"But how did he know?" asked Yuan, then rounded on the Gen. "How did you know Mairis sent her here!"
A cagey reserve came over the prisoner. "We know a lot more than that about your operations!"
Yuan turned on Bianka, his expression ferocious but his nager ringing with unsung laughter. "Did you tell him about Laneff?"
Bianka feigned fear, shrinking from Yuan. "No, not me!"
"We know all about Laneff!" claimed the prisoner.
But he was lying, and Yuan didn't require her to tell him that. He bore down on Nen. "I'm going to find the Diet spy who got in here and talked to him. You get me a list of every guard assigned to this room!"
"Yes, Sosectu," answered Nen wide-eyed.
Then Yuan stalked over to Laneff. "You told me there was no chance of a leak at that Last Year House! You don't expect me to send one of my Gens in there for Laneff if the place is swarming with Diet spies! You go back and tell Mairis—" He tossed a cautious glance over his shoulder at the prisoner. "Bianka, drug him. I don't want any slipups. I'm going to have it all out of him—now." Then to Laneff, he said with sweet deference, "Hajene Farris, would you please accompany me to my office?"
Outside, Yuan was in high spirits. "You're a great actor, Laneff. You should have been on the stage! That was glorious!"
"Yuan, he fears those drugs. Perhaps he's allergic—"
"Don't worry, Bianka's checked that. He fears drugs because he knows he'll babble out everything—and he's one of their best pilots, so he probably knows the locations of every one of our places they've found. Ha! He knows the location of every one of theirs! And I'll have them all!"
"What will you do with the information?"
"Set spies on them. Leak my knowledge to them and force them to abandon and move—just to keep them from accomplishing much. Oh, there's lots to do with such information!"
He spoke as if he'd been carrying on this war for years, right in the middle of civilization and the Tecton didn't even know it. "Yuan, why do you hate the Diet so? They're only frightened."
"I don't hate them because they're afraid! Look, they worm their way into a perfectly happy Gen community, and start sowing rumors that the Sime Center harbors a Pen full of Gens used for the kill. They start talking about certain channels who take donations from the community as being junct. Soon, the Gens of the area stop coming to donate selyn. They turn perfectly happy people into suspicious paranoids, and from each destroyed community they reap a few fanatics to join their suicide corps. There is no life form lower than a Gen who'd seduce a Sime into a kill!"
"But I thought the Distect condoned junctedness?"
"Condoned? No, Laneff. We stand for the right of each Sime and Gen to choose a mode of transfer that suits them, as long as nobody gets hurt."
There was so much vivid passion emanating from him that Laneff had to ask, "How did you get into all this?"
"I was raised in a coastal island village that was one of the first the Diet took over. But I joined the Tecton's Donor classes when I established. Maybe I halfway believed the lies. I was prepared to die on my first Qualification! I found out what Sime and Gen are really about– but too late to save my sister. She joined the Diet's suicide squad, only she hadn't established yet. She went through changeover instead, and they murdered her. The same kind of thing was happening in all the families in our village. I swore to stop it, Laneff!"
"Swearing isn't enough. The Tecton—"
"Oh—I found some old books and began reading up on how the Tecton came about. It wasn't always like this, you know. And Klyd
Farris never did have much more than a bare majority when founding the Tecton. There were a number of Householdings that withdrew to form the original Distect, and a lot of other ideas about how the Tecton ought to be run. The time has come for the world to reconsider some of them."
In the narrow white corridor, Laneff looked up at the huge Gen, the powerful, hurtfully brilliant nager enfolding her. Wistfully, she recalled the scintillating tingle of Shanlun's nager. But she would never see him again. Shanlun thinks I'm dead–and it's better for him that way. He shouldn't have to go through it all twice. "I wish I could believe in your way, Yuan."
He examined her face as if trying to zlin her nager. "I'd like a chance to show you—all of it." His hand came up to graze her jaw-line. "The way we finish a transfer between a man and a woman
The pure maleness of him, from scent to the little tufts of hair on the backs of his fingers, penetrated her perceptions. She knew what he meant. In the Tecton, a man and woman who shared transfer were sexually forbidden to each other for that month. Another rule discarded.
Jarmi had drifted down the corridor toward the exit into the infirmary proper, offering them privacy. Do I really want to do this? She had watched Yuan deliberately frightening a helpless prisoner, but with a peculiar measure of compassion. In his place, Shanlun might have done the same. "Are you really going to let him go?" she asked.
"We don't have any prison cells. I think—I'll have him transported to another facility, and on the way, he'll get an irresistible chance to escape. Then, the Diet won't know exactly where he was. I don't think they know about this place yet. But all that's for tomorrow. For tonight . , " He hesitated, awaiting her permission to touch her.
"Life is a game to you, isn't it?"
"A very dangerous game."
"But it's the danger you like, isn't it?"
"How is it you know me so well?"
"Haven't you ever known a Farris before?" she teased.
"Only channels," he murmured, distracted but still holding back his touch. His nager communicated his desire very clearly, but there was no hint of coercion in him.
For all his Distect philosophy, she knew at core he was a Tecton Donor, and a nonHouseholder at that. He was inviting her for only one night, because he was attracted. If I'd met him before I met Shanlun, I wouldn 't have thought twice about saying yes. I have to try to live as if Shanlun never existed. And this man–is very special.
"Yuan—"
"It will be good for you, too. You're not a channel. It wouldn't hurt you to go a few months without sex. But, Laneff, you're Sime, and that's a wonderful thing to be. There's no reason to make it less wonderful by ignoring the essence of your being."
An utterly spontaneous smile overcame her. "You make a very strong case, Sosectu ambrov Rior."
At her assent, he bent down and kissed her with delicate passion.
CHAPTER 6
DISTECT TRANSFER
"I've always wondered what he's like in bed," said Jarmi wistfully, her eyes fixed on Laneff and her nager glowing with admiration.
Laneff was sitting with Jarmi in the cafeteria. Over the last two days, she'd overheard a number of comments about how unusual it was for Yuan to take any member of Rior to bed. Most of the women were wondering what she had that they lacked, but Jarmi seemed to know. Laneff wished she knew, too.
"He's an expert," replied Laneff, burying her nose in her trin tea glass. "I suppose, anyway."
"You mean after all that you didn't—" Jarmi whispered.
Suddenly reminding herself of her original suspicion that Jarmi had to be Yuan's spy, Laneff asked, "Should we be gossiping about the Sosectu?"