The Rising Flame: Box Set: Defender of the Flame + Herald of the Flame

by Sylvia Engdahl

  This was true everywhere. Terry soon grasped the secret of Maclairn’s society, the foundation of its superiority to all others: everyone was free! The government didn’t tell anyone what they could or could not do. People didn’t tell each other, either—they had diverse lifestyles and did not frown on those who chose differently from themselves. Some liked high-tech living, others preferred simplicity. Common sense prevailed; anyone too lazy to do even a minimal amount of work went hungry when his or her credits ran out, which didn’t last for more than a day or two since there was always work to be done. Those who worked long hours and got rich were respected but not envied. Above all, people helped each other, not just in case of misfortune, but routinely. No one organized this; it just happened.

  “It seems like utopia,” he protested, “and there’s no such thing. Even I know enough about human history to realize that. So what’s the catch?”

  “There’s no catch,” Kathryn said, “though of course people suffer as they would anywhere from things like disappointment and grief. And occasionally deranged people become cruel or violent, which the mentors are trained to deal with; in rare cases where they couldn’t, where psychopathic uses of psi threatened serious harm to others, there have even been executions. Evil can’t be completely eliminated. What makes this different from previous societies is the fact that everyone is psi-capable. There’s no misunderstanding or indifference to others’ feelings, much less hidden hostility, among people who are telepathically aware of each others’ emotions. And that’s why the spreading of our capabilities is so important.”

  As the days passed Terry’s liking for Maclairn grew. He and Kathryn swam at a beach near the marina, a favorite gathering place for young and old alike. In the evenings they went to her friends’ homes, or sometimes to a ballgame or concert, and once to a dance. He had never before enjoyed himself with people. Now he was welcomed warmly as if he had known them all his life. They were aware of his feelings and he of theirs, even when there was no conscious telepathic communication, and everyone was interested in hearing about the other worlds he had traveled to. The mood on these occasions was relaxed and happy, and eager though he was to fly Picard, he found himself sorry that his training period on the surface would soon be over.

  ~ 21 ~

  On the last day before Terry was scheduled to return to Shepard, Tristan targeted for remote viewing a place on Maclairn where no one had ever been, a spot on the map chosen arbitrarily by coordinates. It was too far away to reach by land; there was a shuttle on the ground because some crew members were on weekend leave in Petersville, and Terry received permission to use it for the day. Kathryn and Tristan’s lifemate Merelda came along for the ride.

  Terry’s remote viewing impression had been of water, but the satellite map, when examined, showed no sign of a sea or river visible from orbit. He also had mentioned a feeling of being closed in, as if in a very narrow canyon; but when they neared the specified coordinates there was no canyon to be seen. He hovered the ship over a flat valley and set down as close as he could get to the outcroppings of rock that covered the actual site, which they would have to walk to reach.

  “It doesn’t look familiar,” he said as they clambered over them. “Could I have been seeing something at a different location?”

  “It’s possible,” Tristan told him, “but more likely it was simply an ordinary miss.”

  “What bad luck, the one time we came all this way,” Kathryn said.

  “It doesn’t depend on luck,” said Tristan. “We don’t know what it does depend on, but it’s not just chance.”

  “I don’t feel as if I missed,” Terry declared. “I don’t see anything I recognize, but I sense . . . something, some resonance I can’t define.”

  “Maybe you saw the future,” Merelda suggested.

  “It would have to be a long way in the future for water to be anywhere among these rocks, unless it was just rain I saw.” Troubled, he stared at the rough wall of the cliff they had come to. There was nothing confining about it; with his back to it, he could look out at the whole valley. Yet he knew inside that he had been near this place before. . . .

  “Déjà vu?” Kathryn questioned. “That’s common, after all.”

  “This is more than that, not just a flash. I know I’m close to where I went this morning, where my mind went, anyway.”

  “Déjà vu may be a psi phenomenon, perhaps related to past unconscious precognition,” Tristan said. “You may have had precognitive knowledge that you would be here now, rather than a remote viewing of what’s here.”

  “God, Tristan, if psi capabilities are that complicated, how can we trust what we learn through them?”

  “We can’t. Viewings are mere signposts, not roadmaps, and after two hundred years—even longer, counting Ian’s research on Undine—we still don’t understand how they work. We know telepathy does work because other forms of communication can verify it. We know precognition is possible because events are sometimes accurately predicted. And we know remote viewing exists apart from telepathy because we have records of places described before any living being had been to them. But in the majority of cases, we can’t tell which capabilities are operative.”

  “I’ve been told that Ian saw this planet as it looks from space and showed it to Jesse in a dream,” Kathryn said reflectively. “Did he see remotely across interstellar distance, or was it a precognitive telepathic perception of the colonists’ first sight of it?”

  “That’s something we’ve always wondered. Actually we can’t be sure he hadn’t seen the original discoverers’ photo of it in the Net database, though the emotion he projected with it doesn’t fit that explanation.”

  They sat at the foot of the cliff to eat the lunch they had brought, hard-boiled eggs and chunks of bread full of crunchy sunflower seeds. The view of the valley was beautiful despite the dryness of the land; low native shrubs, a golden blanket, stretched toward the jagged mountains beyond.

  “In some ways I envy you, Terry,” Merelda said. “I’ve always wondered how it would feel to travel. We’ve seen vids in the knowledgebase, but when no one here has ever been offworld . . .”

  That made this planet unique, Terry thought. Nowhere else in the galaxy was there an inhabited planet whose people had no access to space. It would, he thought, be intolerable. “I’ve landed on quite a few worlds,” he told her. “But most of the ones explorers visit don’t have breathable atmospheres, you know. We have to wear spacesuits or stay inside sealed rovers, even when the temperature isn’t too extreme. I’ve only seen one or two that were potentially habitable.”

  “And yet you love exploring,” Kathryn said.

  “Well, it’s not what we find, though that’s fascinating sometimes. It’s what we might find. Something . . . different, something that means more than rich resources and primitive forms of life for the exobiologists to study.” Tristan knows, he thought. Tristan had absorbed it from his mind and shared the feeling. Close as he was to Kathryn, she had not.

  “For a few moments, when the first expedition arrived and saw signs of habitation, we thought this world had been colonized by an alien race,” she said.

  “Did you really? I thought that was a story you made up to explain what you’d been doing with a privately-owned starship.”

  “We made up the story that we’d been hunting for aliens—though I think our captain half-believed it. He hadn’t been told the real reason why he was ordered to take us to a planet charted as worthless. But when we saw buildings and planted fields where none were supposed to be, we were scared, Terry. Not so much for ourselves as for humankind, because it would mean a terrible shakeup even if they were friendly. Earth’s civilization would collapse.”

  “Culture shock, the theorists call it,” Tristan said. “There’s been speculation about it for centuries; not all believers in advanced aliens were crackpots. For a while, before interstellar travel began, many scientists expected them to be found through radio astronomy if
not through physical contact.”

  “And before that, from the late seventeenth century till the turn of the twentieth, nearly all educated people believed the planets of other stars were inhabited,” added Merelda. Terry frowned. She was a historian, so she should know; but he had never heard that. In any case, since long before he was born, belief in the existence of extraterrestrials had been ridiculed.

  Did you think it was ridiculous, Terry? Tristan inquired silently.

  To be honest, he hadn’t. “I don’t expect to ever find any ETs,” he said. “If they existed, we’d have come across them by now, considering how many solar systems we’ve explored. And yet it just doesn’t seem reasonable. We’ve found higher forms of life on plenty of worlds—even primatoids on a few. How is it possible that evolution went no further except on Earth?”

  “That’s one of the great mysteries,” Tristan agreed.

  “As I once told Aldren, I think the search for aliens was a sort of symbol,” Terry said. “And maybe it’s not good that humankind has lost it. Most people, even most star pilots, don’t have any real interest in exploring, and I’ve read that they used to—that scientists once believed it was a basic human impulse.”

  “Historically, it certainly was,” Merelda said. “It still was, to some extent, two centuries ago, according to what the knowledgebase tells us. Are you saying that’s no longer true?”

  “Nobody I know is looking for anything more than mineral deposits that will make them rich. And nothing’s written about hoping for more. All the settled worlds are pretty much the same, and nobody cares. They don’t even care much that civilization’s said to be declining in the colonies as well as on Earth. They just assume there’s nowhere left to go.”

  “Life on Earth’s been getting worse since long before we were born,” Kathryn said ruefully. “I hated it, as who doesn’t? I thought Colonial League law might give me a chance to emigrate—and now that I’m here, in a happier world, I’m not looking for anything else.”

  Troubled, Terry probed, Don’t you wonder about the rest of the universe? I’m happy too on Maclairn, happier than I’ve ever been, but I couldn’t ever stop wanting to see more. . . . She didn’t respond. For the first time it occurred to him that there might be basic things about which they disagreed. It was a thought he didn’t want to pursue.

  He got up and walked restlessly along the cliff wall, which was not sheer until higher up; at its foot there were piles of boulders. Noticing a wide crevice between them, he investigated and found that it went deep into the cliff, leaving a low opening though which it might be possible to crawl. “Hey, I think there may be a cave back here,” he called out. “Bring a flashlight from the shuttle.”

  By the time the others reached him, Terry was already part way through. He could sense clearly now that there was water somewhere underground. He had seen it remotely! His inner sight wasn’t an illusion, it had shown him an actual place—and that excited him more than any of the other powers he had gained, except for the joy of sharing thoughts with Kathryn.

  She followed him through the opening on hands and knees, aiming the flashlight beam ahead of them. A short tunnel led to a small cavern with a roof high enough for them to stand under. Water trickled through a crack in the opposite wall into a pool little more than an arm’s length across; as they shone the light into it, they couldn’t see the bottom.

  “There must be an underground outlet,” Kathryn said. “Most of the water on Maclairn is ground water; the wells have to be dug deep. It doesn’t rain often, but when it does it rains hard, and sinks in through cracks in the rocky areas. Ponds on the surface soon evaporate.”

  Terry stared at the pool, still marveling at the accuracy of his vision. Water . . . a feeling of confinement. . . .

  Behind them, there was a sudden sound of falling rock. He turned and saw, in horror, that the entrance passage had been filled by an avalanche of stones, blocking the only exit.

  ~ 22 ~

  “Oh, God,” Kathryn said. “What if it’s filled the whole tunnel?”

  It undoubtedly had, Terry knew. He’d had enough experience surveying new worlds to know better than to crawl into an unknown cave. No explorer team would have done such a thing. He had been so absorbed in verifying his remote viewing, and had felt so at home on Maclairn, that he hadn’t thought of its wilderness as hazardous.

  The stones that had fallen were not too large to be moved, but there were a lot of them, and more were likely to settle into any opening they managed to make. To try might do more harm than good, even if they had the strength to keep working.

  Terry? Are you okay? Tristan’s thought surged into Terry’s mind, driven by urgency, and he realized with relief that though conversational telepathy was generally limited to people within sight of each other, the strong bond between them, enhanced by stress, had made it possible.

  We’re not hurt. But there’s no way out of here.

  Show me! Tristan commanded. Look around you and at the rock slide, and concentrate on what you see. Shine the light on the walls and roof of the cave.

  Terry did so, knowing that however clear a picture he could project to Tristan, it wouldn’t reveal any means of escape. “At least we’ve got water,” he said to Kathryn. “We’re not going to die from thirst.”

  What is going to happen to us? It wasn’t a question to ask aloud.

  I don’t know, he admitted. “Tristan can’t clear that passage. He’ll contact Petersville on the shuttle’s comm, but there’s no way anyone can get here soon. They’ll have to send another shuttle down from Shepard. They may have to bring heavy equipment and cut another opening.”

  “Terry . . . how long is the air in here going to last?”

  Not long enough, probably, as the rock overhead was too solid to permit any ventilation; but there was no point in saying so. Nor was there any need to tell Kathryn how sorry he was for having put her in harm’s way. He squeezed her hand, and their thoughts were wordlessly shared.

  She was putting a brave face on it, but he could feel her claustrophobic agony at the tightness of the walls surrounding them. That aspect of it didn’t bother him, accustomed as he was to long confinement in small spaceships with a finite supply of oxygen. But on a ship you knew how long the oxygen would last and expected to replenish it. And the carbon dioxide you exhaled was being removed. Here, they would die of carbon dioxide poisoning before their oxygen was gone.

  Merelda’s gone to the shuttle to call for a rescue team, Tristan told him. I’ll stick with you, and I’m going to try to clear an air hole.

  How could he? Terry thought. The shuttle contained no tools, and even if he managed to pull out some stones without dislodging more, he couldn’t reach far enough in to make an opening. Should I work at it from this side? he asked. I’m not sure what good it will do—the distance is too long for us to connect.

  Maybe later you can help. But till we’re sure it can be done, you should exert yourself as little as possible, to conserve oxygen.

  That was true, he knew. Every extra movement lessened the supply. We mustn’t even speak aloud, he warned Kathryn. Sit down, and relax as much as you can. They sat on a low slab of stone and pressed close together for warmth; the cave hadn’t absorbed much of the outdoor heat and they couldn’t afford to waste energy in shivering.

  Terry, came Tristan’s insistent thought, relaxing isn’t enough. Your life and Kathryn’s will depend on using the mind training you’ve had. To start with, slow your heart and lower your blood pressure. . . .

  Of course—why hadn’t they done so immediately, as native Maclairnans would have? What they had learned about volitional control was meant for practical use in a crisis, though neither of them was experienced enough for it to be automatic.

  It’s possible to consciously lower your metabolism, Tristan went on. I can’t teach you the specific skill without neurofeedback, but I’ll give you as much awareness as I can of what you need to do. You’ll have to pass it on to Kathryn; she
and I aren’t close enough for her to get it directly from me.

  Silently Terry assented. Don’t lie down, Tristan warned. The carbon dioxide in the air will sink. Get into a position where you can lean against something, then relax your muscles totally and don’t move again. It may be uncomfortable, even painful after a while, but that’s okay—you know how to prevent suffering from pain, and doing so will keep you in the right state of consciousness for controlling your body’s functions.

  Terry braced himself with his back against the rough rock wall, already feeling it scrape through his thin shirt. He put his arm around Kathryn so that she was leaning against him. I’m okay, she told him. Remember the neurofeedback patterns, Terry . . . focus on the colors. . . .

  He tried not to think beyond the moment. Tristan was still communicating to him, he realized; the knowledge came to him wordlessly. They must let go of all fear, all worry about what was to come, because the body is programmed to respond to fear by priming for action—it speeds not only heart rate but metabolism in general, and produces all sorts of biological effects that take energy. And using energy consumes oxygen. . . .

  In the Ritual the Stewards of the Flame pledge to live without fear, Kathryn mused, and I never understood why until now. I thought it was just a symbolic thing, because nobody can help being afraid sometimes. But it refers to a physical state—not allowing your body to react to fear, It’s why their bodies don’t wear out.

  With some irony, Terry replied, Well, we’re getting plenty of valuable practice.

  That’s true, Tristan agreed. We won’t have to arrange an artificial emergency for you, as we often do in advanced training so people can learn to deal with legitimate fear.