Stewards of the Flame (26 page)

Kira hesitated. “Your older sister was interested in the paranormal, I’ve been told. Why didn’t you share that interest? Why did you never investigate what was known about psi on Earth?”

“Because I thought all that stuff was nonsense,” Jesse declared.

“No. Because you were afraid it was not nonsense.”

He considered this. “Please don’t take offense, but you’re off base there. Before I met you people, I did not entertain the slightest suspicion that there could be anything in claims for the paranormal.”

“Consciously, perhaps not. In a scientifically-oriented person like you, the suspicions are repressed far below the surface. There’s nothing unhealthy in that; it’s a valid form of self-protection. What’s more, in terms of evolution it has been an adaptive response for the species. Our forebears could not have progressed to the stage of offworld colonization if people had been busy exploring their inner powers instead of the galaxy. But we are ready to move on, now.”

“Things like that have been said for a long time,” Jesse maintained. “I did hear enough from my sister to know that line’s not new. It shows up in Earth’s literature; you see it particularly in speculation of the late twentieth century. Humankind must turn to inner space, people argued. It didn’t happen.”

“We’re lucky it didn’t; if it had, we would not be here. There would be no colonized worlds and Earth itself would be a wasteland.”

“You’re saying it’s a matter of evolution, then, not just chance.” He had heard enough from her, and from others in the Group, to know they believed all trends in human civilization were part of a natural sequence, the only alternative to which was extinction.

“We hope and believe that we are forerunners,” Kira declared. “Human civilization has gone as far as it’s possible to go along the road that leads to the stasis vaults—which, if you’ll pardon the pun, are a dead end. So we must strike out in a new direction, not only for preserving our health but for empowering our minds. And the two are related. As we’ve told you before, our methods of training and of healing depend on telepathic communication.”

“But if it’s possible, if it leads to the good I’ve seen here, why aren’t people everywhere doing it?” Jesse protested. “Sure, the Meds object for political reasons, even where they’re not as strong as they are in this colony. That can’t account for the widespread disbelief among the public.”

“No,” Kira agreed. “The paranormal is not easily accepted, Jesse.” After a pause she went on, “I can tell you why, but you’ll understand better if I show you. We’ve held back with you until now because unlike trainees with previous interest in psi powers, you share your culture’s attitude toward them. Are you willing to experience a form of communication more intense than what you’ve received unconsciously?”

He nodded, feeling cold, knowing that something overwhelming was about to happen to him, here in a Lodge that he loved, with people he cared about—people who cared for him, yet would not let him hide from fear. They went out onto the dark porch and sat on the steps. The breeze from the bay smelled faintly of salt, he noticed, though that was unusual; Undine’s sea was far less salty than Earth’s. He found himself picturing Earth more clearly than he had for years.

Kira’s hand closed on his, then tightened. “Our ancestors drew back from awareness of the paranormal,” she said quietly, “but not because they foresaw that our species’ survival would depend on space colonization. They reacted just as you do, and for the same reason. Over and over, scientific evidence was presented for the existence of telepathy and other psi powers. By most people, especially other scientists, it was ignored, blocked out of consciousness—often angrily denied. Because if it exists, then everything familiar to you about your mind, your world, stands open to challenge. There’s nothing firm left to cling to. And if you have paranormal powers, who knows what you might do to disrupt the world, unwittingly, perhaps even unwillingly? Might you not lose control? Might your mind even disintegrate, perhaps? No sane person wants to confront that—”

“God, Kira, what are you doing to me?” It was plain what she was doing. She was giving him the concept telepathically as she spoke; she was not letting him off with mere words.

“If I gave you only words, you wouldn’t take them seriously, any more than most people who’ve heard or read them in the past have taken them seriously. Any more than you took what was happening to you here seriously before Peter spelled it out for you. You still don’t want to believe that it was
your mind
doing something so far removed from everyday reality.”

That was true. He didn’t want to! He wanted to be back in Fleet, back even on Earth, on the seacoast of his childhood—back home, where there wasn’t any question about what minds might do. . . . I should never have gotten into this, Jesse thought despairingly. I can’t do this. I’ll lose control. . . .

Kira squeezed his hand tighter, but her voice was gentle. “Weren’t you taught something early on about the fear of losing control?” she asked.

Jesse pulled himself back to firm ground.
It’s not an arbitrary test,
Peter had said.
In order to gain true volitional control, you must be wholly, unreservedly willing to lose control—to let what comes, come, with full consent to the consequences.
He had passed the test. He’d been warned that the circumstances under which he had passed it were only a prelude to something that couldn’t be taught in a lab setting. And he was damn well not going to let the consequences throw him.

“The first step is wanting paranormal abilities, but the second step is acknowledging your fear of them,” Kira told him. “You started to acknowledge it a few days ago—but then you retreated, told yourself that you didn’t need to be afraid because you don’t have them after all. That’s why you stopped sensing even the currents of thought between friends.”

“But how could my fear be stronger than my love for Carla?” Jesse protested.

“I suspect Carla is closing her mind to you,” Kira said, “just as Peter has closed his to me since he’s been hiding something. She doesn’t have to let you sense what’s she’s thinking unless she wants to, you know. Right now you’re not ready to share her thoughts, yet she knows your sensitivity has been growing. So she can’t feel as free with you as before.”

“How can I move ahead, then?”

“We’ll help you,” Kira promised. “We have ways of doing that, well-established ways. But you must fully accept your fear in order to get beyond it.”

It was all tied together, Jesse realized. Fear of altered states, of responsibility for controlling his body, of the paranormal . . . that was much more troubling than the fear of getting caught by the law. The Group’s illegal activities seemed almost incidental to these inner issues. . . .

“Of course they are,” said Kira, offering confirmation that he was indeed able to project thoughts. “Our healing and hospice work is a sideline. We fell into it because we couldn’t stand by without helping those we had power to help. But it’s not what we exist for. Our real work is here, among ourselves.”

“Just learning to use our minds?”

“Proving that what we do is possible. That we’re healthier and happier than people bound to the premises of Med culture—though health too is a side issue, since it’s not at the top of our scale of values. The goal is to prove that the mind has more power than has previously been recognized. This is the key to the future, Jesse. The proving, not the work we do in the world outside.”

“How can we hope to influence the world?” Jesse demanded. “Can what a few hundred of us do here really lead to the establishment of some future colony where everyone possesses advanced mind powers?”

Kira’s face clouded. “Not in any way we can yet see,” she admitted. “But they couldn’t spread if nobody made a start.”

~
 
28
 
~

Peter, who was spending his first offshift at the Lodge since the installation of the satellite uplink, seemed even more troubled by it than anyone had expected him to be. It was not so much that he was outraged by the invasion of Ian’s private island—although he was, and said that Ian was, too—but that it appeared to worry him. Carla reported that he’d been preoccupied even at work. “I don’t quite see why,” she told Jesse. “It’s a nuisance not to be able to use the upstairs bathrooms, but as long as those of us who can’t reveal our friendship with Peter don’t use them, we’re safe. It’s not as if they could learn any of our secrets just because medical telemetry can now be transmitted.”

Jesse’s blood turned icy as he recalled his initial speculation. “Carla—maybe he’s afraid they planted bugs in the Lodge, too. Maybe they
did
. Have we done a sweep?”

“Oh, Jesse, things like that don’t happen here. The government has no need for non-medical surveillance. It wouldn’t occur to the Meds that there could be opposition apart from individual cases of people ignoring the health laws. They’d have to bug every house in the city if they wanted to find out who complains, and mere talk isn’t illegal.”

“Except what
we
talk about—smuggling, hospices, burying bodies—”

“If they had any suspicion about those things, they’d have arrested us by now. It wouldn’t be hard to find evidence if they were looking for it.”

True enough. That, Jesse thought, was what had bothered him all along. He was not sure whether the Group was foolhardy or naive, but he suspected the latter. Lacking experience with what happened on more heavily-populated worlds, its members viewed spy dramas as they viewed fantasy. Of course they hadn’t done a bug sweep; they wouldn’t know how. The equipment for sweeping probably didn’t exist on Undine, and if it did, the process of acquiring it might create suspicion where none had existed.

Carla hesitated, then pointed out, “We wouldn’t need electronic equipment to find a bug if there was one, you know. There are plenty among us who could locate it clairvoyantly. Peter certainly could.”

“So then what’s he worrying about?” Jesse questioned, trying to cover the dismay this new piece of information stirred in him.

The uplink itself bothered Peter more than the bathroom modifications, despite the fact that it provided phone and Net access that might be useful in emergencies. “I’ve been expecting it,” he had admitted. “But I hoped it wouldn’t happen quite so soon. All the outlying islands will be linked in before long, and I suppose we were put high on the list when the police noticed a lot of guests at the Lodge. That they authorized overtime work, though, and left a crew here all night—”

“That did seem strange,” Kira had agreed. “Establishing medical telemetry for offshifters after years of letting it go is hardly a high-priority job.”

“No. Which means they’ve pushed up the deadline for universal coverage. And once they have it—” Peter broke off, and would say no more on the subject.

He had earlier confirmed that hiding his friendship with former patients was a concern. Jesse was not the only person for whom he’d arranged release from the Hospital, though out of respect for their privacy he did not name the others. Valerie was evidently one of these people. Carla, who kept Peter’s records, surely knew the whole story; but she wouldn’t talk about it. She did, however, reveal what had happened after Valerie’s arrest.

“We got her admitted to the surgical ward,” she told Jesse. “If she’d been sent to the psych ward, Peter wouldn’t have been allowed to handle her case, not when it was known she’d been staying at the Lodge. So it was important to make sure she was put under the care of some other doctor who’s in the Group.”

“How could she be sent to the surgical ward if she didn’t need surgery?”

“I hacked the radiology report,” Carla explained, “to make it look as if she had a uterine tumor.”

“Didn’t anyone look at the actual MRI scan?”

“Only Susan Gerrold, our gynecologist. They’re stored in the database—no one else would have occasion to call up that file.”

“But surgery—how could she fake that? There’d be a whole team present.”

“She didn’t fake it. The idea was to keep Valerie hospitalized long enough for the people on duty to forget that she hadn’t reported for a checkup voluntarily.”

“You mean she really cut her open?” protested Jesse, appalled.

“Yes, she performed a hysterectomy, since Valerie didn’t want children anyway. Susan’s a healer as well as a surgeon; Valerie wasn’t in any danger, and of course, she knew how to manage postoperative pain. The recovery time was what they faked—Susan healed her internally the first time she examined her in private. But the incision was left to heal naturally, since it had to be seen by the nurses.”

“I thought we were opposed on principle to unnecessary medical procedures.”

“Sometimes we have to compromise,” Carla said, “when it’s a matter of preventing something worse.”

Puzzled, Jesse persisted, “Would a psych evaluation have been worse than surgery for someone who’d done nothing illegal beyond trying to escape a medical checkup?”

“For Valerie, yes. She has reason to fear it, which is why she refused to respond to the Hospital summons in the first place.”

Carla wasn’t telling him all she knew. Moreover, the whole thing sounded too much like a scheme that might yet be uncovered. “Carla . . . why should you and the surgeon endanger yourselves for Valerie? She got into trouble through her own poor judgment. Was protecting her from its consequences worth the risk?”

“In the Ritual we pledge to support fellow-members, Jesse,” Carla replied. “So we’d have helped her avoid psych detention even if there’d been no other reason. But in this case, there was. Valerie knows the Group’s secrets. We can’t afford to have members examined in the psych ward by anyone except Peter—other doctors might use truth serum, you see, for psychiatric reasons even if they didn’t suspect any wrongdoing.”

God, Jesse thought. That was all too obvious; he wondered why it had not occurred to him before. “What if the delaying tactics didn’t work?” he persisted. “What if they call her back for a psych check anyway, since her having resisted medical examination seems to call for one?”