Part 31 (1/2)

Thought without ident.i.ty, being without focus. The time is endless. But the will is strong.

Zatar, he thinks, and he notes the act of thinking. Zarvati: the image of a bloodline, Plague-p.r.o.ne and beautiful. Son of Vinir (a tall and angry man, a proud leader) and K'siva (who can command men with a motion and never chooses to, a flower among barbarians, a thing too soft and too lovely to last). He is.

Whatever was reality for him-and at that moment he doesn't recall-it is no longer. There is no darkness, for the concept of darkness implies the existence of light, and light is simply not a reality. He cannot wonder what this place is, for that implies the concept of location and the existence of somewhere else; neither of these things is a truth to him. Only by sheer force of will has he recalled the integrity of his personality and now it is at a loss to anchor itself to the non-world it occupies. This is not acceptable.

He casts about himself for something, anything, to grasp as a basis for reality.

He reaches out with his mind for his body. Surely the two are connected somehow! But there is only the eternal nonexistence of his prison. Fear demands his attention, calling for him to submit and have done with struggling, but he refuses. I AM ZATAR he repeats, clinging to the only shred of ident.i.ty left to him.

A whisper of death pa.s.ses through him and is gone. He is focused elsewhere, seeking the physical world that once he knew so well. But then a thought occurs to him and he stops to consider his purpose. In a reality where there is nothing but thought, then thought must be the key to any change. And pure thought is a thing of concepts, of abstract being, not crude reflections of material substance.

He lets himself drift in the nothingness, trying to detect any variation in the world he has come to occupy.

Again the thread of death touches him, and he grasps it, desperately locking himself to it. It has come from somewhere, and is going elsewhere. Suddenly there is distance, location, movement. He follows it to its destination, which, to his horror, is all to familiar. Yet he is still so distant from it that even as he feels the wave of destruction wash over his own body there is nothing he can do to halt its progress. He is watching himself die. No, he thinks sternly. I refuse.

The waves continue; that tenuous link which binds him to his material form is weakening, and behind him lies only the nothingness he has so recently escaped.

He becomes intention: he is the will to live and he forces himself down the same path his doom has chosen. LIFE, he commands, forcing the requirement into the threads of his being over and over again, until at last the sullen blackness retreats from its alien stronghold and withdraws to those places in the human mind where such things are stored.

He is exhausted and he rests, a thought anchoring him in the world of his body, another standing guard over his personal integrity.

An eternity pa.s.ses, a moment too small to measure in human terms. He is aware of another mind besides his own, and remembers. Suddenly he is alert with excitement; if he means to know his enemy, then here, in a domain free from the bondage of wordly image, is the place to do so.

She is trying to pull back from him, and there is a material a.s.sociation . . . she is trying to withdraw her hand from his to break the contact. He wants to hold on to her; he wants to explore this thing which is so alien to him and yet is a part of himself. But his holding instinct does not affect the body from which he has detached himself. He forces himself into the limb in question: he becomes his hand, wrapping his will around the muscles and tendons and experiencing handness so thoroughly that as the impulse to grab hold of her possesses him he is aware of the extremity responding.

He maintains his grip.

Thought in the darkness; an awareness of Other. She debates whether to break the contact by Discipline, which she has the strength to do. One mental trigger and the wall will slam down between them. He can only struggle with her for as long as she is willing to let him, and she debates now just how long that is.

I will know my enemy, he demands again.

~ Very well, comes the thought, and a whisper of acid hatred with it. ~ And as deeply as you probe, so shall I.

He sees her mind. It boils with violence and engulfs him in its hungry substance. Here is the hatred, and here the bloodl.u.s.t, and here the despair, perfect in their purity and not yet adulterated by being filtered through the body's imperfect biochemistry.

Like the winds of a storm her emotions batter at him and threaten to tear him loose from the mooring of his ident.i.ty. Hatred-he welcomes it, embraces it as a familiar thing, pa.s.ses through and beyond it unharmed. Fear of s.e.xual inadequacy-he counters it with memories from his own youth, painful memories of genuine impotency, which he had hidden behind a mask of cynical humor and eventually genuinely forgotten. Frustration, in floods of painful intensity- but is it anything he is not himself familiar with?

The a.s.sault has an end but not a termination, as though he has come to the center of a storm. All about his awareness the seething emotions swirl, while before him is something no less intense, but in quality quite different.

He touches what no man of the Braxana has ever known: the essence of female being, rich and warm against his complimentary touch. If he had doubted his own masculinity he might be swept away by it, lost to his former self and changed enough so that when mind rejoined body the parts would no longer mesh properly. But he observes, and appreciates, and is apart from it. This, then, is Anzha lyu Mitethe- this storm of emotion spiced with a death wish, this power of female life unable to find expression in the world of solid things.

She reaches for his Name.

He has no idea why the thought comes like that, only that it does. For the first time he knows a fear so great that it threatens to cut short his exploration. Is it unreasoning superst.i.tion, or is there reality to his fears in a world of symbols, where thought is reality and the Name of his soul might well be the key to his existence? He remembers her words: as deeply as you probe, so shall I. Is he that close to the center of her, then, that if she had a Name he would hear it? He forgets his fear in the fascination of discovery, and casts about himself to learn even more. And in that moment, when the decision is absolute and cannot be unmade, when he surrenders that part of himself which previously has only conquered, he pa.s.ses not through the eye of the storm and back into its turbulence, but deeper into it.

Here there is only mental silence, and the faint echo of his presence.What is this place? he wonders, and then he knows: this is the part of her mind-sealed off from her introspection, which she herself has no power to see. The magnitude of it is awesome, and the quiet strangely unnerving. He wanders amazed through the secret avenues of her being. Here and there paths have been severed, reconnected elsewhere, forced to flow in a direction which was not their original intent. Potentials are cut short, others grafted to alien purpose, all by a human hand whose touch has left its mark in the woman's basic essence.

A mark he knows.

He cannot a.s.sign it an ident.i.ty; it is too difficult for him, untutored as he is, to connect this abstract feeling with a human name. But as certainly as he knows what the man has done, he recognizes that their paths have crossed. The touch is familiar-and its work is monstrous.

He travels down paths of health and sees them cut short by a form of psychic surgery he can barely comprehend: he reads what has been done, and why, and is filled with an anger so terrible that it cannot be expressed in anything other than pure thought.

This is the dark side of the power, he thinks, the agony that contradicts the life-song. This is the reason we have weeded out the psychic seed from our own inheritance. This . . . this foulness, which is a crime beyond words.

As he witnesses the details of that crime, as he feels his anger growing, he realizes there are limits to his endurance. The horror and the ecstacy, intermingled, are becoming more than he can safely internalize.

How do I withdraw? he wonders.

And in that moment he has done so.

She stood against the opposite wall, gray eyes fixed upon him. Breathing heavily, as one might after a more pleasurable encounter, with the sweat and flush of s.e.xual arousal still visible upon her face. As it was upon his own, he realized.

There was a pain in his left hand, across the palm. He looked down; the glove was torn and blood welled up in the resulting opening. Her nails, breaking free of him. But their contact hadn't been broken ... he looked up at her and realized why there was just a touch of fear in her regard. She had pulled free. His will had provided the link that permitted them to continue.

He looked at her now with a mixture of feelings he could not have voiced had he wished to. Including sympathy: for what had been done to her was a crime against the very concept of humanity. They had linked death to her desire, he had seen that clearly. They meant her to be alone, and they meant her to suffer. They were counting on frustration to drive her to ... what? That was not clear to him.

But the work was repulsive to him, and to everything inside him that prided itself on being human.

If you knew what they did to you, and with what intent, then I would be the least of your concerns.

”Starcommander.” He said it slowly; speech sounded strange and somehow limiting. Suddenly he longed for the contact they had had, the sure caress of hatred upon hatred . . . but that was gone forever. He had tasted something that was alien to his kind, and save for dreams he would never possess it again.

”You have quite a mind,” she said. ”I've never seen the like, outside of telepathic circles.”

Did she have his Name? Curiously, it no longer mattered. And he had hers.

He looked down at his damaged hand, then slowly peeled the glove from it. The delicate leather was soaked with blood. He held it for a moment, then offered it to her. She smiled faintly. A trophy? her expression said. Of conquest, he thought.

Both ways. She took it from him, careful to put her hand beneath his and let it fall to her, careful not ever to touch. The gesture angered him for the proof it was of what had been done to her. After he was through with her, he would remember to hunt down the man responsible for such an atrocity. It would be a pleasure to destroy him.

”My enemy.” The modes whispered meaning into his words without his intending it. Desire-for conquest, for power, for possession. ”I will not forget.”

He did not meet her eyes again for fear of being drawn into them, but turned and strode to the doors. They opened. For a moment he paused, tempted to turn back and look at her one last time. Though he was committed to seeking her death, the nature of stellar battle was such that they might never actually meet again. But then the impulse was gone and he had stepped forward, and the doors, closing behind him, sealed off that alternative forever. In the conference chamber, alone, Anzha lyu Mitethe was still. Her hand closed slowly on the torn glove it held and a bit of Braxana blood dripped down the length of one finger.

And then, quietly, she cried.

He had taught her how.

Harkur: The man who will not resort to violence must find his own ways to manipulate men.

Sixteen.

HOUSE OF FERAN RINGRECORDING.

MASTERCODE:PRIVATE.