“I can’t,” Terry admitted.
“No, you can’t. Nobody can directly control these patterns. This is lesson number two, Terry. Brain functioning cannot be changed by force of will. Willpower is, in fact, counterproductive. You have to decide what you intend and then just let go and allow it to happen.”
“But it won’t happen if I’m not trying.”
“Yes, it will, once you grasp the concept. We’ll go on dual now, and I’ll show you.”
A second pattern appeared beside his, similar but not so erratic. “Just watch,” Aldren said, “and imagine your pattern being as much like it as possible. But don’t try to change it—just envision it already happening.”
As Terry watched, he began to feel very strange. He sensed that he was drawing on some inner source of guidance. He didn’t know how he was doing it, but as the color brightened to yellow, the similarity between his pattern and Aldren’s grew.
“It’s—awesome,” he said. “But . . . there’s still a lot of pain . . . am I supposed to be getting immune?”
“Not yet; that’s the next step. Immunity to pain is a whole new pattern, unlike the one we’re in right now. It is a different state of consciousness.”
“But you—you’re immune, aren’t you, and your pattern’s like mine,” Terry protested. He had assumed that the stimulators were cross-connected and that Aldren was in the state that prevented suffering.
“I have the ability to enter that state,” Aldren said, “but it’s a matter of volition. I’m not in it right now because you would be unable to match an abrupt change. We have to do it gradually.”
“You mean you’re feeling the pain? Like a normal person does?”
“I’m used to it,” Aldren said calmly. “It’s part of an instructor’s job. I don’t mind because it’s not being forced on me by internal programming—I’m free to choose.”
The pain intensified as the patterns crept toward red. “Keep your eyes on them,” Aldren ordered. “You’re doing fine, you’ve learned to follow while we’ve been talking. If this doesn’t work the first time I shift, don’t worry—no harm will be done if we have to try again.”
Terry was dizzy with pain; he felt on the verge of cracking up again. “It’s okay if you do,” Aldren continued. “You’ll reach a point where you have to escape somehow. When that happens, don’t fight it. Just watch the patterns and go where mine leads you.”
He was falling, falling into blackness, but though he could no longer see the room surrounding him, the patterns stood out as if tangible, so bright that he had to struggle to keep his eyes open. He could no longer hear Aldren’s voice, but somehow he knew what was being said to him: You’re okay. Nothing terrible is happening to you. Follow me, and we’ll be changed, the pain won’t hurt anymore. . . .
It was as if he were suspended in space outside a ship, the familiar stars surrounding him, but with an instrument panel glowing before his eyes, demanding attention. He was supposed to dock somehow. When the pattern on the two halves of the panel matched he would be docked, and safe. It was a shifting pattern now and desperately he reached out with his mind, trying not to lose it, trying to bring it back in focus, like gaining clear sight again after a spell of double vision. . . .
And then, abruptly, the pain was gone.
Not gone, exactly; he could still tell his arm was afire, but it didn’t seem to matter. He was no longer suffering from it, in fact he felt good. Terry’s spirits soared. It was like being high—not that he had ever been high on drugs, but this was how he imagined it would feel. Except that his mind was clear. He was back in the small room and could see the patterns as they were, just images on a wall, but different, now, still red, but not shaped like any he’d previously been shown. As he watched, the red monochrome broke into a thousand shades of color covering the whole spectrum, and he realized that his arm was no longer being stimulated, although it made no difference to him one way or another. He knew he would not suffer if it started again.
Does this make up for the bad part, Terry? Aldren didn’t speak aloud, but the question was clear.
Oh, yes! I’ve heard people can get high on pain—
It wasn’t the pain that did it. It was ending the pain simply by shifting gears, so to speak. By using the power latent within human minds.
He looked at Aldren, knowing from his face, and even more from the emotion he sensed in him, that he too felt elation. Will this last? he asked hopefully.
“The high will fade, but you’ll be able to reach it again. Not just by ending pain, but by using some of the other skills we’ll teach you once the focus provided by pain is no longer needed.”
~ 7 ~
Back in the office, Roanna laid out an enticing variety of food. Nothing had ever tasted so good, Terry thought. He was still floating, and even the fact that he was on Titan no longer seemed depressing. It was even better than flying; more than anything else he wanted to learn what his mind was capable of.
And yet. . . . “I don’t understand how I learned,” he said. “Just watching a pattern—it can’t be as simple as that! The computer could generate those patterns, and people wouldn’t stop suffering just by looking at them.”
“No,” Aldren agreed. He paused thoughtfully. “Terry, I’m going to tell you something I don’t mention to other trainees this soon. Some of them would find it frightening, but I don’t believe you will, and I think that in view of your past problems in relating to people, you have a right to know.”
Terry waited, puzzled.
“The skill you’ve just grasped, and the other controls over your body and brain that will follow, can’t be explained in words,” Aldren went on, “and so they can’t be learned from ordinary methods of instruction. The preliminary stress and the neurofeedback are necessary, but alone they’re not enough. There is a third factor.”
“There’s got to be,” Terry agreed. “It was strange, almost uncanny—I found I could make some sort of adjustment in my mind that I can’t describe.”
“That’s because you learned not from the patterns, which are only symbols of the state you’re in, but from what I communicated to you.”
“But I didn’t hear you talking.”
“I didn’t say anything out loud,” Aldren told him. “Knowledge of this kind can be transferred only directly from mind to mind. By telepathy.”
“Telepathy? You mean ESP?” Terry said incredulously. “But that’s just fantasy—there’s no such thing.”
“So modern society would have you believe. As soon as scientific researchers started to zero on psi powers, the repression of their existence increased—but that’s a long story. First you need to know that the training is based on a telepathic link between instructor and student, without which it could not be made to work. That’s why these extraordinary skills are not more common, and one of the reasons why they must be kept secret.”
“Keeping that part secret isn’t going to be hard. People would laugh at anyone who claimed to be telepathic.”
“Or worse.”
“Worse than being thought crazy?”
“People with psi abilities have often been persecuted, Terry. During some periods of history those suspected of witchcraft were burned alive.”
Aldren meant this to be taken seriously; Terry sensed that he was deeply troubled, unbelievable though the whole idea seemed. “I don’t see how we could have been in contact by psi,” he protested. “You’re saying you’re a telepath, I guess—but I’m not.”
“Oh, but you are. You are exceptionally psi-gifted, as I have known since the first day we talked. That’s why you were able to match patterns much faster than average.”
Terry was speechless.
“Everybody has latent telepathic ability,” Aldren stated. “It’s had a far greater influence on history than is widely known. But most telepathy occurs on an unconscious level. In modern society conscious awareness of it rarely arises spontaneously. Because Roanna and I are aware and can use it purpose
fully, we’re able to provide silent help during training, as I did during your second and third sessions. Without that help, you couldn’t have grasped the new way of responding to pain.”
“You—read minds?” It must be true, Terry realized with awe. All along, Aldren had shown an uncanny ability to understand things that had not been said.
“‘Read’ isn’t the right way to put it. I can’t invade people’s privacy; it is always two-way communication. If consciously or subconsciously a person wants to tell me something, or vice versa, it doesn’t have to be expressed in words.”
“How can it be two-way when the other person isn’t doing it?”
“As I said, it’s unconscious. But under certain circumstances, in contact with a strong telepath, the ability to use it consciously can be awakened. The degree of aptitude varies, and yours is very close to the surface. You have always sensed a connection between us, haven’t you?”
Yes, Terry thought, beginning to understand. The mysterious link that had so perplexed him . . . the thing he had never experienced with anyone else . . .
But you wanted to experience it with them. And when you didn’t, when they didn’t respond, you drew back, feeling a lack you could not define. It hurt, and you avoided situations where you might be hurt again.
Aldren had not said this aloud.
“The isolation is nearly over for you, Terry,” Aldren continued. “Others who receive this training will become aware of their telepathic ability, though they are less ready to acknowledge it than you are and it won’t happen as quickly. Stress enhances it; that’s one of the reasons why we use stressful methods, because without the telepathic connection it would be impossible for anyone to learn the rest of the skills.”
Slowly Terry absorbed this. To feel connected to others, at last. . . .
“Another thing that enhances it,” Aldren said, “is sex. That’s why we don’t allow you to have sex with anyone not cleared for the secret. A person in whom telepathic ability has been awakened could unknowingly reveal it to a partner, since during sex telepaths fully merge their minds.”
“Merge them? Know what each other are thinking?”
“Yes, and feeling too, even in the physical sense. Having once had this experience, few people have any interest in partners incapable of it.”
With a surge of excitement Terry pieced things together. This must be what he’d sensed was missing. . . .
“You had too much latent ESP not to feel the lack of a link where it should have been strongest,” Aldren agreed. “And because you did, you pulled back from even the ordinary unconscious sharing that couples in love—or mere friends, for that matter—take for granted.”
Terry drew breath. He had always believed there must be more to it than what he had felt.
“Has the ability to use telepathy consciously been—awakened in me, then?” he asked. “By communicating with you under stress?”
Aldren nodded. “Some people would be disturbed by knowing this about themselves,” he declared, “but I think to you it will be a relief. And there are more psi powers than telepathy. You’ll be taught more, such as remote viewing, and possibly some a bit further advanced.”
“Why would these powers disturb anyone?” Terry asked. “Surely, if they’re latent in everybody, they can’t be harmful.”
“They can be misused, just like any other human ability, so I’m careful who I train,” Aldren said. “Psi isn’t something to play around with, and its effects when used for destruction can be very terrible—legends about evil sorcerers have a basis in reality. But that’s not what people are afraid of. The average person in this society, especially a scientifically-oriented person, has a deep-seated, innate fear of possessing psi powers, which is why the evidence of their existence has been rejected and suppressed.”
“I don’t understand,” Terry said, perplexed. He could sense that this wasn’t just a casual conversation; he was being told something that for Aldren had deep significance.
“People’s impressions of their relationship to the world, and of control over their own actions and interactions with others, depend on being confident that things work in the way they’ve learned to depend on since babyhood,” Aldren explained. “If they are forced to recognize that reality is fundamentally different, they lose that confidence—and that’s scary, so scary that some among them will go to any lengths to keep from having to acknowledge that the beliefs they grew up with were wrong. The secrecy of our project is a necessary protection from such fanatics. If it becomes generally known that a group of us are actively developing psi capabilities, we may someday be in danger.”
“Physical danger, you mean?” Terry exclaimed in astonishment.
“What people fear, they often try to destroy. The further the project is spread, the greater the chance that the secret will get out. In the future, if you choose to stay involved later in life—” Aldren broke off. “It’s too soon to talk about that. But not too soon for you to learn something about the crisis humankind will soon be facing. You told me you read a lot, that you’re familiar with the standard knowledgebase available on every world’s Net, so you’ve probably come across information about ancient cultures that took things we’d call paranormal seriously—magic, spirits, and so forth?”
“Sure, all kinds of superstitious stuff. In some cultures people really believed in that sort of thing. In fact even in our society, as recently as a couple of centuries ago some used to believe in nonsense like witches and ghosts and mediums who could communicate with spirits.”
“A lot of it was nonsense, but not all. Some such things were actual manifestations of psi. Mediums, for instance—those who weren’t frauds—were gifted telepaths who genuinely believed they obtained information from spirits when actually it came via unconscious telepathy from their clients. And a lot of so-called magic involved psi capabilities with which you’re not yet familiar. The various metaphorical explanations used to describe them, though not literally true, represented real phenomena.”
Fascinated, Terry listened as Aldren continued, “Throughout history belief in the paranormal was common, though it was a minority outlook in modern Western civilization, which dominated Earth. Then during late twentieth century and early twenty-first, more and more people began to get interested in it and a few scientists pursued it to the extent of gathering evidence that became increasingly difficult to ignore.”
“I’ve never seen any mention of that,” protested Terry.
“No. Because by the end of the twenty-first century, a strong reaction had set in, something that had happened on a lesser scale many times before. When it began to look even to mainstream researchers as if psi might be real, people’s unconscious fear of losing confidence in their orientation took over. The majority became even more vehemently opposed to the idea of ESP than before, and suppressed all knowledge of it—not through censorship but through denial and ridicule. Researchers dared not go public lest it destroy their careers. It was said that such experimentation as had seemed successful had not panned out. Psi was dismissed as an immature notion that had been outgrown, interesting only as an element of fantasy fiction.”
Terry admitted uncomfortably, “That’s what I always thought it was, from what I read.”
Aldren went on, “It was a good thing that for hundreds of years the planetary civilization of Earth did focus on technology to the exclusion of psi. That was essential for attaining interstellar travel, without which our species couldn’t survive when conditions of Earth get even worse than they are now. But over the long term, human progress requires development of both technology and mind powers—neither is sufficient without the other. Creating a technological civilization that incorporates psi is the next step in our evolution. It’s going to be a slow and painful process, Terry—and as I said, dangerous for those of us involved. There will be resistance that may turn violent. We must begin in a very small way, and it may look like a hopeless cause. Yet if no one takes the first step, human
kind will stagnate and eventually die out. And so some of us have committed ourselves to making a start.”
~ 8 ~
From then on Terry spent an hour a day using neurofeedback, either on dual with Roanna or alone to practice, in one of several more accessible rooms that were similarly equipped. No pain was involved in these sessions after he mastered the skill of shifting states on his own. He was now capable of matching an instructor’s mind-pattern without it, though his mind tended to wander at first when not forced by suffering to give the patterns his full attention.
He missed working with Aldren, who was busy teaching less talented trainees who needed his guidance the most. Roanna was not quite as strong a telepath. But while the instruction itself was on an unconscious level, Terry found he could sense her feelings and sometimes her thoughts, just as she was sensitive to his. To interact with someone in this way was a joy to him. In the past he had been comfortable only with computers and ships, from which he didn’t expect the response that had been lacking in his human contacts.
From Roanna, he learned to regulate his temperature so that it no longer depended on whether his surroundings were hot or cold—this, she said, was one of the simplest skills. After that he learned to control his heart rate. And he learned to enter other states he could not detect except through the mind-patterns, which she said controlled the production of neurotransmitters by his brain and thus would affect his health. “Often neurotransmitters that enable the body to handle stress keep on being produced after the stress is over,” she told him. “And when continued too long, they cause changes leading to illness and aging. If you purposely turn them off, so to speak, whenever you’re not facing a crisis, your body won’t develop chronic disease. In time, this will become nearly automatic, so that you don’t have to keep thinking about it. A new pattern will replace the biologically-programmed one.”
At first Terry feared that his frequent absences from his quarters would be noticed, but he soon found that a system had been set up to make them appear normal. Neurofeedback therapy for relaxation was offered to everyone and since most people on Titan felt stressed, many took advantage of it; going to the lab wasn’t considered strange. Even his roommate Drew Larssen went sometimes, though he more often stayed late in the rec room with an attractive fellow-officer named Mikaela Orlov. Terry didn’t know which people were in the project, for by an unbroken rule, neurofeedback sessions were strictly private.
The Rising Flame: Box Set: Defender of the Flame + Herald of the Flame Page 5