“Promise has six. I’ve made three trips in it now, but I never saw the bridge. Our captain is a crotchety old guy who came out of retirement for us; he doesn’t like to have passengers get in his way.”
Terry showed her around, explaining what some of the controls did and what the lights meant. They were no active alarms, and the data he called up on his video monitor showed normal readings. As far as he could tell the newly-awakened AI was doing its job, but of course someone would have to perform a more thorough internal check.
“Where are the hyperdrive controls, the ones that Ivana destroyed?” Kathryn asked.
That panel looked normal; evidently all the damage was underneath. He found a wrench and removed the bolts. When he got the cover off and looked into the mess of melted metal behind it, he gasped in awe. That anyone’s mind could have done this, let alone a teenage girl’s, was past believing . . . except that everything he knew about Maclairn and Fleet’s mission here required that he believe in the power of psi.
He sensed that Kathryn, too, was stunned. “I’ve only known about this for a few months,” she said, “so I’m not used to it yet. The children grow up on the story; Jesse and Ivana, and Peter of course, are their heroes. I think perhaps the ship was sealed to keep it from being turned into some sort of shrine.”
“Is it sacred to them, then?” he asked. That might make things awkward.
“Not in a religious sense. But it’s a revered historical monument, like the site of the first landing on Earth’s moon or the dome on Centauri Prime where the charter establishing the League was signed.”
Troubled, Terry said, “Kathryn, I think this ship may be able to fly. If so, we can guard this solar system a lot more effectively than we can without it. Are people going to be upset if we take it away?”
“Some, maybe. Not the Council, not if it contributes to defense.” She frowned. “But Terry, it’s been nearly two hundred years since it flew. Even if it looks functional, wouldn’t taking off in it be dangerous?”
There was no use lying to a telepath. “It would,” he admitted, “though of course experts would check it over first. There’s risk in any explorer mission. I don’t lose any sleep over it.”
“You’re saying you’d be the one to do this personally.”
“Well, first I’ll have to convince my superiors that it’s worth trying,” he said.
“You mean they’re doubtful?”
“They haven’t heard about it yet. It’s my idea.”
“Terry, I’m not sure I like it.” He could tell that his safety mattered to her, and his heart jumped as he realized what that meant.
They locked the ship, leaving the corridor and bridge pressurized, and walked to the grove of trees that shaded some of the old stone dwellings. The heat was oppressive even in the shade, but Terry was by now able to adjust his temperature without effort, as Kathryn was. She wore a short-sleeved shirt and form-fitting pants that ended at mid-calf; seeing her for the first time without the warm clothes that had covered her at the cookout, he became acutely aware that their telepathic closeness wasn’t the only thing that attracted him.
“I guess I should ask,” he said. “You’re not—with somebody, are you? I mean in a relationship?”
“No,” Kathryn said. “Not anymore. On Earth there was a man I planned to marry. When I first got here and knew I wanted to stay, I wrote him a letter asking him to join me. It was never sent because by the time Promise left, the decision had been made to keep the existence of this world secret. We met when I returned and I told him as much as I could without giving too much away—Maclairn isn’t going to allow immigrants, but the Council had agreed to make an exception. When we were together, though, I saw it wouldn’t work. He’s a musician and I’d thought he would be happy here, but he’d just signed with an interstellar distributor . . . and besides, when I hinted about psi, he was repelled by the thought of it. He was ready to break up with me rather than believe I might be psychic. That was when I grasped the extent of some people’s unconscious fear.”
“I’m sorry,” Terry said.
“I’m not. I thought I’d be heartbroken, but in the end all I felt was relief. My God, Terry, I’d been sleeping with him for more than a year. I thought I knew him, knew what it was to be in love. But I didn’t. When Jessica told me how it should be between lovers—”
“A joining of minds as well as bodies? I’ve always felt that . . . only I didn’t know I did. I only sensed that there was something missing.”
“Yes. Maybe there’s not when two people feel like soulmates, but that kind of feeling comes from unconscious telepathy. The Maclairnans won’t have sex with anyone who’s not telepathic—I mean historically they wouldn’t, when they lived on Undine among outsiders. Now, of course, they’re all telepaths, but with observers coming, and Fleet—”
“When our captain briefed us on local customs, he said not to take it personally if friendships didn’t lead to romance.” And he also said that when they do, it often happens much faster than it would with non-telepaths. . . . “Most of the crew hasn’t developed much of any psi awareness yet,” he added.
But you have. Her thought, though not consciously intended for him to pick up, was clear. And I have, except Jessica said I won’t gain full telepathic sensitivity until I’ve been with a lover who has it. On Undine, that was how newcomers were taught—sharing minds during lovemaking awakens psi capability that carries over to other situations.
Do you think we could teach each other? He could not say this aloud yet, not when he’d known her for less than a day. But they both knew it was just a matter of when.
~ 16 ~
To Terry’s surprise, when he broached the subject of flying the explorer, Commander Chiang raised no objections. “It’s worth looking into,” he said evenly. “I’m no judge since my field is communications, but I’ll pass your comments on to the captain.”
The next morning a second shuttle arrived bringing Commander Linley, who was Shepard’s chief engineer, and two AI specialists. Terry spent all day with them checking over every detail of Picard that could be examined without more extensive disassembly than was possible while it was on the ground. When they finished Linley pronounced the ship spaceworthy.
“I see no reason why it can’t get as far as Shepard,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to say it can patrol the solar system until I’ve evaluated results of a complete overhaul, but since that can’t be done until it’s docked, I’m willing to give it clearance. Naturally I can’t guarantee that lifting a ship that’s been grounded for two centuries is safe. You’re the one who’ll be flying it, Lieutenant. It’s your call.”
“I want to try it, sir,” Terry said.
“You realize you won’t have a crew.”
“There’s no need for one just to get into orbit.” There was also no need to risk anyone’s life but his own, a fact too obvious to require mention.
The attempt was put off a day because Commander Linley was scheduled to take two mentors up to Shepard the next afternoon and wanted to get that out of the way before returning to observe the liftoff. Also he said he’d be bringing a medical officer back with him, which struck Terry as pointless since the chances of needing one were virtually zero. If the ship crashed he wouldn’t be injured, he’d be dead, a possibility that the senior officers were evidently unwilling to acknowledge.
He slept soundly that night but woke early with excitement rising in him like a bubbling spring. He wasn’t sure which excited him most—the idea of flying Picard or the thought of seeing Kathryn again.
She was in charge of liaison between mentors and the League, so she would be coming to the Old Settlement with them. Two—a married couple—were to live aboard Shepard and continue the mind-training of the crew. Once used to working with outsiders they would go on to Earth in Promise and another couple would begin the process. And, he realized, Kathryn would be going as their official escort, a prospect he didn’t like at all. He wasn’t sure how l
ong her trips would last; she would assist the Foundation in getting them settled and would bring a new group of observers back with her. Hopefully she would be able to spend more time on Maclairn than away.
Before long the comm technicians went to install satellite dishes in the towns, leaving Terry at the base. He spent the morning showing Commander Linley and the other newly-arrived officers around the settlement, then walked down the terraces to wait for the boat bringing Kathryn and the mentors from Petersville, which was located just below the dam. By daylight he could see more of the beach, which she’d said was a popular place for swimming. There was no spare water on Maclairn, which relied largely on wells for irrigation as well as domestic use. It rained infrequently; she had been vague about that, saying that some sort of rainmaking technology was used during dry spells but nobody would explain to her how it was done. The river dammed to create the lake had been periodically inundated by flash floods, during the first of which the colonists had lost their first crop and their leader Peter, trapped under a boulder, had lost his legs. He had been physically crippled for the remaining eighty-odd years of his life, but he was a superb mentor, and in fact the only mentor until Ivana came of age.
Terry pondered this with mixed feelings. The original Maclairnans had left Undine to escape its oppressive medical tyranny and so had not minded doing without the medical technology available on all civilized worlds—they hadn’t needed it, for there were many healers among them. But healers could not restore lost limbs. Had Peter had any regrets, stuck on a world where he could not be given new legs? Was the commitment of the Maclairnans to reliance on mind power reasonable, or merely blind devotion to an abstract ideal? They intended to reject technological aid from the League, he knew, except for comm and power satellites. To be sure, in most respects they were now technologically advanced. They had no objection to technology itself, only to the price in loss of independence they would pay if they imported it. So they weren’t sacrificing anything but what they valued less than what they gained. Yet it upset him in ways he couldn’t define. He had never committed himself to anything beyond his desire to fly; it was hard to imagine feeling committed to a less personal goal.
And Kathryn had declared more than once that she was committed to Maclairn and its vision of humankind’s future. That seemed to mean something more to her than the wish to make it her home.
He walked along the beach to an upright slab of rock at the far edge of the leveled area, on which to his surprise he saw that names were chiseled—first Hari, for whom the lake had evidently been named, then several columns of others. This, then, was a community grave marker. She had mentioned that Maclairnans buried their dead in the lake from boats, a custom begun on Undine where their ancestors had defied the law by secretly burying bodies in the sea. The few interred in Maclairn’s ground before the lake’s creation had been moved years later, at the time of the first death from old age.
What would it be like, he wondered, to be so attached to a particular location that you knew that you would someday be buried there, in a place you’d been coming to all your life? That was how it was on ancient Earth, of course, but he had never given it any thought. Insofar as he had considered death at all, he had assumed it would be on some distant world he had so far never heard of, if not in space itself. Now . . . what if Picard did crash on liftoff? Did the mysterious tie he felt to Maclairn rise from precognitive knowledge that this lake would be the repository of his own remains? For a brief moment he pictured his name on that marker as clearly as if it were real.
The thought didn’t depress him; instead, it magnified his eagerness for life, a life filled with experience beyond just piloting explorers. He’d begun to sense it during the training for mind powers he had so far only begun to develop; it had grown at his first sight of Maclairn; and now, thinking of Kathryn, he felt his blood stir and he was nearly consumed by a mixture of longings. He would fly Picard and take joy in it, but there was more, so much more. . . .
He turned and saw that far down the lake a boat was approaching, barely visible in the shadow of the cliffs that rose from the opposite shore. It was the large boat; apparently friends had come with the mentors to see them off. Terry walked out on the dock to meet it. As the only Fleet officer present, he supposed he should offer some sort of official greeting.
Kathryn stood at the railing at the boat’s bow and waved to him as it came in. Her flame-colored shirt and white pants were brilliant against the deep blue of the water, a picture he knew would be indelibly impressed into his mind. Dazzled by it, he found himself wishing that no one else was present so that he could take her into his arms.
With difficulty he turned his attention to the couple slated to work aboard Shepard—to his surprise, Corwin and Kamila, whom he had not previously realized were mentors. They looked no different from any other Maclairnans, and were dressed just as informally. Yet they had a certain presence, as Aldren and Roanna did, that made them stand out as special. It wasn’t a matter of age, as they appeared to be younger than Aldren, though Terry reminded himself that Maclairnans’ age couldn’t be judged by sight. Nor was it anything they said. Telepathy, perhaps? He knew instantly that they were to be trusted and that they were aware of everything about him that he’d want them to know.
He and Kathryn went with them as they climbed the trail up the terraces, a walk undoubtedly familiar to them, accompanied by their group of friends as well as a robocart carrying boxes of neurofeedback equipment for installation aboard Shepard. When they reached the top Commander Linley introduced them to the other officers present and escorted them to the shuttle pad. There were no long farewells; there had been a gathering for that in town, Kathryn said.
The mentors were excited and eager to go, but at the same time sad to be leaving Maclairn. Sensing their feelings, Terry began to understand, a little, what dedication to a long-term goal involved. They couldn’t hope to have any significant influence on Earth. They could help only a few individuals gain the new capabilities that might someday transform humankind. They were likely to meet opposition, even danger. And there was so much that they’d be giving up. . . .
Along with duffle bags, the departing mentors were carrying lightweight jackets, impossible to wear in the heat but necessary for meals in the wardroom aboard ship. Seeing the one draped over Corwin’s arm, Terry noticed a flame-shaped lapel pin like the one Aldren had. Once the shuttle lifted and the other Maclairnans headed back to the lake, he asked Kathryn about it.
“Is it some sort of insignia for mentors?” he inquired?
“No,” Kathryn said. “All mentors have them, but so do a lot of other Maclairnans. It means they are Stewards of the Flame.”
“Aldren named our secret training the Flame Project,” Terry said reflectively. “Does it have something to do with teaching mind skills, then?”
“More than that. The flame symbolizes enhanced human mind power. Originally, ‘Steward of the Flame’ was a password the group on Undine used for identification when they had to hide their abilities from the authorities. Then when they emigrated, they had to give a reason to ask for Fleet’s help in leaving illegally, so they pretended to be a religious sect that was being persecuted. They didn’t think of it as a real group designation—there wasn’t any need for one when they all participated in the Ritual. But after the first generation not everyone chose to, so ever since then the name has been used to distinguish the people who do.”
“The Ritual? Is that a religious rite?” Terry asked, surprised.
“No, though it’s as solemn as if it were, I think. What happens during the Ritual is secret from everyone who hasn’t been through it. I was told that knowing in advance would interfere with a novice being able to do whatever it is they do, some special kind of psi that Jessica says I’m not ready for yet. The ceremony involves formal commitment to using our advanced capabilities and spreading them to all humankind. It’s how they kept that goal alive for more than two hundred years.”
> So the commitment she’d spoken of before wasn’t just a vague feeling. As Terry pondered this, Kathryn added, “Only a mentor can lead the Ritual. It’s their main responsibility besides giving mind training, though they also act as psychotherapists and healers.”
At the rim of the canyon they paused. “Will you have to have more mind training before you’re eligible for the Ritual?” Terry asked. He was eager to keep her talking because he did not want see her go.
“Yes, though I’m not sure just what kind,” she told him. “Some people didn’t think I should be ambassador when I wasn’t a Steward and hadn’t made their pledge, but there wasn’t any alternative. I was the only person knowledgeable about League law and they didn’t want to wait. Now, though, Jessica’s hoping I’ll qualify before I go back with the mentors.”
“When will that be?” he asked, hoping it wouldn’t be soon.
“Well, they’ll work aboard the cruiser for several weeks at least, but now that they’ve left home they’re anxious to get to Earth.”
“Several weeks . . . Kathryn, I may not get any leave sooner than that! I’ve had a chance to visit the surface and there’ll be a lot of people in line who haven’t—by the time I come again you may be gone.” He didn’t attempt to hide his dismay at the thought.
Her face told him that she had picked it up and that she shared it. “Oh Terry,” she said. “I’ve been trying to forget about tomorrow, about you flying that centuries-old ship. I know you have to do it, any risk is worth taking to protect Maclairn—but it scares me.”
“Will you come and watch?”
“If you want me to. I couldn’t bear it if anything went wrong . . . but I don’t think I can bear to stay away, either.”
“I’ll be lifting the first thing in the morning,” he said, “as soon as Commander Linley gets back. Will there be an early boat?”
“I could come by myself in a water taxi. Only . . . I think I’d rather stay over. The abandoned stone huts are . . . used, sometimes. They’re not considered private property.”
The Rising Flame: Box Set: Defender of the Flame + Herald of the Flame Page 10