Starfire Saga, page 56
The last warning sounded, and the Lume field generator I activated with the subliminal hum that made my hair stand on end. Tynnanna growled, a low rumble that vibrated in me as I sat pressed up against his rib cage.
We waited until the beep cycle began, and then I glanced at the viewport. Watching the light waves drop into the realm of sound, vanishing from the visual, was, as always, irresistible, just as was counting down the seconds until activation.
Rolls seem timeless, so I never know how long we’re in them, even though their actual length varies widely. They are rarely long enough for us to recognize that we can move or think, but after they end, there is a memory of time having passed. The nausea builds after the ship has become the only speck of light in the universe; the weird, discordant harmonies that resonate in the bones must do so over some span of time.
And yet, entering and emerging from rolls somehow seems to happen outside normal time and space. We were told, in our classes, that some rolls were long enough for the nausea and disorientation to pass and a quasinormal feeling to return. Then movement and conversation were possible, but I personally never experienced one of those, nor did we expect any on the trip from Caryldon to Barbin 3.
As we dropped into normal space a long way from the initial roll point, I found myself wondering if time lost in the radiant tank was like time lost in the rolls; it passed, leaving shadows but no tracks, a silence with echoes.
Tynnanna roared, full-throatedly, shaking his head with such violence that he knocked me partway across the cabin. I rushed to sting him, but found Jemeret there first, already calming him. “We’d better put him to sleep for the other rolls,” I suggested, climbing to my feet and banishing my own nausea as best I could.
Jemeret got up as well. “I think he’ll be all right,” he said. “Come on. We need some sleep ourselves.”
And of course that wasn’t the first thing we did when we got into our cabin’s wide bed. I was, as always, amazed by his ability to move me, by the power of the passion. He was endlessly imaginative and endlessly strong. When I could think again, before I slept, I was overwhelmed by gratitude.
V. A Class A Assignment
We had completed the last of the rolls and were in normal space for the final time before we would orbit Barbin 3 when Jasin Lebec came to get Jemeret and me to tell us Pel Nostro was in the conference room by eftel vid.
In many ways it had been a seductive trip. I was rediscovering the joyful luxury of sonic cleansing, electrolyte shampoos, and holotainment. I’d been able to use the ship’s library to renew my acquaintance with some of the great music and drama of the Com, both past and present. Jemeret watched me without any visible evidence of concern, but I sensed it was there without needing to read him for it.
One high watch, Coney and I spent a few hours watching status reports on the current Com statistics—he had stayed somewhat in touch through the years before Jemeret arrived on Markover; I was three years behind on information. Most of the reports were glowingly positive, the language typically Com-proud, but I sensed some hints of things not said. I wasn’t at all sure how to process missing information that I couldn’t quite identify.
Another high watch, Jasin Lebec told us his observations on the changes occurring in the Com in the absence of Class A talent. The picture, completely disregarding the toll from the war on Barbin 3, was far from attractive. A number of the Planetary Governors had registered requests for Class A service to help sway delicate negotiations. Suffering under the inability to exploit that talent, they had, in not a few cases, begun flirting either with repression or with illegal means of control, even assassination.
I was horrified. The MIs seemed to have given up any attempt at persuasion or bargaining in the absence of Class A talent, and lacking persuasion, only some permutation of coercion remained. That meant the Com needed me intensely, and my oath would save lives. I began to wonder how Jemeret had abrogated that responsibility. Granted, he was young—scarcely fifteen—when he rebelled against training and got himself returned to Caryldon, but Jasin Lebec had been younger and more vital then. Now he was weakening, aging, and probably in need of a well-earned rest, and I was the central point on which his future pivoted. I saw that the environment in which I’d been raised was in itself a powerful habit, a habit I could sink back into with very little trouble, a habit that had taught me I could do a lot of good.
Jemeret was rarely with me in the time between rolls, for he was working on some sort of project. I think he might have been waiting for me to ask him about it, but I plunged into relearning the world of the Com, seeking out Coney’s company or Sandalari’s, or even Keli’s, before I sought his. We’d been through the eight rolls it would take to reach our destination, and I’d spent the last low watch exercising Tynnanna in one of the cargo holds instead of coming to bed in our cabin. I felt Jemeret sweep for me as the high watch began.
I was sitting in Keli’s cabin, playing scattergies with her, the two of us engrossed in the combination of skill and luck that made up a game in which the table was an active participant as well. Keli was good at the game and clearly loved it, more skilled in the verbal rounds than I would have guessed, and almost as skillful when it came to the patterns. I was laughing at one particularly clever pattern of hers when I felt Jemeret’s touch, and I made a deliberate choice to ignore it. His inquiry was gentle, curious, not demanding or urgent. I tried to slip through Keli’s pattern, ran out of energy share before I managed it, and gave her the round.
“You’re good,” she said as the table used my previous pattern and hers to construct the one we would both have to escape.
“So are you,” I told her. “Where did you learn scattergies?”
“On Tanaloa, when I first joined the MF.” She broke contact with the table to freeze the game and took a long drink of her beer. I was drinking plain water. “The training we were getting was largely physical—act, don’t think—so to keep our minds from drying up, we played this. When you don’t have leave, and you’re on Tanaloa, you can play one hell of a lot of scattergies.” She grinned at me. “I was division champion.” She started to recontact the table when her eyes slid past me, and I knew Jemeret had come in.
I felt his presence in multiple ways. I forced myself to keep my focus on the game and nodded at Keli to continue.
She won easily, because my consciousness was fragmented. “We’ll play again,” I promised her, rose, and at last looked at Jemeret.
He was slightly amused, but trying imperfectly to conceal it. “I’d like to speak with you,” he said.
I nearly said something rude—so nearly it startled me. I bit it back and rose, almost speeding across the hall past him and into our cabin. He followed me in and let the door iris shut, then leaned back against it, his arms folded across his chest, studying me as he hadn’t since Caryldon.
I sat down on the couch and curled my legs under me almost defensively. He noticed it and said quietly, “You’re rushing things, love.”
It wasn’t what I expected to hear. I just looked at him.
“You’re a long way from having to make any decisions.” He continued to watch me, but he was not in any way using his sting. “So I think you probably ought to stop worrying so much about whether I’ll understand how attractive you find some things here and just do what comes up.”
“Is that what you’re doing?” The words came out sharply, almost bitten off.
He kept his equanimity with almost embarrassing ease. “Ronica, if you want to know how I’ve been spending my time when I’m not with you, all you have to do is ask me.”
And of course I’d known that. I took a long breath and asked, “What have you been doing?”
He stepped away from the door and came over to the couch, sitting down beside me but leaning away, his arms across the top of the couch back. “I’ve been memorizing a Lumeship, pathfinding it in detail,” he said. “The roll technology may not have changed since I was last out of Markover, but all the sublight systems are more advanced, and I want to have pathfound and understood every one of them before we’re off the ship.”
It was a formidable task, for a rollship had thousands of systems, major and minor, and it would never have occurred to me to undertake it. “Why?” I asked him.
His gray eyes measured me. “I probably shouldn’t need to remind you that we don’t yet know the full scope of what we’re going to have to do here, and that means we don’t know what kind of resources we’ll require. If at any point we have to steal a rollship, I suspect we should know how to use it.”
I knew instantly that he was right, that somehow in my preoccupation with being back in the Com, I’d ignored the fact that he was still determined to find a way to shut down the MIs. “You think we might have to steal a rollship?”
He smiled. “I think there’s no end to the possibilities of what we might have to do. I think we need to be as prepared as we can be. You remember University head Tonkway’s statement that if you have eight days to get from Werd to Orokell, you better spend seven of them making sure the ship is operational.”
Even knowing that he didn’t mean it as a reproach, I felt reproached by it. Jemeret shook his head. “The problem with self-awareness is that you take it so seriously,” he said. “There are five of us here with talent, if we assume Jasin Lebec can be brought to join us. We all have some strengths to contribute. If you forget something, there’ll probably be someone there to remind you.”
“But we’re not all Class A,” I protested, unaware until I said it that I’d just fallen into the same trap as Pel Nostro—the devaluing of lesser talents.
His face took on an expression I recognized very well, a mixture of concern and indulgence. Startled, I realized that there was about to be another revelation. I braced myself. “What is it this time?”
Jemeret said, “The division of talent into three classes is a fiction created by the Com, probably by the MIs. When I test babies for talent—and when you were tested by my na-sire—it’s always a test of intensity, never of kind. The genetic mutation that creates talent isn’t in any way subtle enough to discriminate. Only human beings do that.”
The very idea was incomprehensible to me. The classes of talent were basic to my world. I had to gather to absorb the idea without beginning to laugh in denial.
He went on, “I think it’s a question of training. In the Samothen, there aren’t people with different kinds of power, just people with different amounts.”
Now I wasn’t thinking about laughing. “Are you telling me that Coney or Kray could have had Class A talent—what the Com calls Class A talent—projection and reading—” I stopped, angered.
“Maybe and maybe not,” he said. “Neither of them may have had enough raw power, which means they could drain their reserves the first time they tried to do the most basic projecting. Zitten, the Class B that I lost, might have been able to do some rudimentary projection, but he was never given any training in it, and if it’s not disciplined, it doesn’t crystallize. It’s possible that Coney could learn to do some pathfinding. Sandalari can already, and she can probably project at low levels as well. Most of the priesthood has that ability, in one permutation or other.”
I suddenly recalled the Boru analyzing Coney with surprising accuracy when the Com first sent him down to Caryldon. I remembered, too, the mystery of fluctuant Class A’s—people who sometimes seemed to have that ability and sometimes didn’t. It occurred to me that, while deliberate projection was highly consumptive of energy and could seriously deplete someone without the strength to sustain it, unconscious projection or reading would be barely noticed by its user.
Now that I’d begun to adjust to what Jemeret had just told me, certain puzzles seemed much easier to understand. “Of course,” I said, as if I should have known all along, the words measured, almost resigned, despite the excitement I was beginning to feel. “Of course talent would work that way. I’m a Class A—or whatever—because I have a good supply of raw power and I’ve been trained how to use my reflex.”
Jemeret smiled a little, watching me.
I was remembering childish tantrums, in which I’d wielded power without thinking twice about it, and how Mortel John guided me from the wild power to a hard-fought, absolute control. I was thinking about the hours of study of brain physiology and function, about the even longer hours of practice. I had thought they molded my abilities to project and read, but instead they’d built them, just as Jemeret had rebuilt my brain.
Suddenly there were tears in my eyes, because I was thinking that perhaps Kray could have learned something of Class A work, which might have made him less jealous of me, and might have led to—
Jemeret yanked me up against him and held me tightly to his chest. “Think about it later,” he said against my hair. “Let’s talk about Barbin 3. We’re almost there, and when we get there, we need to do something.”
Almost guiltily, I realized I hadn’t yet arrived at a scenario for Barbin 3, and yet it was my first Class A assignment. We would have to make something happen—preferably something meaningful—to real people in a lot of trouble.
“Do you have a scenario for Barbin 3?” I asked him. I was pretty certain that he didn’t; you don’t create even an unsuccessful scenario and memorize a rollship simultaneously.
“Tell the Com to let them go,” he said, “and to hell with the telusite.” I had to probe him lightly to see that he was only marginally serious.
“No, really.”
“This is your assignment. What have you come up with?”
“My scenario was always going to be to get you to handle it,” I said. “This is open warfare, and I was never interested in studying military strategy. The Com was so certain I could prevent wars that they never felt it necessary to show me how to stop one.”
His smile was tugging at the corners of his mouth now.
“And I only showed you how to avoid them. So you’ll have to use your imagination.”
I must have looked skeptical.
“History says it’s possible,” he said. “We have a situation where the rebels have six plasma disruptors and are therefore unapproachable by human armies, even if those armies are bearing other illegal weapons. Where does that leave us?”
When I still said nothing, he went on, “What do you think a basic first step would be in stopping the fighting?”
I went with my first thought, impossible as it appeared to be. “I’d say we have to get our hands on the plasma disruptors.”
“Think like a Class A,” he said, with some irony. “Remember the kinds of things they need the sting for.”
I thought about it for a few minutes, then said, “We have to persuade the people inside the plasma disruptors to put them out of commission for us.”
He kissed my neck. “Very good, love. We’ll make a peacemaker of you yet.” It was such a simple statement. I didn’t know what it would cost. Perhaps I still don’t.
And that was as much as I’d thought out by myself before Jasin Lebec rounded us up for the conference room vid from Pel Nostro. I wanted to stall him off, but Jemeret agreed we would take the call, and I wasn’t going to argue with him.
We went to the conference room to find Pel already visible on the far side of the table, by himself. The conference room on his side of the table was slightly darker than ours, and the eftel hadn’t equalized the lighting, so the line of demarcation was much more noticeable than usual.
He smiled at us as we came in and rose, though in theory we were all of equal rank and needed to pay one another no visible honor. I nodded to him as I slid into a seat between the two men.
“I can’t tell you what pleasure it gives me to see you all together,” the Com Counselor said. “I never thought I’d live to see three Class A’s in the Com at one time.”
I swiftly debated making a comment, but decided against it and simply folded my hands on the table in front of me. Jemeret asked, “Has the situation on Barbin 3 changed, Pel?”
The Com Counselor sat down again, saying, “No, of course not. Well, not exactly. Not directly.”
Even Jasin Lebec frowned at that.
I wished this wasn’t going on in eftel, so I could read him, and I guessed that Jemeret felt exactly the same way. I asked, “Then why did you call us?”
Pel Nostro glanced to one side, then said, “I want you to be aware of something. The Tribunal met to discuss your marriage, and they feel the circumstances under which you were put into the hands of Jemeret Cavanaugh may call for government intervention to free you from him. The decision has been registered, and will be studied in theory by Petra Chantrey’s staff, then brought before the Chief Justiciar if grounds are indeed identified.”
Jasin Lebec was frowning even harder. Jemeret had gone very still, and I was nearly choked with sudden anxiety. “And what motivates you to make us aware of this, Pel?” I asked him. “Surely you’d prefer that whatever the Tribunal plans to get me away from Jemeret would have some chance for success?”
Jemeret had suppressed his feelings and was now leaning almost negligently on the tabletop, with one arm extended, his hand forcibly relaxed. He was, I knew, waiting for Pel’s reply.
The Com Counselor tried to keep looking at me, but was unable to keep his gaze from straying to Jemeret before he caught control of it. “The Tribunal feels it will not need to invoke any intervention as long as things continue to go well and you observe your oath, Ronica McBride,” he said. “I thought, before you reached and needed to handle the problem of Barbin 3, you should know.” He sounded faintly offended to have his good motives doubted.
“We had an agreement,” Jemeret said coldly then. “You knew it would have to be a sexual healing.”
Pel Nostro nodded at him. “The agreement stands,” he said. “I personally have no problems with your spiking her from now until the universe collapses, and I’m certain the Tribunal feels the same way.” I fought back the sudden heat in my face. “However, the agreement did not involve you marrying her.”
