“I’m so sorry.” It sounded useless, saying that over and over. She had lost only her parents and that had torn apart her world. She couldn’t imagine what it would be like to lose most of a large family.
He walked away, across the room. Bathed in pale light from the Far Moon and the aurora borealis, he climbed the dais. Then he turned to face her. “I’m a good farmer. You want crops with better yields? Bi-hoxen that can better survive your winters? I can work it out. That’s what I wrote my doctorate on, the application of genetic engineering to crop and livestock development. I’ve had Morlin running DNA simulations here.”
“I don’t understand what you’re trying to tell me,” she said.
“Farming.” He stood in the moonlight like a statue, the planes of his chest stark in the colorless radiance that filled the room. “I’ve always loved it. You know where I got that? From my father. He loved the land. And he loved us. His children.” His voice broke. “At least I was there when he died.”
She went to him then, joining him on the dais. Gently she said, “How did it happen?”
He rubbed his palm over his cheek, seeming surprised to find tears there. “Old age. Old wounds.” Dropping his hand, he said, “My father spent his last days with his family, in our family house, on our home world. The Allied military let us have that much.”
“Allied?”
“The Allied Worlds of Earth.” Bitter now, he said, “They were ‘kind’ enough to let us live in our own homes. Of course, Earth now controls the entire planet where we live.”
“Earth? I don’t understand.”
“I told you this afternoon. Our ‘allies’ betrayed us. They won’t let my family go.” In a quieter voice he said, “They believe that without my family to power the Ruby machines, ISC won’t risk another war. Earth fears that otherwise my people and the Traders will destroy civilization, the way the Ruby Empire was destroyed, five thousand years ago.”
“But if you were their prisoner, how are you here now?”
“None of my family could get offworld.”
“But you’re here.”
He looked away from her, out the window across the room. “Do you know what my father’s dying wish was? His gruesome dying wish? That his coffin be launched into orbit around the planet.”
“Orbit?”
“Above the sky.”
“Like the moons?”
“Like the moons. He wanted to be a moon.”
“But why? If he valued the land—”
“He loved it. The land. The harvest. The seasons.” Vyrl turned back to her. “Going into orbit terrified him.”
“But you said he asked to go there.”
“That’s what he told our jailors.” A muscle in his cheek jerked. “We held his true funeral in secret, to do what he told my mother he really wanted. We cremated his body and spread the ashes over his land.” He swallowed. “Then my family took his coffin to the starport.”
“Why, if he wasn’t in it?”
“The Allieds didn’t know that. There was a body, one their sensors registered as his.”
She stiffened. “No.”
He went on, inexorable. “Our family physician on Lyshriol was an ISC agent. He installed an intravenous system inside the coffin to feed me. Made the coffin vacuum tight. So I could breathe. Put in a web system to deceive probes. I weigh more than my father, so he streamlined everything. Same for the web, not because of weight, but to minimize the risk of detection. It didn’t even have a voice mod for conversation. He didn’t want to use drugs in an unmonitored environment, but finally he agreed to sedate me, so I wouldn’t get claustrophobic.” His voice cracked. “It would only be for one day, after all.”
“They buried you alive?”
Flatly he said, “My mother made a heartbroken plea to our jailors. Said she couldn’t bear to think of her husband in that cold wasteland. In compassion for the beautiful bereaved widow, they agreed to let an ISC ship recover his casket from space. In honor of his wishes, it would spend one day in orbit, and then ISC would make the pickup.” He paused. “By the time I awoke from sedation, I would be safe on the Ascendant.”
Relief poured over Kamoj. “It was a trick! To get you away from your enemies. And it worked.”
“Yes. It worked.” His cheek twitched. “With just one little glitch.”
“Glitch?”
“An Allied bureaucrat stalled the pickup.” In a quiet voice, he added, “No one told my family. The Allieds didn’t want to upset them. But minutes after the launch, someone somewhere along the line changed his mind and said they wouldn’t give up the body.”
Kamoj felt as if her stomach dropped. “No.”
“Don’t look so grim.” He flexed his fist, jerkily opening and closing his hand. “Negotiations to recover the body began even before I woke up.”
“You woke up inside the coffin?”
“Yes.”
Kamoj tried to imagine it, buried alive, with only a box separating you from the sky and stars, knowing something had gone terribly wrong, that you were here when you should have been there, safe and free.
Vyrl swallowed. “Do you know what ‘sensory deprivation’ means? No sound. No sight. No taste. No smell. No weight. After a while I couldn’t even feel the inside of the coffin. And my mind—I couldn’t—as a telepath, I need to be close to people to pick up anything. My mind opened up, searching for anyone. Anything. Anything. I was wide open and there was nothing.”
“How long?” she whispered.
The brittle edge of his voice broke. “Thirty-one days. When the team on the Ascendant finally got me out, I was screaming, raving insane.”
Kamoj had no idea what to say. No words would take away this horror, no touch heal it.
“Don’t look so dismayed,” he said. “They took care of me. Treated me. Hell, it even helped. To a point.” His head jerked. “But the psiber centers in my brain went dead. ISC got their precious Ruby psion, but they broke him in the process. Turned me into a crippled telepath.” He swallowed. “Except when I sleep. Then my mind opens up like in the coffin. But this isn’t space. People are all around. So I go into telepathic overload. If they isolate me and I can’t pick up anything, I start to scream again.” Dully he added, “And every time Dazza sedates me, all I can think is that I’ll wake up in that coffin.”
“There must be some cure—something—”
“The rum deadens my brain. It lets me sleep.”
She took his hands. “Surely some other solution exists. Can’t Dazza and her people help you?”
“They can all go to hell.”
“But—”
His voice hardened. “Two people on the Ascendant knew my father’s body wasn’t in that coffin: the special operations officer assigned to the mission and General Ashman, the ship’s commander. They could have ended it any time by revealing that a living man was out there. ISC would have lost me back to the Allieds, but I would have been free from that nightmare.” His fists clenched. “They wanted me any way they could get me, and to the hell with my sanity.”
“Hai, Vyrl.” She thought she understood now, both his pain and the desperation that drove his military to such an extreme. Gently she said, “When did you start to feel thoughts again?”
“With you.” With an obvious effort, he relaxed his hands. “You’re wide open to me, water sprite. I felt it that day I saw you in the river.”
Kamoj remembered Dazza’s face when the doctor had realized Vyrl was picking up his bride’s thoughts. Joy. Hope. Elation. All signs of a healer whose patient had begun a recovery she feared would never happen.