Pegasus in Flight

by Anne McCaffrey

  “Someone who doesn’t like the bod they’re stuck with,” she replied.

  “But o.o.b.’ing is Talent,” Budworth said, “and all of ’em are registered, so they have better things to do than o.o.b.”

  “If they’re registered,” Sascha pointed out.

  “I see, so we run a check on new ones.”

  “That’s right. With the hospitals.”

  Madlyn groaned. “D’you know how many hospitals there are in Jerhattan?”

  “Not intimately,” Sascha said with a grin, and pointed an index finger at her. “Think of it as a survey question in your training. Ask for paralytic cases, teen, preteen, insomniacs . . .”

  “Why blame the teens?” Madlyn asked, bridling.

  “They won’t have been scanned for Talent yet. Okay,” Sascha added graciously, “try anyone faced with a sudden lack of mobility. I’ll add the prison systems, too.” He grinned at Madlyn’s groan. “One of the most famous was a guy escaping a sadistic jailor.”

  Madlyn’s eyes widened. “Can the Center get prisoners released?”

  Budworth chortled. “Don’t you remember your Center history? This place was started by rejects from prisons and mental institutions—” He shot a sly look at Sascha. “—and all kinds of otherwise asocial and/or eccentric personalities.”

  “If my brother were here . . .” Sascha waggled an admonitory finger at Budworth.

  “Huh!” Budworth snorted. “I’m not afraid of your brother even if he is the high-and-mighty Law Enforcement and Order commissioner.”

  “I would be,” Sascha replied. “Which reminds me, I’m late for that appointment. Get the program started on checking hospitals and prisons. And buddy boy, you can do the mental institutions. I appreciate the reminder.”

  “Ha!” Madlyn said to Budworth as Sascha left the Control Room.

  “How can there be that many illegal children in the Residentials?” Jerhattan City Manager Teresa Aiello demanded of Medical Chief Harv Dunster. “Your people are supposed to tie off after a second pregnancy.”

  Harv’s angular face was grim. “Only if we get to deliver ’em. You know that some ethnic groups still refuse to practice contraception. Until we have the right to use infertility drugs in subsistence-level food, there’ll be unreported births—and continued traffic in preadolescents for sexual perversions, or cheap labor in illegal factories. And the ones with the right blood factors and healthy organs will still be stashed away by the very rich for transplants as needed.” He gestured at the fax sheets on Teresa Aiello’s desk.

  “And ruthless people will still dispose of the used ones,” added Boris Roznine, commissioner of Law Enforcement and Order. “Even illegal kids have rights.” He glanced obliquely at the faxes scattered on the work-top.

  Teresa inadvertently glanced down. She was a tough-minded woman, but she had a ten-year-old daughter, and the fax of the bloated bodies discovered as flotsam off the North Shore of Long Island spared no one’s sensibilities. She averted her eyes. The coroner reported that the oldest had been twelve, the youngest five.

  Boris Roznine had contacted her the moment the appalling discovery had been made. The temper of Jerhattan was always uncertain when faced with such news, and Teresa had called an emergency meeting of her commissioners to prepare for a possible eruption if the news was leaked to the media. Boris’s twin brother, Sascha, was due to arrive with the Parapsychic Center’s suggestions. To insure the tight security around the tragedy, the four were meeting in the shielded privacy of the city manager’s tower office.

  “Ah,” Boris interrupted what Teresa had been about to say, his right hand lightly touching his temple in indication that he was receiving a telepathic message. “Positive ID of one, the Waddell girl who was kidnapped six weeks ago . . .”

  Teresa winced and let out a groan. The Waddells were acquaintances of hers, high-tech executives; the child, bright and extremely pretty, had been a school friend of her daughter. Teresa had put a top priority on the abduction, and had officially requested that Rhyssa Owen assign her best finder to the case.

  “Two others are listed as runaways, reported missing two months ago. Of the others . . .” Roznine shrugged, glancing at the medical officer. “The best the lab can do is genotypes, and it’s all-sorts.”

  Every citizen of the United World was permitted—provided they did not carry the proscribed genetic recessives—to produce a replacement. One parent, one child. Two parents, two children. ZPG was stringently enforced until the pressure of Earth’s population could be released on the new habitable worlds, identified but not yet attainable. The Propagation Laws were easier to enforce in rural communities than in the huge residential warrens of cities like Jerhattan, with its population of over thirty million.

  Teresa turned to the LEO commissioner. “You haven’t stopped the spot checks, have you, Boris?”

  “Hell, no, but we’re still not locating the early pregnancies no matter how we try. If I had the personnel to mount simultaneous level searches, we’d catch more.” Boris brought his clasped hands together as if closing a net. He gave a ghost of a grin. “We did pretty well at the Residentials, six weeks after the last big power outage, but that was a once-off.” Then he spread his hands wide, matching Dunster’s resignation. “You know our situation. We manage to keep a lid on most of the trouble—if we’re all sitting down as hard as we can. It isn’t as if we need more bodies.”

  “The ones that ignore the legal control,” Harv said dejectedly, “are exactly the ones educational and hygiene programs don’t reach—in any language.”

  Teresa grimaced. “So there’s no indication where the rest of those poor kids were snatched?”

  Roznine shook his head. “Could have come from any subsistence level.”

  “In the last gruesome chucking, three months back or so, only four were recognizable ethnic types,” Harv Dunster said grimly. “Near Easterners—Lebanese and Arabic. Two were Tay-Sachs, ten were dark-skinned, and one was an HIV carrier—which may well be why they were all . . . disposed of.” The medic sighed heavily. “I suspect Lab may also find anti-body positives among this latest—”

  “Spare me, Harv,” Teresa said firmly, and called up the main Jerhattan map on her screen. “We’ve just had a go-round of the Residentials with Public Health. We haven’t got the funds available for another. Exactly where were the bodies found, Boris?” Her fingers hovered over the terminal as she waited for an answer.

  “Washed up out by Glen Cove, not far from some of the more exclusive residential hives bordering the Sound.”

  “Great!” Teresa’s frustration came out as sarcasm. “No Incident logged?” she asked Boris, though that would have been included in the initial report.

  “The storm, yes. The flotsam, no.”

  “Shouldn’t your brother be here by now?” Teresa frowned, glancing at the clock ticking off the seconds in the corner of the main screen. “We need all the help we can get on this.”

  The focus of Boris Roznine’s blue eyes locked briefly as he linked minds with his younger brother. “Traffic snarl’s breaking up. But he says”—his voice suddenly deepened as the Talent peculiar to the twin brothers allowed one to speak through the other—“Look, I want to save time—yours and mine. These murders go deeper than the loss of thirty juveniles. Forget the HIV factor—it’s irrelevant here. They were disposed of because we’d got too close to them, but not close enough, soon enough. Teresa, Carmen’s been on search-and-find duty ever since you handed us the Waddell kidnap file. She got a whiff or two of terror, but never enough light to pinpoint. Except that she got a hint of water.” Boris’s wide mouth quirked briefly, reflecting his brother’s chagrin. “Most of those children had to be illegals. We all know that that group of pederasts is active—and supplied—despite international efforts to eradicate that sort of traffic. We know that kids are bought as cheap labor and shipped who knows where. And that some are also secreted as possible transplant donors.”

  “We haven’t bee
n idle,” Sascha’s voice continued. “This could, in fact, be the break we’ve been waiting for. We got too close. It’d be nice to know—” and at that word the door to Teresa Aiello’s office swung open and Sascha Roznine strode in, smiling at everyone. As he gave his brother’s shoulder a grateful squeeze, he continued, “where exactly we got so close. We’re working on it, and with your assistance, Harv and Teresa, I think we have a line to throw out to those sharks.” His smile took in each of his listeners, but he cocked his head at his brother and winked.

  Slowly a smile began to lighten Boris’s face as he read the detailed thoughts in Sascha’s mind. “Tag kids with strands through the school system? That might just work! We might even catch the bastard child-stealers this time.” Boris leaned forward across the table. “You are all familiar with the restraint filaments that were recently developed? Sometimes those we tangle with the strands escape before they can be secured. A second application has been made with a slightly altered formula, and now the altered strand can be traced for up to six months. There’re certain anomalies to be resolved, but it’s worth the effort to tag every child in the vulnerable group.”

  “You mean, this side of the river?” Teresa waved at the panorama visible from her tower office, the uptown cluster of beehive, cone, and single-tower Residential buildings clearly visible on this bright morning. “But statistically, it’s the illegals in the Linear Residentials who are more at risk.”

  “If we could catch Linear kids to strand ’em,” Boris said, raising his hands palms-up in resignation, “we’d be way ahead. Meanwhile we’ll strand as many kids as we can on both sides of the river and hope.”

  “Hope?” Sascha asked softly.

  Rhyssa! She recognized the mental touch of John Greene, the Talented bodyguard of Secretary of Space Vernon Altenbach.

  We got problems? she asked.

  Girl, you really deserve all the headaches of administration if you can guess that much from just hearing me speak your name.

  No precog needed, JG, because you never bother me unless there’s political pussyfooting. What is it this time?

  A bill to draft the Talented into whatever position the government needs them!

  Not again? Rhyssa’s response was half-amused, half-irritated.

  Concerted attempts had been made in the past by government agencies to circumscribe the freedom of choice originally granted to the Talented. That was prior to the point at which the government began to appreciate the applications of Talent—after the days when Daffyd op Owen, her illustrious grandfather, abetted by Senator Joel Andres, had fought to gain legal immunity for Talents exercising their abilities.

  Immunity had been particularly vital for precogs because, when they warned of disasters which were, by those warnings, averted, they had been subjected to expensive and time-consuming lawsuits. There had been attempts since then, from the ridiculous to the deadly serious, to regulate or restrict, all manner of Talents to military, civil service, or mercantile uses.

  But the Talented had always managed, quite legally and with no untoward exercise of their particular abilities, to circumvent such attempts. Many Talents had willingly sacrificed personal freedoms to serve in the public sectors, some on a lifelong basis, to preserve the right for their peers to choose. Rhyssa’s parents had done that, to give her the opportunity to achieve the position she now held.

  Again, and this isn’t funny, Rhyssa, Johnny Greene went on, space is in a bind. The platform has to be finished on schedule before the sheer weight of numbers on Earth becomes more unmanageable than it already is.

  So Ludmilla’s been lobbying?

  She’s got some hefty help, and Vernon’s got tremendous pressure on him. I’m the loudest of the Washington/Luxembourg voices, so I’m making the contact with you for the rest of the minders. We’ve been excluded from far more sessions than we ought to be—sessions that have been attended by some of the most antagonistic Right Mutes that have ever been lined up against Talents. And when you think that I helped him develop his shields against unauthorized peeking, I could spit! The nerve of him closing me out!

  One of the more sensitive professions open to empathic Talents was that of “minding” vulnerable top-ranking officials. Terrorism was still a fact of political life, and although the problem of the displaced and the minorities had been somewhat eased by the mass resettlements and the institution of the Linear developments near every major urban area, and the incidence of assassinations had been drastically reduced, empaths were still employed to “mind” those officials who might be targets for the fanatics who still occasionally emerged.

  Rhyssa could hear the hurt in Johnny’s voice that Vernon Altenbach had been shielding his thoughts from his minder, especially since Johnny was also Vernon’s best friend, as well as his brother-in-law. In his official capacity, Johnny served as under secretary in the Space Secretariat. Prior to that he had been a trained etop—earth-to-platform—pilot with twenty successful launches . . . until the twenty-first had grounded him forever. His Talent had saved his crew from death but not himself from losing both left leg and arm. Despite state-of-the-art prostheses, a new career had seemed advisable. So far Johnny had already prevented four attempts to kill or kidnap Secretary of Space Altenbach.

  Johnny: I shoulda been included in these latest talks, but I wasn’t.

  Rhyssa: Which means that Talent was being discussed. Barchenka and Duoml want more kinetics on the platform in the worst way. I’m doing my best to help . . .

  Johnny, in an uncompromising tone: Anyone thought of telling Barchenka that she’s the reason why Talents won’t work up there?

  Rhyssa: Lance Baden did. He thinks she has selective amnesia. Can’t even get her replaced, not with the performance record she’s got!

  Vernon’s tried! She’s so bloody good at what she does—it’s only how she does it. I’ll keep in touch, but we felt you ought to be forewarned. There was a hint of criticism in his voice.

  Nothing has come up with any precog, Johnny.

  I know, I know. That worries me as much. This thing could be very very big, and not even Mallie’s got a whiff!

  Rhyssa: Then obviously the matter is solved before it reaches critical. She tried to sound firmly optimistic even as a little shudder rippled down her backbone. Someone should have been sensing something! Mallie Vaden was one of the most sensitive precogs the Center had ever produced, and her lack of foresight—if Johnny’s reading of the situation was correct—was surprising.

  I’ll be in touch, Johnny assured her. I’ll even see what the ghosts think. You know how they’d like to see our Talented noses out of joint.

  I think I’ll try a frontal attack, Rhyssa said. Might jog a few brain cells loose.

  When’ll I see you then? Johnny asked, his tone brightening.

  If possible, today. Run me through Vernon’s schedule. When Johnny did, Rhyssa stopped him at the lunchtime engagement. I like the food there. I’ll just drop in!

  Rhyssa always experienced a mild shock when she encountered Johnny in the flesh, for the light tenor of his mental voice was at variance with his strong physical appearance. Medium tall, he kept himself physically trim, and one would never guess his serious injuries from seeing him walk or manage eating utensils. Some latent kinetic ability had proved to be an asset with his prosthetic limbs. He rose as he spotted Rhyssa approaching the table where he, Secretary of Space Vernon Altenbach, Exalted Engineer Ludmilla Barchenka, and Padrugoi Personnel Manager Per Duoml were seated. Johnny’s broad smile welcomed her, and they exchanged touch and a kiss.

  Would you have dared look so stunning if the amorous Phanibal had come, too? Johnny’s green-flecked amber eyes twinkled with devilment.

  Rhyssa: Why doesn’t that odious man go back to the Pacific island that spawned him and attend to the family’s plantations?

  Johnny: All you need is a strong handsome man who’ll scare him off. Right now you’ve got this lot embarrassed by your appearance, and yet they haven’t said a
thing out of line, he added, all in the split seconds of the greeting.

  Rhyssa gave Altenbach a genuinely glad smile, then nodded politely to the fiercely scowling Barchenka and the bland-faced Per Duoml. “Just the people I hoped to see. When I saw you were to be in Washington, Madame Barchenka, I realized that I should put in an appearance before matters get out of hand.”

  “Now, Rhyssa,” Altenbach said, signaling a waiter to bring a chair and set up another place for his unexpected guest, “you can’t disrupt the established procedure of lobbying. That’s not the way to play the game.”

  “Nor is going behind my back,” Rhyssa said, smiling to take the sting out of her criticism. She turned to Barchenka. “You have a schedule to keep. What you will not appreciate is that one cannot schedule Talent or lobby it. The kinetics you so desperately need cannot materialize to help you meet your schedule. That many kinetics don’t exist. Talent is a random and highly individual trait, not an imposed one. No one can dictate to a Talent and expect the person to perform to the best of her or his ability. That dictation inhibits the Talent as surely as seasickness inhibits appetite. There is no legislation in the world that may chain the mind.”

  “There is legislation that will recruit those needed to do the job that the entire world has decided must be done.” Barchenka’s stolid words complimented her uncompromising expression. “The platform will be finished as scheduled. The kinetics will participate.”

  Rhyssa caught another strong emanation, this time from Per Duoml, who nodded solemnly to support Barchenka’s statement.

  “There are ways,” Barchenka added, her cold eyes scanning Rhyssa’s whole appearance from the elegantly coiffed hair and subtle makeup to the couture outfit.

  “Legal?” Rhyssa asked with a slight smile.

  The secretary cleared his throat and handed Rhyssa a menu. “I’m still of the opinion that this—impasse—can be negotiated to the satisfaction of all concerned.”