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Chapter 48

For Dououraym, time seemed to stand still. Moramaharta's message hung like fiery handwriting in his thoughts, even after it had vanished from the center of the meditation. The binder was carrying out his promise to step out of the Inner Circle, and the binding was coming apart . . .

(No!) Dououraym commanded. (Maintain the binding!) He sensed surprise rippling through the meditation. (Moramaharta, maintain!)

Moramaharta displayed a wordless query—but nevertheless caught at the threads of the binding to pull the weave back together. The binding shivered; Dououraym felt his vision distort and then steady. He was aware, with a cold, odd sensation, of the stars overhead. Bringing his thoughts back to Moramaharta, he answered the query. (Binder, your statement is premature. I have not demanded your resignation, nor has the Circle.)

Moramaharta replied, (The Circle has rejected the bias that I brought to the binding. I cannot alter my bias, nor can I hold the binding while rejecting its outcome. I must resign.)

(You will not make that decision alone—)

Dououraym's answer was interrupted by a new trembling in the binding. A vortex blossomed open, and at its center was Lingrhetta.

Dououraym sensed urgency, but before he could ask, another awareness blazed through the vortex—and a shock wave of distress and rage, Human rage, lit up the Circle like a red sun. Dououraym and the others were stunned; it was the last thing they'd expected. Dououraym recognized the Human female Pali, and through her eyes the attack on her homeworld!—!!Ghint had received the message, then, and it had begun. Her rage and fear rang through the Circle and resounded among the *Ell*. Yes, it was fear that they felt themselves, an un-Ell fear, though they hadn't recognized it as such . . . except Moramaharta, and they hadn't believed him. Had he been right all along?

From Moramaharta, he sensed an image emerging: Human and Ell thought intertwining, one awakening the other; and intersecting oddly with it, the world outside, the wind and the trees . . .

The image fled, driven away by confusion and urgency; but Dououraym was aware for an instant of the trees and the wind and the stars, and it was suddenly clear to him how their presence gave the binding an unusual character, an openness that in some inexplicable way distilled their fear, and . . .

(WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?) the Human Pali cried, interrupting his thought, and in her cry was grief and horror identical to that which they had felt at the death of their expedition. But even her outcry was overwhelmed by a new presence, a scream that swept through them carried on a haunting silence.

It was the Human Sage, his presence suddenly in the very center of the meditation, and emanating from him was an indescribable feeling of loss, a shocking emptiness that reached deep into the binding and carved out a hollowness among the lines of strength that kept the binding whole. It was the hollowness of death, the same death that had taken the Ell landing crew . . . an emptiness born of loss.

The binding trembled in the shock waves, and the certainty that had existed there wavered; and deep in the well of the unconscious memory, an illumination flared brighter than before, and from among the haunting shadows it reflected back out into the center of the binding; and spinning that light like a web, Moramaharta began altering the binding, expanding it.

(Binder, we need clarity,) Dououraym began.

But the binder was spinning the web wider, drawing them out of their center, and Dououraym couldn't have stopped him if he'd tried. And now, behind the waves of pain from the Human Sage, there was something new, there was muzik filling the connection again, and behind that were the souls of other Humans, echoing with pain and compassion.

The binding resonated, amplifying the emotions, and waves of shock and sadness shimmered out beyond even the Circle itself to the trees, and beyond the trees to the sky. Dououraym felt one thought arising from deep within him, that this pain was the Ell's pain—not just the Human loss but the Ell loss, and not just of the expedition but of everything they once were, everything they had hoped to be.

And Dououraym found himself trapped suddenly by the realization—trapped and paralyzed, unable to lead or to decide.

 

* * *

 

!!Ghint's confidence was growing. His (ship)s were jumping inward toward their next targets, orbiting the Outsider homeworld and on its surface. Several targets had been hit already, and !!Ghint himself was closing quickly on another, darting to evade enemy interceptors. There were many of them, and their coordination was improving. He intended to get in quickly, inflict as much damage as he could, and get back out.

When the battle was over he would open a vortex to the Circle. But now came a message up outreach: "Sighting made; contact in the outer system; reinforcements just out of transient."

!!Ghint snapped his nails in satisfaction and bent doubly hard to the battle, sure in the knowledge that the tide would soon again be with him.

 

* * *

 

The core was doing the only thing it could. It could fight the battle and it could maintain the contact, but if there was to be an ending, it could only come from the Humans and the Ell.

The attacking ships were now well inside lunar orbit. The defensive ships were rising to intercept, but the Ell ships were quick; they had hit two lunar-orbit stations already, and despite the best efforts of the defense, more attacks were sure to follow. Earth itself would soon be in peril.

Closer to its heart, the core felt Sage's grief and wondered if it had erred in letting him learn of his brother's death. There was no helping it now, and no way to assuage Sage's pain, except perhaps by music—and when Ramo reported that he had a musician, Eddie, back at Odesta's, the core opened that link too and let all of the emotions of the connection come together. And it made one last connection: it renewed the GCS link to Delta Station, and finding Harybdartt still alive, brought him back to join with the others.

 

* * *

 

One instant, Harybdartt was in isolation with his own thoughts; the next, he was jarred into the heart of activity between two worlds. There was a battle still in progress, he realized; and there were several Humans in the thought-field, in various stages of emotional distress. He ignored them and looked to the homeworld Ell, but so involved were they in a strange meditative state that he dared not disturb them; and instead, after a befuddled moment, he sought to communicate with the Korr.

And when he had the Korr's attention, he focused a question: What was the condition of one Human, Kent, on Delta Station?

There was some difficulty in translation, and then a humming delay while the Korr searched out the information. When it returned with its findings, there was some difficulty in understanding, because Harybdartt wanted no mistake. But then he knew: Kent had died.

Kent, his friend of such a brief time . . . Kent, who had saved his life . . . Kent, whom he had had no chance to acknowledge . . .

Was dead.

And he would not even be able to acknowledge the magnitude of the loss to his Human captors, because the war raged and the Humans showed every sign of losing, and he would quite likely die with them.

Kent—yes! he remembered in despairing farewell.

Not knowing why this death disturbed him so, even more than did the deaths of his Ell(ship)mates, he looked within himself for solace. But finding none there, he hesitated a long moment, then turned tentatively to the Korr and to the thought-field, thinking that here, perhaps, he might at least make some acknowledgment of Kent. As he opened himself to do so, he was utterly unprepared for the upwelling of grief within him; and despite his startled effort to stem the rush, his distress roared out in a wave, rocking the entire field. To his astonishment, the wave reflected and changed, and he felt another wave wash over him in return, a tidal wave of pain—the Human Sage's grief and loss, exactly like his own.

And Harybdartt gasped with the intensity of the Human's loss, stunned to realize that he had again found, where least expected, a kindred soul.

 

* * *

 

Tony . . . !

Sage was only dimly aware of the others reacting to him, and of the way his feelings were shaking the connection. He didn't look to the Ell, didn't look into their thoughts to see what disturbed them—didn't want to know, didn't care; he was filled with enough pain of his own without taking on someone else's. Tony was gone, his brother, his last living relative.

Tony, why did you go to the stars, to your death . . . why?

He felt the storm rising around him and instinctively used it for cover, let his sorrow fly amid the noise and confusion. He didn't want others to know his pain. There was a war on, and surely that was sorrow enough for them; they could have theirs, and he would have his. And now he heard music, melancholy blues from a stringsynth musician, and he recognized that it was Eddie playing, singing softly, and he let the song course through him without responding to it, not knowing who it was that Eddie was playing for. Surely she wasn't playing for him.

He was aware of Ramo watching; and his impulse was to hide, but it was too difficult, or something was stopping him, and he heard Ramo whispering in a stunned voice so soft that it could hardly be Ramo's voice, saying, [My God, I'm sorry Sage. I didn't know, I didn't realize . . .]

And he began to pull away, but suddenly he felt a touch he'd not expected to feel again—Harybdartt!—and what he felt in the touch, like an arc of electricity, was pain just like his. And before he could think or react, he felt his pain becoming Harybdartt's, and the El's becoming his . . . not just his own terrible loss, after all—he was not alone in it! And in one critical instant, that recognition released the grief and allowed it to flow.

He grieved for Tony, dead on a strange world; for his mother; for his father, whom he'd never even said a proper good-bye to or truly mourned, though he was more than five years gone.

He grieved for Kent, a man he'd never known; for Harybdartt; for the Ell and their lost people, their lost world; and for the Human race, in peril of losing their world.

His grief flooded the rapture-field, and it carried to Harybdartt, who shared it, and it carried a thousand light-years and more to the Ell Inner Circle, who wanted to avoid it but couldn't, who could do nothing but share it in full measure, who returned his grief manyfold and were as helpless as he to stop its terrible fury.

 

* * *

 

Unaccountably, Pali found herself weeping all over again for Gregory, the child she had borne and lost and never stopped loving, though she had tried to put the loss from her mind. She wept for him and for what the numbing loss of his death had done to her—and yet through her tears she knew that her grief was small by comparison. Here in the rapture-field was someone who had suffered more; here was the mourning child of a father gone and a mother gone and a brother gone.

She was terribly afraid now, trembling with fear, but she was not too afraid to know that she ought to give comfort, though it was far easier to be angry. She'd raged at the Ell—rage had erupted from her without her willing it—but it was so much harder to reach out as she needed to do now, to touch and, without hurting, to absorb hurt, to share it; to take pain from another, who was someone else's child but might have been her own.

[Sage,] she whispered, almost crooning, even as Eddie was crooning in response to some need the singer could not have understood—reaching to someone who did not seem to want to be reached.

Harybdartt's sudden entrance rocked her, and she felt the turbulence of Sage's pain and the El's together, and she hesitated, afraid. But her heart was stronger than her fear, and she drew a breath and reached out and shared their pain; and she sensed Ramo's stunned awareness and reached out to him too; and she felt the haunting rhythm of the music, Eddie mourning in response to Sage's pain, though Sage didn't know it; and Pali poured what she felt into Lingrhetta and through him she poured it into the Inner Circle, who shared her mind whether they wanted to or not.

And losing herself in the pain, she wept bitterly not just for Sage and Harybdartt, but for all those other sons and daughters in the space cities and on Earth whose lives, with each passing moment, were in greater peril.

And she felt the Ell, bewildered, weep for them, too.

 

* * *

 

Even Moramaharta didn't know how it had happened, but the meditation now sang clear across the light-years, out of the *Ell* Circle to that other circle of the Human song, the muzik and the grief and the fear. Moramaharta had started the process, turning the binding outward, but now it was beyond his control; it was growing like a fantastic crystal, facet upon facet, and the light that had flickered deep in the *Ell* memory was now burning brightly, ever more brightly. If only they could decipher the reflections . . .

 

*

Human sorrow

*

with *Ell* shared

*

resonates

*

glimmers through

*

passions

*

now waking.

*

 

Something was forming that was greater than the meditation, encompassing the Circle and changing the form of the visible world around them. The trees were no longer just shadowy figures towering against the sky and the light of the nebula; they were a part of the binding, their presence joining with the *Ell*'s. Time itself seemed to flow and change; there was an awareness both of the slow seep of water in the earth, and of the passing of the wind, nourishing and fertile. The wind, ever-changing with its knowing touch, had joined into the binding and become a living part of it. And the sky—the silent stars and the Anvil gazing down at them in their clearing in the forest, little concerned with Ell or Humanity—it too had grown into the binding, neither thinking nor speaking, but living.

 

*

A ring of unity

*

shimmers like ice

*

hardening

*

myriad facets gleaming

*

illuminating and

*

concealing.

*

 

The binding was transforming itself into a giant clear glacier of singing ice, facets and flaws refracting memory and spirit in a thousand directions. An Ell spirit, reawakening in the gestalt, displaced the Human outcry, subduing its appeal . . . and then something exploded through the binding in the final moments before the ice hardened—and that was the voice of a distant El, his pain echoing that of the Human Sage and merging with it, and out of the merging blossomed a new gestalt of Human and Ell spirit together . . .

 

*

Kent

*

Tony

*

friend

*

brother

*

lost

*

 

. . . cried Harybdartt—and Sage—one voice across the light-years.

And the desolation and grief in their cry altered the binding in the moment that it hardened. The crystal was shot through with flaws that refracted Harybdartt's pain, and Sage's; and the Circle, held deep in the matrix of the binding, could not see the world except through the pain of Human and Ell together, sharing . . . and the muzik of the Humans resonated through the binding, muzik haunted by grief and forged of unity between one Human and one El . . .

 

*

Two as one

*

enemies joined

*

 

And the need of the two, as one, echoed and whispered among the stars, and among the trees and the wind, which recognized no difference between the two, their needs and pain identical.

And the Circle was caught helpless in the glacier that was the binding, the binder himself unable to change it even if he had the will; and from the very deepest of the *Ell* memories emerged spirits long forgotten . . .

 

*

Sorrow's compassion

*

loss for one is for all

*

pain denied

*

is prolonged

*

* *

Hardness of spirit protects

*

integrity of thought

*

and memory

*

and body

*

* *

But of what use protection

*

for a spirit

*

grown cold?

*

 

And within the deep recesses of Moramaharta's mind, in a place never before touched by the montan'dri, there came a springtime melting of ice, of the deepest permafrost . . . and the melting touched not only Moramaharta but Dououraym, and Gwyndhellum and Lenteffier and Cassaconntu—and across the stars, Lingrhetta and Harybdartt. And for all of them it was as though time itself were frozen and only now, ever so slowly, melting.

 

* * *

 

For Pali, it was as though time were being torn asunder—at one extreme of her consciousness turning as slowly as a galaxy in the night, while at the other end, it could not be fleeing more quickly as—by the hundreds and thousands—the people of her world were dying.

The battle was a blurred image in the rapture-field, the destruction silent and unceasing: ships firing and colliding . . . a space station turned to a brief sun and then ashes . . . the attacking fleet shifting, some lost and some retreating . . . and on the tacticals the worst news of all, another Ell fleet approaching fast.

And twisting in the torn web of time was Sage, frozen in his grief with Harybdartt . . . and Eddie, as ever, singing out uncomprehendingly, sharing the pain. But it was up to someone else to stop it.

The children of her world were dying!

And somehow, she found the strength to realize that someone must stop it, and a final time she cried out to the frightened, frozen Ell: [Please stop . . . !]

 

* * *

 

The melting was unstoppable, hot rivulets of emotion were streaming through the binding, but still no one could move to alter what was, until the cry from the stars . . .

 

*

Please stop!

*

 

. . . shifted the pressure somewhere, and the glacier shivered apart, freeing the Circle to look around wildly and to absorb the image . . .

 

*

(Fleet)

*

attacking without mercy

*

destroying, a world

*

and a link

*

 

And before the image had even focused in the center of the binding, Moramaharta's and Dououraym's minds caught each other and drew the others close, and the command crystallized clear and hard.

And the vortex blossomed open to the secondary fleet, not yet in battle and still able to receive . . .

 

*

To !!Ghint

*

message:

*

STOP ATTACK!

*

STOP!

*

 

And the song of the stars fell to a whisper as they waited and listened, sorrowfully, for confirmation.

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