Starfire Saga, page 91
Jasin Lebec turned his face upward, as the familiar click sounded and the MI voice said, “Yes.”
I was still staring at John Caryl, whose feet had just been set back on the road all of us would ultimately travel, leading to whatever lay beyond our waysongs.
Coney said wonderingly, “You let him go?” For a moment I didn’t realize he was speaking to the MIs.
“Yes,” the MI voice repeated. “It was asked of us.”
I turned slowly and looked at Jemeret.
It is always easier to destroy a complex system than to selectively alter it. That’s true of human interaction, and it would be true of the MIs. We gathered, bubbled, all of us but John Caryl, who was sleeping, to discuss our final act in the Com, one way or the other. We would go into the MIs. Even Jemeret had been brought to the point of recognizing that we could not turn them off, and he said, “I believe the starfire doesn’t want us to kill them any more than it wants us to kill anyone else.”
“So we have to heal them instead,” I said. “How are we going to do that?”
“We need to show them who we are, truly,” Sandalari said quietly, looking down at her hands. “It’s easier to kill what’s strange to you than what you know.”
“And we need to take back from them some of the things humanity gave them,” Jemeret said, echoing Glon’s question from Sargasso. “Let’s decide what.”
As the Termalume swung into low watch, Jemeret, Andriel, and I went to the lounge with Coney and Sandalari to sing a waysong for her miscarried daughter. Because the priestess had sung so often and so beautifully in the past, she chose and sang her own waysong, instead of asking me to do it. She picked “The Dream Unrealized,” a simple melody with a simple message. She sang:
“Some dreams are never meant to be,
Although you laid your heart on them,
And you must not be injured by
Their failure to come true.
The stars will lead you ever on
To further dreams, perhaps more fair.
A lesson learned by dreams denied
Makes sweeter truth for you.”
After she sang the first chorus by herself, Jemeret and I sang the second with her, modulating our voices so that hers was always the strongest.
Then, at the end of our song, Andriel began to sing.
Everyone I knew who sang, sang songs by poets or by trained composers, following whatever rules of musical theory and whatever internal inspiration the writers had elected to employ. Andriel sang as she had on Ananda, where she knew that if she didn’t sing, she would be afraid in the darkness. I knew she’d sung to me the same way while I was in the underground chamber, though I’d been unable to hear or appreciate the music as I could now. I guessed that when she’d sung then, and her singing now, were the only times Andriel had been able to use the full volume of which she was capable. In the hut on Ananda, she would have had to sing at a whisper, to keep the others from hearing. Now she sang full-throated, and she sang her own song. She had never heard the music of any established culture.
But Andriel’s music was magnificent, and her voice a soaring power imbued with the full strength of her sting. She needed no instrument other than the one she carried in her body, and unlike Jemeret or me, she was not interpreting someone else’s words or melody, she was pouring her very soul out to her listeners. The wash of emotion began with a recognition of loss and moved past it, not easily, but steadily, into a surprisingly mature acceptance of what could not be changed. Rapt as I was with both the voice and the sting of this amazing child, I could still simultaneously sense that everyone on the ship was aware of and affected by the song.
Sandalari seemed bathed in it, as was only proper since Andriel was singing to her. Her tears had stopped by the time the child was done, and she held Andriel to her for a very long moment before she turned back to Coney with a small smile on her face. None of the rest of us said anything for as long as it took the continuing waves of Andriel’s emotions to break, then ebb.
At last Andriel said softly, “I want to make you feel that way. You make me feel that way.”
I knew then, with a clarity I hadn’t seen before, that Andriel was a symbol of what talent should be—she recognized that she’d been saved, had been taken from suffering, and what she wanted now was to help save others, to help heal, as she’d been healed. I remembered that long ago day on Koldor, driving the fever back out of Lanya Ver Lenghy’s brain; I remembered the hours I’d spent teaching Shantiah how to painstakingly replace her scarified fallopian tubes, cell by cell, with healthy tissue. I remembered Shantiah’s joy, and the love and thankfulness of Lanya’s parents. I knew that what I’d had to learn painfully, Andriel instinctively accepted. True talent was the ability to wield the sting for the good of others, to fulfill their wishes, not just your own. The opposite of love, it seemed, was not hate, but selfishness, and Andriel had very little of that.
Jemeret picked up the child, excused the three of us from Coney and Sandalari, and we walked down the corridor toward our cabin. Jasin Lebec waited at the iris, arms crossed, one shoulder against the wall. “The Tribunal’s called about fifty times,” he said. “The captain asked me to tell you we’re running out of message chips.”
“Tell him to erase the messages and recycle the chips,” Jemeret told him shortly. His voice gentled. “Then tell Pel we’ll meet with the Tribunal exactly one hour after the Termalume docks at Orokell.”
“Will we?” his grandfather asked, genuinely surprised.
Jemeret nodded, I irised open the door, and the three of us went in. Jemeret set Andriel down and said, “Get washed, brush your teeth and hair, and you remember how to call up a bedsuit?”
“Yes, ti-sire,” she said with a hint of the shyness that any new intimacy brings. She glanced at me, even more shyly. “Will you come say ‘good sleeping’ to me, too, ti-mare?”
At being given the title of “near-mother,” I felt an unexpected thrill. “Of course,” I answered. “Go on, and call us when you’re ready.” She darted off to the eliminatory. I looked after her for a moment, then went to the couch and sat down. Jemeret ordered two strong drinks from the comsole and gave me one while the table extruded the other. As he was sitting down beside me, I asked, “Do you want to know what happened?”
He leaned back and watched me, his eyes lazy-lidded. “I know what happened,” he said quietly. “Are you asking me if I want to know what he did to you?”
I nodded, apprehensive, but determined to persevere. “I’m less afraid of telling you the truth than I am of what you might be imagining.”
He took a long swallow of his drink. “I don’t imagine anything.”
I fought to get the next words out. “I was talking to Sinet a while back, and she said—she said she thought you wouldn’t want to share me. Sexually. Are you—do you—”
He laid his hand lightly on my wrist. “What happened to you was not sexual,” he said firmly. “It may have involved parts of your body which you and I make sexual, but just as you can use your hands to caress or to assault, the body part is not what governs the situation. You do.” His gray eyes bored into me. “Do you think it was sexual?”
I felt freezing cold. “Gebbish, no!”
A smile played about the corners of his mouth. “Do you think I don’t believe you?”
I wasn’t able to respond.
He said, “I’ll probe you if you want me to, but I love you, and I don’t intend to let anything color that.”
The relief I felt was palpable, because I could read that he was absolutely sincere. I sipped my drink. “I’m trying so hard not to be haunted by it.”
“I can isolate the memories if you like,” he offered, watching me closely. “Then there’s no possibility of them recurring.”
It was so very tempting, but I shook my head. “I’ve spent enough time with missing memories. I’d rather not do that any longer.” And then, to change the subject: “Andriel seems to have developed quite a relationship with you.”
“Yes, we’ve started working out some rules.” He took another drink. “I was the only one who had any chance of controlling her once she began demanding we find you. Not that we weren’t already looking. Her ability to scout and project over great distances is amazing, but we couldn’t reach you until we were almost at Ananda because there was no eftel to work through.”
“It’ll be easier for her than it was for me,” I said. “There’s an unholy satisfaction in killing your enemies. It’s a human thing, I think. We’ve both felt it, and she never has.”
“I’m so proud of you.” His words were fervent with admiration, and they startled me.
“What? Why?” It seemed to me that I’d done neither more nor less than I’d been expected to do; my actions had been—would continue to be—inevitable.
“This time you never turned any of it back on yourself.” He drained his liquor, set the container on the table to be reabsorbed, and began to entwine his forefinger in a curl of my hair. “That was always my greatest fear, that you’d blame yourself for what was happening because you’d run from Caryldon alone.”
I shook my head, surprised, took another sip of the drink, and made myself think again about the unthinkable. At last I said slowly, “It never occurred to me. At the beginning, I couldn’t have left Keli—he started with her, you see—and then, when I was the closest to despairing, Andriel sang me back to balance.”
“Thank the stars,” he whispered, and I smiled a little, weighing the starfire’s words about being grateful for. Then Andriel came out of the eliminatory, her sandy hair half dry and half plastered damply against her head, wet patches all over her white bedshirt.
Jemeret smothered a laugh. “You were supposed to brush your hair, not soak it,” he said, getting to his feet.
Andriel grinned at him, unabashed. “There’s all kinds of water in there,” she said gleefully.
We took her back into the eliminatory to show her how to dry anything she randomly drenched, and then we put her to bed on the couch, creating a bed field for her.
It seemed like forever since I’d slept with Jemeret, even longer since we’d made love. Yet I wasn’t nervous when we stripped and he reached for me. I’d healed the worst of the physical injuries I’d suffered at Dolen T’Kelle’s hands, and Jemeret’s lovemaking had always been wonderful for me, except for that one performance for the observers on Nogdala 7.1 had a stray thought that I really ought to tell him I’d figured out how silly I’d been about that, but he swept it completely out of my head as he swept completely in.
Just before the Termalume was due to land at the Orokell spaceport, we all met in the lounge to plan our scenario. There was a palpable difference between this meeting and all the other planning meetings that had preceded it. For the first time, we were not creating a standard scenario; we were only listening to Jemeret give out assignments. Seven of us would go into the MI synapses in six separate impulses, working simultaneously to minimize any possible defensive response on the part of the MIs. Sandalari and Sinet were much weaker at using the projective abilities they had only just started to learn, but if we were right, they could afford to waste a lot of reserves.
Jemeret bubbled us and then looked at me. “Do you want to say anything?” he asked.
“What is there to say? It’s your task to lead this time, not mine. We have a job to do. Let’s just do it.” I couldn’t help smiling at him.
He squeezed my hand lightly and laid out his scenario. We all listened closely, and the only time anyone argued was when I protested over the fact that Jemeret planned to send Andriel in as an impulse of her own.
“She’s only nine years old,” I said, “and she was born and raised in a nontechnological society.”
“Which is why she pathfound her way through the eftel the first time she ever saw one and sent her sting through to find you on the other side of it,” Jemeret said evenly. “She’ll do as well as we will.” I knew he was saying that, despite having had to repress her talent all those years on Ananda, Andriel knew what it was for with a purity neither Jemeret nor I possessed, because we’d been trained in the Com.
Andriel laid her hand on my wrist. “You’re afraid for me because you love me,” she said. “I understand. I’m afraid for you, too, ti-mare.”
I nodded at her, then at Jemeret, acquiescing.
Sandalari made a small gesture to draw attention to her. “I’ve never pathfound anything big,” she said hesitantly. “And I only ever tried stinging when we were on Ananda. How will I know where to find the nodes I need?”
“Ask as you go in,” Jemeret said, “and remember that the power of the MIs is, in the final analysis, finite. The power of the starfire is infinite, and we will be attempting to wield it without reservation.”
“Will we be able to handle that power without falling all over ourselves, do you think?” I asked him.
“You already did,” he said.
“But I didn’t control it. It just—went. And I was prepared to pay for its use.”
Jemeret was solemn. “We may die in any number of ways. If the power isn’t there for us, we’ll drain our reserves and never get out. If the power is there, but hostile to our intentions, it’ll kill us.”
“It would have been easier just to turn the system off,” Sinet said.
Jemeret shook his head. “That’s exactly what we can’t do. I have no scenario for that, and we’ve run out of time. Andriel, we want to borrow the collar again.”
The child obediently laid the metal chain on the table, and Jemeret rested his fingertips on it for a moment. Some of the links unlocked, and the chain fell into five equal pieces. Andriel took one piece back, and Jemeret pushed a piece to Coney, another to Sinet, the fourth to Sandalari, and kept the last. I took my brow-crown out of my thigh pouch and set it firmly on my head. Now each of us, except for Jasin Lebec, who would be using Coney’s reserves, had a bit of starfire metal, our individual connections to a far greater dream.
“When and where will we go in?” I asked.
Jemeret looked at his grandfather.
Jasin Lebec paused, thinking. “Any of us could go in individually at any node,” he said. “But if we’re all going in at the same time, we need a trunk access, so we’re not blocking the network from one another. I say we go to Jara Deland’s office.”
“And if she’s there?” Coney asked.
“We’ll deal with it,” Jemeret said shortly. “Any other questions?”
“Not a question,” Sinet said. “John wants you to know he hopes we succeed.”
I started to reply, then deferred to Jemeret, waiting.
He got to his feet. “Thank him for us. Then meet us in the cargo bay. If there’s a reception committee at the spaceport, they’ll be waiting at passenger access. We can get past them and be halfway to Government House before they realize we’re off the ship.”
The landing alert sounded. Jemeret dissolved the bubble, and we went to make our final preparations. It seemed silly to pray. We carried with us the object of our prayers, and there was no way that object could be unaware of what we needed. I think I probably prayed anyway, and what I prayed was that we were doing the best thing for humanity as well as for talent.
As we walked toward the cargo bay, Jemeret purposeful, approaching the end of a long and dedicated journey, Andriel reached up and took my hand.
The perception of time changes in certain activities. What seems a few minutes’ work inside the human mind can actually be many hours in real-time; what seemed hours of work inside the MIs was actually only several seconds in real-time. It will take far longer to tell than it took to do.
We slipped out of the spaceport quickly and took a public groundcar to Government House. A groundcar was slower than a floater, but it was also less likely to be used by anyone of any status, so we figured we were more apt to escape notice there. The MF guards who met the Termalume had been deputed to take Dolen T’Kelle into custody, and the minor-level bureaucrats from Pel Nostro’s office would wait at least five minutes for us to emerge before they went on board to actually bother us.
The groundcar insinuated itself into a public parking slot at the edge of the precincts, and we all got out and walked at a normal pace across the courtyard and up the wide steps to Government House. An ironic flash of memory: this was the last thing I had recalled having done before I awoke on Caryldon, and here I was doing it again, for what could be the last time.
It was easy to influence the guards to ignore us, seeing us as just another group of bureaucratic functionaries, and our progress was therefore not impeded in any way. Jara Deland’s office was sealed, but there are no locks that a pathfinder cannot open by something akin to the persuasion we used on the guards. Jemeret signaled Sinet to take on the task, and she did so at once. We were in the office less than two minutes later, and no one was there. We didn’t turn the lights on, and we didn’t speak. Each of the members of the talent team with links closed the metal circles in one hand, and we touched one another, free hand grasping someone else’s wrist. Both my hands were free, and I held Jemeret’s wrist firmly and laid my palm flat against Jara Deland’s comsole.
Jemeret said simply, “Go.”
We all knew it could be suicide; no one hesitated. We had all committed, absolutely, to doing this. Jasin Lebec took hold of Coney’s reserves; I pathfound into the MI circuits and then, without speaking, we spread our consciousnesses outward, sailing down the synapses into an immense complex of lights and shadows. As certain addresses were located, some of the individual minds drew away to go to work.
We discovered later that we all perceived the MI matrix differently. Jasin Lebec and Coney dropped off first, because their target was relatively straightforward, stored in one location. Of all of us, they had the most difficulty, even though theirs was nominally the easiest assignment. They had to work with two minds and varying perceptions. Their assignment was to wipe out all records of individual citizen status rankings. If they did it correctly, it would affect no other records, have no effect on credit ratings or clearances, in no way even contact the demographic accounts. The information would need to be deleted in the way someone would pull the veins from a tourinleaf plant before crushing it for the pulp. And of course, as we all would, they would have to locate and duplicate the effort in the redundancies, to ensure that the data could not be resurrected. They slid along the synapse together to find each juncture where their file intersected with other files, then followed the tracings along to the banks that held the redundancies, and copied them to match the new originals.
