Stewards of the Flame (20 page)

“Carla, love’s more important than training. It overrides, always! Not all newcomers fall in love, but when it happens, it’s much better than the other way.” Peter turned back to her. “But you must be willing. And I must know now, from the start, whether Jesse can count on your help.”

“I’m scared of being swamped by memories, Peter. If that happened at the wrong moment, I could hurt him.”

“Yes, emotionally, just as his own deep-seated fears may hurt you. Yet if the love is real, you’ll get past that. Would he be better off with someone who cares less for him?”

There’d been only one way she could answer. Yet so much would hinge on her strength, not only their love, but Jesse’s entire future! His whole outlook toward the powers of his mind . . . and perhaps, Peter had implied, some unique destiny beyond the commitment required of them all. . . .

“He won’t see why we have to wait,” she’d said sadly. Jesse had made love with women in the world outside; his expectations of sex would be different from hers. For that reason she must hold back from him. Any premature union between them would be disastrous.

“But when the time comes,” Peter had reminded her, “he’ll know it was worth waiting for.”

The waiting, she now realized, was going to be hard.

~
 
21
 
~

Jesse’s lab training session wasn’t scheduled until evening—he learned that when not reserved by Peter, the lab was in constant use by others, not only for advanced training, but for games of some sort. The experienced people lined up to go on dual with each other; matching mind-patterns was a popular form of recreation. He didn’t ask what sort of altered states they were playing with. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know.

By noon he longed for action. Anything, even something risky like a rescue mission or retrieval of a body for burial in the bay. It would be easier than sitting around pretending to relax.

Greg, sensing his mood, suggested a scuba dive. “We’ll go to a place you haven’t seen,” he said, “one we keep secret from outsiders.”

In the boat, getting into his gear, Jesse found to his dismay that he was nervous. The old apprehension about deep water was returning—but that was nonsense! He’d done plenty of swimming by now and was gaining proficiency.

He was paired with Kira; the others had already submerged. “Jesse,” she said as he went into the water, “diving may seem different from before, when Peter was supporting you.”

Jesse held onto the gunwale with one hand, lifting his mask to reply. “He wasn’t supporting me after the first few minutes.”

“I mean he was supporting you telepathically, as he did much of the time during your feedback sessions—for which the diving was a trial run.”

He drew breath, trying to absorb this information. “The others know only that you’re relatively inexperienced and they’ll need to keep an eye on you,” Kira went on. “I can help the way Peter did, but I won’t unless it’s necessary. We’ll be making a long swim, then going into an underwater cave.”

“I should never have needed that kind of help,” Jesse said, embarrassed.

“Yes, you should. We deliberately put trainees in situations where they do need it, because only under the spur of emotion can new mind powers be learned. Including receptiveness to telepathic support, which is essential to the more advanced ones.” She smiled encouragingly. “Your fear of water was a lucky break for us—confrontations with the phobias some newcomers have are harder to set up.”

I can’t believe I’m hearing this, Jesse thought. From a woman over a hundred years old, about to plunge underwater with her on a planet I never heard of till a few weeks ago? The sense of unreality that had plagued him these past two days was stronger than ever. What the hell, he decided. Just go with the flow.

He replaced the mask and dove, Kira after him. The water in previous dive areas had been clear, offering a full view of Undine’s weird, primitive sea life. But here it was murky; Greg, ahead of him, carried a torch. Jesse focused on following it, trying not to be aware of anything else. Not to think of the mass of water over him, the bottom below, the bodies buried there—but no, not below him, for in the boat they had come far from the burial site. He breathed steadily, imagining the mask and air gauge as part of a spacesuit. Then all at once he recalled,
don’t resist the fear. Let it come. It’s supposed to come. . . .
After some time, the sensation of water around him became quite pleasant.

Kira guided him through the underwater cave entrance. To his surprise, they broke surface and swam into shallows. Their torches shone on rocks sloping up out of the water, onto which they climbed. Further on, no torches were needed. Pulling off his mask, Jesse followed Greg and Michelle, wondering why the darkness wasn’t total. As they rounded a boulder and came into the main room of the cavern, he saw a shaft of light from high above. It came from the sky, as, he realized, did air.

Jesse looked around him. Kira knelt at a low ledge of some kind, fumbling with a battery-powered lamp that was evidently kept here. All of a sudden it flared into bluish brilliance. The wall over it was illuminated, revealing a pyramid of painted words with letters too small for him to make out. A list of some kind? Names? Yes, certainly, Jesse thought. This was a memorial; it couldn’t be anything else.

“You are now in the only cemetery on this world,” said Greg. “Or the closest equivalent, anyway. Everyone ever buried in this colony is listed here, except for a few who were destroyed in accidents. They’re in the bay, where it’s deep, where we can’t reach the bottom. It is a better place for them than the Vaults.”

God, Jesse thought, everyone . . . yet the list was not very long. These were the only people who had escaped the stasis vaults, the only ones whose bodies were totally dead! He had been told, but it had not really penetrated until now.

“What if some intruder finds the vent and lowers a rope down here?” he asked.

“They won’t. The Island is off-limits to trespassers, but just in case, the shaft’s booby-trapped—it will collapse if it’s ever disturbed.”

Michelle was opening a sealed plastic sack she had carried. It contained not lunch, as he’d supposed, but greenery. She arranged it on the ledge next to the lamp, which was a sort of altar. Kira was still kneeling, deep in thought or perhaps prayer. Michelle stepped back and stood beside him, silently looking up at the names.

“We knew them all,” she said finally. “At least some of us knew each one, because they wouldn’t be here except for us. They were the people in our hospices.”

“Peter’s wife Lesley is among them, too,” Greg added. “She died last year when a sailboat they were in capsized in a freak storm. She was trapped beneath it and drowned before he could get her into the life raft, and then when he wasn’t able to revive her, he had to sink the raft to keep the rescue squad from taking her body. They might have got it breathing even though her brain was dead. So he hung onto a life preserver in that storm for hours, until a search was launched—he’d ditched his phone to explain why he hadn’t called for help before it was too late.”

“Good God,” Jesse murmured. “Are you saying that if they’d known there was a raft, he’d have been accused of murdering her?”

“Oh, yes. He’d have been convicted for sure—especially since the authorities frown on sailing in the first place. Hazardous sports aren’t actually illegal for adults on outlying islands, at least not yet, but people who engage in them are viewed as irresponsible. He’s given up sailing now to keep his job, and the fact that we scuba dive here isn’t mentioned in the city.”

Convicted . . . exactly what, Jesse wondered, might have happened? What was the penalty for murder on a world where all police power was vested in the medical establishment?

Kira rose and came to him, her eyes conveying more than grief. “Jesse,” she said, reading this thought. “You know underneath what’s done to murderers here. Don’t pretend to yourself that you’re uninformed.”

He had known all along, of course. There was only one thing the Meds could do with murderers when crime was viewed as treatable illness. They would use drugs, ostensibly to cure, perhaps sincerely thought to cure—drugs that would damage the brain. It was done elsewhere, routinely, to anyone considered dangerously psychotic. Chemical lobotomy, it was sometimes called. . . .

Peter, a gifted telepath, more skilled in controlling his mind than Jesse himself could yet imagine—those talents depended on the brain. New mind-patterns, new states of consciousness, higher brain functions than orthodox science was even aware of . . . Damage to the brain would be worse for him—for anyone in the Group—than for its usual victims. They risked losing what they most valued . . . just to decently dispose of dead bodies?

“Not just for that,” Kira assured him. “There was no chance of anyone suspecting him when he handled it as he did. Since he can control his body temperature, he wasn’t even in danger of hypothermia. We take risks only for the living, though when they die in our care we’re stuck with bodies to bury.”

But caregiving was not their sole reason for defying the law, Jesse thought. Their primary goal was to use the power of mind.
In order to gain volitional control, you must be wholly, unreservedly willing to lose control—to let what comes, come,
Peter had said. That was true in a larger sense. . . .

He struggled with the idea, unable to fully grasp it. Kira said, “This is the choice the world forces on us. To become all we can be, we risk being totally destroyed. Yet we can’t choose not to, Jesse. We’re human beings, not mere bodies; we can’t live as if we were less. This is what we’re pledged to. This is who we are.”

This is who we are
. . . For the first time thinking of the Group as “we,” not “they,” Jesse let it sink in. He knew he would never go back to Fleet.

~
 
22
 
~

After returning to the boat, they anchored near the shore and opened the lunch box. As he ate, Jesse stared at the bay and the expanse of pale blue above, dazed at the realization that for the first time in his adult life, he’d become a world-dweller. He’d spent his adolescence counting the time till he could get into space, and later, during leaves, he’d sensed nothing worldlike in his surroundings. He’d visited cities, not worlds; once away from their spaceports you couldn’t see more than small patches of sky. To a spacer, worlds were something to observe from orbit. He had never before felt oriented to a planet’s surface. He found that he liked it.

He turned to Kira, more than ever impressed by her incredible agelessness. “How did you get involved in the Group?” he asked.

“Many years ago, when I was a young doctor, I thought I knew how to preserve health,” she told him. “But a time came when I saw that I was wrong.”

“You’re a doctor, Kira?” said Jesse, surprised.

“A cardiologist, yes,” she told him, “though I no longer believe much of what I was taught in medical school. I’ve retired from the Hospital now, but I manage the Group’s healing house and hospices.”

A retired cardiologist capable of such work when over a hundred must know what she was doing, Jesse thought. She was certainly not like the wackos his sister used to hang out with, even if she did claim that mere mental training could affect health.

“I got disillusioned,” Kira went on. “People have searched for the causes of illness century after century, and some specific ones have been found—although not as many as the Meds would have you believe. You’d think that after all this time there would be less illness, wouldn’t you? That especially here, in a colony where genetic disorders have been eliminated by screening of embryos, where contagious disease has been wiped out and even cancer can be cured, that fewer people would get sick than on Earth? But that’s not what has happened. There’s just as much sickness as there ever was, if not more, the same as on Earth—though less of it’s fatal than in the past. As soon as one condition becomes curable, another takes its place. And here, where continuous medical care is not only free but mandatory, there is more illness than in any other colony in the galaxy.”

“Well, that’s not surprising,” Jesse said, “considering that people here are chased around by cops in ambulances aiming to convince them that they’re sick.”

“True, but it’s more complicated than that,” said Greg. “On one hand people are made to worry about their health, yet at the same time this place is too damned safe. Even potentially-risky sports are discouraged—and too little challenge is as stressful as too much. Human beings naturally crave it; on Earth they’re apt to get into trouble by searching for excitement. Here, the craving is simply frustrated. Once our ancestors got past the challenge of pioneering on a new world, there was no legal outlet for it.”

“Our health and safety laws are largely self-defeating,” Kira agreed. “But stress isn’t unique to Undine; it’s the main cause of illness everywhere. Human nature doesn’t change when specific diseases disappear. Science has known the biochemical mechanisms underlying stress responses since before the age of space colonies, and still the Meds don’t know how to deal with them. They will never learn, because their premises are all wrong.”

“On Earth, stress reduction’s promoted in a big way.”

“Yes,” Michelle said, “but that’s backwards. You can’t reduce stress! Merely
living
involves stress; it always has. Long ago people died of other things before stress caught up with them. But physical response to stress is a normal process—as normal as breathing—and over time it causes damage. There’s always some aspect of the body that’s most vulnerable, no matter how much repairing of parts is undertaken. Fixing one just throws others off balance, which is the main reason our Hospital causes more illness than it cures.”

“You can’t just not fix things,” Jesse protested. “Medical technology is what prevents those other ways of dying.”

“Of course it is,” Greg said. “We have no objection to medical technology where it’s appropriate. It’s great for dealing with injuries and acute conditions. We use its techniques in our own healing house when necessary, and we go to the Hospital for major procedures like limb and organ replacement or eye surgery. But it can’t compensate for the effects of normal stress.”