Telempath

by Spider Robinson

  I took one last deep toke, gazed wistfully at the Nose while I held it, then pinched and pocketed the roach. Sighing, I preceded Collaci and the Guard into Security HQ. Do not collect two hundred dollars.

  It was darker indoors—my eyes were a moment adjusting. “Hi, Shorty,” I called out, smelling an old friend. “What’s new?”

  “Howdy, Isham. Noth—”

  “Shut up, Shorty,” the Guard behind me snapped. “This son of a bitch talks to nobody. Krish’s orders.”

  Shorty Pfeil looked him over, got up from behind his desk and smiled. They call him Shorty because he stands six-five. If you shipped a barrel inside Shorty, it’d rattle a lot. “Cal,” he said gently, “that running of the mouth’ll land you in the Hospital yet.” Cal shut up. “As I was saying, Isham: ‘Nothing much, what’s new with you?’”

  “They shoot me tomorrow morning.”

  He nodded. “Yeah, if it ain’t one damn thing it’s another. We’re on the downhill slope; got to run faster all the time just to stay on our feet. He get the executive suite, chief?”

  Collaci nodded.

  “TV’s busted, Isham, and I’m afraid room service ain’t what it used to be—but for you, it’s on the house.”

  “I’ll take it, Shorty,” I said. “Thanks.” I really was grateful—Shorty’s chatter was the first friendly words I’d heard all week. I thought of a leopard in Central Park, and smiled. I was glad I’d left my heel at the Tool Shed. It didn’t belong here.

  He produced a ring of keys and opened up the larger of the two cells that make up the rear of the building. It was a stone cube with a barred window on the far end. Mattress on the left, toilet on the right, three feet of clearance in the middle. My nose told me that the last tenant had been Marv Cassidy—drunk again. The door was a really impressive steel-bar affair that must have weighed a quarter ton. If Fresh Start were suddenly overrun by rampaging brontosaurs, I’d be perfectly safe—but by and by I’d get hungry. I stood in the entrance for a moment, feeling decidedly at bay. On the other hand, that mattress looked mighty good. I entered the cell. But there was one last bit of business to be played out first.

  Teach’ followed me in, and stood waiting. “I don’t tip bellboys,” I said. “No luggage.”

  “That’s what interests me,” he admitted. “Let’s have that belt, son.”

  “Eh?” Shrewd bastard.

  “Open it. Slowly.”

  I complied. There wasn’t any way to hide the knife blade built into the buckle. I looked disgusted and passed over the belt. My scalp itched.

  “Christ, Isham,” Collaci said, shaking his head. “I taught you that gag.” I nodded ruefully. “And I also taught you that one concealed weapon isn’t enough.”

  That shrewd. Damn him.

  “Let’s see. A smart young fella like you would probably pick a place you expect people’s gaze to avoid. Let’s unpin that empty sleeve.”

  What do you know? There was a sap strapped to my stump. I tried to look unconcerned, but Teach’ was cannier than I’d expected. My scalp itched something awful.

  He stepped outside and closed the door, which snapped shut with a meaty thunk. I sank down wearily on the mattress, feet under me in lotus. “Don’t forget that transcript, Teach’.”

  He paused on his way out. “I don’t expect any surprises.”

  “Uncle Phil…do you like to fight? Or do you just like to win when you must fight?”

  The question took him by surprise; I hadn’t called him that in ten years. He got a thoughtful look. At last he said, almost to himself, “I think you have to get to where you like it, if you intend to keep on winning, every time.” He frowned, and his voice softened. “Sometimes I get to thinking I’d like to kick the habit and lay up awhile. But it seems like they just keep a-coming. Fights, I mean, one kind or another. If I ever get me a sustained break, maybe I’ll—” He frowned and grinned at the same time, squinting his wolf’s eyes. “Yeah, I like it. Why?”

  “You looking forward to the next twelve years of it?”

  He pursed his lips. “Isham, every morning I get up and I put my pants on one leg at a time.”

  “And then strap on an arsenal and you’re ready to shave. You sleep with one eye open and you never use plugs, even when the wind’s from the south. I grew up with this crazy world, but don’t you ever get tired? You told the Council and you told ’em true. It gets worse from here.”

  “So?”

  “Play the transcript.”

  “I will. But I’m dismally afraid you’ve figured out How to Save the World.”

  “And that in your considered opinion can’t be done? May we quote you, Chief Collaci?”

  “So long, Isham.” He left, Cal following like a well-trained gorilla. I’d done the best I could, sown all the seeds I’d brought with me.

  As soon as Shorty Pfeil took his traditional siesta, I shook the lockpicks out of my afro and tried them, pausing to scratch my scalp thoroughly. The third pick worked, the same one that had let me into Columbia University a hundred years ago. I pulled the door closed again, replaced the picks in my hair, and then I went to sleep. I had a long night ahead.

  The first visitor didn’t blow my mind at all. In fact, I’d been expecting him.

  Dr. Michael Gowan arrived late in the afternoon, just as I was waking up. As usual, he managed to make stained overalls into a Techno Tuxedo. I’ve seen him look dapper in the shower, and dammit, he’s too old to be dapper. Not many real blonds can carry off a Van Dyke, but he manages. A rather short man, elegant and awesomely learned. With a variable staff, he’s kept school running at Fresh Start—a school open to anyone, Techno, farmer or Agro alike—for over fifteen years, constructing curricula, organizing softball teams, teaching endless tireless hours, riding hard on a gang of yahoos with fairness and dignity and turning them into educated adults. He always has a spare half an hour for you, and as far as I know he sleeps on every third Thursday. He was my teacher all my life, my personal tutor through early adolescence, and the first adult I ever relaxed with. If Dad was the father of my body, “Docta Mike” was the father of my mind.

  On my sixteenth birthday, he and I got drunk together on his home-brewed beer, went for a walk in the woods with three jugs of home-foam, and woke up two days later in an abandoned warehouse miles from home. The warehouse turned out to be the Hudson Valley Textbook Supply repository—that is to say, about half of what you’ll find in the School Library today. We stayed for a week, and both caught hell from Dad when we returned.

  I had drifted away from Gowan in the last few years. Dad subtly disapproved of the things he taught me, and saw to it that I spent an equal amount of time with Collaci. Both tutors challenged my intellect, but Collaci was clearly the more glamorous role model—and cynicism a more attractive posture to a young man. And so I stopped coming by the book-filled library with the picture window, tapered off the evenings of conversation and discussion, ducked the pesky questions I could not answer about the thing I had to do. Collaci’s kind of teaching was easier to reconcile with the indoctrination I was getting at home.

  When I blinked away the thick fog of sleep and saw Gowan standing at the cell door, I discovered with a detached amusement that I had missed him very much.

  “Hello, doc. Sorry I bust your window.”

  “The pain was transient.”

  “No puns, please. A mouse has died in my mouth. We missed you at homeroom.”

  “You think I enjoyed being evicted at two in the morning? Had the misfortune to be the only window lit when they needed a place to park you. Shorty, old fellow, a glass of water for Isham here. I spent the night on Krishnamurti’s couch and the day asking questions that didn’t get answered. Fortunately I had the sense to bug my own study before I left.”

  “Doc,” I said with genuine relief, “you’ve just saved me pages of dialogue.” I was a little tired of recapitulating the events of recent months.

  “You should have saved them this morning. Really, Isham
, were you that naïve? Or was it simple ignorance?”

  “The old college try. The truth shall make you free.”

  “If you can say things like that, I can make puns. Isham, the Council, individually and as a group, had to ignore your words.”

  “I know—Collaci has explained the political situation. Jordan’s Agro gang is bigger than ever; they’ve been raiding some of the smaller farmers that trade with us and threatening the bigger suppliers. One of those suppliers was killed by Muskies last week, and public sentiment is turning against us. To announce that our founding father was the man who dealt this mess in the first place, and that his son has been collaborating with Muskies, would be asking to have this place burned to the ground.”

  “Spurious argument, Isham.”

  “Say what?”

  “Specious and spurious. And probably exactly what those three have been telling each other all day. ‘Expediency—that’s why we closed our minds.’ Claptrap! A good politician can sell anything—even the truth.”

  “What do you figure, then? Please don’t tell me they have a vested interest in anti-Musky munitions.”

  “Any of them would infinitely rather be producing solar-power units—which we can’t spare the time or manpower for now. No, Isham. Politics is made of people.”

  “Explain.”

  “Each of the three members of the Council has their own reason for reaching this morning’s decision. Their motivations are subtly different but amount to the same thing: they will let no political, social or moral considerations prevent them from punishing you for Jacob’s death.”

  “Look, Dr. Mike, at this point anger would be a comfort. But I can’t see them as that hypocritical. Maybe it’d be simpler and easier to look on them as villains—but I don’t.”

  “Good lord, boy, neither do I. They’re people. People always do what they must—you of all people should know that. Don’t interrupt. You hit each of those three in a vital spot, the kind of hurt they can’t consciously admit because that would involve recognizing and acknowledging the vital spot. You opened scars they do not wish to remember they have. And so they find other, urgently necessary reasons to crush your head between two boulders. That’s not hypocrisy—just rationalization. Which may be just as frustrating to deal with, but not as culpable—the subconscious can plead self-defense.”

  “They loved Dad that much?” I was not convinced. Helen aside, there had been no great warmth between Dad and his lieutenants. Respect, sure; friendship, certainly. The four were together a long time, went through a lot together while I was still learning to use the potty. But not warmth. Hell, I’d never gotten any real warmth from Dad—bare approval was an achievement.

  “Perhaps Helen’s prime motivation is close to love—in the fifteen years since your mother died she’s never stopped believing that one day Jacob would warm to her and return her love. And then you went and cut him down before he could. If you’re ever captured, don’t let them give you to the women. Not alive.

  “But equally important, Helen cannot accept the new version of Jacob. She’s a proud woman, boy—you’d have to know how women used to be treated to understand how proud. If what you claim of Jacob is true, then she displayed execrable judgment in falling in love with him, in failing to see through him all these years. She can’t accept that. So you must be a liar.”

  “All right. That figures. But what about George and Krish?”

  “George is the one you couldn’t have known about…though you might have guessed. Not many celibates around these days.”

  “I don’t get you. So George is a loner…”

  “George is exclusively homosexual. Was, I should say, as he hasn’t functioned sexually at all in all the years I’ve known him.”

  “So what?” I was mildly surprised, but I knew what homosexuality was; I’d seen and smelled it in animals. Only the “exclusive” part puzzled me. Seemed silly.

  “Isham, the kind of persecution such people used to incur is another of those things you’d have to have lived through to understand. We don’t seem to have homosexuals anymore—it must be a Civilized luxury—but when we did we hated them. They were called sick, evil, degenerate, deranged—and indeed many were driven off the rails by inner or outer pressure. It was infinitely harder for such a man or woman to find a satisfactory partner, to build a lasting relationship.

  “George was apparently one of the very lucky few. In his late teens, he met and ultimately moved in with an engineer named Tom Wocjik, and they lived together for nearly ten years. Wocjik was driven into autism by the Hyperosmic Plague. George kept him alive somehow for six weeks until a Musky got him while George was out foraging. He returned in time to kill the Musky with a cutting torch.”

  “So George isn’t disposed to make peace with Muskies. But you say he wants to punish me for killing Dad. Do you mean he has the same motivation as Helen?” The notion seemed weird—unsettling, somehow.

  “No, Isham. But when your father first began organizing Fresh Start, George’s sexual orientation caused some controversy. Sarwar learned of it somehow and argued that George should be driven out as an ‘undesirable.’ You know George—he’d die without projects to boss. Your father spoke up for him, with considerable fervor, and told Sarwar that if he ever mentioned George’s sexual proclivities again, he would be asked to leave.”

  “Oh.” Light dawned.

  “Yes. With the passing of years, George and Sarwar seem to have buried the hatchet—but I suspect that a bit of the handle is still visible. George was extremely grateful to Jacob; thanks to you he’s now under the direct authority of a man who, he believes, considers him less than a man.”

  I felt a flash of pity for George, but it didn’t last long. Poor old fellow has to kill me; how sad for him. I laughed.

  “Pretty ironic, doc. One of the most crucial people in human history blows the big one on account of a taboo that’s been dead for twenty years. Civilization persists in completing its suicide.” He didn’t seem to appreciate the humor. “How about Krish?”

  “Sarwar’s case is an altogether subtler one.” Gowan studied his fingernails. “His biochemical knowledge aside, Isham, your father was a dreamer of magnificent scope—but a shockingly undereducated man. His first big dream resulted in the world we live in today.” Well, at least one person believed me. “Fresh Start was a better dream, but he was no more equipped to execute it than he was the first time around. Again, he needed a stooge. He was the dreamer—but Sarwar was the planner, the systems specialist, the design engineer. Tell him you want living quarters for a hundred fifty technicians, and he’ll devise buildings and water and sewage systems to your parameters. Tell him you want a newspaper, and he’ll locate presses, form a staff, arrange distribution. He’s a realizer of dreams.

  “But he’s not a dreamer. Faced with hostile neighbors, it took him to get Got News and WFS working—but it took Jacob to think of them. Sarwar lacks originality, and his vision is of a unique kind, as limited in its way as Jacob’s. He tends to see the inside, the workings, whereas Jacob saw the outside, the goal. Without Jacob, Sarwar is a man with his head cut off. He has no dreams to forge.”

  “And I cut off his head, and rubbed his nose in the fact that even with that head, all he ever was was the second Wendell Carlson. Oh, Jesus!” It all fit now, and the completed jigsaw picture was sickening. What a tangled concatenation of bullshit for the fate of the race to be decided by! I began to get angry, a deep anger I didn’t entirely understand. “I felt better thinking they were just stupid and ruthlessly practical. That’s a dumb bunch of reasons to die you just gave me, Dr. Mike. Why, they’re worse than hypocrites, they’re—they’re—”

  “Human. Just like Jacob was human, lad. Just like you.”

  “Me?” I leaped to my feet, enraged.

  Gowan stood his ground. “What other reason did you have for killing Jacob than personal outrage? Don’t tell me you really believe that ‘Hand of Man’ guff he used to give you? Have you
really ‘slept easier’ lately?”

  My voice was low and dangerous. “That’s none of your goddamn business.”

  “Suffering Jesus, boy, how can you condemn the Council for their rationalizations when you won’t look at your own? All right then, tell me: why did you kill Jacob?”

  “Hey, listen—he loaded, cocked, and aimed me. All I did was go off.”

  “Oh, crap! You’re a man, not an artifact; you made a free-will choice. The cleverness of the method used shows that you applied your reason to the matter—do you seriously claim you’re a tool of your conditioning? Is that why you associate with our enemies and try to sell a peace nobody wants?”

  “Shut up.” I blazed, startling myself considerably. I don’t think I’d ever said that phrase before in my life. “I don’t need this shit! What I need is someone to help me get through to the Council, not somebody to tell me they’re just as right to kill me as I was to do what they’re killing me for.”

  “What you need, Isham, is to learn to forgive them—and your father. If you don’t, you can’t justly forgive yourself—and if you can’t do that, you might as well not wait until tomorrow morning to die.”

  I didn’t plan on dying any time in the near future, but I couldn’t say that with Shorty listening—he’s my friend, but he has a strong sense of duty. Besides, it was irrelevant. I stood clutching the bars of my cell with my one hand, and for an awful moment I was back on top of the Empire State Building, reeling at a great height. It may be necessary, but is it right? As you sow, so shall you reap. One good burn deserves the other cheek for an eye have been used goddammit used by that sanctimonious…I burst into angry tears and sat down hard on the stone floor.

  “Isham, one of the hardest things for a young man to realize and accept is how many of his father’s worst traits he has acquired unconsciously.” Gowan’s voice was soft, compassionate. “Perhaps there are valid grounds for execution—perhaps they even obtain in your case. But you killed Jacob for personal reasons.”