Stewards of the Flame (46 page)

This phase won’t last,
Peter told him.
I can give you something to lessen the torment, but it will accelerate mental dullness and apathy
. . . .

Jesse pulled himself together.
No. I’ll take this over being a zombie, as long as there’s a choice
.

I thought so. You’re not one to accept defeat. You can never be defeated by involuntary reactions, Jess. All that matters is your inner choices. Even after you lose awareness of them, that will remain true
.

He was still very much aware—far
too
aware of what was happening to him. But he was buoyed by the knowledge that he’d chosen to be.

Later in the day, Carla came.

“Olivia’s home sick today,” she said aloud. “I’m here to change your bandages.” That, he realized, had been planned; Olivia, a Group member, could not really be sick. Peter had simply arranged an excuse to send Carla to his room.

They dared not embrace; there was always the chance that a nurse might walk in. But they joined wordlessly in their minds, striving for courage to spare each other pain. They were not very successful at it, since the looming horror of their future left no other thoughts to share. Jesse was not sure that separation would have been worse. Still he couldn’t have endured not seeing her, and he knew she felt the same way. Was this the last time? Or, over the years to come, could other excuses be found?

Carla’s hands were steady as she wrapped new bandages, concealing the fact that his burns were already healed. “There’s a rec room,” she said, “where you’ll be allowed to go after they’re sure you’re thoroughly enough medicated not to be violent. I’ll have duties that take me there sometimes.”

Peter had told him about the rec room. A place for watching television, playing simple video games, and socializing with fellow patients, most of whom actually did have sick minds. It was not an inviting prospect. It was worse than what Zeb, at the age of ninety-four, had believed he could not face. He himself was more than fifty years younger. God, how many of those years would it take before his unconscious mind provided the escape that Zeb’s had?

Carla, sensing this thought, broke into tears. Against his will, Jesse too began to weep. The drug had begun to weaken him. He could not trust his self-control anymore. “Go, Carla,” he told her. “I don’t want you to see me this way.”

“You need me!” she protested. But she, too, was afraid of breaking down completely; they both knew that.
Oh, God, Jesse! I love you—I love you so much . . . and yet the only chance we have of staying sane is to keep a grip on ourselves. . . .

I love you, Carla. I’ll always love you, even if I stop being able to show it. Let’s remember . . . the good times.

He went over those times in memory after she had gone—his first week on the Island, when he’d loved her before knowing their lives would be shared . . . the night they’d lain by the Lodge fire . . . the Ritual and the wedding feast. . . . His tears would not stop, and the most terrible part was that he was no longer trying to stop them.

The next morning Peter took him to his office and, in private, subjected him to questioning under truth serum—a process he said he could put off no longer without interference from Warick. As before, Jesse’s mind was foggy during the examination and he did not know afterward what he had said. But unlike the first time, he did not fully recover. He formed thoughts only slowly, through a haze. It was like being trapped in the deep water that had frightened him as a child, unable to rise, unable to swim—yet except for brief periods when he roused and struggled in panic against the murkiness, he was not particularly frightened. He was past caring what went on around him.

Time passed: another night, another injection, another stuporous day. Jesse let Olivia help him wash and change clothes, which he could not do alone as long as his hands were bandaged. He barely grasped her assurance that Kira and other friends would visit him as soon as he was permitted to go to the rec room. It didn’t seem to be important. He stared blankly at the window. He ate when he was told to, mildly irritated by the interruption of the apathy into which he’d slipped.

Peter continued to appear as often as he could find a chance. Only at these moments did Jesse’s mind come alive. His telepathic ability, so far, was undiminished. In fact, perhaps because of the dimming of his normal faculties, it seemed stronger than ever. He was aware of Peter’s empathy, and it strengthened him, staving off total despair. At the same time, he felt Peter’s own pain; but even that was better than having no feeling at all.

Late on the fourth evening, as he was trying unsuccessfully to sleep, the door opened, sending a flare of brilliant light into the darkened room. Jesse turned over, shading his eyes, wondering what further indignities the night nurse might subject him to at this hour. But it was not the nurse who entered. It was Peter again.

I’ve just come from Ian, Jess,
he began silently.
He insisted I must speak to you right away.

Abruptly, inexplicably, Jesse’s mind cleared and an image of Ian filled it. Ian wasn’t supposed to know that he was here.
I thought you weren’t going to tell him I was arrested,
he protested.

It was on the news several days ago—they showed your picture.
In a low voice Peter continued aloud, “Neither Kira nor I ever imagined he would see it; he’s so weak now that he doesn’t watch the news. But tonight he got an impulse to look at the Net archives. I suppose that came from telepathic leakage of aggregate emotion—everyone’s grieving for you, and he is sensitive to projected feelings that normally wouldn’t be perceived consciously. He was angry with me for not informing him when it happened.”

Yes, thought Jesse, Ian would hate being shielded from bad news. In his own one brief encounter with him, it had been plain that the man’s capacity for dealing with trouble was unlimited. . . .

“Ian needs no protection from anything,” Peter went on. “I should have known that. Perhaps because I could barely cope with my own feelings, I didn’t want to give the impression that I was burdening him with them on his deathbed.”

Jesse found himself sufficiently roused to manage conversation. “I take it he wasn’t as upset as you feared he’d be by finding out that his dream about me wasn’t precognition.”

“He didn’t react the way I expected. By the time I arrived he’d had a few minutes to get hold of himself, of course; Kira said he was stunned at first. But then, he was somehow . . . revitalized. As if he felt that in the face of a blow to the Group, it was his responsibility to take command again. He made us tell him every detail of what happened during the fire, much more than Kira had said before, when she didn’t mention your presence. He wanted the details of the case against you, too.”

“I don’t suppose he might have found a . . . loophole?”

“There’s no loophole to find, Jess. If he’d seen one I haven’t, he would surely have told me. What he did tell me was stranger.” Peter sat down on the edge of the bed and laid his hand on Jesse’s shoulder. Jesse began to feel healing calm spread through him and knew that once again it was being given to him wordlessly, as Peter talked.

“Ian sent Kira out on an errand,” Peter continued. “Now that he’s physically helpless she never leaves him alone in the house, but I told her I’d stay until she got back. I assumed he wanted to discuss the dream with me privately, as he has many times in the past. But he didn’t mention that, and he wouldn’t let me bring it up either. Instead, he ordered me to take you a message. He said, “‘Tell Jesse that I trust him
in all ways.
And tell him not to lose courage.’”

“I suppose he meant he trusts me not to betray the Group, no matter what’s done to me here in the future.”

“That’s all it could mean now,” Peter agreed. “What puzzles me is why he considered it urgent that you be given such a message tonight. We all trust you; none of us have ever suggested that we might not. Yet Ian would not even let me wait for Kira to return. He said he’d be perfectly safe alone for a few minutes and that I must come to you now, without delay. That I must make sure you don’t give in to fear and despair.”

“I don’t plan to,” Jesse said grimly, “but the stuff may deprive me of choice.”

Peter looked at him with compassion. “Has it been bad today, Jess?”

“Nothing I can’t tolerate. As I’m sure you know, though, when I’m fully awake my nerves are raw. I feel I’m . . . slipping, on the verge of losing control.”

“That’s partly anticipation. When you do lose higher brain functions, you won’t care as much—which is a terrible thing to contemplate, but which will be mercifully dulled later on.”

Jesse bowed his head and did not answer. That had already happened, for a while, and the time would come when he couldn’t shake himself back as he had just now.

Thoughtfully, Peter went on, “Jess, Ian’s wisdom has always been reliable. And what he said wasn’t just for me to pass on to you. He intended it for both of us. He looked me in the eye and declared that whatever happens, we mustn’t lose faith in our own destiny. It was almost as if . . . as if he’d had some inner experience, some revelation, that assured him things will turn out all right.”

“Like a near-death experience, you mean?”

“It’s conceivable. He can’t live much longer, and his second dream—the one he’s felt requires him to hold on until he’s performed some mysterious final action—must seem less impelling now that we know the first one can’t come true. NDEs aren’t confined to people whose hearts stop, especially in the case of those accustomed, as he is, to experimenting with altered states. Perhaps his optimism is mere illusion, an old man’s wishful thinking. But after so many years of being guided by him, I can’t write it off as just that.”

“It would be nice not to. But hasn’t the Group always maintained that we mustn’t shrink from harsh reality?”

“Yes. That’s what’s so strange, Jess. Ian would never abandon that principle, not even when all he’s worked for goes up in smoke just as he’s about to die.”

“Well, my loss is hardly as significant an event as that.”

“Yes, it is,” Peter said unhappily. “You have never been told how significant you are to the Group, and it’s just as well now that no one will ever know. But Ian knew. He can’t have failed to admit to himself how much has been lost. I only hope he doesn’t have a delayed reaction and die tonight in his sleep—his advice to me, his whole manner, was all too much like a farewell.”

~
 
50
 
~

After Peter left, Jesse felt himself falling toward sleep, and knew that Peter had done something hypnotic to make that happen—as, long ago, he had given him sleep after pain on the first night of his testing. Because he’d slept little since his arrest, he was out for many hours. Then, toward morning, he began to dream.

He dreamed of Ian. At first only Ian’s face, his wise eyes, loomed in his mind. Then they were in the Lodge that Ian had built, where they had never met in reality, and the flame of the torch was between them, and Jesse stretched out his hand to meet Ian’s, bathed in flame, as he had done with Peter. And Ian asked,
Do you trust in the power of your mind, Jesse?
And he replied,
I do, but it’s being destroyed.

And Ian said,
No. There’s something in the mind that nothing can touch, short of death. When we affirm the power of the mind, we’re affirming that! We have said it all along by committing ourselves to the idea that the mind has primacy over the body.

Yet we don’t shrink from truth,
Jesse thought,
and the truth is that the mind depends on the brain. Peter said so. My brain is going to be damaged. . . .

Peter doesn’t know everything. And yet even he is aware that telepathy isn’t physical. If it were, how could we be communicating now?

We’re not,
Jesse reminded himself.
I’m dreaming.

The inner mind, the being that is you, does not depend on the part of the brain that drugs can weaken. When reason is lost, even when memory is lost, that essence remains. Once it is gone, life too is gone—the body that remains is brain-dead. You’re not going to die, nor will you lose consciousness. . . .

In the way of dreams, the fire faded. Ian still held his hand and they walked somewhere together, along the shore of the Island, then out across the sea into the air; and he looked down as if from his plane, with the Island a green oval against the vivid blue of the bay. Ian was tall and strong, as he must have been in youth, not as he’d seen him in life as an old man, dying.
Oh, Jesse,
he said,
I don’t mind dying—I’m ready to die—yet I wish I could go where you are going. . . .

They rose higher until the air turned black, and they were in space, space as Jesse had seen it for years before ever coming to Undine. The familiar stars were around them. And Ian said,
I trust you, Jesse, and I think I envy you. . . .
And then they looked down on a world again, not Undine, not Earth, but a different world that he had never seen. It was a golden world studded with sapphire seas, a wild world with no sign of habitation. Jesse looked around and the stars were gone—he was in a starship, on the bridge of a starship, and Ian was no longer in sight. But he knew that somehow Ian still depended on him, the Group depended on him, if he lost courage the Group could not survive. . . .

Carla could not survive. He could not let go of his mind’s core, could not give in to pressure or fear or despair, because if he did, Carla would die.

Go to her,
Ian commanded.
What’s happening to you in the Hospital does not matter. It can’t weaken love. When all else is lost your bond with Carla will still be strong. Go to her, and see that telepathy isn’t dependent on your body. She doesn’t need to be physically present, any more than I do. Go when morning comes. . . .