by Julian May
And then O'Connor and the two men with him were gone, and the gold brocade curtain opened on the handsome Ming Cho Lee set of a monastery courtyard in Spain. The stage illumination lit the faces of the audience. Falcone was aware of a faint, peculiar odor. He leaned over and saw that the eye sockets of his henchmen had become streaming wells of dark fluid, and that neither man was breathing even though they both sat very straight in their luxurious chairs.
2
ALMA-ATA, KAZAKH SSR, EARTH
10 JULY 1979
HE WAS THE most self-effacing member of the delegation of Indian parapsychology scholars visiting Kazakh State University, and afterward many staff members at the Bioenergetics Institute (including the Director) denied that he had been there at all. But the truth was that he had been the one who arranged for the tour in the first place, as a pretext for meeting Yuri and Tamara.
The visitors had seen nothing of the laboratory where the young biophysicist and his wife worked, since it was under the Cosmic security classification. Instead they toured the Kirlian facility, where scanning devices purported to monitor the nonphysical aura of living things. Although one or two of the delegates asked indiscreet questions about corona discharge effects and water vapor, most were suitably impressed. In the afternoon there was a tea, presided over by the Director of the Institute, where the delegates were given the opportunity to mingle with the various project supervisors and a few of the percipient subjects whose psychic powers were under analysis. Yuri and Tamara were there, introduced simply as "biocommunications specialists. " They said very little and slipped away early, and forgot about the group of Indian scholars almost at once. Their attention was fully occupied by the matter of Abdizhamil Simonov. There were rumors that Andropov himself was taking a personal interest in the KGB's inquiry into the mind-controller's sudden death.
That evening, as Tamara was putting little Valery and Ilya to bed, Yuri received a phone call from the Director.
"A distinguished member of the Indian Paraphysics Association tour group has asked for a personal meeting with you and your wife. " The Director's voice was strained and overly formal. "He was told that such an appointment would be difficult to arrange, since it would have to be approved by Moscow. This did not deter him. He... prevailed upon me to phone the Comrade Academician himself with the request. It was approved. "
Yuri could only say, "How unusual!"
"You will meet this Dr. Urgyen Bhotia in the main lobby of the Hotel Kazakhstan as soon as possible. He is a Tibetan resident of Darjeeling, and he wishes to speak to you about certain studies he has made that are relevant to your work. Show him every courtesy. " Before Yuri could respond, the Director hung up.
Tamara came out of the children's bedroom with lifted brows.
He transferred the amazing gist of the conversation to her in an instant, adding: I have no idea what this is all about but we are going to have to see this guru and postpone our discussion with Alla and Mukan until later tonight I'll call them while you get Natasha to baby-sit.
When everything was arranged, they took a bus across town to the soaring new hotel on Lenin Avenue, where only the most distinguished visitors were housed. No sooner had they come into the air-conditioned lobby than the strangely influential Tibetan was there bowing. He was a short, sturdy man with very brown skin, dressed in crisply pressed trekker's garb.
"Dr. Gawrys and Madame Gawrys-Sakhvadze, I am Urgyen Bhotia. I thank you profoundly for coming here, and apologize for causing you inconvenience. I hope you will forgive my summoning you in such a precipitate manner, but I have waited nearly five years for this moment. " Shall we stroll outside in the cool of the evening?
Yuri froze in the act of shaking hands. Tamara said: I think that would be wise. Have you taken the cable car up Koktyube Hill?
Not yet but I hear it provides a marvelous view of the city.
Yuri said: You know us and our work? How can this be?
The Tibetan laughed and said, "This is not my first visit to your lovely city of Alma-Ata, but it is my first opportunity to enjoy it with all my physical senses! Let us walk. "
He casually took an arm of each of them when they were outside and guided them across Abai Avenue into the gardens of the Lenin Palace of Culture as though he were the host and they the visitors. The fountains were lit with the coming of dusk and the spray from them was cooling and welcome. A heavy scent of flowers arose from the formal gardens and Urgyen paused to admire them.
"So many lush growing things in this splendid, modern city! The aether sings with vitality. " He might have been any age from forty to sixty. His head was shaved and his cheeks were such a bright red that they might have been rouged. His teeth were very white and perfect and his eyes, almost hidden in a mass of deep creases when he smiled, were an unusual hazel color.
Tamara said, "It is clear that you are one of the adept — unlike your colleagues. You will please tell us how you came to know of our psychic faculties and of our work, since both are closely guarded state secrets. "
"I know you, " the Tibetan said, "because I have been blessed with an ability to perceive the bioplasma of the brightest ones across great distances. My vision extends only throughout Asia. But for more than twenty years now, since leaving Tibet, I have studied the soul manifestation by means of what you would call remote-viewing. I saw the two of you for the first time in 1974, when you were newly come to Alma-Ata, a double mind-star more brilliant than any I had found before. Since then I have watched, I rejoiced in the birth of your two brilliantly ensouled sons, and now I anticipate with you the coming of your third child, a daughter. "
"It is a girl?" Tamara exclaimed.
"Most assuredly. " Urgyen searched the faces of the young couple, ruefully acknowledging the mental barricades they had erected against him. "Please do not be afraid of me. My only wish is to help you at this very difficult time, when you two and the many immature minds under your care find yourselves at a moral crossroads. "
"You say you have watched us, " Yuri stated. "How close has your astral scrutiny been? Have you read our minds?"
"You know from your own remote-viewing studies that such a thing is impossible. Nor can I read them now unless you freely give access. Nevertheless, I am aware of the temptations bedeviling you and the dangers that you face. I asked myself and the Compassionate Lord if it was my duty to advise you. "
"And what, " Yuri inquired coldly, "did your heavenly oracle say?"
"I was helped to understand that, in spite of certain inhumane actions you have abetted, you are both persons of goodwill. You have rejected the false joy of the great determinism that hands over the individual conscience to a group and evades personal responsibility. You know you are free, and you know you will have to make choices. Too many people of your nation deny this difficult truth. They do not understand that the human mind must cultivate both soul and spirit if it is to be integral. "
"You will have to explain that, " Yuri said.
They walked on, across the palace concourse and into trees where cicadas were beginning to buzz.
Urgyen said, "A month ago there was a meeting of leaders in Vienna. The President of the United States and the Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev signed a strategic arms limitation treaty. At one of their conferences, which took place in the Soviet embassy in Vienna, a person from your Bioenergetics Institute named Simonov exerted coercive and mind-altering force upon the American President, throwing him into a state of confusion and irrationality that still persists... The Chairman of your KGB was so elated by Simonov's success that he made arrangements to send the man to Washington, where he would be able to exert his inimical influence upon other American leaders, as ordered. The plan was aborted when Simonov dropped dead while jogging on the university campus. "
"An autopsy showed that his heart was enlarged and weakened, " Yuri said. "It is a disability that often accompanies great psychic exertion. I myself am under a physician's care for similar symptoms. "
"Exactly, " said Urgyen sadly.
They walked in silence. Ahead was the brightly lit funicular station, the goal of many other evening strollers.
Tamara said, "Abdizhamil Simonov was a tribal shaman before he was recruited to the Institute, a petty and vicious man who resisted all our efforts to dissuade him from cooperating in Andropov's scheme. He was half mad, a menace to world peace. The KGB thought they could control him, but we knew they could not. "
Urgyen nodded. "There was also Ryrik Volzhsky, a strong coercer and an incorrigible corrupter of children. You have in your special program at the Institute more than sixty youthful psychics. When Volzhsky persuaded your Director to assign him to the pedagogical staff, both of you admonished him to restrain himself. He laughed. Two days later he was found drowned in the Bolshaya Alma-Atinka River. "
"The normals can only agonize in their impotence when confronted by evil, " Yuri said. "They can only utter foolish curses or wish the destruction of the wicked. We are more fortunate. "
"The soul would say so, but not the spirit, " said the Tibetan.
They came to the ticket office, where Yuri paid. Then the three of them got into one of the crowded red-and-yellow cablecars. The other holidaymakers made room for pregnant Tamara near the window, and a moment later they were soaring up the hillside, suspended in the clear air, with the discussion now relegated to telepathy.
Yuri said: So you presume to judge me and castigate me with your pious Eastern word-play... Soul and spirit! Talk instead of life and death! Talk of a pair of fearful children become the toys of power-corrupted old men who would use marvelous mind-powers as weapons rather than dedicate them to the good of humanity!
Urgyen said: But if you kill even in a cause that seems just are you any better than your oppressors?
Tamara said: We regretted the deaths bitterly. Yuri acted only after serious reflection.
Urgyen said: In Tibet in the eleventh century the poet Milarepa had mental powers like yours. He was able to strike his enemies dead from afar. But only after he renounced his usurpation of god-power did he become a saint.
Yuri said: We aren't saints. We are only persons wanting to survive. Yes I killed and because I am a Pole and a Catholic I was tormented and I wish there had been another way but there was not. Once I was timid little Jerzy snatched from my parents in Lodz bullied and cajoled into mental slavery thinking there was no helping it. Then came Tamara! In Leningrad the scientists studied us and tested us and the military men tried to convince us that our duty was unquestioning loyalty and service to the state. But Tamara knew better and helped me to know also. Her dear father was exiled because he dared to protest and publicize the GRU's treatment of us and of other psychics.
Urgyen said: Your unhappy memories are clear to me... and I see what you are reluctant to state directly: that even then you thought it necessary to kill...
Yuri said: Why can't you understand!
Tamara said: There was a cold-blooded brute the chief of the GRU. Yes he was the first. He would have locked us away treated us as equipment rather than human beings to further his ambition. We were to be his secret weapon to spy with remote-vision on Chairman Andropov of the KGB. When our enemy died the GRU lost control of the psychic-study program. Andropov and Brezhnev became fervent believers in the mind-powers, coopted the project and promised us and the other adepts that we would now be treated as honored Soviet citizens. It was 1974. Six months after Papa's exile. I was 16 and Jerzy/Yuri 22. We were given permission to marry and sent to Alma-Ata.
Yuri said: We expected a barbarous outpost in Central Asia with camel caravans and fierce nomads and bazaars. Imagine our surprise at this green new city with the great university where we could study as well as be studied.
Urgyen said: You have acquired knowledge but not wisdom.
Yuri said: Gawno!
Tamara said: Urgyen Bhotia we are not Indians or Tibetans. Our soul does not flinch at the prospect of violence because our people have survived for centuries in violent lands enduring persecution. We know we face grave choices but we have made glorious plans and we are determined to see them carried out. This means defending ourselves if necessary. Yuri and I are the most powerful of all the minds assembled here in the pilot bioenergetics program. We teach the young ones remote-viewing and convince them to hide their true ability from the KGB evaluators. The program thus seems to progress very slowly. But the children understand that their minds set them apart that they must work for all the world not only for the Soviet Union.
Urgyen said: If you are the teachers it is that much more important that you reform your erring consciences.
"Here we are at the top of the hill, " Yuri said. "Come, let us enjoy the view!"
There was an observation platform and a restaurant at the terminus of the cableway, and the other passengers disembarked laughing and exclaiming at the beauty of the panorama. To the north, lost in purple haze, were the steppes of the Virgin Lands, turned into fields and orchards by irrigation. The multicolored lights of the great city were just beginning to twinkle on while the last sunset glow illuminated the eastern foothills. Behind Koktyube, to the south, was the Zailiysky Ala-Tau, a heavily wooded outlier of the high Tien Shan. China lay only three hundred kilometers beyond.
They stood at the railing, looking out over Alma-Ata. Tamara said, "The city's name means Father of Apples. There are orchards everywhere, and vineyards. We have come to love this place. At the university, we are trusted. We say the proper things and are circumspect in the use of our higher mind-powers. We can do so much good, Urgyen... and someday when other persons like us in other parts of the world are able to reveal themselves and work openly, we will also. Then we will forever renounce the self-defensive violence that we have been forced to resort to. I swear it. "
"You know there are many others, many minds with these powers, " Urgyen said. "But do you know that there is a World Mind, of which you and I and the others, whether highly empowered or lowly, partake?"
"We know there is the Great Soul, " Tamara said. "My many-times-great-grandfather told me of it when I was a child. Now we would call it the Conscious Field of Humanity. Some persons call it God. "
"It is not God, " said the Tibetan. "God is spirit and cannot be infected by evil. But the World Soul can... and this is why I came to plead with you. "
Yuri cried: Soul! Spirit! Tell us plainly what you mean!
"I will try, " said the Tibetan. "Years ago, when I was a monk called Urgyen Rimpoche and practiced my mind-powers proudly, I thought I was one blessed by the gods, a living miracle who had the right to command heaven. I was young! In the turmoil that my poor country suffered during the Chinese invasion of the 1950s, my attempts to coerce divinity and repel the invaders were futile. Our little monastery was utterly demolished and we were beaten and called parasites by the Red soldiers. Of course, they were right... I had confused soul with spirit. So had my brother monks who had prospered and enjoyed prestige by celebrating my talents. Along with many of my countrymen, I fled to India. After suffering much and losing my psychic abilities because of self-doubts, I began to acquire wisdom. The first thing I took to heart was the realization that the soul and its powers are not supernatural. They are no miracle. They are part of the natural human heritage and all people have them in greater or lesser degree. "
"We have also come to that conclusion, " said Tamara.
Urgyen said, "The soul is neither physical or spiritual. But it is still part of matter's realm, born with certain coalescences of matter and energy. Even atoms have a minute portion of soul! Higher organisms have much more. And there is a World Soul —"
"Do you speak of a World Mind?" Yuri asked.
"No, no. That comes later, with the infusion of spirit! But let me go on... The soul feels but it cannot know. It is — as most thinkers have recognized — feminine: life-giving, as patient and enduring as planet Earth whose soul-essence is part of each one of us. Living things form
a hierarchy of soul, first tropistic, then sentient. Plants and animals. In us, souls dream and imagine and fantasize and create. They remember and they fear. They are basically passive and amoral. When the soul is properly entuned, its powers may move matter and change it. Sometimes the human soul swells large and begets ultrasenses, or a coercive will, or mental control of matter and energy, or the reorganization of dysfunctioning mind or body that we call healing. "
"Tell us how mind relates to soul, " Yuri demanded.
"Only in thinking creatures is the soul infused with spirit, making a mind. "
"And spirit is what?" Tamara asked.
"It does not belong to the realm of matter. We may call it divine, but it is of a different order of reality. It enkindles the intellect, orders all things in our minds, impels us upward as flames rise. It is masculine: impregnating and driving, engendering discipline, truth, wisdom, and law. It makes thinking creatures yearn toward a higher reality, what I would call the face of God. It knows good and evil. It strives to unite in love with other minds and to form the World Mind. But it can be debased. Its impulse toward increasing organization can be crippled, even halted. "
They said: We do not understand. Especially we do not understand why you say WE threaten your World Mind.
"Look around you, " Urgyen invited. "You see the terraced mountains with their forests and orchards, and you see a modern city. The mountains were upthrust ages ago, and slowly they are being worn down. The trees and other plant-life spring up from seed and grow — but when growth stops, they will die. The city of Alma-Ata is only the latest of many human settlements in the Valley of the Seven Rivers. Others flourished for a time, but when they stopped growing, they died. Growth! Evolution, if you like, with life and mind organizing itself at ever-higher levels! If Mind does not grow, it will also die. My dear Tamara and Yuri, you are the vanguard of the planetary Mind, together with the others like you. It is so simple: you must be better than those who came before because spirit must grow as well as soul in the evolving World Mind. Without growth, there can only be death. If you, the leading shoots of your growing species, become corrupt, you will tend to corrupt the entire Mind. "