Stewards of the Flame (35 page)

“The only problem,” Peter said, “is whether you can keep it from Carla. You realize, don’t you, how she feels about stasis? We’re all repelled by the thought; when we pledge to live past other fears, we project our normal human fear of death onto it. But she has a true phobia.”

“She has good cause,” Jesse declared. “I certainly won’t mention it to her.”

“Can you keep it out of your mind when you’re telepathically joined?”

“If she can, I can,” Jesse declared, “and she has, after our first night. The image she projected was quite accurate, incidentally. Does that mean she was put through this—ordeal?”

“Yes, when she joined us, before she was married to Ramón. At the time of his execution, I was sorry. But no one could have anticipated that happening to someone she loved.” He sighed. “If she came to me for professional help, I could cure her of the phobia even now; I’ve helped recruits conquer worse ones. But she is not a trainee, so it’s not my place to stir it up when she hasn’t asked me to.”

“Best to let it ride,” Jesse agreed. “It’s not as if she would ever have to see stasis vaults personally again.”

“You’re no longer a trainee either, Jess. You don’t have to do this. But Carla said you were looking for some sort of challenge, and it’s all I can offer right now.”

“I think I do have to do it,” Jesse said. In the Group you didn’t turn away from things you found distasteful. “And yet—I wonder, Peter, whether it’s right for us to take part in something we’re so opposed to. As a matter of principle, shouldn’t we refuse to work in the Vaults? Maybe even sabotage them?”

“We couldn’t help matters that way,” Peter said. “Public opinion wouldn’t be changed by our refusal. As for sabotage, tempting as it sounds, it couldn’t be done short of blowing up the entire building, killing all the patients and staff in that part of the Hospital. We don’t take risks, let alone lives, for the sake of the dead.”

Jesse couldn’t argue with that. “I guess what bothers me,” he confessed, “is that I don’t see how we hope for even a moral victory. I’m not looking for martyrdom, but if we never protest publicly—”

“We can’t win by your criteria,” Peter said. “You’re a man of action; you see winning as having an impact on the system here in this colony. That’s not how human evolution works. There is a cumulative telepathic influence on culture, Jess. It has sometimes been called the collective unconscious, sometimes described as a sort of psi field, but never understood as the very significant factor that we in the Group know it to be. We have studied history in this light—Reiko’s a professional historian and she can tell you the details. And so we believe that, as the Ritual puts it, we’re ‘stewards of a flame that will illuminate future generations.’”

“You mean that literally, Peter? That individuals influence the future in some way apart from what they pass on through public actions or words?”

“Yes, in the long run, if enough people are involved. And in any case, the individuals benefit. We win simply by being who we are. By living up to what we’ve pledged, by helping others when we can, by looking ahead to an era when there will be more of us. Not by futile attempts at forcing society to change.”

Yet there had been hints that Peter had something active in mind for him, Jesse thought—even that Ian did. . . .

The next morning he waited until Carla had gone, then followed her to the Hospital and reported for work in the Vaults. Merely entering the building, donning orderly’s garb and walking through miles of antiseptic corridors fraught with memory of his imprisonment, was daunting; before he even got to the stasis section he was unnerved. His discharge had been legally signed, still he wasn’t listed as “cured.” And in any case, there would eventually be mandatory checkups, a prospect he’d tried to put out of his mind.

He knew he could stand anything the Meds might do to him, short of mind tampering. He was not physically afraid. After a while, he perceived that the idea of being forcibly controlled was what frightened him—the thought of finding himself helpless in the hands of alleged authority. That concept was what the Med establishment stood for. It was what the Group resisted. Seeing this, he understood as never before what his Ritual pledges meant, understood how the Group could win without changing the world outside. He understood, too, why Peter had sent him here. But that did not relieve his nerves.

The Vaults occupied many floors, a bewildering maze of chambers lined with row upon row of metal stasis units stacked ceiling-high, separated by narrow aisles. Only their ends were visible; they slid out like drawers in a morgue. Jesse had seen this on the old starship, though on a lesser scale—but those units had been empty. There was a wholly different feel to it in the presence of death masquerading as life. Dead bodies forcibly made to breathe, hearts kept beating by force . . . the control of well-meant authority extended past life into death, forever. . . . Throughout human history there had been tyranny, but always before there had at least been escape in death.

The work of a vault attendant was to check the indicator panel for each unit to make sure there were no malfunctions. He was given a phone with which to summon a technician in case any were found. This seemed to Jesse an unnecessary task, since the whole system was AI-controlled and malfunctions presumably would be detected by the central computer. It took him a while to realize that it was psychologically important to the Hospital staff, and the public, to believe that not-quite-dead loved ones were, in fact, cared for by human beings. Manually checking the panels served the same purpose that checking the control board did on a starship—a starship was AI-controlled, but you nevertheless kept a full-time watch on the bridge. You didn’t leave it unattended until the computer triggered an alarm.

The Meds weren’t defrauding the public. They truly believed in their mandate to preserve life as they defined it. That was the true horror—the travesty. The belief that personhood resided in literally mindless flesh. His function here was to maintain the fiction by treating the bodies as he would treat sleeping passengers.

He had expected the panels would show no names, but only numbers. He was wrong. That made it worse, somehow. It wasn’t the same as names on tombstones . . . was it? Perhaps, Jesse thought, traditional interment had also been a charade. There were, after all, old tales of the dead rising from cemeteries, ancient superstitions that once had inspired true fear. Abhorrent though it seemed to him, he knew some Earth cultures had gone on preserving dead bodies, burying them in silk-lined caskets encased by concrete so they could not cleanly decompose, until the space for such burial had literally run out. Peter was right, he thought despairingly. Most people wouldn’t stop equating persons with bodies, and if stasis technology became affordable elsewhere, the maintenance of the brain-dead would spread from world to world. The reality would continue to be repressed, as it always had been.

He did not read the names. He carefully looked past them, in terror lest he come across Ramón’s. Everyone he knew must have relatives in here, he realized—even the crèche children who didn’t know their identity. But death before old age was extremely rare on Undine. The vision brought to mind of old people was not quite so horrific as that of those sealed in prematurely.

At least he told himself it was not. On the fourth day of his circuit of the Vaults, Jesse learned otherwise. The lights on a panel before him indicated trouble. For a moment he thought, what the hell? Why call a technician to restore breath to a body long dead? But then he pictured what decomposition inside the sealed unit would mean . . . it would not be clean, certainly. That was an old fear of space travelers placed in stasis on the long trips, trips where no one stayed awake to deal with malfunctions. It had happened infrequently, but the result had been all too gruesome. Since this body couldn’t be removed from the unit, he decided, it had best be maintained.

The technician came; the automatic racking mechanism was activated and the unit slid out from the wall, then lowered. The translucent cover opened. Within lay the body of an old woman. It was not breathing; the face was blue despite the ventilator tube protruding from the mouth. The veined hands, lying at its sides, were also blue. Oh God, Jesse thought. Can’t they let it go? Is it not past restoration? Do they never dispose of them decently? He had never asked what would happen in such a case.

Nor did he find out. “It’s not too late to save her,” the technician said happily. “All we need to do is move her to a different unit.” Metabolism being far lower than normal in stasis, going a short time without breathing was okay—lack of oxygen to the brain could not damage a corpse already brain-dead. Following instructions, Jesse unracked an empty unit—some were left in each chamber for use as spares—and suppressing his repugnance with difficulty, he helped transfer the flaccid body into it.

After the technician had gone, he retired to the nearest lavatory and was sick.

~
 
38
 
~

Jesse thought, after actually seeing a maintained body, that keeping the image from his mind when with Carla would prove impossible. He walked home the long way, head down, staring into the canals, while he got his emotions under control. But it proved easier than he expected to deceive her. Their telepathic contact was not constant; she had already begun to teach him the knack of closing his mind, a skill as necessary for living among telepaths as the ability to open it. If she sensed that he was troubled, she did not mention it. Not until much later did it occur to him that Carla knew perfectly well what newcomers were required to do and had carefully refrained, during his week of vault work, from asking how he spent his days.

As for their hours of lovemaking, no thoughts of mundane life ever arose. Jesse was long past the stage of thinking during sex; it was a timeless altered state in which he knew only the sensations of the moment and the unity of his mind with Carla’s. That this was not a state exclusive to the Group astonished him. Carla assured him it had been practiced by the ancients as well as any number of occult groups throughout Earth’s history, described in many old texts though sometimes couched in symbolic terms. In the Group it was merely extended to the stage of full conscious telepathic communion.

“I don’t get it,” he protested. “I understand how knowledge of paranormal stuff got suppressed, but
sex
—well, there were eras when talking about it was taboo, I guess, but from the mid-twentieth century on—”

“Well, you see,” Carla said, “It does lead to the so-called paranormal to do it this way. That’s why rites involving sex were often condemned as the work of the Devil. And it’s why most people gave information about them a wide berth long after the taboo on sexual frankness disappeared. You’d think the books on what some called mystical sex would have been popular—yet they were widely ignored, just as the serious books about ESP were. It was the same unconscious fear, Jesse. Instinctively, people knew where prolonged sex could take them, and they didn’t want to go there.”

The same fear he himself had felt . . . the fear that had kept him apart from Carla until he learned to trust his own powers. People gave up sensual pleasure to shut out awareness of telepathy, just as they preferred sickness and treatment to the belief that their minds’ power could heal them. It seemed crazy, viewed that way, yet he had lived for years in the world outside without guessing that he was doing it. Would the majority ever change? Not without the support of their culture, he realized. But the Group wasn’t a culture, not even a subculture, and it couldn’t become one without children. . . .

He had long ago stopped minding not having kids. Now, with Carla, he found himself wishing they could make a baby. He’d had no such thoughts during previous sexual encounters. Was there some genetic imperative, he wondered, that was activated by a committed relationship? Carla felt it, too. “I guess it’s my biological clock ticking,” she said, “because I never cared when I was with Ramón. Of course we’d both been brought up to view natural conception as primitive, even uncivilized. With you, I sense how on other worlds it’s seen as the fruit of love.”

They were free to have a child by IVF if they chose to—legal marriage wasn’t a requirement—and in some ways the idea was tempting. But there was a reason why Group couples didn’t, in addition to those Dorcas had explained to him. No one really knew what part inheritance played in paranormal abilities, but genes surely had some influence, just as musical talent ran in families. Most Group members had been selected for telepathic potential. If two were to mate, their kids might display paranormal gifts in childhood, before knowing enough to conceal them, and would be in danger of being viewed as mentally unbalanced by the Meds. They’d be given drugs to suppress those abilities. Worse, the Meds might learn what genes were responsible, and discard all future embryos that carried them. Those risks were too great to ignore.

Besides, Jesse thought, it wouldn’t be fair to the kids. Taught one thing in the crèche, another by part-time parents, they would grow up conflicted. If the Group’s ways were to spread, they should be absorbed from childhood on, and that could never happen in this colony. It troubled him. Perhaps, Jesse thought, it was because he, unlike all the rest, was an outsider and not yet resigned to the policies in place on Undine.

That was not the only problem he faced. A larger one was the question of what to do with the rest of his life.

He had tried not to think about it while at the Lodge. The training, the new friendships, his love for Carla . . . he’d been fully absorbed by these, not wanting to look ahead. The only decision he’d made beyond commitment to them was that he would never go back to Fleet.

“Do you miss space at all?” Peter had asked him once. Jesse knew that Peter, like most Group members, was fascinated by space though without hope of leaving Undine. The colony’s monetary restrictions were an unbreachable barrier against offworld travel, unless a person was fortunate enough to have both passage and living expenses paid for by someone, or some institution, on Earth.