The Loranth (Star Sojourner Book 1) (12 page)

“Suppose we share it?” he rasped and shuffled forward.

“Share what?”

He gestured toward the bone, there between us.

'Where did you come from?” I asked him.

“I live in that place now.” He pointed to a dark ledge just above the ground. He stared at the bone. “We could share it.”

“I thought you went over the edge in the landslider.”

“There are edges and there are edges.” He edged forward and slowly drew the bone back to himself. He turned it over in pudgy hands. “I found the entrance.” He chuckled. “I didn't know how to look for it any more than Jack did. But I found it all the same!” He shrugged and ripped a piece of tough raw meat off the bone. “I wanted so much.” He stared at me as he chewed, waiting, I guess, for me to ask what is was that he'd wanted so much. But I didn't care.

“Respect, love, recognition for discovering this master race,” he told me anyway and ripped off another chunk.

I was sick to my stomach as juices ran down his chin. He extended the bone. “A little nosh?”

I shook my head and looked away.

“Now I desire nothing but to be nothing,” he said. 'An empty mirror. I don't ever want to want again,” he slurred between mouthfuls. “You understand that…Jules, isn't it?”

I nodded. “No, I don't think so.”

“So, maybe someday you will.” He squinted past me. “Maybe today.”

I didn't want to look back, but the thing that touched my right leg was damp and spongy. I jerked away. It reached out and snapped around my ankle.

Walls? I threw up mental fortresses. Kor battered them down. I squeezed my eyes shut, concentrated hard to break his mental hold. I envisioned a maze and ran through winding paths and escaped. He was out there, waiting. I lifted a sea above me, swam to its deepest rift. He emerged from beneath it. I imagined a void so vast, so starless, space itself had not happened yet, and threw my mind to its outer edges. He recoiled. I felt it. He recoiled, then became a kernel of matter and energy that expanded to engulf me.

I was tiring.

I mentally attacked his probing tel fingers with images of shiny blades that splintered bone, made blood spurt, then wondered if, like Earth's mollusks, he had no real bone? I felt his laugh and thought of Leone. The Institute's military hardware, its power-suited militia, armed with powerful rail guns, all hunting Loranths. He drew me an image of Terrans and aliens marching into the Chablis Sea, sans the benefit of diving gear, the water rippling over their heads

I was shaken. I locked onto a picture of Earth, a beautiful jewel in space. He forced a pathway, my foster dad, calls me into the garage. I'm scared and excited and I trip, catch the banister going down steps, but I can't get there fast enough. There's a smell of oil, the smooth purr of a motor. It's red and its wings are pinstriped and -

No!

I forced my way through Kor's projection, like pushing past nightmare, and replaced it piece by piece with the reality of stone, sand, water, then reached for the formless void image he hated.

Cancel.

“Fuck you!”

Cancel.

A firebrand of heat struck inside my head, past bone and protective layers. “You crotemunging piece of glotshit!” I scraped nails across his tentacle, felt mucous collect under them. He tightened his hold on my ankle and I clawed at the ropy coil. My side burned as he dragged me toward the pool. The rock walls tilted and became a steep precipice. The pool was a canyon floor. I saw Ginny's terrified face stare up at me.

“Stan!” I twisted around, grabbed his pants leg. “Stan, help me!”

“All right.” He stopped chewing. “Examine your fears and set them aside. Now let go of my leg!” He tried to kick off my hand, but I clung.

My mental barriers were sliding faster than I was. “Help me fight him!”

It's red, gleaming new and ready for the skies. It's my sixteenth birthday. And there was never anything in the world like my XL 750 Hornet Cub. I climb into the small cockpit, smell real mockleather, and sit carefully, as though I've entered a holy shrine. I touch controls. Ginny scrambles in next to me, giggling

No! He can't have that memory, not even if he drags me underwater. I drew in deep breaths against the gritty taste of sand. “Reality, Rammis,” I mumbled, “is cold stone and a slow slide to drowning.” Would anyone ever know I did this in an attempt to save Leone?

Someone was screaming. I opened my eyes, realized it was Stanley. I still clung to his pants, which were halfway down his hips as he hugged a boulder. And screamed. I stared at my hands, opened them. My ankle ached from the clamped tentacle.

Kor jerked me toward the pool.

“You scramballed bastard!” I yelled, then held my breath as cold, slimy water ran up my legs, stung my side, poured in rivulets through sand grooves I dug with fingernails.

And stopped there.

I shivered as his tel probe deepened to a physical pressure inside my head. Thad and Christine became figures in night fog. Stanley crawled through mist to reach his ledge with the bone clasped in his hand.

I drew in breaths that held Kor's bitter chemical smell. There came a rumbling. The ground vibrated. I expected a tidal wave of slopping liquid. Green light fragmented.

Panel lights blinked. Dials held steady on gauges. Below us streams, fields, flooded with a sudden brightness. To the west, sheer heights of Colorado snow peaks. My nerves extend to the outer skin of the Cub. I feel the small plane slide through air. I'll never land again! Just circle the Earth forever like an eternal bird. I'll skim meadows and silver streams. When I grow old, they'll wrap me in a shaft of moonlight and bury me in a woolly cloud. Metal and glass and winking lights are the only friends I need. And my kid sister Ginny.

Total complete freedom at the touch of a lever. No weight of court decisions and agency decisions to send Ginny and me from one foster home to another. “It clears your mind, doesn't it, Squeaker?” I tell Ginny, who sits in the cockpit beside me. “Riding the edge. It's all in your own hands.” I laugh, intoxicated by the Hornet's speed. “Up here we make the decisions, right?”

Ginny turns from looking out the canopy and I wink at her.

“Julip, I want to go there.” She points to the three soaring peaks we always called The Three Sisters. Wind lifts snow veils like shrouds above them.

“We can't go there!,” I tell her. “The mountain thermals are dangerous. Don't you know anything, kid?'

“C'mon, Julip, I want to see the mountains from the top. Please! Carrie says monsters live up there with the Three Sisters. I want to see the monsters!”

'There's no monsters and we can't go, twerp.”

'You're afraid!” She bounces in her seat. “Julip's afraid.” She laughs, showing teeth with gaps. Her small chin turns up, throwing a silent challenge, her expression shows blatant reliance on our special bond to get her way.

“No way, bratface, now forget it!”

That would be something though. To see jagged peaks through cloud patches beneath us, like skeletal backbones of fantastic dinosaurs.

“There are rocks in mountain clouds,” my instructor had warned and drummed into me. You can't always tell where the peaks are when you're inside a cloud.

“Please, Julip. I'll never ask you for anything ever again. I promise!” She waits, her wide eyes the color of hazelnuts, her round face a wash of freckles and a pouting mouth. Her hands clasped as though in prayer. “Please,” she murmurs.

She'd never asked for much, never expected much.

And I. God…

“OK, Squeak. But just one pass over that lowest ridge. That's all!”

She nods quickly, presses forward against the seat belt to search for monsters.

We never made the timberline. But we found a monster. The insistent buzz of the stall alarm as we were swept up the mountain rotor. The terrifying nightmare sensation of flipping over in the thermal, spinning out of control.

Beneath us the canyon.

I opened my eyes and turned my head to look at Kor. He thought he had me. 'I'm not that easy, slug!' A rush of mountain air still seemed to whip by my ears.

He'd released my ankle, but my legs felt numb. I shook from cold as I climbed to my knees and crawled out of the water, then collapsed on sand and rolled to my back to stare at fungi. What did green plants live on? I would fill my mind with that question. Think green!

A sickening lurch as the Hornet crashes into spiky pine trees.

No!

What's Gretch doing right now?
I thought desperately. Had she come back from hunting, looked for me, then turned wild again? Was she off in the fibrins, cracking trees and sucking their juices? Or cracking bones? She was an omnivore. I tried to picture the fibrins…and began to drift off to sleep.

The canopy rips off when we hit the rocks. Ginny's seatbelt breaks loose.

What followed was emotional rape. I had no will left to resist Kor's probe. I curled up, my arms over my head, moaning, trying not to feel.

He sharpened the terrible memory of Ginny's death into experience relived, carved each wounding detail from my soul. I felt him draw back from the desolation within me. That was something anyway.

It had never been a contest. Kor knew more about humans now than ever I'd learned of Loranths. I'd given him deadlier ammunition, that's all. Would he use it against Leone? Even if Christine hadn't betrayed me, my plan to study Kor as though he were a caged animal would never have materialized.

What was it Thad had said? “There are no noble causes, only glory hounds.” Sand and gravel felt soft beneath me and there was escape in sleep.

But the slug would not allow me to sleep. When I was hallucinating from the lack of it, he invaded the images and showed me a cool sunlit pond with Earth birds chirping in trees and vaulting into an azure sky with puffy white cumuli. It was spring in my mind. Swans drifted across the water. I crawled through beds of violet and golden wildflowers to the sweet water of the pond and drank my fill.

Then the Master allowed me to sleep. I won't talk about what dreams that came.

Val Tir Sye Morth, a Loranth in geth, that disembodied state between flesh incarnations, cradled his spirit essence, his kwaii, which Terrans called soul, within the giant star's hot core of a spent supernova. He was pleased he had found this center in a centerless universe. But even in geth state of so-called death it was a dangerous place for his kwaii to linger. The collapsed star's crushing gravitational field threatened to disrupt his own quantum being and trap him within its immense gravitational well. The star might continue to collapse to a black hole from which he would never escape!

Beyond the star's core, a crucible forged in hellish heat spewed elements which were prelude to life: carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, calcium, even cosmic rays to trigger future mutations on some planet with life still unborn.

In the distant deeps of space, in a time so distant Loranths themselves would have evolved into new life forms, a sun would blink on, planets rich in these elements would produce life, life which could lead upward to awareness, thoughts, knowledge of supernovae and the elements forged within these cosmic furnaces.

Or so Morth hoped. He knew a moment of panic as he attempted to drift out of the giant star's core and found that its gravity well held him in a viselike grip.

For a flicker there came a bonding with Mind so vast, so incomprehensible, so loving that Love itself was its essence, and all other passing loves were cast as shadows from His Compassion. Morth felt Great Mind open His Being and embrace him. Morth's kwaii swelled with the Oneness. If he had breath he would have cried. The tel-linking of all Loranth kin at Century's End was as a passing brush of kwai compared to this Touch of the Immortal.

The Touch was gone.

Morth quested after it, probed with tel, but found only the panicked kwaii of creatures fleeing from a planet burned to a cinder by the exploded sun.

Morth opened his being, as Great Mind had done for him, and offered quiet reassurance and love as the frantic kwaiis quested for new planets and the safety of lifebind in unclaimed fetuses.

Travel is broadening, Morth thought as his expanded kwaii sailed outward from the star. He humbly thanked Great Mind.

There came a song, the Loranth Calling Song of his people.

So soon?

There was no mistaking the Calling Home for the ritual of rebirth. But to bind himself in a body again? So soon? To know the blindness of eyes, the prison of thoughts arising only from the trapped mind, and have to grope again toward awareness and increased knowledge. To feel the pain of birth again! Yet the summons could not be ignored. He sighed without breath. It was Law. He turned toward home, toward red Tartarus, as the Terran aliens who inhabited their Cape Leone hive had named his Keepworld.

* * *

Morth studied the limestone portal to the underwater Sacred Grotto with a heavy heart, so to speak. Only duty held him, bade him read the inscription before entering, while a flesh kin swam through him, unaware, and into blue phosphorescence.

The grotto had been carved ages ago, deep in West Sea's' continental shelf, down below color and light, by an ancient Loranth who, it was said, devoted one hundred and twenty-two lifetimes and all the concentrations of his glands to burn-carving out the immense cavern with its halls and passages and labyrinths for his people's most holy ceremonies. The carver's real name, his kwaii lineage, were lost, tangled in myth and antiquity. Some said he was First Loranth, gene-giver, molded from a lesser sea race. He Who First Remembered Kwaii State. The polished statue of a perfect Loranth graced the entrance as a memorial.

The Carver had probably finally refused to return from geth for another sentence, Morth thought glumly and moved through the portal, then down terraced flanks of meandering corridors. He missed turns, drifted through walls as the intimate thoughts-ideas-feelings-sensations of his kin reached him. He grudgingly admitted to himself that it was good to be among his people again.

And so he came in high spirits to the vast ceremonial hall and the gathering of Loranths. Perhaps ten thousand! Almost all the Northwestern Shelf's kin not currently in geth state. Those he didn't see in the swarm, he felt, as one in body feels a neighbor's stirring as vibrations along the lateral lines.

The tel presence of his kin surrounded and engulfed him, drew him into their being. The heart of Loranth pulsed around him.

He sighed. It was still nothing compared to the touch of Great Mind. He ignored a certain tense undercurrent in thoughts, an inordinate amount of mind focus on the Terrans of Cape Leone. The phosphorescence glowed like welcoming stars in dusty space. He cloaked his thoughts and impishly eavesdropped on private conversations.

Yes, it was good to be home. He hovered by a group that partook of black-skinned basin fish. Some Loranth had braved crushing bottom pressures for that fare. He wondered if adventurous Syl Tiagra T had slid down the thick dark waters to catch and prepare the ritual food.

“They're dangerous,” he heard from Avan Syl Y'Ti. Morth recognized her. “Kor says they're devious and treacherous.”

“And without loyalty to their own race,” Sye Avan finished and chewed sagely with the fish held in stubby hands.

“That's difficult to believe,” Sye Drac sent, “though I've touched the Leone hive and found anger and greed for the things they themselves make, and ego enough to suit a child. It drives them, as Kor says, but…” He shuddered and put aside his food. “But the aloneness!”

“Yes,” others agreed. “The aloneness without tel.”

Who was Kor slandering now? Morth wondered. The alien gathering by West Sea? Ego indeed! The harsh old traditionalist was best at censoring all that wasn't Loranth, and never beyond deciding what was and wasn't Loranth. 52 I don't get the changes.

Kor had lost more than an arm under that first Terran ship, Morth decided. Kor should go voluntarily into geth state. Drying the gills and drowning in air was not too painful. Geth might teach him the meaning of empathy. And if the nefarious mute-brain should stumble upon that shadow of Great Mind, then just possibly something of love!

The group fell to subliminal ramblings as they ate. Morth watched Syl Amoi chew and swallow a fish tail and found that he envied her the taste buds.

Why should Terrans be considered dangerous? he pondered as he drifted past wall carvings of alien forms studied on other worlds by Loranths during geth flights. Inscriptions told of the aliens' star systems, something of their cultures.

He glided through the vast Loranth Hall.

Myth, legend, history, inscribed on stone structures, manifested in friezes; statues cut from white limestone spires by artists whose techniques and themes deepened with successive lives. All that his people were, all that was Loranth, was traced on the soaring walls and carvings like frozen thoughts and dreams. Above it hung the golden symbol of Great Mind. Morth had never contributed to the artwork, had always considered himself more a poet. But he was proud of the sublime beauty of the Hall, proud of his people's questing after knowledge and understanding.

Understanding…

Why then nothing of the alien hive by West Sea? The Cape Leone hive? He studied a new statue of a Terran as hunter/slave, and felt anger. It was easy to love a distant race, to coolly discuss the virtues of this or that alien custom, religious belief, taboos, and quest for their possible origins among bones and technological artifacts. More difficult to love the alien individual, with all his differences, especially when he was crowding one's territorial tail.

Morth vowed, there at the base of Knowledge and Understanding, that once in body form he would push for contact with the alien hive. Knowing his people's propensity for the security of What Is, he concluded that it would be his coming life's work, possibly the work of two lifetimes. He thought of First Loranth. Tail feces! Gland-burning a cavern with all its labyrinths might be child splash compared to unraveling the mazes of Loranth traditions and old collective thoughts, as frozen as those inscriptions on the walls!

He moved among the groups, still cloaked, seeking Sye Kor, hoping to catch Kor's direct thoughts on the alien hive.

He passed Gris T Syl Kwa, an old Loranth due soon for geth. She reclined on a ledge surrounded by youths with gifts from sea and land, trinkets to trade for questions to ponder which would hopefully lead them to the allegorical Cave of Wisdom.

As though wisdom can be bought, Morth thought disdainfully. But there was Kor, in a marriage alcove decorated with shells and coral, with lovely Syl Fia! So, they were to be parents. Not his, he hoped. Not Kor! Genetic endowment was difficult to overcome, even when the new brain became aware of the kwaii's past lives and geth states. Personality itself was always slightly altered. Was it genes, cultural influence, free will?

Oh, dispersal! That was an argument which chased its own tail.

He settled beside the couple to listen. This veiled intrusion was against Law, but he was beginning to wonder about Loranth codes. Perhaps he had been away too long.

He watched Sye Kor and Syl Fia touch brows for that deepest of all mind ties. Morth felt Kor's path open and knew his past lives, the bodies his kwaii had inhabited, not always handsome; his joys, defeats, his most secret desires, the agonies of his births and deaths, the teeming worlds he'd touched during geths.

Morth felt Kor's distraction at the birth of a Terran child in the alien hive. The infant cried, frightened by sudden light, cold sheets of air and too much space. The weight of her own small body pressed down and sounds were raw in her wet ears.

Kor considered the treacherous creature she would become and probed her mind, seeking the race's instinctive fears.

Morth recoiled at the animosity Kor displayed toward this innocent new entity. He felt Fia's surprise and curiosity too.

“If you knew them as I do,” Sye Kor sent to her.

Morth considered the Terran called Jules who had openly defied Kor's commands, thrown off his master's control and urged the other Terrans to rebel. What was it this Jules had called Sye Morth? A sea slug. Probably a being from his own homeworld.

Morth watched Kor snap his tail, causing an eddy which sparked green with tiny phosphorescent dim-mind creatures.

Syl Fia drew back,

“They are devious and vindictive, Fia,” Kor sent.

“Because they rail against enslavement,” she asked.

“They're a danger to Keepworld, a plague. They do not deserve to continue in lifebind here. Or anywhere.” He tucked his deformed right arm stub close to his body.

“How so, Kor?” Fia asked. “They are intelligent, civilized in their small way. Do you have a right to keep them as hunter-slaves?”

“Civilized?” Kor's mind shouted.

Morth backed away from the vehemence that was like a slap in his mind. A group of bodied Loranths stared.

“They turn on each other.” Kor lowered his mindsend. “They are driven mad by their own fears and obsessions.”

“Yet you keep them,” she sent gently.

Morth smiled inwardly at her questioning of holding thinking slave/hunters.”

“One holds them by their needs, “Kor answered Fia, “and I study them toward an end.” He squirmed on the carved limestone bed, padded with newly woven mats of sea fronds for the Calling event. “Did you never know anger, Syl Fia?” he sent sharply. “The rightful outrage which demands revenge?”

Syl Fia drew back her head from his. “You can no longer turn them free, unless you've found a way to wipe their memories of contact with you, and through you, of our people.”

Morth probed Sye Kor's mind for the answer, but found only a predatory quest to crush the race of Terrans.

Morth retreated from the link. It left him shaken. When had Sye Kor turned so vehement? Once, they had been children together. They had laughed and played together. The accident, Morth thought. It had to be the accident.

“They make good hunters,” Kor told Fia. “For all the trouble they cause. I think they enjoy the kill.”

Syl Fia swam stiffly off the bed. “Sye Kor, custom demands that I choose my child's father with the greatest care. I thought I had chosen well in your proven strength and courage. Now I find a flaw in your psyche and I must reconsider.” She swam away.

She rejects me, Morth felt Sye Kor's deep mindcloak but managed to breach it, because of this damnable ugly stub. The Terrans are but a mask of vicious Great Mind. I will tear apart the mask!

Kor's next thought sent Morth fleeing out of range of his tel. An image of Kor, his claws and fangs dug into Syl Fia's flanks as he held her to the limestone bed and raped her.

The real aloneness is that of the bankrupt spirit! Morth thought, dismayed by Kor's ferocious deviant thoughts.

Morth yearned for the freedom of geth and the pure expanses of space, but was more determined than ever to work for alien contact and exchange.

Compassion mattered. Love of all creation mattered!

He felt mindjoinings among his kin as he drifted. Some left their bodies, flirted briefly with geth while still in lifebind.

One strayed too far down a spiraling grotto passage. His abandoned body settled to the bottom and began to die. Morth went to it, into it, and felt his kwaii senses shrink to a tunnel of light, a narrow spectrum of muffled sounds, the sting of salt water on delicate gills and the smell of too many close bodies. He felt a tingling vibration along his lateral lines and wanted to scratch all over. Flesh dragged like so much baggage, made him aware of the thump of the body's heart, the pressure of a full bladder, tentacles of cold water probing. Lifebind is pain, distraction and blindness!

He fled gratefully when the owner returned and wanted his body back. Morth opened his being to the wild tidal rush of a distant sea channel. Far better, he thought, far better than blood coursing through veins.