Mindbridge

by Joe Haldeman

  MINDBRIDGE

  Joe Haldeman

  WHAT MUST HUMANITY LEARN ABOUT ITSELF TO SURVIVE?

  “Haldeman creates real, human characters.

  They are three-dimensional in pain, fear, and love.”

  Cincinnati Enquirer

  “DAZZLING

  ... soars into speculation on the future of humanity.

  I couldn’t put it down!”

  Cleveland Plain Dealer

  “FASTER-THAN-LIGHT

  . . . . Haldeman knows exactly what he is doing.”

  The New York Times

  “MASTERFUL”

  Houston Chronicle

  “SPELLBINDING”

  Science Fiction Review

  SELECTED BY THE SCIENCE FICTION BOOK CLUB

  This book is for my teachers at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop:

  Stephen Becker

  Vance Bourjaily

  Ray Carver

  John Cheever

  Stanley Elkin

  William Price Fox

  John Leggett

  Also for

  John Brunner

  Dos Passos, pro forma

  The quotation from the I Ching in Chapter Two is taken from the James Legge translation, copyright © 1973 by Causeway Books.

  AVON BOOKS

  A division of

  The Hearst Corporation

  959 Eighth Avenue

  New York, New York 10019

  Copyright © 1976 by Joe Haldeman

  Published by arrangement with St. Martin’s Press, Inc.

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 75-26185

  ISBN: 0-380-01689-3

  All rights reserved, which includes the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address St. Martin’s Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10010

  First Avon Printing, February, 1978

  AVON TRADEMARK REG. U.S. PAT. OFF. AND IN

  OTHER COUNTRIES, MARCA REGISTRADA,

  HECHO EN U.S.A.

  Printed In Canada

  Contents

  1 - Blessed Are the Peacemakers

  2 - Autobiography 2062

  3 - Personnel Report

  4 - Roster

  5 – CHAPTER ONE

  6 - Biospheres: Classroom 2041

  7 – CHAPTER TWO

  8 - Geoformy 1

  9 - The Levant-Meyer Translation

  10 – CHAPTER THREE

  11 - Bridge 1

  12 – CHAPTER FOUR

  13 - Insurance Manual

  14 - The Slingshot Effect

  15 – CHAPTER FIVE

  16 - Autopsy

  17 - Schedule

  18 – CHAPTER SIX: PRELUDE

  19 - Fugue

  20 - Coda

  21- To the Marriage of True Minds Admit Impediments

  22 - Sing Nonnie

  23 – CHAPTER SEVEN

  24 - Geoformy II: Access to Tools

  25 - Carry the Seed

  26 - Autobiography 2051

  27 - Touch Me Not

  28 – CHAPTER EIGHT

  29 - They Also Serve

  30 - Nine Lives

  31 - Crystal Ball I

  32 - Help Wanted

  33 – CHAPTER NINE

  34 - Numbers and Dollars

  35 - Autobiography 2053

  36 - Things That Go Bump in the Night

  37 – CHAPTER TEN

  38 - Second Contact

  39 – CHAPTER ELEVEN

  40 - Autobiography 2053 (continued)

  41 - All I Know Is What I Read in the Papers

  42 – CHAPTER TWELVE

  43 - Job Description

  44 – CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  45 - Messenger

  46 - Autobiography 2034

  47 – CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  48 - Psychiatrist’s Report

  49 – CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  50 - Mindbridge

  51 - Crystal Ball II

  52 - Autobiography 2149

  53 - For They Shall Be Called the Children of God

  1 - Blessed Are the Peacemakers

  Denver pissed him off.

  Jacque Lefavre had managed a long weekend pass from the Academy, and at the last minute decided to go to Denver instead of Aspen. It looked like rain.

  Indeed it rained in Denver, bucket after cold bucket, time off at midnight for sleet. In Aspen, he learned later, it had been eight inches of good powder snow.

  He went to the Denver Mint and it was closed. So was the museum; government holiday. He went to a bad movie.

  He was walking along with his overcoat open and a cab splashed him from collar to cuff. Traveling light, he’d brought no other outer clothes.

  The hotel’s one-hour dry cleaning service took twenty hours. They wouldn’t admit they’d lost the trousers.

  He drank too much room-service booze, sitting in his room watching daytime TV in his underwear.

  When he got his uniform back, they had neglected to roll the cuffs. He would have to re-iron them when he got back to Colorado Springs.

  The desk clerk would allow him neither student discount nor military discount. He had to shout his way all the way to the assistant manager, and then they only gave him the reduced rate to get rid of him.

  The train broke down and was six hours late. He stomped his way through the sleeping dormitory, in mild trouble for coming in after curfew, and smelled fresh paint when the elevator stopped at his floor.

  His roommate had painted their room flat black. Walls, ceiling, even the windows. Jacque had painted the room at the beginning of the semester, to cover up the government green. Now he discovered a curious thing.

  There was a limit to rage.

  “Uh, Clark,” he said mildly. “What, you didn’t like beige?”

  Clark Franklin, his roommate, was stretched out on the bed, chewing a toothpick and studying the ceiling. “Nope.”

  “Personally, I thought it was rather soothing.” He felt deadly calm but abstractly realized that his fingernails were hurting his palms. He stood at the foot of Franklin’s bed.

  Franklin shifted, crossing his ankles. He hadn’t looked at Jacque yet. “Chacun à son goot.”

  “’Goût.’ I don’t like the black very much.”

  “Well.”

  “You should have asked me first. We could have arrived at a compromise. I would’ve helped you paint it.”

  “You weren’t here. I had to paint it while I had the time free.” He looked at Jacque, lids half closed. “The beige was distracting, I couldn’t study.”

  “You lazy son of a bitch, I’ve never seen you crack a book!” A neighbor thumped the wall and shouted for them to keep it down in there.

  Franklin took the toothpick out of his mouth and inspected it. “Well, yeah. Couldn’t study in the beige.”

  The next morning the registration clerk told Jacque he would have to wait until next semester to get a new roommate. Four months.

  Actually, Franklin moved out a few weeks early. He left three teeth behind.

  2 - Autobiography 2062

  I’ve never used a voice typer before but I know the general idea you’ve got to damn you’ve got to press the character button and say period. . . . There. Comma,,,, It works, how about that. Paragraph button now.

  My name is Jacque, spelling light comes on, Jacque Lefavre. If it were a French machine it probably would have spelled out “Jacques” and the hell with it, but no, that’s right the way it is up there, without the final ess.

  This is for the archives, I mean ARCHIVES damn. Got to touch the capitals button then get off it before you say the word. Starting over.

  This is for the Archives of the Agency for Extraterrestrial Development. Motivational analysis and training evaluation survey. H
ighly confidential, so get your eyes back where they belong.

  Begin at the beginning, my freshman composition teacher used to say, and I could never figure out whether that was profound or stupid. But all right, the beginning. I was conceived sometime in the spring of 2024. We’ll skip the next eighteen years or so.

  But I should say something about my father because that is important. And if what they say is true, that this won’t be read (spelling light again, crazy language) for another twenty years, then people will probably have forgotten who he was.

  My dad’s-Robert Lefavre’s-shining hour was the paper he delivered at the 2034 American Physical Society meeting. It was called “The Levant-Meyer Translation: Physics as Wishful Thinking.” Look it up, it’s very convincing. It was well-received. But the next month, Meyer sent a mouse and a camera to Kruger 60 and they came back alive and full of exposed film, respectively. Via the LMT.

  So in one day my father was reduced from Nobel candidate to footnote.

  Even as young as I was, I could see that something broke in my father when that happened. Something snapped. With hindsight, now, I have sympathy for him. But he was a ruined man, and I grew up disillusioned with him, contemptuous and hostile.

  It’s kind of a kick, watching this machine spell. I couldn’t spell contemptuous if my life depended on it. Now if they could only program it to put the semicolons in where they belong...

  So as far as motivational analysis, I guess the main reason I became a Tamer was to hurt my dad.

  After his anti-LMT thesis was demonstrated to be wrong, Dad took a sabbatical from the Institut Fermi and never went back. Maybe they asked him not to return, but I doubt it. I think it was just that he would have had to start work on applications of the Levant-Meyer Translation, like everyone else at the Institut. After spending six years trying to prove that there was no such thing as the LMT; that the freak accident that happened to Dr. Levant had nothing to do with matter transmission, but could be explained in terms of conventional thermodynamics.

  So we gave up the nice Manhattan brownstone and moved upstate, away from Institut Fermi and the weekly seminar at Columbia, to a little junior college where Dad became one-third of the physics department.

  He hated the job, but it gave him plenty of time outside of class. He would stay locked in his study all morning and evening, oblivious to us, trying to find where his thermodynamic proof had gone wrong.

  Mother left in less than a year, and I left as soon as I was old enough to take the Tamer examination.

  My nineteenth birthday came just three days after I graduated from gymnasium (we’d moved back to Switzerland in 2042), and that morning I was the first one in line at the AED employment office in downtown Geneva. The testing took two days, and of course I passed.

  I went home and told Dad that I’d been accepted, and he forbade it. Those were the last words he ever said to me. I didn’t even see his face again until his funeral, nine years later.

  Dad’s attitude was the familiar one (then), that we had just come too far, too fast. Less than a century had gone by between the first unmanned satellite and interstellar travel via the LMT. We hadn’t even finished cleaning up after the Industrial Revolution, he claimed-and here we were planning to export the mess to the rest of the Galaxy. And war and et cetera. We should grow up first, put a moratorium on the LMT until the race was philosophically mature enough to handle the vast opportunity.

  Who was going to tell us when we’d grown up enough, he didn’t say. People like him, presumably.

  So I slammed the door on his silence and went on to the AED Academy in Colorado Springs.

  (Reading over the above, I can see that it gives a pretty lopsided picture of my motives for joining the AED. Although my father’s extreme stance in the opposite camp was very important, especially in keeping me from quitting the Academy when it got rough, I probably would have tried to join no matter what my family situation was. The profession seemed romantic and interesting, and my generation had grown up coveting it.)

  I’m not the best Tamer to ask about “training evaluation.” It took me six years to get through the Academy (in those days a lot of people got through in four), even though I had no trouble with the course work or the physical training. My semester reports were always marked “profiled for psych.”

  They’ve loosened up on this a bit, over the years. But when I was at the Academy there was one quality they valued over all others, for the people who made up a Tamer team: icy self-control. The kind of person who would face certain death with a slightly raised eyebrow.

  They never got perfection, because they also were looking for qualities such as imagination and resilience, rarely found in robots. But I did have to admit that all of my fellow students seemed rather more self-possessed than I was. Mainly, I had one hell of a time controlling my temper. They put me through psychoanalysis and situational therapy and even made me study Buddhism and Taoism. But then they would test me with the damnedest things, and I would always flunk and get profiled.

  They liked to use ringers, for instance. I got a new roommate once who turned out to have been an actor, and who spent a whole semester perfecting his role. He would borrow things and never return them, express outrageous opinions without deigning to argue about them, contemptuously refuse to study and yet get high grades. Plus a whole galaxy of small annoyances. And then, in the middle of the study week preceding the semester’s final exams, he sauntered into the room and announced that he had won over my current lover. And he had revealed to her certain things. Things a man will tell another man and feel protected by bond of gender.

  I hoped the AED repaired his nose and fixed that kneecap. I left him there bleeding and went out to walk through the snow, actually afraid I would kill him if I stayed in the room. I stomped around until my fingers turned blue, then returned to find him gone, replaced by a note from my psych counselor.

  It turns out that the two extra years served me well later on. I took a heavy load of technical electives, and things like discrete tectonics and atmosphere kinematics came in handy when we got down to practical geoformy. With a broad, general knowledge of the physical and biological sciences, I’ve always drawn more than my share of trailbreaker assignments. The first Tamer team that goes to a planet has to have a couple of generalists aboard, to help decide what sort of specialists will go on subsequent trips. And it’s a lot more fun to crawl around an unexplored planet than it is to go in with pick and shovel and geoform it. For me, anyhow.

  Studying oriental philosophies didn’t improve me the way the psych board hoped. But Taoism did save my ass in a very direct way, in what I later learned was my final, make-or-break, situational exam. It also involved an actor.

  My Taoism instructor was a kindly old gentleman named Wu, full of humor and patience. I was headed for Germany on summer break, and not planning to do any serious studying, but out of respect for him I agreed to continue the I Ching readings. Even though I privately considered the book’s wisdom to be only slightly more profound than the little notes you get inside of fortune cookies.

  So every morning I would compose myself with contemplation and prayer, trying not to feel silly, and then ask the I Ching a general question about the day ahead of me. Then I’d toss the coins, look up the proper commentary, and commit it to memory, so I could refer to it at various times during the day.

  I don’t even remember the question I asked that morning before my final testing. But I’ll never forget the commentary:

  Here a strong man is presupposed. It is true he does not fit in with his environment, inasmuch as he is too brusque and pays too little attention to form. But he is upright in character, he meets with (proper) response...

  It struck me as oddly appropriate, and all day I walked around trying to be not-brusque and proper. That night, as I had done every night since coming to Heidelberg, I went to a quiet, inexpensive bar down the block from my hotel to read and relax from the day’s sightseeing.

  A
bellicose drunk was abusing the bartender for not serving him. I watched the argument for a while, noted privately that the big fellow could use a dose of the I Ching more than another drink, and returned to my reading.

  I looked up when the argument stopped, and in the mirror behind the bar caught a glimpse of the drunk lurching by behind me. Then for no reason he picked up an empty stein and tried with all his might to brain me with it.

  I didn’t know it at the time, but the AED was not going to allow me a seventh year of training. They didn’t care whether I got my brains bashed out for inattention or stopped the assault by simply punching the guy. Or breaking his back; he was getting paid enough to compensate for a long hospital stay or a prison term for second-degree murder.

  Either way, I would have flunked out.

  But I saw it coming and grabbed his wrist and twisted the stein away from him. I set it on the bar and asked him, “Do I know you?” in pretty good German, in a low voice. When he responded with a stream of bilingual invective, I told the bartender to call a cop. The “drunk” left.

  The anger, bitter anger, hit me a few minutes later, in trembles and cold sweats and grinding teeth. But instead of going off in a rage, finding the guy and pulverizing him, I remembered who I was trying to be, and kept it bottled up. And wound up spending the rest of the short evening on my knees in the john.

  There were three other people in the bar, and one of them was an AED observer. The next day, I got my papers.

  3 - Personnel Report

  Satellit Ubersendung Mitteilung ITT

  ZU John Thomas Riley VON Hermann Kranz RECHNUNG- DATTEL ZEIT

  Director of Personnel Abgeordnete fur Mann NUMMER

  AED Academy schaften

  Kabel Adresse: AED Munchen 01 285 78496 20 Jull 51 02.10

  Starseed Deutschland

  Kollekt

  My Dear Riley:

  As directed, I was present at the informal testing of Tamer Candidate Jacuqe Lefavre. I am trying to reach you by telephone, but get no response from your office or home. You must be in the early evening; it is 2.00 AM here.