In her gut, she knew one would deliver the satisfaction she craved. The other would not. Which? Choose! they commanded. But which?
Equally intense, two ruddy gold hearth fires vied for her favor. One was pure Genness laced with familiar overtones that told her of an understanding of her need. The other was like the Donors here, throbbing with compassion verging on pity. Pure Gen knew what was being asked of her, and was confident she could do it. The other, groping blind, only hoped.
A viciousness that shamed her rose. I could make Groping Blind pity himself! I could make him give me egobliss!
She looked at the viciousness pouring up into her, knew it for a part of herself she had never acknowledged before, and thought, I don't have to be this way.
PureGen knew that about her, as he knew it about himself. She chose to let the lifeline of PureGen pull her into a full contact. She took the selyn offered, clumsy with greedy haste, laving her insides with warmth and life. It came fast as she could desire, sensitive and clean, washing through her with bright delight as only a Gen could experience it. Each dynopter of selyn pulsing through her carried that bottomless Gen attitude toward life modulated by ineffable relief from the strain of need.
That modulation soaked into her own nerves, and the shrieking alarm of need was stilled, the jangle of urgencies faded and was gone.
She found herself lip to lip with warm flesh. Her tentacles were held securely by matching tentacles. Channel! As it came to her that PureGen was in fact a channel, a Sime not a Gen, the woman released her, dismantling the contact gently while a ferocious grin transformed her face. A Farris face. A Farris channel she hadn't met before.
Blinking in the bright light, stunned by what had happened, Laneff heard the woman introduce herself and her Donor, the GropingBlind she had rejected. "Congratulations on your disjunction. You'll never need for a Gen again."
The horror of the nightmare returned full force as she woke, the taste of satisfaction still on her nerves and the emptiness of need cramping her guts. The dreamed satisfaction only raised intil, leaving her sweating and shaking as she remembered the lab, the Distect, and her last-ditch effort to make her life's work mean something.
She rolled on her side, curling up against the familiar craving for killbliss, wiping out the easing channel's touch had once given her. In mourning that loss, all she could produce was a sort of coughing bark halfway between a laugh and a sob. The pain of wanting to cry and being unable to swamped out the need for selyn just long enough for her to sit up and calm herself with the breathing techniques she had thought forgotten.
Jarmi arrived at dawn while Laneff was once again going over her notebook to make sure nothing had been left out. "What are you doing?" asked Jarmi. "Got a new idea?"
Laneff closed the cloth-bound book, clasped it to her chest. "Jarmi, I've got to have transfer now. I'm dangerous like this."
The smile transformed! the rather plain woman's face. "At last! I thought you'd never be ready!"
She went with Jarmi back to the room they shared now. Laneff had been there so seldom she hardly knew the way. She paid no attention to the twists and turns, for her mind was busy reviewing her decision. Her only other choice was Yuan, and now that she'd had a new taste of the sort of need she'd suffered during disjunction and then been protected from all these years, she knew that with the infinitely imperturbable field of the higher-order Donor, she would not achieve enough satisfaction to keep her from yearning after every other passing Gen. With Jarmi, match-on to herself, there was a good chance. This way, I'll be safe for a month.
Her decision made finally, Laneff looked around Jarmi's room as if she'd never seen it before. Years of accumulated clutter gave the place character. Woven reed matting, as everywhere else in the installation, provided padding from the tile floors. Handmade needlework adorned the walls. Wicker shelves held books, heaps of file folders, speakers for her sound system, and an assortment of personal-care items. Between the beds, a double pad of mats was cleared and equipped for weightlifting and exercise.
Laneff took a shower while Jarmi tidied up and gathered the laundry. In her bathrobe, Laneff came out, toweling her hair. "I had a pair of pink slacks and an ivory shirt."
"You wore that four days ago, remember? It got splashed with tomato soup."
Laneff remembered, and the realization she had nothing to wear was overwhelming. She dropped onto the bed she used, despairing.
"Never mind," said Jarmi cheerfully. "I can rinse out your cream-and-maroon skirt, and you can wear it with the ivory shirt."
"Shuven! I'd look like somebody from Householding Juanatec!"
"Nonsense. They don't have any Farrises!" chided Jarmi.
"The point is I don't have anything to go out in now!" With overcrowding, they had rationed laundry, too.
"Go out?" asked Jarmi, bewildered.
Exasperation lent an edge to her voice, and Laneff let herself shout, "To wherever they do transfer around here!"
"There's no transfer suite here. Anyway, what's wrong with right here? I don't have a transfer lounge like your room did. But people did without for centuries . . ."
With that, she moved to Laneff's side and, grabbing pillows from the other bed, she edged onto the bed. The bed sagged under the plump Gen's weight. With a few deft moves, the Gen had Laneff propped against a heap of pillows, one pillow under her knees to simulate the contours of a proper lounge for complete relaxation..
By some alchemy, Jarmi seized as firm control of the selyn fields as she had done of their physical situation. She laid her hands about Laneff’s wrists very lightly.
The wrist orifices, Sensitized by ronaplin, seemed to feel every pore in the Gen's skin. Her tentacles ached, licking at the orifices, searching for the Gen skin. Laneff gasped, unable to deny the raging intil that seized her. But Jarmi firmly denied them emergence, with both field and grip.
Laneff hung at the peaking wave of need until Jarmi stroked Laneff’s forearms, her fingers massaging the ronaplin glands that lay just under the lateral tentacles and fed the selyn-conducting hormone into the lateral sheaths. Tenderly, Jarmi massaged those four glands, sending ineffable sensation throughout Laneff’s body, relaxation and intil together in wave after wave.
Laneff heard her own whispered groans, felt saliva flood her mouth, ronaplin oozing from her lateral orifices. In moments, Jarmi had Laneff’s ronaplin smeared all over her arms.
Hyperconscious, zlinning only, in the Sime's hunting mode which conferred strength and speed beyond imagining, Laneff was keenly aware of everything about her, a predator primed for the kill. Yet the imperturbable Gen nager held her in thrall. Her will to take was swamped out by the Gen's self-absorption in pleasure.
Totally helpless, Laneff tried to convince her rioting glands that she wasn't about to die in attrition this moment. Unsuccessful, she had to wait in mounting terror of death while Jarmi slowly secured the fifth contact point. For one stretched instant, Jarmi held back the selyn flow, and Laneff had time to think in shock, She's got my ronaplin on her lips!
Then selyn was pouring into her at need-slaking speed. She struggled to take control, to draw selyn herself, but Jarmi wouldn't permit it. The Gen forced selyn into Laneff, selyn full of bright, bubbling laughter, sheer joy in the discovery of life. The ebullient spirit of the Gen impressed the selyn with her personality.
Irrepressible delight coursed through Laneff, warring with the roused predator's instinct that commanded, Take life! The riptide of emotion lasted only an instant. With so little selyn to transfer, and such a high speed, the experience was abnormally brief, abnormally intense.