Starfire Saga, page 90
“The starfire must have come as something of a surprise to you,” Jasin Lebec said dryly.
Dolen T’Kelle nodded. “I was certain I was the strongest talent in existence,” he said. “It seems I hadn’t counted on Ronica McBride calling for reinforcements.” There was an edge of amusement in his tone. I had to grit my teeth. Andriel’s hands tightened on my shoulders.
“You told Ronica you were going to use her to bargain with the Com, and that was why you didn’t kill her,” Coney said. “What were you bargaining for?”
“The Com destroyed my followers,” Dolen T’Kelle answered. “I wanted another set.”
That brought my head up sharply, and I knew I couldn’t keep silent. “Why did you need to take me to do that? Why didn’t you just sting people to make them follow you?”
His expression as he faced me showed nothing of the memories of the things he’d done to me, and I was grateful for that.
His answer astonished me so completely that for a moment I was able to forget the long hours of torment. “It takes too long to culture and grow the brain tissue once I’ve cloned it,” he said calmly. “I’d have been able to work twice as fast if I used yours as well as my own.”
We all stared at him. “Excuse me?” Coney said at last. “Brain tissue?”
Dolen T’Kelle nodded again. “You people have been using influence nonintrusively,” he said, sounding earnest and helpful instead of outrageous. “But to develop a real inner corps of loyal followers who can be influenced with ease and sometimes used to influence others, I discovered it takes a direct contact, brain-to-brain. I had about a hundred chemical-cell servants. That’s what I called them. It was like multiplying my own personality. But almost all of them were destroyed by the Drenalion.”
I felt my skin crawl with a horror that was somehow worse than the horror I’d been made to suffer. At the same time, I was aware that the calm of a deliberate purpose had fallen across Jemeret. He let go of my hand and leaned forward. “I think you’d better explain what you’re talking about,” he said, his voice hard.
Dolen T’Kelle remained unmoved. “All right,” he said. “I was experimenting with the idea of trying to make it possible to sting at great distances. It was inconvenient to have to depend on actually being in the presence of the people I wanted to influence. I experimented rather rigorously, and a number of my acolytes died in the process, but, you know—” Once again, he seemed a little amused. “—the government doesn’t care very much about deaths among the unproductive. Eventually I stumbled on a process whereby I could directly implant several cells from my parietal lobe in the amygdala of an acolyte, a relatively simple procedure. It didn’t even leave marks. Then, no matter where I was or where they were, I could force them to act in the ways I wanted. Of course, I wanted to make as many servants as I could, but since I couldn’t afford to lose too many brain cells too quickly, I developed a way of removing a few and cloning cultures of them. The cloning process was not foolproof. It was harder to force compliance, especially if the acts were things the person wouldn’t normally want to do. Eventually, the servant went mad and had to be eliminated.”
I made an unintentional sound.
Dolen T’Kelle’s dark eyes went curious. “You’re a strange one, Ronica McBride,” he said. “This is affecting you so strongly, and yet I couldn’t break you.”
I was shaking visibly then. “Why was it necessary to break me? Why not just take my brain tissue and use it?” Responding to my need, as he always had no matter what else was concerning him, Jemeret slid his sting gently into my mind, reassuring, comforting.
Dolen T’Kelle answered, “You’d still control the tissue. Therefore I had to control you.”
If I hadn’t been so close to tears, I might have laughed. My old flaw of having to be in control had probably saved me, there in the darkest of the torment. I could not let him control me, and I could not risk my sting; I had just held on.
“So Gabon Idana was an acolyte of yours implanted with your cloned cells.” Jasin Lebec was a little uncomfortable with the subject, but seemed to feel the need to clarify.
“Of course.” Dolen T’Kelle leaned back, his eyes on the ceiling. “The beauty of the system, you see, is that a Class A reads no abnormal intentions, no hostility. The servant has none until I trigger it.” I was thinking that even if I had probed Gabon Idana, I would have found nothing. The relief was palpable. Dolen T’Kelle’s huge head came back down, his eyes on me. “And a Class A who would feel another Class A affecting them doesn’t feel it when the influence comes through a third party. So you never suspected, did you? That I was manipulating you through Keli Idana? It was such a stroke of luck, her being sent to Markover Station.”
I could barely hear him after he said Keli’s name. She’d been so afraid that everything was her fault, and I’d been so reassuring, so certain she was innocent. And all the time, she had been unconsciously correct. “I’d have known if I were being influenced. I’d have felt it.”
Dolen T’Kelle shook his head firmly. “You’d have sensed me, but talent doesn’t sense influence once removed. You were really quite malleable through the Idana girl. All I had to do was trigger her.” His voice was still without any vestige of satisfaction at what he’d done.
“How did you reach her over such great distances, or when she was on Caryldon?” Coney asked.
“Through that thing on the wall of the house we were in,” Andriel said. “I saw her using it. That’s how I knew I could, too.”
I wasn’t paying much attention. I was remembering washing Keli’s battered body with my tears. “How could—” I stopped, made myself continue. “You found her so useful. How could you just kill her?”
“Once you were in my hands, I could influence you directly, and it didn’t matter if you knew I was doing it,” he said. “I didn’t need her anymore. And I was looking for ways to make you react to me.”
Coney turned his face away from the man whose detachment was now more indifference than diffidence. His expression left no doubt that he was angry and disgusted.
Jasin Lebec remained calm, but his voice had gone much lower. “In what way were you manipulating Ronica McBride?”
Dolen T’Kelle smiled. “It wasn’t easy, I’ll grant you that,” he said. “She’s very strong. I urged her to take Keli Idana into her service. I gave her the idea of asking the girl to pick someone else for guarding her, to get Gabon into the group. He was inherently more violent than his sister, and he was easier to trigger than she would have been. And once Ronica McBride felt uneasy about the correctness of whatever little decision she’d made down on Jemeret Cavanaugh’s world, I persuaded her to come back to Orokell alone. It was my best chance to get my hands on her.”
Coney turned back suddenly, like a man forcing himself into danger. “Why didn’t you just implant Ronnie with your clone cells while she was unconscious, make her another of your servants? Wouldn’t that have been simpler than...” He let the question die.
“It doesn’t work, talent-to-talent,” Dolen T’Kelle said. “I tried it on one of the children at the very beginning of my experiments. He just canceled it out somehow. That was when I realized I would have to eliminate all the other talents. I couldn’t have anyone else setting up a rival faction.” He looked back at me again. “You, on the other hand, showed promise as an ally. You’d already killed another talent yourself, so I knew you could be as unprincipled about your own kind as I was.” He shrugged. “Sometimes things just don’t go the way you plan them.”
I couldn’t repress another noise. Being considered a possible ally of such a monster was an enormous insult, and of course I wondered if there were any hint of truth in it. Andriel slid her hands around me and tucked her head against mine, leaning forward until her chin was resting on my collarbone. The links of Tynnanna’s collar pressed against my back. “Don’t be sad,” she whispered. I laid a hand absently over hers.
Jasin Lebec was the only one of us who seemed to remember there was an agenda here. “So the fact that there were groups of people beginning to worship talent was not your major reason for wanting to destroy the rest of us,” he clarified.
For the first time, Dolen T’Kelle showed some emotion; he was annoyed by that question. “No, I had encouraged it,” he said, “and it was an inconvenience that you broke it up like you did.”
I could see how being thought a god would be helpful at some future time if you decided to take over.
“Do you have any idea what it was in your background or training that gave you such strength without any of the moral judgment necessary to contain it?” Coney asked.
Dolen T’Kelle said lightly, “Just good fortune, I suppose.”
Jemeret was seething with outrage by that time, and I was fighting back angry tears. But, strangely enough, it was Andriel who brought it all into focus. She lifted her head, but kept her hands clasped around my neck, and I felt her still-too-thin body shake with emotion. “He’s supposed to be sorry,” she said indignantly, “and he doesn’t know how to be. He can’t possibly be healed until he’s sorry!”
“Some flaws go too deep,” I said. “Sometimes healing can only go so far.”
But Jemeret had calmed as Andriel spoke, and now he said softly, “Andriel’s right. He just doesn’t know how to feel repentance.” His gray eyes fastened on the now talentless man’s rugged face. “Perhaps I can help.” His sting shot past me and struck Dolen T’Kelle with all the force Jemeret could pack into it. I knew he needed to hit the former Repository of the Macerates with something ever since he’d seen what I looked like under my jumpsuit, and now he had figured out what he could use.
For a moment Dolen T’Kelle did not react at all, and then he began to shake. The expression on his face melted downward into a kind of pain that plainly signaled an awareness of wrong, an acceptance of culpability, unwelcome and forced, but strong. Jemeret yanked back his sting, but before Dolen T’Kelle had a chance to try to recover his equilibrium, Andriel took over, pouring into him her all-too-mature awareness of what it meant to accept responsibility for immoral actions, filling the man who had hurt me with a hitherto missing sense of obligation to a larger world than himself. When the child let him go, I stared at him as he writhed and cried out against a pain he’d never had any intention of feeling, caught in an alien contrition that probably harmed him, in its own way, fully as much as he’d harmed me. When he finally seemed to catch a little more control of himself, his eyes darting around the conference room as if seeking an absolution he’d never before needed and not finding it among us, Jasin Lebec signaled for the guards. “Take him back to his cabin,” he said.
I might have reminded them that Dolen T’Kelle would be alone—as I had not been even at the most painful moments in his hands—with his newfound consciousness of morality, but I did not. He would have to find ways to live with his sorrow, and if he did not find them, well, I’d already admitted that I would not regret his death. In the meantime, the strength and speed with which both my lord and my child had rushed to punish the man who had harmed me filled me with happiness.
When Dolen T’Kelle had been removed to await our ultimate arrival at Orokell, where he would be turned over to the Tribunal for his crimes against the Com, I pulled Andriel around in front of me and hugged her. Jasin Lebec cut off the eftel vid connection with the Tribunal without speaking to them.
As Andriel drew back from me, smiling, I saw the large, softly glowing links of Tynnanna’s collar and said impulsively, “I wish we could talk to the starfire, too. It should be a witness here, but we don’t have Tynnanna.”
And Mortel John stepped in the door of the conference room. He said quietly, “Give me the collar and call the starfire. The MIs tell me it will speak through me, using the part of me they use.”
Jemeret jumped, and Coney and Jasin Lebec stared in open disbelief, but I was far beyond disbelief by this time, and there were too many things I needed to know. I touched Andriel’s arm lightly. “May we borrow Tynnanna’s collar from you?”
She grinned at me, flattered to have been asked, and lifted the heavy chain off over her head. She hesitated a moment, then walked to the cyborg and held the collar out to him. I got up and laid my fingers on it, closing my eyes, calling the starfire.
When I opened my eyes again, multicolored flames danced around the edges of the conference room, and Mortel John was looking at me with an expression so rich in love that I caught my breath. “You have done well,” he said, the tones and pronunciation his own, but the emotional power of the words far beyond anything I ever remembered Mortel John possessing. “We want to speak with you now, between the nexuses, to say that we are proud of you, that we are pleased we were not mistaken to rest our hopes for an evolving humanity in you. You have defeated the thing that vitally needed to be defeated.” Only much later did it occur to me they had not meant Dolen T’Kelle.
I was astonished. “But Jemeret and Andriel came after me,” I protested to the power that was currently residing in my old teacher, “and you saved us all. I did nothing.”
“Listen to us,” said Mortel John’s voice, “and listen well, for you will have to teach this to your people. Humanity’s greatest error is in failing to understand that ‘not killing’ is doing something. You, Ronica McBride, have been tested in the harshest way you could have been tested. The first and second times you were attacked physically—in a much lesser way—you responded by killing.” I knew the starfire meant the hitch, who had threatened Coney and Kray and me when we were Andriel’s age, and the Drenalion who had attacked us years later. “The third time you were attacked—more intimately and therefore more hurtfully—you responded by killing. But you had begun to learn that killing is not an appropriate response for you.” This time they meant Kray. “The fourth time you were attacked was the only time you did not use your talent as your weapon, but again you killed. You were starting to learn, but you had not learned enough.” Evesti of the Ilto. “This was your final test. Had you responded by killing or trying to kill this time, our hopes for your evolution would have died. But you did the right thing. You did not kill.”
I was breathing harder now, all my emotions on the surface. Jemeret got up and came to me, putting his arms around me, kissing my forehead. Andriel put a finger in her mouth and watched us, eyes glowing. Something inside me wanted to argue that I hadn’t had any choice, because I had recognized from the outset Dolen T’Kelle’s superior strength, but I remembered that there had been moments during which his strength slackened, when I might have lashed out at him.
The cyborg went on, “By now you have begun to learn the satisfaction that comes with healing, rather than destroying, which has always been, for humanity, a minor motif rather than a major one. It is the mission of your evolution to do that small thing: to reverse the two motifs... Jemeret Cavanaugh.”
Jemeret looked up at my old teacher—his, too, I remembered.
“You have always understood healing, even though you have killed,” the starfire went on. “You have climbed the mountain that leads to this place with a strong hand. Just as the nexus behind you was largely Ronica McBride’s to face, the nexus still to come is largely yours. Handle it well. Trust what you have learned, as Ronica McBride is coming to trust what she has learned. We may speak with you again when the nexus is past.”
“Wait, please!” I turned in Jemeret’s embrace to make certain I could see that the presence still lingered in Mortel John. “I need to ask you why some of us with talent are so much stronger than the others, and why some of us with talent can still be so wicked.”
“But why would that surprise you?” countered the cyborg. “You know that each creature is unique, and you are the generation that is still mired in the fallacies of humanity. There are tens of thousands of years of those fallacies behind you.”
“Will there be more like Dolen T’Kelle, or was he an aberration?” Jemeret asked. It was the first time he’d spoken since the starfire inhabited Mortel John.
The starfire did not answer directly. “There have always been those who cannot understand that power does not serve its wielder. There may always continue to be, unless they grow so numerous that their weight sinks the species.”
“Are we right to worship you?” I thought that Jemeret must have wanted to pose that question since he saw his father die, and that only now, only knowing that I had stung the starfire and lived, was it possible for him. I felt him holding his breath.
Mortel John’s eyes took on the same depth of love they had shown for me when the starfire first possessed him. “You are right to worship,” his voice said. “What humans must understand is that the act is of equal value with the object, that its intention is to heal, rather than to encroach, rather than to coerce. It is vital that you be grateful for; it is not vital to be grateful to.”
Coney covered his eyes with his hand to hide the sudden tears.
Then the starfire was gone, and Mortel John gasped and dropped to his knees, the collar sliding out of his fingers. All five of us leaped for him, startled.
“What happened?” Jasin Lebec demanded.
“Are you all right?” Coney asked at the same time.
Mortel John looked dazed as we helped him to his feet and Andriel retrieved the collar. “Get me some water,” he said.
Coney signaled the table to extrude the requested drink and put it into our teacher’s limp fingers, holding them around the container until the other man began to regain control over his body again. We watched as he fastened both hands on the container, raised it, shaking enough to spill a little, drank a swallow, lowered it again. When he looked at us, his eyes were haunted.
Jemeret was the first to understand. “He’s human again,” my lord said softly. “The MI part of him is gone.”
