 2, tossing his sword aside and accelerating to me almost before I had realized I was going to start crying. I felt his arms around me and his sting touching my mind at the same moment, neither delving nor influencing. “Tell me,” he said.
“I—never paid—for hurting him,” I said, the spaces between the words consumed with the effort to swallow irresistible sobs. “I hurt Coney, and I never paid for it!”
“How would you want to pay for it?” His voice was right at my ear. I was too distressed then to realize what I did later—that he was pleased by what was happening.
“I’m not—” I had begun to say I wasn’t sure, but then I remembered that when I first felt the truth of how much I had hurt Coney, I had been devastated to think that I would never have the chance to apologize for it. Now, of course, I did. It was such an elementary thought that I felt, again, abominably stupid. But its very rightness calmed me at once. By the time I’d blinked back the tears and looked up, Coney was standing in front of us. I guessed that Jemeret had stung him to call him over.
The expression on his face was one of infinite concern for me, and I knew it as well as I knew Kray’s mocking, challenging smile. I rose up out of Jemeret’s embrace and threw my arms around one of the two men who was much more than a brother to me. Jemeret, behind us, must have warned the others back, for all at once it was as if the three of us were alone.
I barely gave a thought to Jemeret’s expressed wish that the Boru not learn that Coney and I had known each other before our separate arrivals here. And Jemeret could have stopped what was happening, but chose not to.
Coney held me tightly, and I gripped him as if he were somehow the key to my future—which, it has turned out, he was, though not in any way I could have anticipated.
“What is it?” Coney whispered to me. “What can I do?”
He was so damned unselfish that I wanted to shake him. Instead I said, “You can forgive me.”
He was honestly flabbergasted. “Forgive you?”
I nodded. It had become vitally important to me to do this. “I am so sorry I made you sleep with me. I know you didn’t want to. I know I caused you pain. I need you to forgive me for that.” I’d tried to keep my voice low, but it had scaled up.
Coney held me even more tightly against his chest. “Ronnie, I forgave you years ago. Don’t do this to yourself.”
“I’m sorry,” I said again, almost helplessly, looking up at him. He turned his head, and I assumed he was looking once more at Jemeret. Then he bent slightly, only a little taller than me, and pressed his lips against my forehead.
“I forgave you,” he repeated. “Now you have to forgive yourself.” He set me away from him and turned me, in effect handing me back to my lord.
“He’s right, Ronica,” Jemeret said. “You are very hard on yourself, and you’re judging yourself much more harshly than you ever needed to. Forgive yourself.”
I began weeping in earnest now, and the men used their bodies to block me from everyone else. Somehow the thought of forgiving myself was almost paralyzing, as if it was a step I couldn’t possibly take. After a few moments I felt Jemeret slide into my mind and make adjustments, and I began to calm. Coney had forgiven me, and that was, after all, what I wanted more than anything else. The tears dried.
“Coney, I never meant to hurt you,” I said honestly.
“I know that. I always knew that.” He smiled at me. “I was even flattered that you chose me instead of Kray.”
“Were you?” I asked dubiously.
The smile went a little crooked at the edges, reminding me of the charming, sheepish Coney I knew so well. “Not at first,” he admitted. “But later, after it was all right again, then I told myself you’d chosen me when I was—” He stopped abruptly, suddenly looking at Jemeret.
“You were what?” It was Jemeret’s voice, coming from over my shoulder, and it was amazingly gentle. I would have asked it myself if he had not.
“—not as good as Kray.” He tore it out of himself.
It made me angry. “Coney, stop it!” He stared at me, startled. “You were the best of us—better than Kray, better than me!”
Jemeret’s hands closed on my shoulders, but he didn’t try to keep me quiet.
Coney shook his head. “Ronnie, you were always, always the best of us. We knew that. We never forgot it.”
And then there was something I heard myself say, feeling the hard, bare truth of it, letting it carve a piece out of me. “Oh, no,” I said. “I was only the strongest. Strongest—isn’t always—best.”
Just as he had before, Jemeret blazed outward, surrounding me, holding me with him away from the world, far more tightly than his grip on my shoulders and far longer than I would have thought he could sustain it. Then the fire of his soul dropped away from us and he turned me against his chest.
I was no longer aware of anyone or anything else, only his arms around me, his heart beating steadily beneath my ear, and that I was clinging to him, panting as if I’d just run a hard race without the help of my reserves.
That night, the world changed again.
When we were preparing for bed, after my apology to Coney on the practice field, I thought about what Jemeret had told me, and remembered how much I was looking forward to beginning the lessons he had promised me.
I had no notion of what was to follow.
The evening had begun normally enough. Coney shared dinner with us, and I noticed, almost shyly, that we had nearly regained the easy familiarity of our time before. After he left, Jemeret and I played a duet on our nomidars by the dying sitting-room fire. We had been playing for quite some time now, and our music blended and supported itself in ways that made me very happy. The nomidar had always been a private obsession, and to share it with someone of his skill and depth was, I believed, making me a better player, as Lyrafi had predicted it would.
When we went to bed and I reached for him, he caught my wrist and held it lightly away from his body. “We’re not going to make love,” he said seriously. “Not tonight.”
“Why not?”
“It’s necessary.” His face was very sober in the firelight. “Lie back. And, Ronica, you have to trust me.”
I lay back against the pillows, curious but not in any way alarmed.
Then, still holding me by the wrist, he said, “You’re going to feel a need to snap your shields up, and I want you to control the reflex. Keep the shields down no matter what.” My control over the shields had developed enough now so that I thought I could do it, but there was nothing he could have asked that was more calculated to test the trust he’d built up in me. The shields had always been my saviors. He watched me, waiting for acquiescence.
I nodded, not sure I could speak.
“I’m going to enter your mind and find a certain place, a certain set of nerves—not pleasure, not pain. You’ll feel where I am. I want you to concentrate on touching me there.”
Before I could say that was impossible, he used the sting, stilettolike, and slipped along a particular neuron chain I would have needed a month’s study of brain physiology just to locate.
I had no time to wonder how a primitive on a wilderworld would have the sophistication to identify this individual chain, small and subtle as it was, because he was right—I could feel where he was, and I could touch him there. And I felt the reflex threatening to slam in and try to thrust him out. I fought it, helped by fascination at what he was doing inside my mind.
As I grew more and more absorbed in the exercise, controlling the shields consumed less of my conscious energy and I paid more attention to what Jemeret was doing. He was moving the sting lightly back across the neuron chain, a millimeter at a time, drawing my awareness with him, deeper into the complexity of brain function.
The neuron chain seemed to terminate in a blank wall of grayness, and I would have stopped, but Jemeret drew the sting past the wall and I followed, almost pulled along by the force of his own will, the moment I was past the wall myself, Jemeret withdrew his sting and took me back along with him. The outer world returned. I realized that we were still in the bedroom together, but that it was day, and I was physically exhausted. What had seemed only a few moments of contact within my brain had been eight or more hours of hard work.
I could see that Jemeret was very tired, too, but he was watching me so seriously that I guessed we weren’t finished yet. He took my hand and stroked its back with his thumb. “Now, Ronica,” he said in a very matter-of-fact voice, “I want you to tell me what I’m feeling at this moment.”
Without thinking about it, I gathered and touched him to read him—and then I realized what I had done. My entire body spasmed at once; tears sprang to my eyes and I stifled a scream, pressing my free hand against my mouth.
Jemeret nodded, unsurprised. “It’s all right,” he said. “I wasn’t certain I could do it, but it worked.”
“You—I have my sting back!” I was afraid to believe it had happened, but I knew it had. He had given me back the sting.
I began to weep, and Jemeret embraced me, holding me against his chest and rocking me as if I were a child. I had thought that part of my life was over, but it had been restored to me.
“Try to sleep,” Jemeret said, his lips against my hair. “You don’t have much left in your reserves. I’m sorry I had to use so much, but I can’t drain myself all the way down.”
The gale of weeping blew over me and left me so drained that all I could do was fall asleep, and then deep. He may have slept awhile, too, but I had no way of knowing. He may also have gotten up and done whatever he needed to do all day, but when I awoke it was dark again, and he was beside me, watching me. I struggled out of an unaccustomed web of sleepiness.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
I was calmer now. “I’m fine,” I said. “I’m whole again.”
“Not quite yet. You still haven’t remembered anything about what caused the sting to go away.”
I stared at him, openly bewildered. “Jemeret, how do you know all of this?” I demanded.
“You keep forgetting how long and how often I’ve been in your mind. But you’re getting better. Let’s get something to eat.”
We got up and raided the kitchen, for Numima was not in the house. I wondered if he’d sent her away.
As we sat at the table eating by the light of a flickering lamp, I reached out with my newly recovered perception, feeling his satisfaction with what he’d done and with me, but also a subtle undercurrent of anticipation, which he was not—intentionally or unintentionally—fully masking.
“Could you have restored my sting at any time?” I asked him.
He shook his head. “You weren’t ready until yesterday night,” he said. “You would have slammed the shields up on me if I had tried. And, by the way, I didn’t restore it. All I did was remind you of where it was and how to reach it. You restored it yourself. Before yesterday, you might not have been willing to.” He took a large swallow of clogny and watched me closely, reading me with a strength I could now feel and did not in any way resent.
I pondered what he’d just told me. I knew there was some connection for me to make, something he could see and I could not, something that might lead me to a portion of the memory still locked away from me. As I chewed on the bread and cold dennipin, I chewed, too, on what I knew.
