Get Off the Unicorn (8 page)

With great reluctance they turned to Larak's silent shell. Because they had to, they opened it and saw with some little relief that there was no mark of his passing on the young face. A curiously surprised smile lingered on his lips.

Isthia turned away in tears and Jeran, too numb to display his own sorrow, put his arm around her to lead her away.

“Sir,” the captain of the ship said respectfully when they entered the control room, “we have the location of the alien ship debris. Permission to recover fragments?”

“Permission granted. Isthia and I will return to the Tower.”

“Very good, sir,” the captain said, and stiffened to a rigid attention. The unashamed tears in his eyes and his very crisp salute expressed wordlessly his pride, his sympathy, and his sorrow.

 

Struggling against a will determined to keep her asleep, Damia fought her way to semi-consciousness.

“I can't keep her under. She's resisting,” a remote voice called to someone.

As distant as the sound was, like a far echo in a subterranean cavern, each syllable fell like a hammer on her exposed nerves. Sobbing, Damia struggled for consciousness, sanity, and a release from her agony. She couldn't seem to trigger the reflexes that would divert pain, and an effort to call Afra to help her met with not only the resistance of increased agony but a vast blankness. Her mind was as stiff as iron, holding each thought firmly to it as though magnetized.

“Damia, do not reach. Do not use your mind,” a voice said in her ear. The sound was like a blessing and the reassurance it gave her wavering sanity was reinforced by the touch of . . . Isthia's hands on hers.

Damia focused her eyes on the woman's face and clutched Isthia's hands to her temples in an unconscious plea for relief of pain.

“What happened? Why can't I control my head?” cried Damia, tears of weakness streaming down her face.

“You overreached yourself, destroying Sodan,” Isthia said.

“I can't remember,” Damia groaned, blinking away the tears so she could at least see clearly.

“Every rating in FT & T does.”

“Oh, my head. It's all a blank and there's something I have got to do and I can't remember what it is.”

“You will, you will. But you're very tired, dear,” Isthia said crooningly as she stroked her forehead with cool hands. Each caress seemed to lessen the terrible pain.

Damia felt the coolness of an injection pop into her arm.

“I'm putting you back to sleep, Damia. We're very proud of you but you must allow your mind to heal in sleep.”

“ ‘Great nature's second course, that knits the ravelled sleeve of care.' What's knitting, Isthia? I've never known,” Damia heard herself babbling with a cool scalliony taste in her throat as the drug spread.

Again, after what seemed no passage of time at all, Damia was inexorably forced to consciousness by her indefinable but relentless need.

“I can't understand it,” came Isthia's voice. This time it did not reverberate across Damia's pained mind like tympany in a small room. “I gave her enough to put a city to sleep.”

“She's worrying at something and probably won't rest until she's resolved it. Let's wake her up and get the agony over.”

Damia forced her mind to concentrate on identifying the second voice. With a grateful smile she labelled it “Jeff.” She felt her face gently slapped and, opening her eyes, saw Jeff's face swimming out of the blurred mass about her.

“Jeff,” she pleaded, not because he had slapped her but because she had to make him understand.

“Dear Damia,” he said with such loving pride she almost lost the tenuous thought she tried to hold from him.

Her body strained with the effort to reach out only a few inches a mind that once had blithely coursed light-years, but she soon managed to communicate her crime.

I burned out Larak and Afra. I killed them. I linked to the Larak-focus and killed them to destroy Sodan. 1 saved myself and killed them.

Behind Jeff she heard Rowan's cry and Isthia's exclamation.

“No, no,” Jeff said gently, shaking his head. He placed her hands on his forehead to let her feel the honesty of his denial. “In the first place, you couldn't. You don't
use
others. You sort of shift gears into high speed to make other minds work on a higher level. You drew power from the Larak-focus to destroy Sodan, yes. But the killing thrust was yours, Damia; you were the only one capable of doing it. And every T-rating in the Federated Worlds will vouch for that. Your touch, my dear, is indescribable. Further, without you to throw
us
into high gear, Sodan could have destroyed every Prime in FT & T.”

Damia heard an approving, admiring murmur from Rowan.

“Will my touch come back? I can't feel anything,” and in spite of her control Damia's chin quivered and she started to sob with fear.

“Of course it'll come back, dear,” said the Rowan, who elbowed Jeff aside to kneel by her daughter and stroke her hair tenderly.

“You'd better go knit some more sleeves of ravelled care,” Isthia suggested with therapeutic asperity. “You knit like this,” and Isthia inserted a visual demonstration of the technique of knitting into Damia's mind. It was an adroit change of subject, but Damia, with a flash return of perception, saw the three were evading her.

“I must be told what has happened,” she demanded imperiously. A wisp of memory nagged at her and she caught it. “I remember. Sodan made one last thrust.” She closed her eyes against that recall, remembering too, that she had tried to intercept it and, “Larak's dead,” she said in a flat voice. “And Afra. I couldn't shield in time.”

“Afra lives,” the Rowan said.

“But Larak? Why Larak?” Damia demanded, desperately striving to touch what she felt they must still be hiding from her.

“Larak was the focus,” Rowan said softly, knowing, too, that Damia would never absolve herself of her brother's death. “Afra was supposed to be the focus, being the experienced mind, but the old bond between you and Larak snapped into effect. You tried to shield Larak, but his mind was too unskilled to draw help from you. Jeff and I felt it because we were part of the focus, too, and we tried to help divert it. We could cushion only Afra in time. Sodan's was a very powerful mind.”

Damia looked from her mother to her father and knew that that much was true. But another reservation hovered in their eyes. . .

“You're still hiding something,” she insisted, fighting with exhaustion. “Where's Afra?”

“Okay, skeptic,” Jeff said, lifting her into his arms. “Though why his snores haven't kept you awake, I don't know.”

He carried her down the hall. Pausing at an open door, he swung her around so she could see into the room. A night light hung over the bed, illuminating Afra's quiet face, deeply lined with fatigue and pain. Denying even the physical evidence, Damia reached out, touching just enough for reassurance the pained mental rumble that meant Afra still inhabited his body.

“Damia, don't do that again,” Jeff said, carrying her back to her room.

“I won't but I had to,” she replied, her head ballooning with agony.

“And we'll see you don't again until you're well enough. Out you go, missy,” and she slid into blackness.

 

An insistent whisper nibbled at the corners of her awareness and roused Damia from restoring sleep. Cringing in anticipation of the return of pain, she was mildly surprised to feel only the faintest discomfort. Experimentally, Damia pushed a depressant on the ache and that, too, disappeared. Unutterably pleased by her success, she sat up in bed. It was night and she was in her family's home. She stretched until a cramp caught her in the side.

Heavens, hasn't anyone moved me in months?
she asked herself, noting that her mental tone was firm. She lay back in bed, deliberating.
Poor Damia
, she said in a self-derisive tone,
ever since that encounter with that dreadful mind-alien, she's been nothing but a T-4, T-9? T-3?
Damia tried out the different grades for size and then discarded them all, along with her histrionics.

You idiot, you'll never know till you try.

Tentatively, without apparent effort, she reached out and counted the pulses of three . . . no four, sleepers. Afra's was the faint one. But, Damia realized in calm triumph, it
was
there. Which brought her face to face with the second fact.

She slid from her bed to stand by the window. Beyond the lawn of evergrass, beyond the little lake, to the copse of evergreens her glance traveled. And stopped. Instinct told her that Larak was buried there and the thought of Larak buried and his touch forever gone broke her. She wept in loneliness, biting her knuckles and pressing her arms tightly into her breasts to muffle the sound of her mourning.

Out of the night, out of the stillness, the whisper tugged at her again. She stifled her tears to listen, trying to identify that sliver of sound. It faded before she caught it.

Resolutely now, she laid her sorrow gently in her deepest soul, a part of her but apart forever. No matter what Jeff and Rowan said, she had caused Larak's death and maimed Afra. Had she been less preoccupied, less self-centered, she would not have been so dazzled by the fancy that Sodan was her Prince Charming, her knight in cylindrical armor.

Such a pitiful thing she was: a spoiled, rotten-hearted child, demanding a new toy to dispel boredom when all the time . . .

The whisper again, fainter, surer. With a startled cry of joy, Damia whirled from her room, running on light feet down the hall. Catching at the door frame to brake her headlong flight, she hesitated on the threshold of Afra's room.

She caught her breath as she realized that Afra was sitting up. He was looking at her with a smile of disbelief on his face.

“
You've
been calling me,” she whispered, half questioning, half-stating.

“In a lame-brained way,” he replied. “I can't seem to reach beyond the edge of the bed.”

“Don't try. It hurts,” she said quickly, stepping into the room to pause shyly at the foot of the bed.

Afra grimaced, rubbing his forehead. “I know it hurts but I can't seem to find any balance in my skull,” he confessed, his voice uneven, worried.

“May I?” she asked formally, unexpectedly timid with him.

Closing his eyes, Afra nodded.

Sitting down cautiously, Damia lightly laid her fingertips to his temples, and touched his mind as delicately as she knew how. Afra stiffened with pain and Damia quickly established a block, spreading it over the damaged edges. Resolutely, regardless of the cost to her own recent recovery, she drew away the pain, laying in the tender areas a healing mental, anesthesia. Jealousy, she noticed someone else had been doing the same thing.

Isthia . . . has . . . a . . . delicate . . . touch . . . too.
He sent the thought carefully, slowly.

“Oh, Afra,” Damia cried for the agony the simple thought cost him. “You
aren't
burned out. You
won't
be numb. I won't let you be. Together we can be just as powerful as ever.”

Afra leaned forward, his face close to hers, his yellow eyes blazing.

“Together, Damia?” he asked in a low intense voice as he searched her face.

Her fingers plucking shyly and nervously at his blanket, Damia could not look away from an Afra who had altered disturbingly. Damia tried to comprehend the startling change. Unable to resort to a mental touch, she saw Afra for the first time with only physical sight. And he was suddenly a very different man. A man! That was it. He was so excessively masculine.

How could she have blundered around so, looking for a
mind
that was superior to hers, completely overlooking the fact that a woman's most important function in life begins with physical domination?

“Damia—speechless?” Afra teased her, his voice tender.

She nodded violently as she felt his warm fingers closing around her nervous hand. Immediately she experienced a profoundly sensual empathy.

“Why did you wait so long, knowing that I needed you?” The words burst from her.

With a low triumphant laugh, Afra pulled her into his arms, cradling her body against his and settling her head in the crook of his arm.

“Familiarity breeds contempt?” he asked, mocking her gently with her own words.

“And how could you . . . a T-3 . . . manage to mask . . .” she went on, growing indignant.

“Familiarity also bred certain skills.”

“But you were always so aloof and reserved. And Mother . . .”

“Your mother was no more for me than Sodan was for you,” Afra interrupted her, his eyes stern as she stared up at him, shaken by his harsh voice.

His expression altered again, his arms tightened convulsively as he bent his head and kissed her with an urgent, lusty eagerness.

“Sodan may have loved you, in his fashion, Damia,” Afra's voice said in her ear, “but mine will be far more satisfying for you.”

Trembling and ready, Damia opened her mind to Afra without a single reservation. Their lips met again as Afra held her lightly in what would shortly be far more than a mere meeting of minds.

 

“Daughter” and “Dull Drums” were specifically slanted for the young adult market, but the original yarn concerning Nora Fenn and the futuristic university system is far, far out.

I had submitted a story called “A Pocket to Mend” at the Pennsylvania Milford SF Writers' Conference, chaired by Damon Knight and Kate Wilhelm. It was savaged by the assembled writers as sentimental, impossible, and stupid! And after I had the opportunity to try to explain my intentions, I was told that I had done all the wrong things for all the wrong reasons. They suggested I go home and really think the basic idea through. From the original premise I retained the term “Wendy,” meaning a girl with tolerance and understanding (in my story, training), who acts as housemother to and bears the children of men with homosexual proclivities.

I had enough homosexual male friends—even before the Gay Liberation developed—who were bitter that they could not adopt children because of their sexual preferences. I have never felt capable of writing a full-length novel about this situation as it should be written. So only these three stories exist, and they involve a futuristic society in which
all
citizens may have a “legal” child.

“Changeling” has never before been published. This story deals with one aspect of the “Wendy” theme. I wrote it originally in response to Harlan Ellison's request for a story for his
Dangerous Visions
anthology. Frankly, I think this one has a far more dangerous vision than “The Bones Do Lie,” the story Harlan finally accepted.