Starfire Saga, page 43
Jemeret made a silencing move with his hand, which surprised everyone. I read him instantly, and the sense of purpose he projected was rock-hard, unstoppable. He looked directly at Ashkalin. “You and I must talk,” he said. “The need is great.”
With those four words, something changed in the Lord of the Marl. Jemeret had not stung him; I knew that, for I would have felt it. But despite the lack of influence, Ashkalin’s wariness was overridden by something else, almost indefinable to me. “Come with me,” he said, turning to issue some orders about refreshments, and then leading Jemeret into the largest of the clustered buildings fronting directly on the square.
I looked at the people around me in surprise, narrowing my gaze on Venacrona. “I absolutely know that something important is happening,” I said quietly, “and this time I do not want to miss what is going on here.”
“I think you can be certain it will involve you,” Venacrona said.
“Everything appears to involve me,” I said to him, a little exasperated, “but I never understand any of it. This time, I want to understand.”
Some women appeared from the houses with trays containing cups of grog and some dried-fruit sweets. Venacrona helped himself to a particularly sticky variety of the latter, pointing to his chewing mouth when I became impatient for an answer. He never got around to swallowing while I was there.
Jemeret swung open one of the windows of the building he and Ashkalin had entered, a wood-frame square inset with rows of glass circles, and called, “Mekonet.”
Without looking at me, Coney went to his tivong, took a package from his saddle pouch, and ran lightly across the cobbles of the square. He handed it to Jemeret, who shut the window again.
I forgot about Venacrona, instead using the sting to assess the feelings of the Council members. Most were as openly bewildered as I was. Sabaran was cautious. Sandalari was openly, deeply hopeful. I was trying to decide whether there was something else that I could do when I felt a light touch on my arm and looked up, startled, to find Coney beside me.
“I’m going in,” he said, taking his hand off my arm. “Take five or six deep breaths, and then follow me.” He vanished into the house.
For a moment I couldn’t breathe at all. I tried to scan, then read, within the house into which they had all gone, but my attempts were repulsed at once, so I knew that Jemeret was masking it all now, with a bubble the likes of which I had just recently learned to create. I made myself walk forward.
The entrance gave onto a little area that I guessed was a storm guard, with a wall directly inside the door, blocking the view of the room behind. I hesitated an additional moment in the entry, slowing my heartbeat, banishing my sense of apprehension to be better able to cope with whatever lay behind the storm wall’s innocuous wood paneling. I wanted to be prepared. At last I took one of the deep breaths Coney had advised and walked the three steps that moved me past the barrier and into the small room that was obviously central to the house.
I was not prepared.
Coney and Kray stood together in the center of the room, watching me, Coney still in the tunic and traveling cloak he had gotten from the Boru, Kray in the silver jumpsuit he’d be wearing in government service for the rest of his life. As I froze, feeling the beginnings of a panic I didn’t understand and was helpless to control, I felt Jemeret touch my mind lightly with his, making an adjustment. The panic faded, and the last door opened in my memory.
I was in my rooms at Government House, the morning after the graduation gala. Jasin Lebec had just left my suite, and I had not yet had a chance to change out of my wrapper, when the knock came firmly on the door. I’d started for it, sensing Kray’s presence, but he pathfound the lock and let himself in before I was halfway across the room. I stopped walking as he turned from the door to confront me, almost brooding. “I think we need to talk,” he said.
“Is something wrong?” I was paying him the respect of not probing him, of letting him say his piece unhindered.
“When we leave today, we’ll be with Coney,” he said. “This may be the last time we’re ever really together.”
I recognized how painful that was for him and gestured for him to sit on the couch, sitting beside him, concerned about the nature of our parting. I wanted it to be all right between us. I felt as if I should be proud of finding ways to bring our relationship to a worthwhile end.
“We always knew this day would come,” I said to him. “All the time we were growing up, we knew we would go separate ways.”
He acknowledged that. “But I didn’t think we would part with so much unfinished business,” he said. “Not you and me, Ronica, not as alike as we are.”
I was a fool not to have suspected it. I felt the lust coursing through him and started to rise, but his hand snaked out and I felt something bite my leg, through the thin wrapper. Automatically gathering to pull away, I tried to analyze the compound he’d injected into me, but it was gone almost instantaneously. In one corner of my mind I thought quite logically that it had to be some kind of experimental drug, and that if it was, he’d paid an absolute fortune for it. It seemed to interfere with my ability to use the gather for my Class C talent, for the strength to pull away from him was suddenly simply absent.
“Kray, stop this!” I said, growing alarmed and angry at the same time, wondering how he would dare, then realizing I should have guessed all along that he’d try something like this. “Stop!”
“I can’t,” he said, rising and drawing me down onto the couch. “I can’t just let you go out of my life. I can’t.” And then his mouth was on my throat, my shoulders, my breasts, as he stripped the wrapper from me.
Stupidly, I kept trying to use the gather and failing, which cut me off from my most usual line of defense, and I was also helpless to locate and neutralize the drug. I tried for far longer than I should have, feeling inept, but determined to reexert control over the talent I’d lost. By the time I realized that I was not going to be able to recapture it and would have to do something else, he had thrown me down across the couch, my wrists pinned in one of his hands, the other between my legs.
I was overcome with a horror unlike any I had ever known, even in the attack by the Drenalion. This was Kray. This was not some brutal stranger. This was one of my lifelong companions. This was a man who was supposed to love me!
I struggled for a moment or two longer, wordless, gasping, bathed in a fury and fear I was unable to control, and then he took his hand away from my body to open his jumpsuit.
“You won’t be sorry,” he said to me.
He had left me no weapon but the sting, and I was past the point where I could have used it wisely. He had bargained, I think, on the speed with which he could seat himself inside me. He thought, as some men sometimes do, that his penetration of me would unite more than my body with him, when of course the exact opposite was true. He was so completely wrong, and my loss of control so completely enraged me, that I stopped trying to think and simply reacted. I raced past the gather reflex, not needing it now, took firm hold of the sting, and struck him with it just as he sank into me. At that range, and with all my power behind it, I must have blown his mind apart.
He slumped down onto me, his mouth half open, his eyes suddenly vacant. His grip on my wrists relaxed. For a moment I couldn’t move at all, caught in the relief of being safe, wanting only to eject him from my body. Then I realized there was no life in the man who lay on me, and I began to scream. I screamed until I lost consciousness.
Now, in the house at Salthome, I began to scream again, but this time Jemeret was there instantly, his arms around me, his mind locked in mine, putting himself immovably between me and the madness as he had put himself immovably between me and death. He was solid and strong, unyielding and loving, making it possible for me to look at the true magnitude of what had happened those years ago without fleeing from it.
I had killed Kray. It was my first real test as a Class A, and I had used my power to destroy someone I cared about. And then I had tried to destroy myself as punishment for it. The self-hatred started to rise in me again, and Jemeret relentlessly beat it back down. Slowly I realized he was speaking to me, saying over and over again, “You can bear it, Ronica, you can bear it. Hang on to me. It’s all right.”
“I killed Kray,” I said unnecessarily. “With my mind. I killed him.”
“He didn’t leave you any other choice,” Jemeret said. “Look at me and hang on. You can bear this.”
I looked at him, his face blurred through my tears, but infinitely precious to me. “I don’t think—”
And more of the memory came flooding in, choking off the words. I actually remembered methodically taking my brain apart, to the point where awareness could no longer record the memories. Then there was the ghost of memory from what must have been a long time in which things imprinted themselves on a brain over which insanity and destruction reigned unchallenged. The sparkling gold curtain that had been haunting me resolved itself into the Com’s radiant sustenance fluid, a substance that kept people alive when their autonomic nervous systems had been injured or paralyzed, rendering them incapable of such basic bodily functions as breathing.
Weeping, clinging to Jemeret’s support as if to a lifeline, I realized where my missing years had gone—lost to a mindless madness self-inflicted for a misjudgment I couldn’t forgive. The memory carried me forward through the endless time of golden-sparkled near-death, until I remembered that my brain had been rebuilt, but not by me. I’d thrown away all my tools when I threw away Kray’s life and my own sanity.
I saw in memory, as vividly as if it were really happening now, the imprints left on my returning consciousness, the picture of the man who stood outside the radiant tank in which I floated, and who worked tirelessly, month after month, putting me back together from the cellular level upward, attaching neurons, rebalancing chemicals, reconstructing personality, compartmentalizing memories. I saw him clearly, his smooth-shaven face always solemn and determined above the plain, dark blue jumpsuit he wore.
And, of course, it was my Lord Jemeret.
Blinded by tears, choking on the sobs of memory, I held him so tightly I tore his tunic. He went on murmuring to me, but I no longer knew what he was saying. He had been in the Com. He had healed me.
Some of the images involved him and Coney together, and I remembered that they’d been together the day I was finally removed from the tank, which meant I could breathe on my own and govern my own organic balances. I understood why they had seemed to know one another. I understood why, from the very beginning, Jemeret had seemed somehow familiar to me. I understood at last why it was so easy for him to slip into my mind, how he could speak through me and play the nomidar through me, and where the bond had come from that let him read me with such ease.
Under Jemeret’s steady, soothing comfort, I had begun to calm almost without noticing it, but the tears still made it impossible for me to see.
I heard Ashkalin’s voice. “Was there no way to save him? You saved her.”
“I couldn’t, not him,” Jemeret said above my head. “By the time they sent for me, he’d been dead for more than two years. And besides, when she ruined his mind, she took him out at the cellular level. There was nothing left to rebuild with. When she demolished her own brain, she pulled out every connection—like tearing down a house by taking away all the strapping, nails, bolts, and dowels, but leaving all the blocks in the rubble.”
“I see.” Ashkalin’s voice was toneless.
“Is she all right?” It was Coney, anxious.
“I think so.” Jemeret’s mouth moved very close to my ear. “Come sit down, Ronica,” he said. I couldn’t move. “Come on, love.” I felt his hands on my shoulders, gentle, steering me.
I realized that if Kray were truly dead, it must have been Ashkalin in the silver jumpsuit, and I unfastened my fingers from Jemeret’s clothes to scrub at my eyes and get my sight back.
Jemeret sat me down on a cushion on a window seat and let me lean back against the window. I saw him first, the same face, bearded now, the same solemnity and determination in it, the eyes darker than his normal shade, grave, but still warm. “I love you very much,” he said, “and I’m going to let you be on your own now. All right?”
I knew he meant he would withdraw the sting, and for a moment I was flooded with fear. Jemeret said strongly, “He should have known better than to strip your control away from you like that. He should have understood something of who you were, who the Com had raised you to be. He never learned to think with his brain, instead of with his balls. He left you no choice.”
He needed me to believe him, and that, more than actual belief, made me nod at him. He slid out of my mind with the same exquisite tenderness he’d always used sliding in. And I rocked for a moment, as the self-hatred started rising in me again. With every ounce of strength, I beat it back. I was no longer the girl who had killed Kray, and I knew it at such a visceral level that the old pattern couldn’t hurt me this time, not now that I recognized it for what it was.
Coney was still standing beside the man I’d taken for Kray. I looked more closely, recognizing that it was indeed Ashkalin, beardless now, peeling off what appeared to be a deceiver—the thin, smooth, clinging mask that older Com citizens wore to counterfeit youth once their own skin would no longer support shrinking without breaking down.
Jemeret crouched in front of me, his gaze locked on my face, his arms resting on my thighs. He said softly, “Talk to me.”
I reached out and laid a hand on his cheek, not bothering to still the trembling in my fingers. The words came almost unbidden, surprising me. “I seem to have learned what you set out to teach me.”
He turned his head and pressed his lips into my palm, then rose, holding on to my hand, looking at Ashkalin and Coney. Both of them, I saw now, seemed pale and shaken. “I’m sorry you had to take the full blast of that,” he said to them. “I couldn’t protect you and keep her from blowing her mind out again. I’m afraid she’s my first priority.”
Ashkalin pressed his lips together briefly, then nodded once. “In any case, I wouldn’t have believed you if I hadn’t felt it,” he said. “I need a drink.” He seemed to fling himself into motion and crossed three steps to a table with a decanter and some mugs on it. His hands shook as he poured several mugs-ful, and he made no effort to stop them.
By the time he handed one of the mugs to me, I had begun to be able to think again. So many questions were whirling inside me that I wasn’t certain I could choose one to ask. Coney accepted a drink and leaned against the room’s dead fireplace, silent. I took a gulp of the liquid, which was a rough, searing fire as it went down.
Finally a question crowned, and I got it out. “Is this a wilderworld?”
“Absolutely.” Jemeret’s voice was utterly sincere, almost steely in its strength. “This world is everything it appears to be.”
“But K-Kray—” I stumbled over his name, made myself speak it. “He looked just like—”
Jemeret looked at Ashkalin, who took a swallow of his own drink before speaking. “He was my oldest son, birth name Mahd.”
“He was born here?” I asked. “This is Abranel?”
It was Coney who said, “This world is called Caryldon.”
I frowned. “But Kray was born on Abranel.”
“He was born here,” Ashkalin corrected, his voice steadier now. “I can show you the house, if you like. You can meet his mare. You’ve already met his brother.” Danaller.
Jemeret’s words were measured and quiet. “You were all born here, Ronica. Everyone with talent. Caryldon is the only planet in existence on which talent arises.”
I was having trouble absorbing this. As much as I now wanted information, in the aftermath of the crisis, I kept getting information I couldn’t process. “But I was born on Steressor.”
Jemeret almost smiled. “They told you you were born on Steressor, love. You’ve been a Boru all your life.”
That, I absorbed. “How?”
Ashkalin said flatly, “The Com fishes here, Lady Ronica. For babies with power.”
I realized that I was gaping, closed my mouth and looked helplessly at Coney. “I’m an Elden,” he said. “Jemeret told me my tribe while we were working on you.”
I drank the rest of my liquor down in one burning gulp and looked into the mug as if I expected it to grow more. “But no one’s mentioned the Com to me the whole time I was here except for Sandalari. They weren’t interested.”
“Besides Sandalari, only four of us know.” That was Jemeret. It began to frustrate me that they were all so calm about this, when I was being hit with revelation after revelation. “Venacrona, Sabaran, Ashkalin, and me. We power-test the children, and a few of those with real potential are sent from Caryldon to the Com to be raised there.”
“Why?” I hadn’t meant it to sound so anguished.
Jemeret answered. “Because it’s the only way the Com won’t conquer us, absorb us, ruin us. It’s what buys our freedom to stay the way we are.”
I shook my head. “That doesn’t sound at all like the Com I know. Why settle for an occasional person with talent when you can have the entire population?”
“We’ve convinced them that they would destroy talent completely if they took us over,” he said, “and the Com needs talent too much to risk it.” He let go of my hand, turned to the decanter and refilled my mug, then Ashkalin’s. Coney had barely touched his own drink. “They keep their hands off the rest of us to avoid damming up the flow.”
“But—” I was trying to find a logical way into the moving stack of questions. “This world could use an alliance with the Com to benefit from some of the scientific advances, some of the technology.”
Jemeret shook his head. “Technology kills talent. Why do you think talent has never arisen in the worlds of the Com?”
