Peripherally she felt Frey shivering under multiple stresses, Jindigar calming him, while the war was fought in the tunnel, the troopers still pouring in from the carriers landing outside, the ferocious attack on the rustlebird hive, the birds in the tunnel being slaughtered. She felt other hives mobilizing around them, large carnivores, small insects, marching in the unnaturally lit darkness to an ally's aid. "Jindigar, we've got to help the hive!"
"We can't—"
"Traitor!" Desdinda rose. "We can too!" Sick to death of helplessness, ignoring Frey's keening wail of pain, she possessed the triad and Inverted. ,«
Frey screamed, voice and mind echoing hollowly as she used him to channel the power of her imagination against the Imperials, visualizing their armor losing power, becoming ashen gray, useless against their own weapons' energy splashing wantonly about the tunnel.
Krinata, no! Jindigar shattered her focus. Again he'd rendered her helpless. How could you strike back at someone who gutted you of all power over your own life? You could only hate—and deny. This isn't me. It's Desdinda!
Frey's ragged, tortured scream seared through her mind and body, flowers of his pain blossoming within like sonic bombs. / can't, I can't! Let me go! I can't! But she couldn't let him go. His scream lasted forever, and when it was over, there was only blackness. Void. Falling. Out of control. Beyond help. Hopeless. Dissolution/death.
Down and down, world spinning into blurring nightmare, she tumbled out of control, clinging to Jindigar, pursued by a tall black scouring funnel of a tornado vortex, Desdinda's face formed out of its angry whorls and knots. Flinging her arms and legs out, grabbing at the insubstantial blackness, at Jindigar, she was unable to slow or deflect them.
The whirlwind took them. It stretched their bodies to a transparent blur, wrapping them around and around its own core, smearing them until their substance mixed and became Desdinda. They'd been triad, one had died, and 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 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.j|
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 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?