"Jacqueline Lichtenberg - Sime Gen 10 - The Channel's Exemption" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lichtenberg Jacqueline)

Originally published in "Galileo" #4.
This electronic edition done with permission of Jacqueline Lichtenberg.

THE CHANNEL'S EXEMPTION
by Jacqueline Lichtenberg
Look at you! Yone Farris berated himself. You can'teven take your eyes off her! To his left
and a few stridesahead marched Livya Jeter, her pony tail bobbing over the tantalizingswell of her
hips. You've got a full scale Imprintation ifever I saw one!
For the last three months, Yone Farris had guided the band ofshipwrecked Gens, his mutant
Sime senses unfailingly alert. Butnow, he no longer noticed the sun-spackled forest around
them,or the ominous cracking roar that grew ahead of them. Stopdramatizing! he told himself.
It's simply Coital Deprivation.
The column of ordinary humans, the Gens, depending on Yone's far-reachingSime senses,
followed him right up under the falling tree whilehe argued with himself. So why don't any of the
other women dothis to you? Well ... but if it's Imprintation, there's onlyone thing to do. Right!
Explain it to her and get it over with. Can't. She's a Sime-phobe like her mother. Dozen reasons
whyshe's untouchable. Face it! You've got the CD's and an Imprintationtoo. Plead Channel's
Exemption and just take her! It doesn'tapply. She's under age. She doesn't have to consent.
You'rea channel. You're exempt. There isn't a planet under Earth'sdominion where you can be
tried for rape! You can do it rightthis minute. No! Few more months and we'll be back in
civilization. I can hold out that long.
Yone tried to quell the voice of temptation by moving closer toBrian Inikar, one of the Gens
walking point, but close, Imprintationis the channel's affliction. You were born a channel, a
specialkind of Sime with special problems. You can't help what you are! I can always help it! I
am what I choose to be! You can't alwayschoose. What if she just brushed against you now? It's
not likeselyn need. I can control it. Yeah. You can control yourselfright into an early grave and
everybody else here right alongwith you!
At that point he saw the shadow blotting out the alien sun, andsimultaneously the Gens around
him also looked up to see the wallof living wood majestically descending. Behind him, shrill
crieserupted from the children; women's screams joined them, and thedeeper male voices rose
over the panic yelling, "Scatter!"
Without thinking, Yone grabbed Brian Inikar and pushed him towardthe column of Gens. "Move
them to the right!"
Then Yone braced his feet wide apart and raised his arms as ifto take the entire weight of the tree
on his bare hands.
Yone was built like the typical Sime, spare-framed, delicate looking,but incredibly tough. Yet no
mere human flesh and bone, howevermutated, could stop that tree. He had to draw on the one
thingthat differentiated him from the Gens, and he was the only Simeamong them, the only one
with tentacles to do this job.
From the orifices at each wrist, he extended the six tentaclesthat usually lay sheathed along each
of his forearms from elbowto wrist. Flexing them, he touched the tips of his fingers witheach of
the dorsal and ventral pairs. Then the two slender lateralsat the sides of each arm stiffened as he
threw selyn -- the veryenergy of life itself -- into his secondary nervous system andout through
the four nerve-rich lateral tentacles.
It felt as if he were focusing four beams of psychokinetic powerthrough those delicate laterals.
And for an instant, the treeactually slowed in its fall and hung over their heads. He couldsee the
deep, regular expansion cracks in the bark, the festoonsof dirty cobwebs, the trails of insects, the
runnels of drippingpink sap. It was a wall that filled the universe.
His feet sank into the matted forest floor as if it were loosesand. He strengthened his body by
consuming selyn at one hundredtimes his basal metabolic rate, a "tenth level Augmentation,"and