Starfire Saga, page 68
Jemeret and I tuned the strings to one another, and then he smiled gently at me and waited for me to choose a song.
I thought about what I knew about Lage N’Verre, which was really quite minimal. I knew that she’d survived training, that she had done her work well, especially after she began teaming with Sinet, and that she had slept with Kray. I knew that Sinet knew much more, and that of all of us, she was the one who would have to feel this death most. Then I remembered a song my teacher had sung for me just before my formal instruction on the nomidar had ceased, when I’d been anxious about parting from her and she, in turn, had been sad that I was leaving. I looked at Sinet.
“I’m going to give Lage the song ‘Letting Go’ for her waysong,” I said, falling automatically into the familiar, welcome pose of cradling the nomidar against me.
{{indent}“What I give away, I cannot keep,
A thing, a joy, a love, a song
And yet when at long last we sleep
The gifts we gave help us along.
A life well lived gives many gifts
Of self and others, work and play,
In warmth or cold, of new or old,
The worthwhile heart gives itself away.
So weep not when I have to leave;
I loved you then and always will.
I gave my heart to you to bind;
I’ve gone, but left that part behind.”{indent}}
And only after I’d sung those words did I begin to play. Jemeret touched his sting to me and played a deeper counterpoint to the melody I’d chosen. After a verse, when the melody began to repeat, wordlessly, Sandalari raised her head and sang, higher than I was playing, her exquisite voice soaring clear and strong through the room, lifting and mounting until it seemed to suggest something beyond the normalities of daily life, then flowing downward through the tonal qualities to a quiet rest.
Sinet wept at the beginning of the song, seemed calmer when the nomidars began, and, though I was only lightly augmenting the sympathetic strings, because the moment was too filled with natural emotion to need any exaggeration, she seemed almost content when we were all silent again.
Keli surreptitiously wiped at her own eyes. Coney tightened his arm around Sandalari. Jasin Lebec cleared his throat and said to me, “Ronica, if that’s what Caryldon did for you, I’m very sorry we made you come back to the Com.”
Once again, as on Caryldon, there seemed to be no end of surprises. I thought wryly that someday I might begin to get used to them, but that day certainly hadn’t come yet. “You didn’t make me come back,” I said to him as gently as I could. “I took an oath, and I was given a choice.” I smiled at Jemeret.
He played a few random chord sequences on his nomidar, and I could feel his answering smile, though he didn’t show it.
Jasin Lebec watched us. I sensed that he wanted to say more, but he didn’t.
“Please,” Keli said suddenly.
We all looked at her.
She hesitated a moment, as if afraid she had no right to interrupt, but when no one’s expression seemed in any way condemnatory, she took a breath and blurted, “You said you might tell me what I was doing here, Ronica. Can you, please? It’s knocking me off my fulcrum, not knowing.” She twisted her hands a little in front of her, head bowed, her curls hiding her face. “It’s not like this is a punishment duty; I think I should understand why I’m here.”
Now everyone was looking at me. But it wasn’t as if I weren’t used to that. I set the nomidar down between me and the end of the couch. “Keli, I feel that we need you here,” I said to her. “Partly it’s because you haven’t talent, and you’ll see things differently from the ways we see them. And partly it’s for reasons I’m only beginning to see the signs of.” As she looked up at me, uncomforted, I had a momentary inspiration and asked, “Jasin, has anyone ever used the sting to run a comparison between the physiology of a single brain with talent and a single brain without talent?”
Jasin Lebec was silent for a long time, searching his memory. Then he said, “Not that I know, and certainly not minutely. We always used the MI banks for our physiology studies. It was never efficient to re-explore an area that had been fully catalogued before.”
I saw on Jemeret’s face that he’d guessed where I was heading, and, along with approval, there was something I didn’t recall having ever seen before—gratification. It was the kind of expression I’d seen on my nomidar teacher after I’d performed a piece better than she’d expected me to. My brain—the instrument the Com and the MIs through Mortel John had trained more completely than any other—was beginning to see connections for which no one else had ever previously looked. My lord had rebuilt that brain when I destroyed it, and I guessed that now he was beginning to feel confident that he’d made a good job of it.
I admit that none of what I was thinking truly justified Keli’s presence; I wouldn’t understand it completely for quite some time. But because I needed to try, these explorations were as good as any others. And we might learn something from them.
I looked at Jasin Lebec again. “Jemeret and I can be in two places at once when we’re linked. I thought we might link, and he might probe someone with talent—say, Coney—while I probed Keli, who keeps pointing out that she’s the only one here without talent. We could do a direct comparison and see what’s what.”
Jemeret nodded agreement. “Two of us might identify something one could miss.”
“Then do it, please,” Keli said. “I’d like to think I had a use here.”
I looked at Jemeret, asked silently; he set down his own nomidar. “Coney?”
“Of course,” Coney said instantly. “You spent enough time linked to me when we were on Markover. You ought to know your way around.”
I felt Jemeret link with me, a bond that was so completely welcome and welcoming, it was almost like more of myself added on. Then he slid easily into Coney’s mind, a place where I had never been, and waited there for me to form a probe and slip into Keli. Almost immediately we began a neuron by neuron comparison, skimming over the normal configurations of motor, autonomic, visual, auditory, speech, and olfactory nerves, and concentrating on the higher cognitive functions, then the neuron chains that we associated with the facets of talent.
It was nearly morning before we were done. No one had left the area of the couches, unless they’d visited the eliminatory and returned while we were still deeply engaged. Sinet was stretched out on the couch, her lush-figured body curved into the cushions, but she was awake, as was Jasin Lebec, who was watching us closely. I didn’t know if he had reached out at any point to see what we were doing; I hadn’t felt his presence, but then, I was absorbed in the work. Sandalari was still beside Coney, but her head was pillowed on his thigh and she was asleep. He stroked her shoulder absently with one hand.
I was tired, but not near exhaustion.
“Are you all right?” I asked Keli at once. I’d never spent such a long time in anyone’s mind before.
“Gebbish!” she said in tones of wonder. “I’ve never felt anything like that! I couldn’t have imagined it.”
Jasin Lebec had the table extrude large glasses of clear fruit drinks, and we drained them. Sinet sat up; Sandalari stirred, rubbing her eyes.
“We need one more comparison, I think,” I said.
Jemeret nodded. We needed to be sure that the tiniest anomalies we’d found were not sex-linked variants. “Sandalari,” I said. No one corrected it to “Sandi.”
She pulled herself upright and out of sleep. “If you need me, I’m here,” she said quietly.
“I’m going to probe you,” Jemeret said to her.
I experienced the fleeting edge of a breath of jealousy and forced myself to disregard it. I knew it was stupid; I just couldn’t help it.
“Keli, I need to come back in,” I said to her.
She put her glass back on the table. “Go,” she said.
It took less than half an hour to confirm what we needed to confirm, and by that time it was past dawn.
We withdrew, drank some coffee, got up, and walked around for a few minutes, until Jasin Lebec finally asked, “What did you find out?”
I was yawning, so Jemeret answered. “One large and three small differences. One neural connector for the gathering path; one set of dendrite chains to the reserves; one infinitesimal node in Keli’s amygdala missing in Coney and Sandi. Physiologically, everything else is identical.”
“That’s the three small differences,” Coney observed. “What’s the large one?”
Jemeret looked at me.
I said, “Keli has no reserve capacity. Even if we figured out how to link the gather to her frontal lobes and build the dendrite chains, we’d have nothing to attach them to.”
“And that’s only the physiology,” Jemeret said. “We haven’t even begun looking at the brain chemistry yet.”
“You’re not going to try now, are you?” Keli asked, a little shakily. “I mean, I’ll do it, but—”
“No,” I interrupted her. “We’re finished.”
“Thank the Preserver!” she said, then blushed at the slip her weariness had led her into.
I made a soothing motion with my hand.
“I wonder if what happened to me could ever happen to anyone here in the Com,” Sandalari said thoughtfully. “I mean, I have the reserve capacity, and yet I was born to the Honish.”
A chime began going off in my head. Tired as I was, something was trying to get through.
“I don’t understand,” Sinet said. “Who or what is the Honish?”
“I was born with talent, spontaneously, to a group of people who never had it before,” Sandalari explained to her. “If it could happen to me—”
And then I had it, tried not to get too excited about it, but must have made a gasping noise, because everyone turned toward me. “The man M’Cherys,” I said.
Jasin Lebec drew in a sharp breath, as if he, too, should have seen it.
“Jemeret, did you—did Caryldon—ever send us—the Com, I mean—” I was stumbling all over my words now, weariness combining with agitation to make me uncertain. “—a man called anything like Ghefir M’Cherys? He would have been a boy then, I guess, except that he never reached the school. He was a fluctuant Class A who had a messianic movement behind him and got exiled someplace with his followers.”
“I can answer that,” Jasin Lebec said. “We’ve been idiots! So worried about minimizing a messianic impulse, so contemptuous of the religions, that we let something important just slip through.”
Jemeret had been staring at me, trying to absorb what I was saying, what his grandfather was confirming. I was tired enough to feel a single, petty stab of joy that for once a surprise had overtaken him. He dealt with it better than I usually dealt with mine. “It wasn’t just an oversight, na-sire,” he said calmly. “The Com was busy telling its talents that they were born on member worlds, and falsifying records to support those stories, so when a talent actually was born in the Com, no one thought there was anything unusual about it.”
“Where was he exiled to?” I asked.
“I’ll find out,” Jasin Lebec said, and went to the comsole.
Sinet looked bewildered. “I was born on the Strand, wasn’t I?”
“Sandalari, tell her,” I said. “I’ve got to throw some water on my face.”
Jemeret came with me, and in our bedroom we held each other briefly. “I don’t know whether to laugh or to cry,” I said, clinging to him, fingers curled into the folds of his jumpsuit. “If talent can arise spontaneously in the Com, they won’t need us anymore, and we can go home and be left alone.”
Tired as he was, Jemeret bubbled us. “If talent arises in the Com,” he said carefully, “it’s still too scattered and on too small a scale to be of any use to them. And it’s never been allowed to stabilize. Remember, too, love, what we came here for. We’re not going home until we’ve done it, or...” He didn’t say, or died trying.
I was too weary to argue. I needed to deep sometime soon, and so did he. “We’ll find out about the man M’Cherys,” I said softly, “and then we’ll see what there is to see.”
X. Discoveries
In the late morning, Mortel John arrived with Tial Borland in tow. They were followed by a young man carrying an MF guard kit and looking around with the bewilderment of someone who, only hours before, had been on a completely different world he hadn’t expected to leave. Pel Nostro made a point of greeting them and bringing all three to us, and Gabon Idana was nearly overwhelmed to be met by the Com Counselor. He was a male version of Keli, good-looking without being showy about it, seemingly unassuming, but with an air of capability about him, which he was trying hard to keep up in a lofty environment.
When we were growing up—Kray and Coney and I—Mortel John had taught us that formality was a necessity for large bureaucracies, that nothing would ever be able to move without complete chaos if there weren’t strictly adhered-to rules and ceremonies. Because the rituals of bureaucracy were empty to me, I tended to encourage informality around me. Pel Nostro had finally figured that out, and he, more than anyone else in the government, seemed to grasp how many truly unprecedented matters were unfolding. He also seemed to understand that, since the MIs appeared unwilling to stop us, he should attempt to do nothing as well. He’d been dependent on the twin supports of government power—the MIs and talent—for his entire term, and he would not alter it now.
Jemeret and I had deeped long enough to refill our reserves. Our talent team was gathered at the dining table, ignoring Com messages as they piled up on the comsole, and eating a very late breakfast. Sinet still seemed a little stunned by the events of yesterday, and Jasin Lebec looked less tired than I might have expected.
My lord had called up a meal for Tynnanna, then sat down beside me, sipping coffee, when the suite chime rang. Coney was closest to the door, and he asked the caller to identify him- or herself. Pel Nostro’s face appeared just on the inside of the doorway. “The shuttle’s in, and its passengers are here,” he said, not bothering to announce who he was.
Coney signaled the door to open. There was a little boy holding the hand of the person I’d always thought of as my father, standing beside the Com Counselor, and Keli’s brother behind them, with the lost, determined, and slightly disoriented expression he was to wear for a day or so. For a long time no one did very much. Sandalari and Sinet looked up; Coney gestured for the newcomers to enter. No one did, however, except for Pel Nostro. Then Keli emerged from her room to join us, saw Gabon and launched herself at him with a cry of delight, staggering him even further.
I felt Jemeret stiffen and begin to simmer beside me, and I was momentarily surprised. Then I remembered how he felt about Mortel John, and that it was Jemeret who had given the Boru boy Tal to the Com. I wanted to look at the child, but I couldn’t take my eyes off Mortel John.
He said solemnly, “It’s good to see you again, Ronica McBride. We feared you were lost to us.” His dark eyes traveled over the people in the room, lingering briefly on Coney, staying longer on the two women at the other end of the table. If he was at all surprised to see Sandalari, he didn’t show it, but then, had I really expected him to show emotion, now that I knew his true makeup?
“Come in,” Jasin Lebec said. “Ronica, I really think you ought to play your messages. There may be something there of interest. Jemeret, if you want to say something insulting, please do it. That way we can get on with the business at hand.”
We all looked at him, surprised.
Jemeret said only, “You know damned well how I feel about the cyborg.”
“You still get as much pleasure as ever from disliking me, I suppose,” Mortel John said to Jemeret, with something like an edge of amusement in his voice. “I’m not as bad as you’ve always believed me to be, Jemeret Cavanaugh, nor am I as good as some of the others thought me.” He glanced at Coney.
I heard myself say, “You don’t look a day older.”
“I don’t age,” the big man—I could not stop thinking of him as a man, no matter what I knew to be true—said evenly. “Well, not physically, not any longer. I feel older.”
Jemeret snorted abruptly. I understood without touching him that he viewed a statement like the last one as farcical, because MIs didn’t have feelings, and yet I sensed that there was a peculiar rightness to Mortel John saying what he had. I was about to ask him something about it when the little boy looked up at him and piped, “Is this where we’re going to live now?”
“Yes, Tial,” said Mortel John, “but we’re not going to be staying here for very long. So we don’t say we’re ‘living’ here, we just say we’re ‘visiting.’”
“Visiting.” Tial repeated the new word, testing it. He looked up at us. “Are all of you visiting, too?”
“Yes.” At least four of us said it at exactly the same moment.
Tial eyed the food on the table. “I’m hungry,” he announced, let go of Mortel John’s hand and ran to the table, climbing onto one of the chairs, next to Sandalari. “Does this table work like mine?” he asked her.
“Probably,” Sandalari answered. “Tell us what you’d like.”
I looked back at my old teacher, conscious that Jemeret, Jasin Lebec, and Pel Nostro were all watching the two of us. “How much of you is human?”
He regarded me with the solemn, considering expression I knew so well, as if analyzing not the question, but the motives that prompted it. For an instant I was transported back to our classrooms on Werd or Koldor, to the times I used to ask him things that interrupted the measured flow of the lessons. They were usually things Coney and Kray and I had argued about and failed to resolve. Almost without being aware of it, I reached out for Coney’s familiar steadiness. He felt my touch and came across the room to me.
At last, having pondered, Mortel John sighed. “Less than twenty percent now. When we began all this, it was balanced half and half. They thought then that they could create someone who would be able to maintain that balance, but their experiment was not a success.” He was discussing himself with the dispassion that I had come to associate with the MIs, and yet there was a sense of emotion I could read from him, buried deep, like water on a desert world.
