Stewards of the Flame (64 page)

Still holding their lighted candles, people left a few at a time for the stasis deck, escorted by Reiko and met by Kira and Hari. With Peter and Carla, Jesse stayed on the passenger deck, maintaining the telepathic high among the others, until the last of them had gone and the ship had been secured.

He had set the master stasis timer and sealed the bridge earlier. There’d have been no point in leaving a watch crew awake even if resources had been sufficient, since there was no one qualified to repair problems in any case. Either the starship would get them to Maclairn, or it wouldn’t. Either the life-support AI would maintain their bodies in stasis and wake them in due course, or it wouldn’t. Having no means of control over these things, he did not concern himself with them. He would entrust the ship and himself to whatever it was that Peter called fate.

The high from the Ritual still sustained them when they reached the stasis chamber, though their burns were already nearly healed. All the others had been sealed into units except Kira. They stripped quickly and placed their folded clothes in the storage compartments of the adjacent units reserved for them; then Jesse helped her into hers. “One way or another, we’ll wake to a new world,” she said, smiling and evidently at peace. Grasping her meaning, Jesse became aware that although this had never been his own faith, it was now a part of the merged knowledge, so that he could not be sure whether it had come telepathically into his mind or had risen from his own unconscious depths.

“I’ll go last,” Peter said, “since I’m the strongest telepathically.”

“No,” said Jesse. “It’s the Captain’s place to go last.”

Peter nodded. “Okay. Carla?”

“I’d rather go closest to Jesse.”

“That’s wise,” he agreed, getting into his own unit. Just before he closed the lid he said to her, “Ian must have told Ramón the truth, you know. He was with him at the end, as I was with Ian.” And to both of them, “There’s something I didn’t mention that I learned then. There will be a brief moment awake in the unit, and then for a short while, I think, altered consciousness. Ian and I were in contact during that time—as we now know happens in other mind-impaired states, the prelude to stasis enhanced his telepathic power. That was why I was sure he had no fear. You may experience this with me; I don’t know. But I believe you’ll have contact with each other.”

Jesse held Carla tightly as the translucent cover slid shut and the unit swung into the rack. In their minds, Peter’s thought was clear.
What fools we all were to feel terror! What happens to mere bodies does not matter. The important things aren’t touched by that. . . .

“It’s time, Carla,” Jesse said gently. “The sooner we get it over with, the sooner we’ll find ourselves near our new world.”

“I know. I’m not afraid anymore, just so you’re with me.” She clung to him and they kissed, a long, passionate kiss. Then he opened a unit for her and helped her in. She looked up at him, eyes dark and luminous but not anguished, dark hair framing her pale face. “I’ll see you in a little while, Jesse,” she said, and pressed the switch for the lid.

He did not wait for the automatic racking, but got quickly into his own unit, fumbling with the controls in his hurry to go under as fast as possible. He could hear her calling in his mind, and feared she might lose consciousness before his, too, became enhanced. Or would they, somewhere in the deepest recess of their being, continue to share?

And then he was in darkness, oblivious to what the AI was doing to him, aware only of Carla as their minds merged. He saw her not in the unit but on the Island, as on the day of his Ritual commitment, the day they had made love joyously by the shore. She stood on the rocks with bay mists swirling around her; he moved forward to her, floating free of his body, free of all fear or grief, and he took her hand.
I love you, Carla,
he said and heard her answer,
I love you, Jesse,
as love enveloped them
. . .
and there was nothing more than that to say, because nothing mattered now except the love.

# # #

Also Available

Book Two:
Promise of the Flame

Their starship was low on life support when they went into stasis—so it’s still low when they wake. They must land fast, or they’ll run out air. Captain Jesse Sanders is their only pilot. How can he choose a site for the colony with no chance to explore their raw new world? How can he shuttle them all to the surface within a few short hours? And when the site proves less than adequate, how can he live with the knowledge that his own astrogation error was what got them into such a fix?
  
Read an
excerpt
at www.sylviaengdahl.com.

Book Three:
Defender of the Flame

Two hundred years after the founding of the colony on Maclairn, the time has come to take the first steps toward spreading its people’s advanced mind powers to other worlds. But on Earth, the
 
idea of paranormal phenomena is scorned and repressed even more than in past centuries, and the discovery of a world where psi is prevalent is not welcomed by the authorities. Can the Stewards of the Flame advance their cause effectively in secret, and how high a price must they pay for refusing to give in to intimidation by Maclairn’s undercover enemies?
 
Read an
excerpt
at www.sylviaengdahl.com.

Afterword

We are closer than you may think to the things described in this story—both the bad and the good. When I came to revise a draft of portions written years earlier, I discovered that some of my imaginings are no longer science fiction. (For Web links to these topics and more, go to www.stewardsoftheflame.com.)

Antabuse implants are already in use for the treatment of alcoholism. Some patients voluntarily seek them.

Toilets that can measure health parameters and transfer the data to a home network have been on the market in Japan since 2005. More advanced features are on the horizon; according to an article in the
New York Times
for October 8, 2002, a Matsushita engineer explained, “‘You may think a toilet is just a toilet, but we would like to make a toilet a home health measuring center. We are going to install in a toilet devices to measure weight, fat, blood pressure, heart beat, urine sugar, albumin and blood in urine.’ The results would be sent from the toilet to a doctor by an Internet-capable cellular phone built into the toilet. . . . But some civil libertarians are having nightmares about ‘smart toilets’ running amok, e-mailing highly personal information hither and yon.”

The December 19, 2006 issue of the
IBM Systems Journal
included a paper about the design of computer systems for remote health monitoring, citing a number of research projects in which such systems have been used. “Because the data is automatically recorded directly from the patient’s biomedical sensor devices, physicians see an accurate representation of the patient’s day-to-day condition,” it stated. An article on monitoring in
Nursing Homes
declared, “Users must be willing to trade some degree of privacy for an added sense of security.”

Implanted heart monitors were undergoing clinical tests as early as 2001. An article in the May 4 issue of
EE Times
reported, “Ultimately, engineers say they can foresee a day when an implanted heart monitor will detect a problem and call an ambulance, all while the patient lies sleeping.” It quoted a representative of Medtronic, Inc. who said, “We’d like to believe that someday a pacemaker could send a signal directly to a satellite. When it comes to this kind of patient management, we’d like to believe the sky’s the limit.”

As for passive implanted microchips that merely refer to a medical database, these were approved by the FDA in 2004. Some people are eagerly getting them, although there are others who view them as the Biblical “mark of the beast” (Revelation 13: 16–17). There have been proposals to implant them in immigrants, the homeless, and all members of the military. Whereas an implantable GPS-enabled chip that could be used for tracking is not yet available, developers are working on it; to the dismay of privacy experts and countless bloggers, a wearable prototype was unveiled in 2000.

None of this is to say that there aren’t valid uses for remote monitoring technologies or that they may not be beneficial to people who choose them, such as those who find it difficult or expensive to travel to medical offices, or who might be enabled to stay out of nursing homes. But it is a short step from choice to compulsion once the government and the public come to believe that health considerations trump all other human values.

In 2006 New York began checking the blood sugar levels of residents with diabetes by requiring medical labs to report test results to the city—the first time any American government has monitored individuals with a non-contagious disease. The program is justified by its supporters on grounds that money and lives could be saved through intervention in the care of those whose diabetes is poorly controlled. As an article in the
New York Sun
commented, “This new diabetes regulation is, in short, a harbinger of more intrusive legislation to come—all in the name of ‘public health.’”

The involuntary treatment of persons deemed mentally ill is not a new issue, and there is a huge amount of information about it on the Web and elsewhere; so here I will simply say that my portrayal of it in the story is, if anything, less appalling than the reality. Any opponent of tyranny who remains under the impression that it’s okay to impose what’s “best” for sick people on them by force would do well to investigate the horrific effects of psychiatric drugs, and ponder the implications of compulsion for health care in general.

On the bright side, in December 2005—several months after this novel was completed and many years after the first draft of Part Two was written—the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Science
published a paper describing research in which people have been taught to control pain perception through real-time functional MRI brain scanning. Furthermore, in 2007 several major books have appeared on the new science of neuroplasticity, among them
Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain
by Sharon Begley. So it appears that what I envisioned for the future may someday come true.

The influence of the mind on biochemistry—and the physical effect of psychological stress—is by now a well-researched field of knowledge and many excellent books for laypeople deal with it (for example,
Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers: An Updated Guide to Stress, Stress-Related Diseases, and Coping
by Robert M. Sapolsky and
Who Gets Sick: How Beliefs, Moods and Thoughts Affect Health
by Blair Justice). This is the science underlying traditional alternative and/or spiritual healing practices, most of which have a foundation in fact however metaphorical the explanations they offer for their success. Unfortunately, in the twenty-first century we lack methods for fully utilizing this knowledge. The story is not meant to suggest that all conventional medical treatment could be abandoned by the average person living today.

The so-called “paranormal” powers of in the story are exaggerated only with respect to the characters’ conscious control over them. These abilities, with the exception of fire immunity and rapid healing, have been confirmed by a vast amount of scientific evidence, albeit evidence that is ignored by too many orthodox scientists. (And even fire handling—as distinguished from firewalking, which is common—is occasionally practiced by small religious groups today, apart from the many historical reports that may or may not be true.) Among the best books on psi are
Parapsychology: The Controversial Science
by Richard S. Broughton,
The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena
by Dean Radin, and
Reading the Enemy’s Mind
by Paul H. Smith. For a list of many more, please visit www.stewardsoftheflame.com
  
—Sylvia Engdahl
, August, 2007

Afterword to the 2009 Edition

Several excellent books on psi have appeared in the past two years:
Parapsychology and the Skeptics
by Chris Carter,
The ESP Enigma: The Scientific Case for Psychic Phenomena
by Diane Hennacy Powell, and
The End of Materialism
by Charles T. Tart.

As I write this, Congress is struggling with the issue of what to do about the nation’s health care system, which everyone agrees is badly in need of reform. What nobody on either side of the debate recognizes is that society can never afford to provide medical care for everyone who really needs it as long as so much unnecessary—and often even harmful—treatment is given to those who do not. I strongly recommend the recent book
Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer
by Shannon Brownlee (Bloomsbury, 2007). Another good but more technical book is
Worried Sick: A Prescription for Health in an Overtreated America
by Nortin M. Hadler (University of North Carolina Press, 2008).
  
—Sylvia Engdahl
, August, 2009

Reading Group Discussion Guide

1.
 
“benevolent” dystopian society in which
Stewards of the Flame
takes place is, in the author’s opinion, the logical conclusion of health care trends in our own society. Do you think that given unlimited funding, an essentially similar health care policy would be likely to develop in our world? Jesse reflects, “Not to be treated [for illness] might be crime here; elsewhere, it was sin. People would not vote to permit what they’d been taught to feel guilty about.” Do you agree?

2.
 
Would you find the medical surveillance to which residents of the planet Undine are subjected objectionable or reassuring? Has the story altered your own perception of health care issues in any way? Did it make you less likely to accept government and/or medical establishment statements about these issues as incontestable truth?

3.
 
Whereas most of the medical technologies portrayed in the novel are either already in existence or expected to be developed in the relatively near future, the permanent preservation of bodies in stasis is an obvious exaggeration—an extension of today’s attitudes to, as one reviewer said, reductio ad absurdum lengths. Is this an effective symbol of how death is now viewed by the medical establishment? Does the idea of stasis seem as horrific to you as it does to the characters? Does it evoke legendary images of the “undead” or of spirits who cannot go to their rest because of improper burial, or do you feel that as long as a heart can be kept beating life is present and should be maintained by any means available?

4.
 
The proposed legalization of physician-assisted suicide is a current issue in many states; both advocates and opponents feel strongly about their arguments. The characters in the story are adamantly opposed to artificial prolongation of life, or pseudo-life, by medical technology, yet they are also opposed to suicide in any form. Does this seem inconsistent? The reason why they consider suicide wrong even for the terminally ill is not a common one; does Kira’s explanation of it seem valid to you?

5.
 
The effect of the mind on physical health is a well-established principle for which research is accumulating more and more evidence. However, at present it is not possible for people (other than a few yogis and shamans) to control their own biological responses consciously in the way the characters learn to do. Do the training methods used in the story—and the psychological barriers to gaining such control that are explained—seem credible to you? Is it understandable that Jesse has mixed feelings about it? Would you want to receive such training if it were available?

6.
 
Many people today believe that psi (psychic) powers are real, and parapsychologists have shown, through many well-controlled laboratory experiments, that these phenomena do indeed exist. However, most other scientists do not accept the results of this research; and the public tends to associate such investigation with ghost-hunting, fraudulent mediums, and other sensational topics. Kira, in the book, offers an explanation for the widespread resistance to serious consideration of psi. Do you think it may be the correct one?

7.
 
The characters in the story believe that telepathy is not an exceptional talent, but is latent in everyone and has operated at an unconscious level throughout history, exerting a major influence on human affairs. Do you think that this might be true, and that it might explain aspects of culture that are otherwise puzzling?

8.
 
Some of the paranormal skills portrayed in the novel are ones for which there is strong scientific evidence and are exaggerated only with respect to the characters’ degree of conscious control over them. But others are further removed from realism. Does the author intend to suggest that the more fantastic abilities will actually exist in the future, or should they be interpreted as symbols of the power of the individual mind? Does their inclusion add to the overall impact of the story, or does it make it less convincing?

9.
 
Why do you think the author combined a critique of today’s medical philosophy, a call for individual freedom, and ideas about psi powers in one novel, when many people who are interested in one of these themes have given little or no thought to the others? Is there a logical connection between them?

10.
 
At the beginning of the story, Jesse Sanders is a burned-out starship captain who drinks too much when not on duty, hasn’t much confidence in himself, and sees little meaning in his life. The experiences he undergoes not only enable him to find a meaning, but transform him into a leader capable of taking responsibility for the lives of many people under conditions of increasing difficulty. Do you find this believable? Is lack of challenge a factor in the lives of many underachievers?

11.
 
Peter is a strong and admirable leader, yet he is also emotionally vulnerable and must feel a good deal of anxiety during his recruitment and training of Jesse, considering what is at stake. The narrative merely hints at this because Peter’s plans for the immediate future aren’t revealed until late in the story. Imagine how portions might be told from his viewpoint if it were not necessary to maintain plot suspense.

12.
  
Stewards of the Flame
is not as specifically aimed toward science fiction fans as is required by publishers of adult SF.
 
It’s not an action/adventure story, nor are the culture and concepts portrayed far enough from reality to fit that market, as it is intended to be enjoyed readers who don’t usually choose science fiction. Do you feel, as Engdahl does, that the strict labeling of fiction by genre—which the structure of today’s publishing business demands—artificially limits the audience of some books and may prevent others from being published at all?