ESIMIR SAT BY Hinano1’s bedside in the vivification lab. The chamber resembled a hospital room, intentionally so. It was of small, human dimensions, just large enough for the med bed, monitors, working staff. And the subject.
Hinano1 slept now, a mature clone grown to match her Prime’s physical age. Over the last weeks the corpus had been eased from a slack, vegetative state to one of fitness by a tensor regimen that put vat-grown muscles through a routine workout. The brain was successfully imprinted with one of three personality constructs parsed by Prevak and scribed by nanoneurals. All that remained was to imbue the clone with the spark of ensoulment that would rouse her from her comatose slumber.
Terel and others monitored Hinano1’s data flow from outside this room. Two security guards with stun guns kept watch outside the door, ready to step in at a shout from the bioempath. Esimir doubted he would need them; his eyes lingered on the hospital restraints that tethered the clone’s wrists to the bed frame. It was a necessary precaution, learned the hard way when the first convict subject had awoken and launched himself out of the bed in a murderous rage. His fingers had locked around the doctor’s throat and choked Esimir half unconscious before the guards could pry him loose.
They had never taken that risk again during an Awakening.
Esimir leaned forward. He placed his left hand on the crown of the clone’s head. At Ilanya’s order, her hair was no longer its natural tawny color, but white again, and styled as it had been on the Prime. He would have mistaken this clone for the original, but for the lack of minor lines around mouth and eyes that his trained eyes knew to look for. He felt the warmth of her beneath his hand and breathed out, slowly, relaxing into that space that opened him to his higher powers. Then he focused his eyes to see with the other-sight that was the learned skill of a bioempath.
He was within the aura of his subject, a subdued and meager field at this moment. His hand was awash with the glow of lavender light that radiated from her crown, from the region called the Gate of Heaven in ancient times. Down the length of her body other points of energy glowed with their own radiance, a sprinkling of gem-colored embers from head to toe.
Seven of these major energy centers, the lau-dan, punctuated a human being from groin to top of head, along with many minor power points and energy meridians that ran throughout the body. He saw them now as tracery within her aura and in her physical body. The lau centers were the most vibrant: colored vortices along the spinal meridian, channeling energy into and out of her physical form. It was a human’s connection with the infinite made visible. Along the highest of these pathways, a piece of Hinano’s soul would find its way back into this body.
Esimir exhaled, his eyes fluttering shut, and extended his senses through his hand. He felt the clone’s somnolence, then quested out along the crown lau-dan into that space beyond the body where energy frequencies shifted upscale into the invisible and the infinite.
The bioempath dropped into a trance state, blood pressure dropping, the beat of his heart slowing to a glacial pace. He aligned his energies with the clone’s and sent a part of himself elsewhere along the lau-dan path.
If she were an accident victim lying in a coma, he would will the spark of consciousness that belonged here to return from its errant travels and take up residence again in the sleeping shell that was its home. He did something similar now. Hinano was not in a coma born of injury, but in a state of repose never yet enlivened by the vibrance of a soul. And yet this body shared energy ties with its kin: with the Prime that was its origin, with its crèche-mates, with the collective energy that all humankind were part of.
Somewhere out there, a spark did await to house itself in this physicality. Was it a part of the Prime? A related soul fragment? Could one person be ensouled in many bodies at once? Such philosophical questions had occupied Esimir once on Corvus, but he had no definitive answers to them. What he knew was that a call and a focused will could pierce the ether like a beacon and lead back to the body that divine spark that wanted to inhabit it.
That was what he did now. He became a conduit, a lighted path from the beyond to the body that rested beneath his hand. His world became one of sensation, of the tingle of Hinano’s bioelectric field, the vibration of her basal aura, his senses flowing out through the Gate of Heaven to some disincarnate sphere where energy vibrated in the ether like a plucked chord.
Something that resonated with that chord was drawn to that tone and came flowing, like a single glissading note, down scale, down frequency, down the lau-dan channel, and into the body.
He felt the flare of her aura, heard her sigh as her energy shifted. Like a man in a dream he opened his heavy-lidded eyes, saw her looking up at him.
Her expression was one of confusion. Her eyes searched his face, knowing him, not remembering—yet—the context for that knowledge.
Esimir took his hand from her head, drawing power back into himself, severing connections created to serve the moment. Tired. Always tired, immediately after the Awakening. He smiled. “Ferris will care for you,” he said, “and I will see you later.”
He stood, turned his weary body away. In the doorway he paused. He heard Hinano fighting her restraints behind him.
He left without another word.
NO MORE EXPERIMENTS, Kes told herself. I don’t care what arrangements the Eosan made, and they can add this to my contract-debt if they want. I’ve had it with this place.
She yanked again at the tethers that held her wrists to the bed frame. Finally the anger she had suppressed towards the meddling doctor had boiled to the surface. This was a hard one, this awakening—they must have drugged her. Things weren’t coming clear right away. Not her thoughts, not her eyesight. She felt lightheaded. Metmuri, the first bleary thing perceived upon opening her eyes, was not a welcome sight, and it had set her blood to boiling right away. She did not want to be at his mercy anymore, nor in his laboratories.
I want out. And I’m getting out, one way or another.
She made an effort to calm herself, to breathe deeply like in a laufre exercise, seeking her power and her center. It was pointless to waste her energy fighting a bedstead when what she wanted to do was slug the doctor and walk right out of here. They had said the testing was done. They had no reason to stop her from walking to the parking dome—she could help herself to a car and be gone before anyone noticed. How to get free enough to do that required some thought, though, and her thoughts were not coming together yet.
She heard the door open, footsteps come in. She noted her pulse beating faster with near clinical detachment. Her muscles tensed. If it was Metmuri, she doubted she could restrain herself. If it was anyone else—
“Kes?”
The voice was familiar from daily encounters. Eva. She opened her eyes, blinked the red-headed woman into focus. She stood by one side of her bed, Teo, her ever-present companion, on the other.
“How are you?” Eva asked.
Kes tried to answer, coughed, and swallowed down a dry throat before she could speak. “Not right.” Her voice sounded rusty, disused. Strange to her ears. “Want out.”
Eva nodded, patted her hand. “Can you sit up?”
Kes jerked her right wrist; the restraints would not permit her to sit upright. Ilanya nodded to Teo; the pair bent to the tethers and soon freed her arms. She tried to sit up; fell back. Eva propped her up with an arm around her shoulders.
“Weak…” Kes mumbled, discontent with herself and everything in her world at that moment. She felt like she had just woken from an unnaturally deep sleep and was not yet back in her body. Her limbs were heavy, and her body felt unresponsive.
Eva nodded in understanding. “You need to move around. You’ve been in bed for far too long.”
How long was that? She could not muster the energy to ask.
“Come. We’ll help you to your room. Wouldn’t hurt if you could walk the distance. Can you try that?”
Kes gave a noncommittal shrug. They helped her to her feet, gave her slippers; Teo held a robe for her as she lifted lead-heavy arms and slipped into the sleeves.
Shuffling, then, with a gait like an old woman, Kes left the medical room with Eva and Teo by her side.
KESADA LAID QUIETLY in her hospital bed, trying to make sense of her situation. Wrists, restrained: they feared she would hurt herself, then, or hurt one of them. Metmuri had smiled more warmly upon her than he had in the past, then left without a comment. Would he be back? Would someone else?
Questions with no answers flitted through her head. Some part of her wanted to worry over this, get every bit of nuance out of this situation. But it was so hard to marshal her thoughts.
No point in fighting it right now, she told herself. I’ll find out soon enough what they’re up to. Meanwhile, I can use the rest.
She felt drained, exhausted, uncomfortable in every muscle. When she shifted her legs, muscles ached in response to her command to move, as if she had run a marathon and fatigued them beyond recall. Her whole body felt that way. How long had she been out, anyway? Her thoughts were confused, and that was unsettling. She wanted order in her internal dialog, but words and concepts would not stay strung together long enough to make sense of anything.
Sleep. Maybe she just needed to sleep.…
KESI DIDN’T LIKE seeing Metmuri first thing upon awakening, but thankfully he left right away. She didn’t trust that man. She feared him, a little. Well, more than a little. He could hurt her—worse, hurt her unintentionally, like a bug crushed underfoot. She seemed to have that much weight with him.
Tears clouded her eyes as the distress and anxiety she had ignored all these many weeks welled to the surface. Did Eosan Bejmet have any idea what hell she’d sent her shigasa into? Did Helda? Did they care? She thought they did—she was an investment, at the very least, and Helda cared for her in her limited way. And was Morya worried about her? Oh, to be held by her right now, and comforted, and told this ordeal was over, how wonderful that would be.…
Tears leaked from her eyes. She blinked them away. It wouldn’t do to seem too emotional, but she couldn’t help it. She wanted to go home, and she was feeling sorry for herself, too sorry.
I hate it when you get like this, Kesi berated herself. You can have a good cry when you’re back in the privacy of your room. Right now someone’s probably watching you on a monitor. How embarrassing to have them see you cry. So just stop it. Besides, if Commander Kolo never lost it in the desert wastes of Baku, you don’t need to lose it in the jungles outside Lessing, now do you?
She snorted a laugh at herself. Cheap net heroics wouldn’t help, but they did put this in perspective. This, too, would pass, and she would get out of here soon, get back home … and put her foot down to Helda about outside work. Never again. And if they pushed her, what a fit she would throw. She couldn’t afford to leave Palumara House yet, but she could make life miserable for everyone if they pushed her.…
The thought kept her mind off of Metmuri, and that suited her fine as she drifted off to sleep.