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still they were triad. Mad, warped, dying amid Jindigar's terrified screams.
"No! Oh, no! I can't. No! I won't!"
She came to, snug and warm, cozy, happy, safe in the infirmary bed Arlai
always allotted to her aboard Truth. So many times now she'd succeeded in
saving Jindigar's life but nearly killed herself, and Arlai healed her. Those
were always the best times, and she looked forward to it now.
Lazing back into dream, she found herself in a hive nursery snoozing amid a
pile of other infants a hard carapace digging into her back, powderpuff fur
against her cheek, soft rustleplates tickling her toes. Her skin was stark
white against the nest pebbles. Young as she was, she was already roaming
through the hive, peeping through the eyes of her fellow crafters, watching
the rustlemen trying to teach mind-gatherers to coordinate warriors in battle
lust.
The freedom to wander the hive, be a rustleman producing mortar to repair a
wall, or be a warrior training hard to defeat onnoolloo, or hunt bloodmeat for
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the young, be a mind-gatherer learning to sing mindtunes, or spur the mothers
to procreation, was such luxury. She'd become a herald and share this with
every hive. One wasn't enough for her. So she'd have to endure the long,
lonely treks between hives. But it would be worth it.
Her attention was grabbed by her trainer, a rustlemother who held the Whole
Memory. If she was to herald, she must absorb the Whole Memory of her hive
first. It would be hard. What came naturally to rustles was agony to whites
but rustles couldn't herald. It was her bred-for duty.
Steeling herself, she reached for the Whole Memory.
Her mind stretched like a flexible ship-to-ship access tube inflated in space
and about to burst. She looked down that long tunnel to infinity. Terrified,
she searched through the walls and found only infinity massed with stars that
swirled as if a tornado wind had scooped them up. And she was falling into
infinity.
Twice in space she'd felt this; the first time in a perfectly safe access
tunnel, the second in a malfunctioning spacesuit cut loose from its safety
cable. The terror had become a phobia, and now it paralyzed her mind and body.
And there was Jindigar. She grabbed, and they slammed into one another.
Suddenly there was the hive, and there was herself, and they weren't the same
thing anymore. This was the hive's tunnel, its history painted on its sides in
morality plays, murals, and craft diagrams. It lanced Jindigar with terror,
and she could not see why, except that the hive memory stretched back
eons perhaps as long as Jindigar had lived.
Images flew by, history blurring, incomprehensible as seen through an eternal
mind that wasn't an individual. They passed juncture after juncture where new
hives had swarmed off older ones. They spun around the walls, marveling at the
images of Dushau and others exploring their world. Jindigar rode this
corkscrew toboggan chute, perceptions squeezed tight against it all, muscles
locked, mind paralyzed in the hard clutch of denial.
Now we're all helpless! How do you like it, Invert!
The Desdinda voice, mixed sonorously with Krinata's, brought Jindigar's eyes
open. She shouted into their paralyzed minds, You'll never win! I'll never let
you win!
With a thrust Desdinda propelled them head over heels into a cavernous void.
Infinitely deep. But where the tunnel had been walled with shallow murals, or
chained concepts of a linear group memory, here an n-dimensional space
archived events, Dushau ideas, Dushau problems, incomprehensible Dushau
solutions. Events jammed on top of ideas, within problems, overlapping
solutions, integrating other events, associated, interpenetrating, twisting,
crazed with reference lines, broken into shapes, transforming, churning,
tilting, compacted into a tesseract, then folded around yet another dimension,
wrapped around with walls to contain and shape it, isolated from personal
memory by a great, gaping void.
In panic she flailed about for something familiar
and she landed on Ephemeral Truth, Arlai's Dushau simulacrum bowing
graciously before her Outreach. "Takora's Oliat is most welcome and will be
properly served."
Jindigar was standing behind her, in the Office of Protector of her Oliat, but
Arlai knew better than to speak to him while the Oliat was balanced. In fact,
his ship was so beautifully designed, she was going to order a copy made for
herself. Perhaps she'd name it Eternal Truth. Yes, that was a good name. She
could travel now that her Oliat career was ended by successfully Centering.
When they arrived at Dushaun, Arlai obligingly tendered a copy of Truth's
plans, but by then she knew she was terminally ill. It began with weakness in
the limbs and spread to a weakness of the mind blurring memory, inability to
reason without being caught by reminiscences, and a loosening grip on the
Oliat. She'd experienced four Renewals and knew that, though she was in
pre-Renewal instability, this was not normal.
It hadn't been until Dushaun was in their scopes that Arlai's tests isolated
the problem senile dementia. An organism she'd fought off on their last
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planetfall had altered her metabolism beyond repair.
Her last memory was the hospital bed, her Oliat about her, Grisnilter hovering
in the background to retrieve her memories for his Archive. All her Officers
were in Renewal, even young Jindigar, so earnest in his priesthood, so
inquisitive and easy to delight, a point of bright, burning enthusiasm that
could light her days through Renewal, if only she could make him understand
that's what she wanted. But, though she knew she'd fascinated him, it often
seemed everyone else did too. He was so undiscriminating. But she could live
with that for one Renewal it'd be his fourth. He should mature quite a bit.
A bright new thought occurred to her, and she couldn't understand why it
hadn't come before. It's time to Dissolve this Oliat. If any of them were
actually in Renewal, Dissolving now could kill someone. Why have I waited so
long?
Yet, as the thought formed, it drifted away into the blurring daze of no-time
that gripped her. With a little puff of despair she knew she was drawing them
all with her into premature death helpless to Dissolve. Grisnilter was right.
I shouldn't have tried the Oliat.
She had no strength to impart this insight before it drifted away. Darkness
encroached. She stopped breathing. Her chest ached, but it was too hard to
draw air. They couldn't prevent themselves dying with her. Dissolution/death,
a bottomless void.
She felt Jindigar's panicked sense of helplessness as on-rushing darkness
swallowed them all. Without warning his strength flooded upward, wrenching,
ripping the Oliat from her grasp, relegating her to Protector. A twist, and he
Inverted the entire Oliat. Spinning, bruised, stunned, personally violated,
she watched as he shifted to another Office and Dissolved. It was a desperate
scramble for life that left them all pummeled, bruised, mindblood oozing from
every thought, cutting her loose to drift alone into nothing.
Krinata/Takora felt his hands on her face, wet with her tears, cold as death.
He was lying half on top of her, a gray armored body pinning his legs as he'd
protected her. She felt no stir of breath in him. Her hair stank,
blaster-singed where her scalp hurt. Behind her eyes, occluding the shadowed
scene around her, Desdinda's features shimmered, a grotesque mask of hate.
Jindigar's panic in the moment of Takora-death saturated her nerves, the same
feeling as when she/Krinata had stolen -the triad from Jindigar's control and
Inverted to help the hive fight the Troopers. She'd meant only to save
innocent lives as he had saved her Oliat, helpless through no fault of their
own.
Jindigar had said it. My decisions limit your options; your decisions limit
mine, Grisnilter had wanted him and Takora to avoid that. Each renders the
other helpless.
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