Farfetch

Finally, Chinchee and the hivebinder convinced the vermin with hivelike projections of repelling horrors to stop chewing on wires and the crew's armored feet and find their meals outside. Then the board Krinata was working on came to life under her hands. Relief and a wild cheer rang through the Oliat linkages, infusing her with a warm glow unlike any other satisfaction she'd ever known.

The shuddering and jerking of the deck ceased. The roaring thunder, a vibration in the bones more than a sound, did not slacken, but the tone changed. The Oliat focus shifted so Krinata had a moment of nauseating vertigo followed by a horrid drop in the pit of her stomach as she fell into a seething cauldron of wide-angle Dushau visual fields. //Sorry,// Jindigar apologized. //My fault. I've never done this before, either. Better?//

Krinata had both hands clamped over her mouth and her eyes squinched shut. Peripherally she felt Cy's hand on her shoulder, and his touch steadied her as much as whatever Jindigar had done. She got her muscles unknotted and fumbled for the communicator he carried for her. It was set on full shipwide and crew address, so her voice was heard everywhere as the Oliat a

//What did that mean?// wailed Krinata, suddenly weary beyond endurance. She knew the Oliat was viewing the entire outside panorama, but she, herself, was cut off from it because, as Outreach, she was to be aware of their immediate environment, not bemused by the larger picture. Jindigar's fumble had given her too much information to process because when he functioned as Outreach, he was able to work inside the multiview contact as well. After over three thousand years' experience! And in her exhaustion she despaired of ever being a real Outreach.

Jindigar used her hands on the controls to shape the forcefield into a hyperbola, transforming the animals' forward momentum gently into momentum at right angles to the surface of the field where they hit, sliding them off along a vector pointing out into open plains. The terrified bellowing of the animals was louder than the rumble of their hoofbeats, and there was nothing the hivebinder could do to reassure them.

Hours and hours through the long night, the seemingly endless herd gradually slowed, gradually turned short of the "hive" forcefield and the cliff. As fewer hit the forcefields Jindigar diminished the power to the jets manually because they lacked the parts to give the Sentient control of those circuits. It was tricky work, balancing the forces to prevent the fortress from skidding into the stampede, yet not letting it slide over the cliff.

But at last, when Jindigar lifted the skills suffusion, the Oliat rejoined the gestalt the hivebinder struggled to maintain. With Chinchee's help, the binder integrated the new seven-way unit that now replaced the five-way unit. It seemed upset with the vanished five-unit and two-unit, but gradually it adjusted. Shortly after that, the frantic eruption of small, furred bodies through the rents in the hull ceased altogether. The vermin already ru

Their hunger sent them swarming over the carcasses heaped around the fortress, some of them finding their way down to the piles of flesh at the foot of the cliff. By the first graying of dawn, the grisly business of cleaning up was well under way.

As quiet descended, the evacuation of the fortress began. All the able-bodied went down to help those below. The Oliat was among the last to leave. They emerged onto a launch platform overlooking part of the cliff and part of the plain. Jindigar was trying to reduce the intensity of the Oliat contact, preparing to adjourn them—not to Dissolve, for once he'd Dissolved his Oliat, he'd be unable to Center another.

Jindigar's control was shaky, like a hand twitching uncontrollably from too many hours of clutching something. The scene of carnage she viewed around them alternated between the stark, revolting, but properly colored human vision; the dim, but semantically neutral, view seen by naked Dushau eyes; and the Oliat gestalt of a natural process proceeding in a healthy way.

Krinata was shaking all over with abating tension, too tired to celebrate properly, confused beyond endurance, nerves blasted, body aching. She barely remembered Cy urging her to step onto the largest weapons platform with Chinchee and the hivebinder. The rest of the Oliat crowded around her. The platform took off none too steadily with such a load, but as they moved out beyond the edge of the cliff, she ceased to worry about it.

The heaps of dead animals at the bottom of the cliff were crawling with scavengers and black with flying insects. The light of the rising sun gleamed off blood. Streams of animals carried chunks of meat and entrails away to their hives. But the sight that sent her groping for the railing to hang over open air and retch helplessly was the way the vermin attacked the dead settlers and troopers strewn about the battlefield. All over, surviving troopers still in armor teamed up with the settlers to fight the vermin off the bodies of their dead comrades.

She felt the Oliat react to her illness, but this time not with derision or contempt but a determined patience with her differences. She tried to open herself to their attitude– a joy that they had been fully accepted by this world—that even their dead would not be ignored but integrated into the natural processes. But she couldn't.

//Jindigar!// she protested through the fading Oliat linkages.

The Oliat embraced her, looking out at the scene through her eyes and her perceptions. The stark horror multiplied until she thought she'd fly to pieces. But then they moved as one, accepting her with all her differences. //Zunre.//

She spoke once more as Outreach, addressing Chinchee in his own language—scraping her throat raw in the process. Then the hivebinder's gestalt urged the scavengers away from the dead strangers, understanding suddenly that the renewed fighting was not a rejection of a kindness but a defense of a deep integrity.

As the platform reached treetop level Jindigar stood behind her, one long-fingered hand draped over her shoulder. //Now.// She felt a shifting, rending, straining realignment, the strange yet familiar compartmentalizing as when Jindigar loosened the duad or made it dormant. Only this time it was a pit-of-the-stomach bereavement, a needle-sharp shock, a wail that screeched along the nerves and made her hair stand on end and her teeth ache.

She gasped as the seven of them began to move and breathe in disco

Jindigar turned to each of them singly, making eye contact, somehow adjusting everything to ease. She thought she sensed him being critical of how roughly he performed this adjournment. At last he said to Cy, rather wistfully, "Consider us adjourned for the moment, though we may have trouble maintaining that."

Cy frowned at Storm, and then they both nodded agreement. Storm passed the word to the Outriders squeezed onto the platform with them: "Adjourned, then, but watch for sudden changes."

Below, people who had been fighting vermin off the bodies of the dead now stared after the retreating creatures. Some troopers began assembling the scattered bodies into neat rows. But Krinata noticed how they placed armored troopers beside settlers, making no distinctions.

As the Oliat platform passed overhead, aiming to land at the Dushau compound, troopers with their helmets off, settlers with their wounds bandaged, all stopped to gaze up at them. They'd been bound into the hive linkage. What did they think had happened? Would they keep the peace among themselves now?