Telempath

by Spider Robinson

  I threw them both a grateful look. “I won’t betray you,” I lied with great sincerity, and turned to face the Nose. First time in human memory Teach’ ever trusted someone, I thought wryly, and of course he’s dead wrong.

  “WHAT’S YO’ ANSWER, TECHNO?”

  “THIS IS ISHAM STONE, JORDAN. THERE’LL BE THREE IN OUR PARTY.” I wondered if Teach’ had noticed Mike’s absence.

  “SAID I’D SEE YOU AGAIN SOMEDAY, BOY. WHERE WE TALK?”

  “HALFWAY UP THE MOUNTAIN. BOTH SIDES STEP INTO VIEW AT A GIVEN SIGNAL. BY THE TIME YOU REACH DECENT COVER YOU’LL BE IN GRENADE RANGE, SO I GUESS I CAN TRUST YOU. BRING NO WEAPONS.”

  “I GOT YO’ LADY, SO I GUESS I CAN TRUS’ YOU. NO WEAPONS IT IS.” He said something off-mike, then, “OKAY. SAY WHEN.”

  “Keep your head down, Wendell,” I ordered. “Anybody from either side who recognizes you is liable to shoot.” I hoped I was giving Mike enough time. “NOW.”

  Krishnamurti, Collaci and I stepped from shelter. I threw down three weapons, Krish dropped one, and Collaci dropped five. It was a tense moment, and excellent time for a doublecross. We were upwind, so Jordan knew almost at once who we were, whereas he could send four expendable ringers and start blasting at once.

  But my eyes and Collaci’s immediately confirmed that Jordan was indeed among the four who came into view at the top of the Nose. So was Alia.

  I watched her carefully as she descended. Her arms were bound behind her back, and Jordan held the bight of a slender wire that ended in a noose around her throat. I saw no obvious signs of ill-treatment or starvation, and relaxed a bit.

  That reminded me to relax a bit more, so I began regularizing my breathing. A calm came over me, and I seemed to see myself as from a great height, one of a number of ants scurrying up and down a rock for unimaginable ant-reasons. To be sure, I was about to literally help decide the fate of a planet. But what of that? What is man—or Musky—that thou art mindful of them?

  I was ready to dicker.

  The climb took awhile.

  We reached a place where slab boulders afforded cover from both sides, and waited there. Jordan’s party arrived almost at once. Alia preceded him, and behind him followed the regulation two thugs, one thin and middle-aged, one surly and young. They both smelled dirty. Jordan loomed above us all.

  He was dressed in the same clothes he had worn when I first met him, but the long knife was conspicuously absent. But it was obvious that a sharp yank from that powerful left arm would tighten the wire noose right through Alia’s jugular and carotids. He appeared and smelled supremely calm and confident, which was just the way I was feeling. I winked at Alia, and she smiled serenely in reply.

  “Figured you was around when I smelled all them sky-devils,” Jordan said to me. “Seem like they listen to you now.”

  “Well, Jordan,” Krishnamurti rasped, out of breath from the long climb, “what’s your offer?”

  “Real simple, my man, real simple. You an’ all yo’ progress-lovers get an hour to clear out. Then I burn the place. After we finish toastin’ marshmallows, you get yo’ daughter back alive.”

  I’ve got to hand it to Krish. He stood right up to the giant. “Don’t be a jackass, Jordan. I can’t possibly agree to that, daughter or no daughter. Alia knows better and so should you.”

  “I told him,” she said quietly, and Jordan yanked at her leash. I took a firm hold on my own.

  “You’ve got the advantage of position,” Collaci pointed out, inserting a toothpick lazily into his mouth, “but we’ve got lots more firepower. You can pour troops down into Southtown without our even being aware of it—but then we’ve been mining it and booby-trapping it pretty heavily in the last week, and the only map is in my head.”

  “Yes,” I put in, “but he has a fuel train of many, many, many gallons stashed about five thousand yards east of here, smell-shielded, and enough covering fire to get most of it strung out along the whole length of the Nose.” Collaci and Jordan stared at me, no doubt deducing the source of my information. “The fire of God could rain down on us from the heavens without an Agro leaving the mountain. Of course, our mortars could give Jordan some trouble. The point is, gentlemen, that if it is battle you want, it looks like being a bloody one. A Pyrrhic victory for whoever’s left at the end.”

  “I don’t want no battle,” Jordan growled. “I don’t even want to harm one soul. But if you gentlemen can’t see your way clear to takin’ my offer, I’ll jus’ naturally cut this lady’s throat an’ get on with the battlin’.”

  “You continue to put too much store in the tradition of hostage holding,” Collaci answered calmly. “This time Krish here understands that the stakes are just too high.”

  “You both put too much store in violent solutions,” I cut in. “I believe it’s time to announce my mutual disarmament proposal.”

  I stood on one foot, twisted my right heel ninety degrees clockwise and brought it down hard before anyone could stop me. Behind me to the northwest, there was a sound like a dragon coughing. I hoped Mike had been able to clear folks away from the Tool Shed.

  “What the hell was that?” everyone asked at once.

  “Excuse me,” I said, and rolled up my eyes.

  (Now, my brothers!)

  Excited shouts came distantly from two directions.

  “What kind of shit is this?” Jordan snapped. “What’d you do?”

  I unrolled my eyes and opened them slowly. I showed Jordan my back teeth. “Defanged both sides,” I said cheerfully.

  “Explain!” Collaci rapped.

  “That noise was a shaped charge I palmed on you, Teach’. It blew the loading dock off the Tool Shed, which sort of opens it to the general public.” Teach’ swore, explosively and filthily. Krish glared at Teach’. “Jordan’s fuel train was already kind of open-air. Right now partisans of both sides are being dismayed and consternated to discover that their most essential assets are crawling with about sixty or seventy Muskies apiece. Those Muskies can stay there forever, if need be—and if anybody’s stupid enough to fire on them, or if I tell them to suicide, the resulting explosion’ll wreck the eggs.”

  “Double cross,” Jordan snarled.

  “What it is, folks, is the first sit-in since the Exodus. And I’m happy to say I’ve got the drop on all of you. Better stop the fight.”

  There was a shocked pause, in which the sound of distant shouting was clearly audible again. We heard no gunshots, but someone could lose his nerve at any moment.

  “HOLD YOUR FIRE,” Jordan and Collaci bellowed together, and the shouting stopped.

  “My god,” Krishnamurti cried, “are you mad? Don’t you know the equipment in that Tool Shed is vital?”

  “To what? The lives of men and women? That’s what you’re proposing to spend on them.”

  Krish fumed on almost incoherently, but I was watching Jordan.

  He must have been just as shaken as Krish by the sudden disappearance of his only chance to destroy Fresh Start without a protracted struggle that would cost Pan most of his congregation. But he wasn’t showing a thing.

  “Where you at, boy?” he rumbled, cutting Krish off. “I don’t figure yo’ action. What you sellin’?”

  “Peace,” I said earnestly. “Peace and the notion that we can work out literally any dispute if we can all manage to keep from killing each other while we’re doing it. We’re repeating a pattern of madness that lay upon the world for countless centuries before the Exodus—and we can break that pattern now.”

  “What you mean?” Jordan asked.

  “You and my father disagreed on how the world should be rebuilt. So you set up two political parties and agreed to be lifelong enemies. Along the fringes of both camps, some communication took place—but I’m the first hardcore Techno you’ve spoken to since you left Fresh Start, and you’re the first hard-core Agro I’ve ever spoken with in my life.

  “Can we say that our differences can never be resolved? Can we say we have even tried
?”

  Jordan blinked.

  “What are you proposing?” Collaci asked.

  “A chance for all the fights to stop ‘keepin’ on a-comin’,’ Teach’. All of you must have guessed by now that I’m in contact with the High Muskies. With their aid, we can make what Jordan calls ‘the smelly place’—this hunk of real estate we’re standing on—a very unsmelly place. Safe, from a medical rather than military standpoint. Clean, the way technology always should have been.

  “It will then become essential that we have the wisdom and influence of a pantheist like Jordan.”

  “What?” chorused Collaci, Jordan, Krish and Alia, each in a different tone of voice.

  “With air pollution gone—and by the way, quite a lot of what is now water pollution could be turned into Musky-food at very low cost—one of the few natural controls on technological progress will go. It won’t be such an obvious physical nuisance anymore, and so we may take even longer than ever to perceive its psychological and psychic nuisance effect.” Krish and Collaci looked blank. “Have you gentlemen actually forgotten what the world was like just before Exodus? I didn’t live through those years, but I sure heard about ’em. They were a time of mass insanity, of social institutions and human values shoveled like coal into the boiler of progress with a capital P. Every human furthered his or her own self-interest—even, toward the end, to the exclusion of mate and children—and became bitter and frustrated when he learned that the best this cultural imperative could give him was more than he wanted, needed, or could cope with.

  “We tried to grow too fast, and in any direction at all. We don’t dare recreate the world we once had, lest we drive another good man to madness. It was not my father’s nose that made him visit the Hyperosmic Plague on the world. It was his soul. It cried within him at a whole world growing too fast for itself to bear, in order to stoke an immense and complex machine that fed a few at the expense of many. Why, do you know what Dad’s last job was? Biological warfare. Making people sick as a strategic policy. No wonder he destroyed his world.

  “Jordan can provide the necessary counterpressure to keep us in balance with the planet we’re living on, to remind us that we belong in harmony with our world. Just cleaning up the gases we breathe won’t do that. He can help us redesign Fresh Start to put it more in harmony with the world we’re trying to save—you must admit that the presence of so many dissatisfied customers here today is a hard lesson to overlook. I know you feel a need to expand—there’s things we need yet that we haven’t got. But I tell you there will come a day when we have expanded enough, when we have Progressed as far as we should for the times. And I have a hunch that day might come about midway between when you think it is and when Jordan thinks it is.

  “You know steel and glass; Jordan knows earth and water. We must all know both sides, if we are to rebuild a world worth living in.

  “And you, Jordan,” I went on steadily. “You speak of steel and glass as the crutch used by ‘weak life-stuff,’ that ‘Pan woulda scrapped an’ started over.’ Don’t you see that those are fair weapons for life to use in struggling for survival? A man whose body grew too infirm for him to continue as a warrior once wrote a book that turned literally thousands of people on to Pan. He called it ‘grokking.’ Don’t you see that in the kind of world you say you want, most people would be working too hard and suffering too much to grok a damned thing, let alone teach each other how? Don’t hate us for what we don’t know—teach us.

  “We can strike a balance, and we can make it work. Or you folks can have your battle if you really feel you must—but if I hear any shooting today, my Muskies will self-destruct. You pays the lives of your people and you takes your choice.

  “Now, why don’t we all go home to my place and have scrambled eggs?”

  There was a long silence. I scratched my stump, which was aching for some reason, and caught my breath while I watched them all think. Krish looked highly skeptical, but he was thinking about it.

  It was Jordan who broke the silence. “Well, you double-crossed me good, boy, in a way I wasn’t expecting…but I guess my triple cross still works. Slim! Eddie!”

  Skinny and Surly reached over their shoulders, and their hands came down with knives in them.

  Collaci and I might have been mirror images. Our right arms blurred and two knives whipped across the intervening distance, turned over a careful one and a half times and struck the two Agros hilt-first in the forehead. The Armory commando knife got Surly, and the older Marine issue got Skinny. Both dropped in their tracks.

  Collaci and I glanced at each other briefly, a flicker-glance in which a lifetime spiritual agreement was made between us. “‘The serene mind avoids killing,’” he quoted briefly, and then we were confronting Jordan.

  “Quadruple cross, and we’re even,” I announced.

  “Shit we are,” Jordan barked. His right hand came around from his back pocket with a crude pistol, a private enterprise Musky-gun. “Brought this in case some o’ yo’ damn sky-devils come along, Stone boy,” he said with satisfaction, “but they ain’t any in smell. I reckon it’ll put a hole in any o’ you that come close. Now you call off yo’ friggin’ sit-in right quick, or I cut yo’ lady’s throat.”

  “No!” Krish cried in spite of himself.

  “I mean it,” the big man yelled, his voice rising. “Worst that happen, I lose my fuel train, but you Technos lose half yo’ tek-knowledge-y—then I clean up the rest.”

  My heart turned to ice within me. I could not give him what he demanded—and I knew from his eyes that he was mad enough to kill Alia and the rest of us and take his chances on a bloody battle.

  I stamped my foot on the ground hard and leaned on it, rolling my eyes heavenward.

  (Please.)

  And High Mistral was at Jordan’s face before he could move. The sky-rider was too thin and insubstantial to smell until he had plunged into our midst, but his psychic aura had the impact of a bass chord from some shatteringly vast pipe organ. It shook me, and I was not the focus of its aim. The aged Musky struck at Jordan with the multilevel awareness that was his alien mind, conveying on a hundred levels one overriding, undeniable emotion.

  Love.

  Jordan shrieked, wasting the air in his lungs, and flung gun and wire rope blindly from him. At once High Mistral retreated to a distance, ignoring the strong north wind. The big Agro sobbed and fell to his knees.

  “I’m sorry, Lord Pan,” he gasped as he wept. “I didn’t know…they was…your creatures too.”

  (ALL VIOLENCE) I “heard,” (CAN BE AVOIDED BY THE TRULY SERENE MIND.)

  (If it’s got a right heel to home in on,) I sent back dazedly. (Thank you, elder brother.)

  And then I ran to my woman.

  We were embracing and saying inane things when my subconscious identified some small sounds they’d been picking up from behind me. Someone was coming slowly up the mountain toward us. I turned, expecting to see Wendell, and for one awful second I knew for certain that I had blown every fuse. My heart literally faltered, and there was a roaring in my ears.

  “Hello, Isham,” my father said. “This time you have truly done well.”

  “Thanks,” I whispered, and fainted dead away.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Somewhere in there my self tried to go to a place from which it would not be able to find its way back.

  But a swarm of Muskies prevented it, and stayed with it until it was well.

  Their name was Mistral.

  I opened my eyes.

  My own bedroom. Late afternoon. Lying on my own bed for the first time since forever. There was my guitar. There was my bookshelf and the twin speakers. There was my hookah.

  There was Dad.

  It’s all been a dream, that’s it…

  Nuts.

  “Hi, Dad.”

  “Hello, son.”

  Neither one of us spoke again for a long while. I was studying him, looking for something I could not name. I was a long time
looking. It’s curiously difficult to actually see your father’s face, I found—you tend to assume it. But I made the effort, and found whatever it was I was looking for, knew all at once the identity of the last of the three selves in whom I had seen reflections of my own (Collaci, I’d learned on the mountainside, was the second).

  By damn, my old man loved me very much. Why hadn’t I ever seen that before?

  “You’re looking good, for a corpse.”

  “Don’t try to get up. You rolled a way downhill after you fell, and gave your head a nasty crack.”

  “Wouldn’t dream of it. I was thinking of skipping school today.”

  That got a quick smile, gone in an instant. It got me thinking that I’d like to see another. “Dad?”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m delighted to see that the reports of your death were exaggerated.”

  This smile was huge, but it dissolved in moments into tears, and we embraced awkwardly. “I’m sorry, Isham,” he sobbed brokenly. “Oh, son, I’m sorry.”

  I discovered that I was weeping too, just as loud. “I felt just shitty without a father,” I managed, and then I could not speak for crying. We held each other and bawled together for a very long time. It brought me—and him, I knew—back to the night Mama died. The family’s back together again, I thought crazily, and wept anew.

  Finally we disengaged and blew our noses. The honking produced enough comic relief to get us both grinning like idiots, and I decided to turn my mind to practical matters before it melted into mush. “Did you hear my proposal to Jordan?”

  He sobered. “I heard the whole performance as I ran from Sarwar’s home. He was wired for sound.”

  “How do you feel about my proposal?”

  “Like a damned fool. If I had had your wisdom when I was your age, or even my age…yes, by all means, let there be peace. I don’t want to rebuild everything I destroyed.”

  “Where’s Jordan?”

  “Gone. After you’d been carried back downhill, I went to him. I begged his pardon for closing my mind to him for so many years, for assuming an uneducated ex-Techno had nothing to teach me, and asked him to join the Council. He was like a man who’d been sandbagged; I wasn’t sure he’d heard me. Then he looked up, and his mask was soggy, and he begged my pardon right back. He was so sincere he startled me. He offered to meet the Council over breakfast tomorrow, to ‘discuss how he could best help us,’ and I said that would be just fine. Your…your friend High Mistral…er…gave us to understand that he would also attend the conference. Then Jordan shook my hand and left, still looking sandbagged, and within ten minutes there wasn’t an Agro left on the Nose. Did your Musky friend do all that to him, son?”