Stewards of the Flame (24 page)

The ache lessened, became bearable. After a while he found he could enjoy the music. When the evening was almost over Kira moved to his side. “How are you feeling?” she asked.

“Better, thanks. Much better. I think I’ll be able to sleep.”

“Better? Jesse, it’s not supposed to be merely ‘better.’ You are not supposed to suffer from pain
at all,
ever again. Did you think what Peter taught you was just for the lab, with no practical use?”

“You mean what I did during the breakthrough, when I literally didn’t mind it? Over a long period like all day?”

“Of course. Your brain can work the same whether you see feedback or not, after all.” She smiled. “We know perfectly well that you aren’t yet experienced enough to do it on your own. But you need to start trying to. That’s why we didn’t ease it for you as we would have for an outsider. Come downstairs now, and I’ll help you.”

In the lab, Kira went on dual with him again, sharing his natural pain—which she claimed to literally feel, telepathically—to form the feedback pattern. He found he could match with it quickly. He didn’t get high, but the pain no longer bothered him. It was just there, in the way mild heat or cold might be there.

“The relief won’t last,” Kira warned. “You’ll have to keep reminding yourself, visualizing the pattern, over and over. In time, you’ll learn to do it without thinking. After that you’ll have to rely on common sense to tell you when an injury needs treatment.”

“Kira—why was I so blind? How could I go through a night and a day suffering pointlessly, after I’d once learned?”

“There are good reasons,” she said. “Since the question’s come up, I’ll tell you, though you may not be ready to hear.”

They went back upstairs and out across the porch of the Lodge onto the damp beach. The heavy clouds had blown past, but mist dimmed the stars.

Kira said, “Usually we don’t have this conversation until a person’s been with us longer. But Peter said to push you. Frankly, I don’t know what’s going on with Peter. He says he’s moving fast with you because he wants to learn the reactions of an offworlder. That’s nonsense. Human reactions are the same except where cultures differ radically, yet the culture of Fleet is much like Undine’s, and you haven’t been exposed to the telepathic undercurrents on Earth for twenty years. So it’s not a valid experiment. Even if it were, Peter would never exploit a trainee! It would be contrary to his basic ethic.”

“I don’t think I’m being exploited,” Jesse said. “I agreed to accelerated training. I want to get on with it.”

“Perhaps,” Kira said. “But he closes his mind to me in a way that’s not like him. He’s seemed troubled for some time now, since the week before you arrived. Maybe it’s just that he’s preoccupied with grief for Ian, and with worry about what’s to come when Ian is gone.”

“I guess it will be hard on the Group to lose the leader,” Jesse said.

“Hard for all of us, and not only because we love him. But especially for Peter, who will have to take his place.”

Jesse had not realized this. But of course, it was obvious. There could be no doubt about Peter’s qualifications to lead. “What exactly does the head of the Council do?” he asked. “Aside from presiding at ceremonies like the ritual Michelle mentioned?”

“Presiding at the Ritual is a bigger responsibility than you know,” Kira said, “but that’s not the problem. No new leader can be what Ian has been to us. Peter cannot fill his shoes. There will never be another like Ian; he is psychically gifted beyond any but the greatest spiritual leaders who ever lived on Earth. If he were not, there would be no Group, no hope of achieving our goal on even a small scale.”

“And the goal depends on these—gifts? Not just the system he developed?” Jesse had been told that the neurofeedback lab had been established by Ian and that it employed technology so far unknown in the world outside.

“The training we give our people depends on telepathic aid to a much greater extent than you’ve seen so far,” Kira explained. “And that’s okay. We’re here to provide it. But in the beginning there was no one but Ian. He developed the mind skills we rely on, personally on his own, and was able to pass them on only through paranormal talent that far exceeds what any of the rest of us can hope to attain. He is literally ahead of his time, perhaps by centuries.”

Jesse tensed, shifting his weight and feeling his back start to ache again. The constant references to telepathy continued to make him uneasy.

Kira sighed. “Anyway, you asked why it didn’t occur to you that you could get rid of your pain. To begin with, it’s a matter of habit. When you feel pain, all your past experience tells you it’s unpleasant. You don’t question that. Your brain keeps on functioning the same way it has since you were born. But there are deeper reasons why you let yourself suffer, why you have a backache in the first place. It’s not from chopping wood. Jesse, unconsciously you
want
to suffer—not for some perverted, unhealthy reason, but because that is a normal response to certain kinds of stress. It takes your mind off things you’d rather not be aware of.”

“Oh, I don’t think so, Kira—”

“Of course you don’t. By definition, unconscious choices of this kind are not accessible to your thinking mind. But they are part of being human. Everyone is subject to them sometimes, at some point in life. You have been placed under extreme stress—and the stress is going to get worse, which you know underneath but would just as soon not contemplate.”

Jesse was silent. This was, of course, true.

“As we were saying two days ago, most illness is caused by stress,” Kira went on. “Not stress like what you went through during testing. You’re okay with that. Humans are genetically equipped to deal with crises. But ongoing stress, stress that comes from what’s going on in your mind, is another matter. Instinctively, you respond biochemically when you’re stressed, and that affects your heart, your nervous system, your immune system—even your muscles—in ways that would enable you to act fast if you were in danger. It’s often said that these responses damage the body because they last longer than nature intended, but there’s more to it. The results of prolonging them are psychologically useful.”

“That doesn’t make sense! Are you saying people get sick on purpose?”

“Yes, though the purpose is unconscious, of course. When this was first understood, it was viewed by some as if it were a fault that victims of sickness should be blamed for, and because that was so wrongheaded, most refused to believe any purpose exists. But it’s a constructive one buried deep in our biological inheritance. A tired, stressed-out caveman didn’t fare too well fighting predators; if he got sick, not sick enough to kill him but enough to keep him home from the hunt, his genes were more likely to be passed on. That genetic programming still affects us, though today’s stresses are different and they no longer have any impact on evolution.”

Peter, too, had said something about evolution, Jesse recalled. He’d said it was time for humankind to grow up. . . .

“We’re learning to overcome our programming. But—here’s the hard part—unavoidably, the very process through which we teach you to handle stress creates
more
stress. In the first place many of the skills you need can’t be learned except in crisis situations. And in the second place, those skills in themselves add another very severe stressor on top of what’s required to awaken them—which you’re now beginning to feel, and which your unconscious mind will resist.”

“Catch-22, you mean.”

“Not quite that bad. You’ll get through this stage. But for now, you’re lucky you don’t have something worse than a backache.”

That was hardly a comforting thought. Developing skills to protect his health seemed like a great idea, and yet somehow . . . he was not sure, Jesse realized, that he really wanted to become Superman.

“That’s just it,” Kira said seriously. “You
don’t
want to be Superman. Nobody does! For starters, people don’t want conscious control over their bodies—it’s too much responsibility to carry. Just as kids want the safety of home and parents, no matter how much they may think they long to escape, adults want someone to rely on for care. In modern society, that means medical care. It’s the reason people give control of their lives to the Meds. You’ve seen where that leads, but it’s not easy to accept the alternative.”

No. All your life, you assumed that your body would function, your heart would go on beating, without any conscious attention. That you didn’t have to worry about managing such things because they were totally beyond your control. Knowing that you
could
control them would involve loss as well as gain. . . .

Kira reached out for his hand and squeezed it. “To rely on your own mind, even in defiance of built-in responses like pain that nature supplied to protect you—that’s very, very scary, Jesse. The sooner you admit that to yourself, the better off you’ll be.”

Slowly, thoughtfully, Jesse said, “I didn’t want to turn off natural pain. I didn’t want so much power as that; I couldn’t trust myself with it.”

“That’s why we had to use artificially-induced pain—severe pain—to teach it to you. Given a choice between using that power and suffering mildly, your unconscious mind would have backed off from it—as today, in fact, it did.”

He did not intend to back off. He’d accepted a challenge, and he was going to see it through. Even though he felt shaky inside and wasn’t at all sure, underneath, that he still wanted to. . . .

Now wasn’t the time to think about that, Jesse decided. Tomorrow was the start of a new offshift, and Carla would be coming back to the Island.

~
 
26
 
~

Tonight I’ll be with Carla, Jesse thought, waking free of back pain to a sky clear of clouds. All his friends except Kira had gone; by lunchtime new planes were coming in. He was kept busy meeting yet another new set of people, hoping with each arrival to see her among them. Finally, from the Lodge porch, he saw Anne’s red seaplane circle, and went down to the dock to watch it land.

Carla was the only passenger. He ran to her and she embraced him, her smile joyous. But to his dismay it was a sisterly embrace, the hug customary among all Group members. When he moved to kiss her she clung for a moment—then dropped her arms and stepped back. “No,” she said gently. “It’s too soon.”

“Too soon, Carla? No, it’s not. I love you, you know that! Don’t you?”

“Yes!” she said. “I love you too, Jesse. If you hadn’t joined the Group, I don’t think I could have borne it. But for now—wait. Don’t expect more than what we had last week. Please.”

“But why?”

“Because I ask you to. Because it’s best, and I can’t give a reason.”

They walked back along the dock in silence, their footsteps loud on the wooden planks. Carla gripped his hand, but would allow him to come no closer. Bewildered, he had no choice but to let it ride.

And that was the way it was for the entire five days of her offshift.

Carla was vibrant, fun—to be beside her remained a joy to him. They were apart only during his sessions with Kira, although never, he noticed, alone. With the others, they swam and hiked and lounged on the beach. They ate together; they sat together before the fire. There was warmth and affection and an emotional closeness even greater than he’d known with her before. And there were undercurrents of desire. But nothing more. Not even, as the days passed, the mere friendly kind of touching with which they’d begun.

God, Jesse thought, was there some obscure colonial custom no one had told him about? Was he supposed to ask her to marry him first? Marriage was rarely mentioned in the Group and, he’d assumed, not viewed as essential. If Carla wanted marriage, though, he’d be more than willing to go through the formalities. He had already decided he wasn’t going back to Fleet.

But you couldn’t propose marriage to a woman you’d never even kissed.

Peter, Jesse recalled, had foreseen that there might be a problem. But Peter didn’t come to the Island; he was spending the offshift with Ian. So Jesse couldn’t consult him. The last day ran out with nothing changed, and before he knew it, Carla was gone.

The next five days without her passed slowly. He continued training with Kira, gaining control not merely of his heart rate but his blood pressure and, she claimed, his biochemical responses to stress. “Yes, the mind can do that,” she told him. “It’s long been known that under hypnosis, people can have biochemical reactions unlike those of their normal state. That’s true of multiple personalities, too—sometimes each personality has different medical disorders. So there’s no doubt that the unconscious mind controls biochemistry, and what your mind can do, you can learn to do intentionally.”

In addition to working with Kira he was required to spend time matching prerecorded mind-patterns, alone except for a computer operator in the control booth. This included sessions under mild stimulus; he must learn, Kira said, to manage pain without assistance. Surprisingly, it wasn’t hard. He went quickly into the state where pain didn’t bother him, and came close, in so doing, to getting high. It was a great feeling. He knew that once he could do it without feedback, he would be free of physical pain for the rest of his life.

And yet, quite apart from his worry over the way Carla had acted, inexplicable anxiety nagged at Jesse. The training troubled him more and more. Some sessions elated him, yet when the near-high wore off, he didn’t feel good about them. He was, in fact, feeling less good than in the beginning about everything, despite his liking for an increasing number of friends. He supposed this was due to stress, produced not only by Carla’s rejection of intimacy, but by the buried fears of which Kira had warned him. But there seemed to be something else, just below the surface . . . something that was not quite right.

He was glad when Peter arrived before Carla returned. Somehow, Jesse thought, he’d gotten off on the wrong foot with Carla. It had been made plain that a relationship between them would have the Group’s approval. Her desire for it had been unmistakable. So what unspoken rule had he violated? He was ready to seek the advice Peter had offered.