It had not previously occurred to him that sometimes the only way to create a better society might be to start a new one.
~ 20 ~
For Carla the workweek seemed endless before it had barely begun. She could scarcely focus on the hacking required to alter Group members’ telemetry data, much less on the duller, if safer, routine of her official job.
She had taken an extra shift the first night so as to be at the Hospital when Peter returned, had been waiting in his office, in fact. Though when he came in she’d known instantly, telepathically, that all had gone well with Jesse, she’d needed to hear him put it into words.
“He’s everything I hoped for, and more,” Peter had said. “The ways of fortune are very strange, Carla. Despite all we know, all we believe beyond established science, we’ll never understand the miracle of synchronicity. We could never have foreseen the fate that brought this man to us—”
Carla stared at him in bewilderment. “Synchronicity? Fate?” This was not at all what she had expected him to say. It made no sense.
Startled, Peter came back as if from trance. “Forget I said that,” he told her. “I’m tired. I haven’t slept since the night before last and I’ve got a night shift ahead of me.”
“You haven’t rested?” She’d assumed he’d have gotten back to the city by noon.
“I stayed at the Lodge longer than I planned.” In reply to her unspoken question he explained, “Jesse has an ability rare among people who choose technical careers such as space work; he’s highly intelligent but not so analytical that he feels he’s got to calculate every move. He’s willing to let things play out, even when he doesn’t fully understand what’s happening. That means he has natural aptitude for our training—so much, in fact, that this afternoon we went all the way to breakthrough.”
“Breakthrough? Oh, Peter—you haven’t pushed him too hard, have you? He’s all right?” Peter, at times, was prone to demand more of people than was prudent.
“He’s fine,” Peter assured her. “He got high. He’s having a great night at the Lodge. I got high too, and then flying back with Anne, I crashed—me, that is, not the plane. I’m running on empty, Carla. There’s more I haven’t yet told you; Ian is dying.”
She went to him, embraced him, sensing his need for consolation. Ian had been like a father to Peter ever since his college days. A retired professor then already over a hundred, he had sought paranormally-gifted young people to train as future leaders. He’d helped both Ramón and Peter through medical school—Ramón specializing in geriatrics, Peter in psychiatry—and after Ramón died, his bond with Peter had grown even stronger; he had adopted him legally as his heir. Everyone in the Group would grieve for Ian, but for Peter it would be the hardest, especially as it hadn’t been long since the death of his wife, Lesley. Yet while still mourning the double loss, he would have to take on the full burden of leadership. Ian’s wishes had been made clear. The Council could not possibly choose anyone else to succeed him.
It was no wonder Peter didn’t seem quite himself. Still, what could he have meant by saying that fate had brought Jesse? From Jesse’s standpoint, his detention on Undine had turned out to be a stroke of good fortune. But was it that important for the Group to include an offworlder? Or did he have some special talent of which only Peter knew?
Proceeding to breakthrough on the same day as testing was unheard of. That, on top of the unprecedented speed with which Jesse had been recruited, meant Peter was hiding something. Which of course she knew in any case, from the way his mind was closed to her. Among telepaths there was normally free exchange between close friends.
Suddenly a thought occurred to her. “Peter—your hurry to accept Jesse hasn’t anything to do with me, has it?” she ventured. “I know that for years you’ve been thinking I should stop mourning, that only in a sexual relationship can I recover—” She flushed; this was a topic she would never before have discussed openly with him. She’d had to guard her own feelings, those she’d long known that she might have developed for Peter, were it not that until recently he’d been married. What she now felt for Jesse had set her free.
With brotherly affection, he stroked her hair. “You can never stop mourning the manner of Ramón’s death,” he said, “nor can any of us, as far as that goes. But it’s true that there’s only one bond powerful enough to heal you. I felt joy when I saw it might form between you and Jesse. The sooner it becomes possible, the better, though that’s not my main reason for fast action.”
She was silent. After a moment he continued, “In due course you’ll know what’s at stake with Jesse. I can’t tell you, or anyone, until it’s time for him to know, to make a deep and irrevocable commitment to the Group that I’ve no right to ask for until he’s better acquainted with us and has made the Ritual pledges.”
Carla’s heart lurched. “Peter! You wouldn’t put him in danger—”
“Not in the way you’re thinking. Not of dying as Ramón did, I promise you.”
She relaxed, chagrined at having allowed herself to fight the sensation of fear. She knew how to handle it—that was what Group training focused on, after all. Coming to terms with fear was the key to controlling effects of stress on the body. You must inwardly consent to the worst possible outcome in order to live free of worry. But there was one thing she could never consent to, never again dare to love anyone to whom it might happen. Was that why she’d held back even after Lesley was gone?
“For now,” Peter was saying, “Jesse’s welfare does have a great deal to do with you. Am I right in assuming you want a long-term relationship?”
“Well, Peter, I don’t know if it’s what he wants.”
“I have every reason to think it will be.” Peter looked away. “This is awkward. I don’t like intervening in people’s private lives. But—well, you remember how it was with you and Ramón—”
At the beginning, he meant, before their marriage . . . the long-ago time of her own induction into the Group. Ramón had sponsored her in the Ritual. Earlier, he had taught her not only Group skills but the nature of physical love itself. She’d been a virgin until then, and had not known how different it was for outsiders. She was not sure she knew now, despite the explanations she’d been given.
“It can’t be as it was Ramón,” she acknowledged. “I’m the experienced one, now. That will be hard for Jesse, I suppose.”
“You realize, don’t you, that so far he has no comprehension at all of what an intimate relationship within the Group entails?”
“But you’ll tell him, surely, now that he’s through the test.”
“He’s not ready to understand quite this soon. It has to be absorbed gradually. If it comes up I’ll tell him; but telling isn’t the important part. He must be shown, Carla—if not by you, then by someone else. A lot depends on it.”
Underneath she had known this was coming. She had blocked it out; she had not wanted to speculate about who would teach Jesse the things mere lab sessions could not. There were trained instructors, and she was not one of them. She was not qualified. . . .
“Carla, love’s more important than training. It overrides, always! Not all newcomers fall in love, but when it happens, it’s much better than the other way.” Peter turned back to her. “But you must be willing. And I must know now, from the start, whether Jesse can count on your help.”
“I’m scared of being swamped by memories, Peter. If that happened at the wrong moment, I could hurt him.”
“Yes, emotionally, just as his own deep-seated fears may hurt you. Yet if the love is real, you’ll get past that. Would he be better off with someone who cares less for him?”
There’d been only one way she could answer. Yet so much would hinge on her strength, not only their love, but Jesse’s entire future! His whole outlook toward the powers of his mind . . . and perhaps, Peter had implied, some unique destiny beyond the commitment required of them all. . . .
“He won’t see why we have to wait,” she’d sa
id sadly. Jesse had made love with women in the world outside; his expectations of sex would be different from hers. For that reason she must hold back from him. Any premature union between them would be disastrous.
“But when the time comes,” Peter had reminded her, “he’ll know it was worth waiting for.”
The waiting, she now realized, was going to be hard.
~ 21 ~
Jesse’s lab training session wasn’t scheduled until evening—he learned that when not reserved by Peter, the lab was in constant use by others, not only for advanced training, but for games of some sort. The experienced people lined up to go on dual with each other; matching mind-patterns was a popular form of recreation. He didn’t ask what sort of altered states they were playing with. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know.
By noon he longed for action. Anything, even something risky like a rescue mission or retrieval of a body for burial in the bay. It would be easier than sitting around pretending to relax.
Greg, sensing his mood, suggested a scuba dive. “We’ll go to a place you haven’t seen,” he said, “one we keep secret from outsiders.”
In the boat, getting into his gear, Jesse found to his dismay that he was nervous. The old apprehension about deep water was returning—but that was nonsense! He’d done plenty of swimming by now and was gaining proficiency.
He was paired with Kira; the others had already submerged. “Jesse,” she said as he went into the water, “diving may seem different from before, when Peter was supporting you.”
Jesse held onto the gunwale with one hand, lifting his mask to reply. “He wasn’t supporting me after the first few minutes.”
“I mean he was supporting you telepathically, as he did much of the time during your feedback sessions—for which the diving was a trial run.”
He drew breath, trying to absorb this information. “The others know only that you’re relatively inexperienced and they’ll need to keep an eye on you,” Kira went on. “I can help the way Peter did, but I won’t unless it’s necessary. We’ll be making a long swim, then going into an underwater cave.”
“I should never have needed that kind of help,” Jesse said, embarrassed.
“Yes, you should. We deliberately put trainees in situations where they do need it, because only under the spur of emotion can new mind powers be learned. Including receptiveness to telepathic support, which is essential to the more advanced ones.” She smiled encouragingly. “Your fear of water was a lucky break for us—confrontations with the phobias some newcomers have are harder to set up.”
I can’t believe I’m hearing this, Jesse thought. From a woman over a hundred years old, about to plunge underwater with her on a planet I never heard of till a few weeks ago? The sense of unreality that had plagued him these past two days was stronger than ever. What the hell, he decided. Just go with the flow.
He replaced the mask and dove, Kira after him. The water in previous dive areas had been clear, offering a full view of Undine’s weird, primitive sea life. But here it was murky; Greg, ahead of him, carried a torch. Jesse focused on following it, trying not to be aware of anything else. Not to think of the mass of water over him, the bottom below, the bodies buried there—but no, not below him, for in the boat they had come far from the burial site. He breathed steadily, imagining the mask and air gauge as part of a spacesuit. Then all at once he recalled, don’t resist the fear. Let it come. It’s supposed to come. . . . After some time, the sensation of water around him became quite pleasant.
Kira guided him through the underwater cave entrance. To his surprise, they broke surface and swam into shallows. Their torches shone on rocks sloping up out of the water, onto which they climbed. Further on, no torches were needed. Pulling off his mask, Jesse followed Greg and Michelle, wondering why the darkness wasn’t total. As they rounded a boulder and came into the main room of the cavern, he saw a shaft of light from high above. It came from the sky, as, he realized, did air.
Jesse looked around him. Kira knelt at a low ledge of some kind, fumbling with a battery-powered lamp that was evidently kept here. All of a sudden it flared into bluish brilliance. The wall over it was illuminated, revealing a pyramid of painted words with letters too small for him to make out. A list of some kind? Names? Yes, certainly, Jesse thought. This was a memorial; it couldn’t be anything else.
“You are now in the only cemetery on this world,” said Greg. “Or the closest equivalent, anyway. Everyone ever buried in this colony is listed here, except for a few who were destroyed in accidents. They’re in the bay, where it’s deep, where we can’t reach the bottom. It is a better place for them than the Vaults.”
God, Jesse thought, everyone . . . yet the list was not very long. These were the only people who had escaped the stasis vaults, the only ones whose bodies were totally dead! He had been told, but it had not really penetrated until now.
“What if some intruder finds the vent and lowers a rope down here?” he asked.
“They won’t. The Island is off-limits to trespassers, but just in case, the shaft’s booby-trapped—it will collapse if it’s ever disturbed.”
Michelle was opening a sealed plastic sack she had carried. It contained not lunch, as he’d supposed, but greenery. She arranged it on the ledge next to the lamp, which was a sort of altar. Kira was still kneeling, deep in thought or perhaps prayer. Michelle stepped back and stood beside him, silently looking up at the names.
“We knew them all,” she said finally. “At least some of us knew each one, because they wouldn’t be here except for us. They were the people in our hospices.”
“Peter’s wife Lesley is among them, too,” Greg added. “She died last year when a sailboat they were in capsized in a freak storm. She was trapped beneath it and drowned before he could get her into the life raft, and then when he wasn’t able to revive her, he had to sink the raft to keep the rescue squad from taking her body. They might have got it breathing even though her brain was dead. So he hung onto a life preserver in that storm for hours, until a search was launched—he’d ditched his phone to explain why he hadn’t called for help before it was too late.”
“Good God,” Jesse murmured. “Are you saying that if they’d known there was a raft, he’d have been accused of murdering her?”
“Oh, yes. He’d have been convicted for sure—especially since the authorities frown on sailing in the first place. Hazardous sports aren’t actually illegal for adults on outlying islands, at least not yet, but people who engage in them are viewed as irresponsible. He’s given up sailing now to keep his job, and the fact that we scuba dive here isn’t mentioned in the city.”
Convicted . . . exactly what, Jesse wondered, might have happened? What was the penalty for murder on a world where all police power was vested in the medical establishment?
Kira rose and came to him, her eyes conveying more than grief. “Jesse,” she said, reading this thought. “You know underneath what’s done to murderers here. Don’t pretend to yourself that you’re uninformed.”
He had known all along, of course. There was only one thing the Meds could do with murderers when crime was viewed as treatable illness. They would use drugs, ostensibly to cure, perhaps sincerely thought to cure—drugs that would damage the brain. It was done elsewhere, routinely, to anyone considered dangerously psychotic. Chemical lobotomy, it was sometimes called. . . .
Peter, a gifted telepath, more skilled in controlling his mind than Jesse himself could yet imagine—those talents depended on the brain. New mind-patterns, new states of consciousness, higher brain functions than orthodox science was even aware of . . . Damage to the brain would be worse for him—for anyone in the Group—than for its usual victims. They risked losing what they most valued . . . just to decently dispose of dead bodies?
“Not just for that,” Kira assured him. “There was no chance of anyone suspecting him when he handled it as he did. Since he can control his body temperature, he wasn’t even in danger of hypothermia. We take risks only fo
r the living, though when they die in our care we’re stuck with bodies to bury.”
But caregiving was not their sole reason for defying the law, Jesse thought. Their primary goal was to use the power of mind. In order to gain volitional control, you must be wholly, unreservedly willing to lose control—to let what comes, come, Peter had said. That was true in a larger sense. . . .
He struggled with the idea, unable to fully grasp it. Kira said, “This is the choice the world forces on us. To become all we can be, we risk being totally destroyed. Yet we can’t choose not to, Jesse. We’re human beings, not mere bodies; we can’t live as if we were less. This is what we’re pledged to. This is who we are.”
This is who we are . . . For the first time thinking of the Group as “we,” not “they,” Jesse let it sink in. He knew he would never go back to Fleet.
~ 22 ~
After returning to the boat, they anchored near the shore and opened the lunch box. As he ate, Jesse stared at the bay and the expanse of pale blue above, dazed at the realization that for the first time in his adult life, he’d become a world-dweller. He’d spent his adolescence counting the time till he could get into space, and later, during leaves, he’d sensed nothing worldlike in his surroundings. He’d visited cities, not worlds; once away from their spaceports you couldn’t see more than small patches of sky. To a spacer, worlds were something to observe from orbit. He had never before felt oriented to a planet’s surface. He found that he liked it.
He turned to Kira, more than ever impressed by her incredible agelessness. “How did you get involved in the Group?” he asked.
“Many years ago, when I was a young doctor, I thought I knew how to preserve health,” she told him. “But a time came when I saw that I was wrong.”
“You’re a doctor, Kira?” said Jesse, surprised.
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