CHAPTER 2

FUNERAL

From her vantage in the visitors' box, Laneff watched Simes and Gens throng into Householding Square. Most of them, men and women both, wore formal capes displaying their Householding colors. All around the edges of the square, the banners of the Houses were on display, flapping in the brisk spring wind, illumined by the rising sun.

The riotous splashes of colors divided around the granite statue of the legendary Rimon Farris, mounted on his horse. For this occasion, a Zeor-blue cloak had been draped around his shoulders and over the flanks of the horse. Rimon, as father of the first Householdings, was claimed as member by all Houses, so no one was offended by the blue today.

Laneff’s place was to the right of the podium which barred the gate to the old Householding Cemetery. Elaborate displays of flowers hid the raw wood of the stage. Mairis and Shanlun were already taking their place at the center of the podium, surrounded by blue-cloaked dignitaries of the House of Zeor, those who ran the vast corporate network of businesses owned by Zeor, those who administered the education of Zeor's children, and those who held rank by virtue of skill as channels or Donors.

Across from Laneff, on the other side of the podium, a roped-off area held the children and attending members of Zeor, a blindingly brilliant field of blue cloaks. Beside and behind Laneff, there was a sprinkling of blue, renSimes who were members of Zeor but now in need.

The guards stationed at short intervals around Laneff s end of the visitors' box were all high-order Donors or channels, most of them members of Zeor. But one Gen in particular, who seemed intent on Laneff alone, was not wearing any Householding affiliation. He paced and paused with an awkward self-consciousness before the front-center seat that had been assigned to Laneff.

When Digen's coffin was brought through the Gate behind the Zeor member's box and solemnly installed among the flowers on the podium, Laneff had to adjust the attenuators she wore to maximum, despite the horrid sensory distortion. Again, she was glad she hadn't eaten. Her peculiarly sensitive nervous system never would be able to accept the attenuators. The renSimes on either side of her were wearing attenuator rings tuned to maximum and seemed perfectly comfortable.

At last Mairis was handed a microphone wand and took his place beside a table on which various items were laid out. The public address system came to life with a drum roll, and the bell-like twang of a shiltpron plucked in the call to mourn. The crowd silenced, but the nager intensified with gut-wrenching bereavement. Many of them had known Digen personally, taken transfer from him when he was channeling, or worked with him when he was World Controller. We were all sure he'd recover this time, too. He seemed immortal.

Mairis, braced by Shanlun's nager, spoke calmly into the microphone. "Digen Ryan Farris, Sectuib in Zeor for the last one hundred sixteen years, is dead."

The inchoate emotions focused to a piercing sense of permanent loss. Ihate funerals! thought Laneff, struggling to keep her awareness hypoconscious, to block out her Sime senses so she wouldn't drown in the emotions of others when her own tears were blocked by the deadening pall of need.

"My great grandfather," said Mairis, his voice low and intimate, "who held the office of World Controller a record six times in his life, is dead. An era has come to an end."

Beyond the far end of the podium, ranks of television cameras scanned the crowd for grieving faces. She knew some of them would be focusing on her, and she fought not to let her rising nausea distort her expression. The renSimes beside her sensed her discomfort and edged as far away as they could to give her breathing room.

She tried to concentrate on the nager of the Donor who paced before her. Prom the massive pull of his nager, she deduced he had to be a First Order Donor like Shanlun, but he was otherwise un-remarkable. Reddish-blond hair framed his unweathered face. Gingery eyebrows and mustache matched his pale freckles. He wore a floppy-brimmed hat as sun protection, and a serviceable gray suit.

As he turned, his ever wandering eyes chanced to meet hers, and he smiled. His face lit and his nager glowed with an instant friendliness that wiped all trace of self-consciousness away. She inched forward in her chair and said, "Could you stop pacing? It's making me nauseated."

Chagrined, he nodded and planted his feet firmly, positioning himself between Laneff and her neighbor, a woman wearing a House-holding Frihill cloak.

With the rippling in the fields tamed, Laneff turned her attention back to Mairis.". . . and in the last hundred years, under the leadership of Digen Farris, the world has started to move once again toward the dream of our ancestors who founded the Householdings, the union of the two halves of the human race, Sime and Gen. Never again will there be a nation in which only Simes are citizens and Gens are bred and raised in pens like cattle."

On the periphery of Laneff s awareness, to her right and out in the sea of now-still bodies, there was a movement. A large silver-painted van with a broadcast camera on its roof was creeping toward the visitors' box, parting the crowd by inexorable force. Two Gens on the roof wrestled with a huge old camera, panning the long snout of a sunshade from Mairis to where Laneff sat. Why aren 't they confined to the press zone? Most of the cameras in the press zone which was carved out of the crowd in front of the statue were aimed at Mairis now.

"Seven hundred years ago," Mairis continued, "Rimon Farris discovered he could take selyn from any Gen and give it to a Sime in need so the Sime didn't have to kill to live. He became the first channel. Two hundred thirty-two years ago, Klyd Farris founded the Modern Tecton, built on the foundations provided by the Householdings and their channels and Companions, but designed to encompass every living Sime. That was a mere beginning. Over the last century, the face of civilization has changed.

"When Digen Farris was a child, the world controllership was just being created. When he took over as Sectuib in Zeor, nobody could place a telephone call across a Territory border. He was the first Sime ever to go to school out-Territory. When he was a young man, all the Tecton's Donors were trained by channels, a method so inefficient it caused the infamous Donor Shortage.

"That was in the year one thirty-two, a full century ago. Is there anyone here who remembers that time?"

The anguish of the crowd began to give way to a sense of wonder at all that had been accomplished during one man's lifetime. The blond Gen guard, too, was caught up in it, and that drew Laneff duoconscious, aware of the full range of Sime senses as well as her ordinary senses. The blond Gen's nager paled to insignificance beside Shanlun's pyrotechnic vibrancy, a shell of positive energy that Shanlun threw around Mairis to protect him from the ambient of the crowd.

Mairis put one arm around Shanlun's shoulders. Despite attenuators and the wall of trained Donors who surrounded the low-field box with protection, she perceived how the two nagers blended in harmony. She tried to force herself to breathe evenly. But even from this distance, every nerve in her body remembered that moment in the rotunda and resonated to the barest hint of it that seeped through to her now, activating need again.

It wasn't the magnitude of Shanlun's nager that was his strongest attraction to her. It was the quality. I'd love that man even if he was Sime."... and channels still depend on our Donors. But now there are enough such Donors. It's a profession entered not just by Companions from the Householdings but by many children raised by Simes in-Territory, and also by Gens raised by Gens out-Territory."