After a long time Dr. Aldren came back and sat in the chair beside Terry, turning to face him. “It’s natural to be disappointed in yourself,” he said, as usual grasping feelings that hadn’t been purposely revealed. “The important thing now is what you’re going to do about it.”
“There’s nothing I can do,” Terry said bitterly. He could sense that Aldren was genuinely sympathetic, that amazingly, his cowardice had not changed the man’s previous approval to scorn. But sympathy was not what he wanted.
“You’ll get another flight assignment before long. And after all, until yesterday you never expected to gain any extraordinary capabilities.”
“I’m not the same as I was yesterday.”
“No. Will you be happy once you get back to flying, Terry?”
“I think you know I won’t. You know what I feel—you always have.” The lost connection between them was back in full force. He found that in spite of what had happened, he still trusted Aldren, and if it had been possible to wish for anything, he’d have wished to know just what it was that made contact with him so special.
“The worst thing wasn’t the pain, was it? It was finding out that you couldn’t handle it indefinitely—that you’re not sure you could handle it at all a second time.”
Terry nodded miserably. What good could it do to put this into words?
Slowly, thoughtfully, Dr. Aldren asked, “What would you do if you ever crashed a ship? Would you stop flying, leave Fleet?”
“Of course not. No pilot worth his salt would stop flying after a crash. You make another flight as soon as possible, before you have time to lose your nerve.”
“Like getting back on a horse.”
“A horse?” Terry had never paid much to historical vids involving horses.
“In ancient times, it was common knowledge that a rider should get on a horse again soon after being thrown.”
“Well, it’s too bad it doesn’t apply to things like last night’s crisis.”
“It does apply, Terry.”
“What? You said I wouldn’t get a second chance.”
“It’s true that no one who quits during the initial session can continue in the project. But you’re not thinking about the project now. You’re simply afraid that if you ever had to face severe pain again, you’d crack up before it even started.”
This was undeniable, so Terry said nothing.
“It would help, wouldn’t it, if you were free of that fear—if you knew you could face it, that you could take on whatever fate threw your way, even if it didn’t always turn out well?”
“But I can’t know, because it’s over and done with. Unless— Oh, my God,” Terry burst out, sensing more than had been stated aloud. “You’re saying I should let you subject me to pain again just to prove I’m capable of consenting.”
“It would a wise thing to do,” Aldren agreed. “It would take only a few minutes out of your life, and you’ve seen that it doesn’t harm your body. It couldn’t make you feel any worse than you already do.”
The idea was appalling. He must be out of his mind to be seriously considering such a thing. Yet if he didn’t do it, he would lose what remained of Aldren’s respect for him. And it was true it couldn’t make things worse. Even if he broke down again, he would at least know that he wouldn’t retreat from whatever might arise in the future.
In a daze, Terry found himself getting back into the chair, sitting still while the sensors and helmet were attached, and the neural stimulator. He didn’t much care what was done to him. He would probably pass out this time, or even scream; but it would make no difference. The point of this was simply to consent to it, not to display courage he now knew he lacked.
Relax, he told himself, and it seemed as if the thought came from outside. He was detached from it. Relaxing will help. This will be easier if you let go and quit trying to be heroic. The sooner you reach your limit, the sooner you’ll know you can trust yourself not to stop short of it.
The pain wasn’t as bad as before, which was, Terry felt, misplaced mercy on Aldren’s part. If it was made too easy he would never be sure he could have stuck it out even as long as last time. “Don’t hold back,” he said, finding he had breath enough to speak.
“I’m not going to,” Aldren said. “But this time I want to show you some neurofeedback. Roanna’s in the control booth operating the computer.”
To Terry’s amazement, the entire metal wall opposite the chair lit up in a blaze of color. The image wasn’t a brain scan; he knew what those looked like. Rather, it was a complex, hypnotic pattern of moving lines.
“Our software interprets the brain data,” Aldren went on. “It shows a symbolic representation of the mental state you’re in. But this one isn’t real-time—it’s a recording from last night. The intensity of the pain is shown by the color, in rainbow sequence starting with violet.”
“Then why is it yellow instead of red?” Terry asked. He was sure that last night’s pain had been close to the maximum that could be produced.
“Last night was in the mid-range,” Aldren informed him. “I’m going to switch to a real-time display now. What color do you think it will be?”
“Green, maybe even blue.”
“You’re wrong, Terry. Take a look.” The image faded and was replaced by a new pattern in brilliant, glowing orange.
“That’s got to be wrong,” he gasped, feeling himself weaken at the thought that it might not be. “There’s less pain today, not more.”
“There is more in terms of physical stimulation. But you are not fighting it now, and your brain is reacting differently. This is lesson number one—fighting your biological programming does not work. Accepting your feelings does.”
“Why are you telling me this when it’s too late?” Terry demanded.
“Because it’s something you need to know in order to absorb the training.”
Bewildered, Terry whispered, “But you said—”
“I said that no one who quits gets a second chance. But you didn’t quit, Terry. You simply cracked up after your brain had reached a state where you no longer had the power to decide. The data readout on my remote showed that.”
“You left me here for hours, blaming myself?” Terry burst out angrily.
“I hated to,” Aldren told him, “but it was a necessary part of the crisis. You had to reach the point of not caring what happened to you in order to stop fighting for control long enough to discover that pain lessens when you let go. That’s something no one with any power of endurance can grasp without a demonstration.”
“Yet there wouldn’t have been a demonstration if I hadn’t decided to come back.”
“No. Coming back was the real test, the one you’ve just passed.”
“You mean you planned it this way all along? But then how do the rest of the trainees learn, the ones who don’t crack up the first time?”
The pain ceased instantly as Aldren turned off the stimulator. “You’re missing the point,” he said. “It works the same way for everybody. The first session continues until the brain data shows me that no further reaction will be voluntary—and there is always a second session, though some people aren’t as easily persuaded as you were. With most of them I don’t have to use such high intensities as I did with you, because they can’t tolerate as much to begin with.”
“What if someone refuses to go through it again?” Terry asked grimly.
“That never happens. To leave a person with the memory of intolerable pain, not knowing how to prevent suffering in the future, would be psychologically damaging. It would violate my promise to do no harm.”
“You just force them, then?”
“Of course not. But for a volunteer to back out would mean I’d done a poor job of choosing trainees,” Aldren said, smiling. “I don’t begin the process with anyone I’m not already sure of.”
~ 6 ~
After a shower and four hours of sleep in a room adjacent to Aldren’s office, Terry felt better,
though still somewhat depleted by hunger—and still very confused. How could the doctor have been sure of how he’d react in a crisis when he hadn’t known himself? “I—I’m too stirred up to know my own mind, I guess,” he’d admitted.
“Yes. Your brain has been jarred into a state in which ingrained mind patterns can be broken, which facilitates this kind of learning. So it would be better to go straight ahead today than to wait. The more stress you’re under, the easier it will be to let go of old habits of thinking.”
“I’ve got to report to work,” Terry had protested. “I’ve already been away from my quarters overnight, which is going to be hard to explain.”
“That’s been taken care of. As far as anyone knows, you have been admitted to sick bay with a new virus that’s going around, which only Admiral Derham’s wife, who’s the medical officer in charge of the isolation ward, is allowed to treat. It won’t be questioned.”
“Okay,” Terry had said. After all he’d been through, he wanted to find out as soon as possible what had been gained by it.
“The next session will be different,” Aldren had declared. “You’ll be given feedback and other kinds of help. You’re ahead of the game because you held out longer than average the first time, so that by now you’re already able to deal with pain severe enough to trigger a breakthrough. And you happen to have other qualities that not all trainees possess. I can’t promise, but I believe that for you it will take only once more to master the trick of not suffering.”
Roanna provided him with clean clothes and offered him coffee, but no food; he was shaking by the time they got back to the small hidden lab. He tried not to think ahead while he was being strapped into the chair. What was about to happen would happen, and there was no use worrying about how he would meet it.
“You’re going to be fine from now on,” Aldren told him, “as long as you remember what you’ve learned about relaxing. It’s a paradox—in order to gain voluntary control of processes that are normally involuntary, you must be willing to lose control in the sense most familiar to you and use your mind in a different way.”
“Like switching to another computer program?”
“There’s an analogy, but minds are not computers. The key to entering the necessary state of consciousness is volition, which is something computers don’t have.”
“Neither do people, according to what I’ve read. Free choice is just an illusion,” Terry pointed out, glad to be distracted from his apprehension.
“That theory has been dominant for a very long time,” Aldren agreed, “which is one reason why the skills you’re about to learn weren’t developed sooner. It’s true that living beings are biologically programmed, but as I told you last night, what we do here overrides that programming. Only volition makes this possible.”
With a sigh, he added, “The notion that we don’t have volition is not merely false—it is potentially dangerous. There are people who don’t want to believe that human minds have abilities beyond those that fit their theories. Some of them are powerful people. Some might resort to violence to suppress any evidence that they are wrong. I hope you’ll never encounter such a situation, but it’s conceivable that you will. One of the reasons for the secrecy of this project is to minimize that possibility.”
Sensing deep feelings in Aldren, Terry burst out, “There’s more to it than I’ve been told, isn’t there? The Flame project, I mean.”
“Yes. You are not yet authorized to know its full purpose.”
A plan that will give us a chance to help spread these abilities? Terry wondered. To do more with our lives than just hope there’ll be something to discover if we fly far enough?
Aldren continued fervently, “Picture a time when nearly everyone is free of pain, when there is hardly any sickness, when people of all worlds sense and respect each other’s inner feelings. When they have full use of all the capabilities humans are born with, some even greater than they’re now aware of.”
Puzzled, Terry asked, “Why would abolishing pain and sickness make people respect each other’s feelings? I’d think it would be the other way around. If they don’t care about all the suffering there is now, which a lot of them don’t, why would they if there were less of it?”
“Well,” Aldren said, “altering the brain’s programming has far-reaching effects. People who’ve learned to do it discover more powers within themselves than the ability to control their physical reactions.”
Awed, Terry whispered, “Will I discover . . . more powers? Besides those I know about?”
“Yes, I’m sure you will. Right now, though, we’ll focus on proving that you do have volition, because it is the key to all the rest.”
To Terry’s astonishment, Aldren proceeded to sit down in the second chair, put on a helmet of his own, and rest his arm casually on what looked like a second stimulator. “This is what we call working on dual,” he explained. “Most of your training, with me and with Roanna, will be done like this. The aim is for you to make your neurofeedback pattern match mine.”
“You mean so that my brain’s reacting in the same way?”
“That’s right. How much do you know about altered states of consciousness, Terry?” Aldren asked.
“Well, I know drugs produce them.”
“Yes, but so do many other things. Not all states are as dramatic or as destructive as those produced by drugs. Whenever your brain is operating in a different way from the ordinary rational mode of thought, that’s an altered state, and there are far more distinctions than are traditionally considered separate. For example, sexual arousal is an altered state—you are not fully rational while you’re having sex. Severe pain also alters the way your mind works, and so do other crisis situations.”
“But in a crisis, I can’t stay in control, so how does a crisis help?”
“It shakes you up, makes your brain receptive to new patterns of functioning so that you become familiar with what they feel like and can later reproduce them. Essentially that’s what drugs do, which is why people sometimes have bad trips long after the drug has worn off. The states you experience with our guidance, however, will be good ones.”
Terry frowned. “How can I experience good ones if I’m in pain?” He was resigned to the obvious fact that he would be; his arm was already hurting just in anticipation.
“You’ll see. I will lead you into a state where you don’t suffer from it, which you’ll later be able to enter at will. And that will teach you how to switch states so that you can learn others without needing to be in a crisis.”
“Merely by somehow making my neurofeedback pattern match yours,” Terry said skeptically.
“Exactly. Our software portrays states of consciousness symbolically, using data from brain scans that would not be visually distinguishable without processing. That’s needed not only for matching, but to remind you how specific states feel. Eventually you’ll be able to enter them by visualizing their patterns in your mind.”
That seemed unlikely, Terry thought, but he resolved to do what he was told to do without trying to figure it out. At first he was shown only his own pattern—fascinating, like a fractal music visualization but without motion. Following instructions, he switched between tension and full relaxation, induced by the memory of a happy afternoon during his Yellowstone camping trip. And the distinctive shapes of the image on the wall shifted, so that after a few minutes of watching he would have been able to tell from a recording how he had been feeling from one moment to the next.
“These are ordinary, normal states of consciousness,” Aldren said. “Do you remember, from this morning, what the pattern looked like when you were in pain?”
Terry nodded. It had been jagged and less steady, especially in the recorded one, and of course differently colored; the normal patterns were multicolored instead of the monochrome used to indicate intensity of neural stimulation.
“Okay, we’ll try that again, starting on blue.” The feedback pattern turned briefly to gray, an
d Terry steeled himself for what was coming. The pain was mild when it hit; still the sharp jagged lines appeared, and the harder he tried to alter them, the more erratic they became.
“Can’t you make it look more like the normal pattern?” Aldren said. “This isn’t very much stimulation; in a minute or two you’ll have to deal with a lot more—”
He’d never be able to do this, Terry thought. There wasn’t any way to do it, and worse pain was coming . . . what if he cracked up again. . . .
The pattern went crazy.
As it shifted from blue to green, he gritted his teeth and swore to himself that he would master himself, he would not let Aldren see that he was close to panic; it was only pain, after all, and he’d been able to stand it last time. But he could see from the pattern before him that he was failing.
“Terry,” Aldren said quietly. “You’ve lost sight of what you learned this morning. Stoic endurance doesn’t work, remember.”
He struggled with the thought. No, you weren’t supposed to be stoic, you were supposed to let go and stop caring what happened . . . but he did care. He was no longer in despair, and now learning to do what was expected of him mattered a great deal. He tried to calm himself, tried to believe some magical way of controlling the pattern would be revealed to him. It steadied a little, but not much.
“Make it look like the normal pattern,” Aldren commanded.
The Rising Flame: Box Set: Defender of the Flame + Herald of the Flame Page 4