Starfire Saga, page 75
“I didn’t think I’d feel...” I couldn’t tell him what I was really feeling, because I wasn’t certain what it was.
He studied me carefully, but I didn’t feel any kind of probe. “I didn’t realize how closely you’ve been equating your worth with your sexuality when it comes to me,” he said softly, “and I should have. We can probably thank Kray for that, but I’m not entirely guiltless. I had to use it to heal you, and now if it gets damaged—”
“Make it better for me,” I said, unable to look directly at him, waiting for him to reach for me. When he didn’t, I looked up, startled.
His expression was unreadable, and I had a flashback to a moment on Caryldon when he had reached for me and I’d flung myself away from him. He wouldn’t help me with this. I saw him recognize that I’d seen it.
“We really do need to get a little sleep,” he said, turned, and went to the bed, allowing the bubble to dissolve away.
I knew what had to happen then. If I wanted him to make love to me, I would have to be the initiator. And just then, too close to the memory of being used, even by the man I loved and needed, I couldn’t do that. I lay down beside him, and I immediately made myself sleep.
We accomplished one lightning raid in a cargo shuttle to prove that we could get in and out of the spaceport in the confusion of cargo ship arrivals and departures without anyone taking ballistic offense. Four hours later we made a second raid to get into a red stripe area and see exactly what was transpiring there. We chose one far from the spaceport, even though the risk of discovery was heightened with distance. We had created worker identities so that, if stopped, we would have legitimate reasons for being where we were. Only Jemeret, Coney, and I made the second raid—Jemeret and I to keep anyone from calling attention to Coney; Coney had to actually enter the area and then return to report. We followed him from outside with our stings, ensuring he passed unnoticed, and when he returned, he said nothing, only made a gesture for us to get back to the shuttle and get away.
In the shuttle itself, lifting off, he said, “We were a little wrong.”
“About what?” I asked. “Are they slipping the illegal products into production along with licit ones?”
“Not exactly.” Coney gave one short laugh. “They’re in full, open production on drugs and weaponry in the red stripe areas. That is, I assume some of the others are devoted to weaponry. This one was strictly drugs. And I saw one of the assistant governors berating a shift foreman for failing to make the quota in time for some order or other. This is not a small smuggling enterprise. The whole government appears to be in on it. The assistant governor was in uniform, with full regalia.” He was angry. “Their protestations of helplessness to stop it unaided were lies from the outset; they’re running it.”
On the Lumeship we told the others on our team what Coney had discovered.
“Get a secure line to Terrill Guthrie,” Jasin Lebec began, but Jemeret interrupted him.
“It’s not necessary,” my lord said firmly. “Terrill’s role in this can remain completely unchanged. The pulse will shut down the illegal operations as effectively as the legal ones. It’s our role that just got a lot easier.” I saw immediately where he was heading, and once again I agreed with him.
We went for the rollship captain and told him to put the ship in polar orbit and hold it there. Then, after he left, Lendo Dell asked, “What have you got in mind?”
“Not alerting the populace,” Jemeret answered. “We need to take care of aborting the cult of talent and then just sit tight in orbit until the blockade vessels arrive.”
Coney and Lendo Dell looked at him curiously, but none of us asked him to explain; something in his clipped manner made that impossible. Jasin Lebec asked only, “When do you want to go down and begin the destruction of the Becois cell?”
I asked Coney, “When’s the next service?”
Coney glanced at the chronometer. “I think in about four hours. They seemed to be holding them twice a day, and the day is twenty-two hours long.”
“We ought to go, then,” I said. “We should be in place in the Umbra before anyone begins to assemble for the service.”
“Be careful,” Coney cautioned unnecessarily. We nodded at him.
We took the smallest of the shuttles. There was no hint that we were going into less danger than we were leaving behind us on the ship.
It was our third lightning raid in less than three days, and we were getting more confident, trying not to become complacent as well. We were still dressed as workers, still with our worker IDs, and we moved easily through the halls of the Structure until we were inside the Umbra. Each of the major religions had centers here, and some of the minor ones; many, failing, had fallen into disrepair. Religion would do well only with the workers, who were a very real underclass. The managers would be far more materialistic than religious. There was a small stream of people going into the doorway that led to the rooms the Becois had claimed, and we followed them.
Coney had been right; the wall paintings were astoundingly obscene, and I found myself unable to look at them for very long. Some erotica was beautiful; this was awful. Jemeret seemed grim, but unshocked, until we saw the savagery of the paintings depicting dismemberment by the Drenalion. These were either desperate or sick people, possibly both.
The room filled, and then the leader—whether called a priest or any of the other designations religious deans were accorded, I never learned—entered and announced the opening of the rites. A weak beam projector in one of the back walls began to sweep the room, evoking a sense of emotional satisfaction combined with a sense of appetite. I began to have an uneasy inkling as to what the rites of worship were.
Jemeret leaned casually against the wall beside us, pathfound through to the beam projector in a flash, and disabled it. Immediately the two of us inundated everyone present with a sense of absolute wrongness, an almost nauseating discomfort at the idea of indulging in such a sick fancy. Then he did something I would never have credited him with doing: he took a surge of power and channeled it directly to their pain receptors, concentrating its crest on the priest, leaving the man howling in agony on the makeshift altar.
When we’d completed that action, I assessed my reserves to be a little more than half full, and I risked another small amount to lay a hand on the wall and break the molecular bonds of the paint to the surface. The pictures all melted downward in falling streams of color.
We had debated how best to discourage the belief without permanently harming the people espousing it, and our ultimate solution discounted despair, which was probably the easiest way, because it might have led to suicides. We also rejected contrition as too apt to bring feelings that the worship might be worthy and the worshipers performing it wrong. “We have to bring them to believe they misplace their adoration when they direct it to us,” Jemeret had said.
“That’s dangerously subtle,” his grandfather warned him.
Jemeret had nodded agreement, but I said, “I think it’s a risk we’ll have to take.”
Now, at the back of the rooms in the Umbra, we began trying to convey a complex concept—that all people, talented or not, were just the same. He had to do it by using emotional images, not words, and I was trying to support him, not receive him, so I wasn’t certain exactly how he was working it. I kept trying to implant the feeling that these people were as good as anyone with talent. For a long time the Becois congregation lay on the floor of their meeting room, stunned by pain into near unconsciousness, receiving the quasi-visions aimed at making them cease this senseless worship of other humans. Then Jemeret turned nearly sightless eyes toward me and said hoarsely, “We’ve done our best. Let’s get the hell off-world.” But he stumbled when he tried to move.
Alarmed, I grabbed at him, instantly beggaring what was left of my own reserves to pour some strength into him. He tore himself away from me before I could really hurt myself, which I probably would have done in fear for him, took my hand again when he realized I’d recovered from the abruptly broken contact, and we slipped out of the building, then out of the Umbra and onto the slideways.
It reminded me, in some ways, of the long ago flight after the battle with the Drenalion, except that this time no one had to die, and this time we were almost equally debilitated. Twice we had to hide in doorways or alleys, clouding ourselves over so that people who might have seen us—no one could have heard us in the normal cacophony of the Structure—passed us by. We had, I admit, no notion of whether we’d been observed leaving the Umbra, and thus no notion of whether we might be under pursuit.
There was an unusually high level of activity at the spaceport, and I had to let go of Jemeret so we could walk separately, with the confident but unhurried gait of workers on assignment. We left the Structure and crossed the open section of the landing field to our small shuttle, sitting among a forest of others. Once inside, we simply crouched there, out of sight, until I judged that enough of the ground activity had died down so I could join the vessels lifting off.
I was fumbling with the controls, very slow myself, when the shuttle gave a massive lurch. I thought we’d been hit by fire from the surface and desperately forced myself to try to pathfind the shuttle to see what was wrong. Jemeret knocked my hands from the control panel. “The ship’s grabbed us,” he said with an effort. “Save your strength.”
I started to cry, and he pulled me out of my seat, barely supporting my weight, and onto his knees, surrounding me with his arms. “I should be able to help you more,” I kept saying.
The Detralume hauled us in; Coney, Sandalari, Keli, and Lendo Dell pulled us out of the vehicle and carried us to our cabin. I remember seeing Mortel John’s serious face in the background, and then I fell into deep at once.
Jemeret roused me from deep, which was highly unusual. Customarily, we let each other rise from deep naturally, allowing our bodies to make the choice as to when our reserves were full enough to support awakening. I swam up from oblivion to the sound of his voice and the feeling of his hands light on my shoulders. “Come on, love,” he said softly. “There’s been trouble.”
I didn’t know I could awake from deep so quickly. “What happened?”
He was very somber, almost grave. “There have been a few deaths,” he said carefully.
I felt a stab of fear, tested the gather and found I hadn’t drained myself so much as to render it unusable. Always a death or deaths. Always the necessity for waysongs. As children in the School for Talent, Coney and Kray and I had studied various definitions of humanity, the process of definition being considered vital after other species had been given sentience. It was thought prudent—especially among some chauvinistic and xenophobic elements—to arrive at meaningful differentiations based on something other than the ability to perform advanced reasoning. Scientists had arrived at a definition that described humans as “the species which systematically organizes and tests knowledge in the pursuit of truth.” The Universities suggested the addition of, “using learning to improve the life of the species beyond that of earlier generations.” A dissident faction among scholars proposed defining the species as composed of beings “inexplicably attracted to unanswerable questions,” but the scientific community insisted that all questions were inherently answerable, and the dissidents were overruled.
When Jemeret woke me with news of more deaths, I realized I rejected all the accepted definitions as too grandiose. Human beings, I decided, were members of the species that believed it could solve its problems by killing their sources—and since often those sources were other human beings, well, then, those particular human beings were liable to be killed. Was talent to go the same way? Were we ultimately to be no different?
I studied his grim face for a moment, then asked, “Who have we lost?”
“Four members of the crew, Vazhny Lastone, Gabon Idana, and Tial Borland,” he said, his voice steady.
I could feel his apprehension that I would fly apart at the loss of talent, as I had done before, but I kept a tight hold on myself and tried to think rationally. “Are we still in danger?”
“Not at the moment,” he answered.
“What happened?”
His grip on my shoulders tightened, and I could feel his sting hovering just beyond the edges of my consciousness. “Ronica, did you probe Gabon Idana when he came on board?”
I knew the moment he asked it that I had not, and I understood in a flash why he was so very apprehensive that I might harm myself. Gabon Idana had arrived with Mortel John and Tial Borland, and I’d been distracted by their presence—and then Keli, whom I trusted, had just taken her brother over. I’d never thought of it again; once I’d recognized him as part of the team, it ceased to be a concern. And the probing had clearly been my responsibility: Jemeret had been doing all the pathfinding. I shook my head, asking weakly, “Was he the danger the starfire warned us about?”
Jemeret was still watching me minutely, ready to pounce if I turned my mistake inward. I could feel the temptation of it pulling at me, but I fought it. I had to learn to accept my imperfections without trying to destroy myself for them. It had been a mistake, overlooking the probing; it should not have the power to make me turn on myself. I fought to keep it from developing that power. “He was the weapon of the person we’ve been calling our enemy,” Jemeret said. “And now we know who it is. Mortel John is calling Pel Nostro with the information.”
I felt a hard pang for the little boy, an overwhelming rush of gratitude that Coney and Sandalari were alive. “Who is it?” I asked him. “Who’s killing us?”
He answered obliquely. “It appears that Dolen T’Kelle has come to believe he’s the Preserver.”
I stared at my lord, incredulous. “Keli—” I said, the word strangling me.
Jemeret shook his head. “She’s blameless, but she’s confined to her cabin. I probed her and put her to sleep. She fell apart when her brother went mad and started killing people.”
Ultimately, he, Jasin Lebec, and Mortel John reconstructed the series of events for me. Coney and Sandalari had gone to feed and exercise Tynnanna, which was their responsibility while Jemeret and I were planetside, and Sinet and Lendo Dell had decided to go with them, fascinated with the klawit. Their absence from the guest quarters probably saved their lives.
The Detralume’s captain had received an eftel call for Gabon Idana and patched it through to the lounge, where Keli and her brother were playing scattergies. Gabon keyed in the receive sequence, heard, according to the recordings, nothing at all, but obviously received some sort of signal, turned away from the eftel and knocked his sister halfway across the room. Then he drew his blaster and killed the crewman who happened to be in the vidchair. Vazhny Lastone, across the room with Jasin Lebec, at the card table, hit the ship’s alarm and took two blasts, the second clearly intended for the old Class A, who was blocked by the younger man’s body. Without waiting to see if he’d actually killed anyone, Gabon left the lounge, heading for Mortel John’s room. He was jumped by the trio of crew sent in response to the alarm, and killed them despite being lashed several times himself by their neural whips. Whatever had triggered him seemed to have also rendered his pain responses ineffectual.
Had Mortel John actually been in the cabin, Tial Borland might still have been alive. But the cyborg had come out to see what the ship’s alarm meant, and Gabon had dashed past him and blasted the child where he sat on the floor, constructing a pattern block. The pieces of the construction melted into his hand. Mortel John grappled the blaster away from Gabon before he could turn, then broke both his arms and snapped his back expertly at the waist.
Jasin Lebec had sent a call across the ship to the four talents in the cargo bay, and they came quickly, Sandalari’s face as pale as milk. Coney, taking in the scene quickly, restrained Keli as she came running up, half her face already purpling from Gabon’s blow, and Jasin Lebec probed her as best he could, then sent her to her cabin with Sinet to watch her.
To Mortel John, the dead were dead, and Gabon had to be kept alive long enough to tell what he knew. The captain of the Detralume and one of his remaining officers were also present when Mortel John began questioning the young man.
Sandalari ultimately had to turn away as the story emerged indirectly from the fragmented words Mortel John literally carved out of Gabon Idana, and the questioners had to make a lot of assumptions, extrapolating from the bits of information. Despite the heretical nature of the corruption, the Macerates must have been poisoned by the ambition of their leader. We assumed that, in order to declare himself Preserver and elevate his religion above any and all others, Dolen T’Kelle had for some time been perverting the ideals of some of his followers, turning those with access to weaponry or authority into fanatical adherents. We concluded that Keli had escaped by virtue of having been posted to distant Markover Station.
By the time that much of the story was done, I was hyper-awake and horrified. “But why did he want to kill other talents?” I asked my lord, hurting for the dead and for Keli, gathering to fight the weakening that the hurt created. “Talent is part of the same tribe, and besides, we’ve always left the religions alo—” And I stopped in mid-sentence, seeing something, whispering, “They had begun to worship us.”
Jemeret nodded, his eyes dark with his own anger and sorrow. “He clearly had no way of knowing that we would, as talents, find such adoration repellent, since he, an untrained, untamed talent, desired it so much.” He stroked my arm. “He appears to have decided that he needed to eliminate all his potential rivals—others with talent—before he revealed himself. Then he might have been able to add the Becois to the Macerates already following him, and I assume he believed others would fall into line.”
