Terry, who was permitted to cross-examine, required the miners to state under oath that they had not seen any cargo aboard during the flight. This was simply to protect Darrow in case it later occurred to the police to wonder where the hypothetical stolen goods had come from; it would make no difference to the outcome of his own case. He knew the miners wouldn’t volunteer that there was hidden cargo that they’d seen previously, for that would have implicated them in its concealment. As for its unloading, they truly had not observed it—they’d been drunk at the time, presumably because they’d been well aware that the less they knew about such transactions, the better.
Darrow was called next to testify that while recovering from his injury he had allowed Terry to pilot his ship, offering him a percentage of the proceeds. The prosecutor’s purpose being to show that Terry had conned him, she avoided any questioning that might suggest that he himself had ever been a smuggler—that the government knew he had, and had therefore visited starships, was not something they wanted revealed as long as they were getting a good share of his profits. When she asked whether he had known the starship would be visited by Terry he replied truthfully that he hadn’t, and that he had been astonished when the police informed him that it had been.
Alison too had been subpoenaed. As she took the witness stand, her eyes met Terry’s and he was overcome by sorrow at the thought that this was the last time they would ever see each other. With some surprise he became aware that if they had met in a different life, if he had not been committed to someone else and had never known what love between telepaths was like . . . but that was pointless speculation. Things were as they were. And now they would be separated in any case, no less irrevocably than he’d been separated from Kathryn.
To his relief Alison was asked only to confirm that he had worked as a healer. Although the prosecutor wanted to establish that she too had been deceived by him, that would have been awkward to pursue because she had benefited financially from their partnership. Instead, the police had managed to locate one of the few clients who hadn’t responded well to neurofeedback and telepathic reduction of pain. This, Terry knew, was because she had been told by doctors that her pain was incurable and underneath she didn’t want to believe medical science was not infallible. He had never claimed he could help everybody. This witness nevertheless testified, with some bitterness, that he was a swindler; and he could call no others to counter her because the police hadn’t given him an opportunity to contact anyone.
“It has been demonstrated,” said the prosecutor in summation, “that this man, Terry Rivera, is a habitual liar and perpetrator of fraud. Although the evidence that he attempted to sell stolen goods is circumstantial, there is little doubt that he did so. His status is that of a common criminal. In his defense he will make claims that if not deliberate lies, can be nothing other than delusions. Since he admits that he visited a starship, none of this would matter except that he has associated himself with a absurd legend that has been circulated on the Net. To make sure that no citizens are taken in by this legend, we have chosen to try him publicly even though he has pleaded guilty to the charge of offworld contact, the penalty for which supersedes all others.”
Terry stood. Beforehand, he had feared that speaking out would be wasted effort, but by now the mounting emotions of the spectators had made plain that they were people who would listen to him. This was his last opportunity ever to do anything by his own free choice, and he would make the most of it.
“You’ve been told that I am not honest,” he began, “and it’s true that I’ve disguised myself at times. But I now tell you a more significant truth: I am the captain of Estel, and I was born on another world.”
There were gasps; even Quaid had not guessed that he would claim offworld origin. “I was born on Earth,” Terry repeated, “and I have visited many planets. And on all of them except this one, people are free to read whatever they like. All the books and stories that have been written are publicly accessible. All the vids that have been produced can be seen. You have not been informed that this is so. You are not permitted contact with offworlders, lest you find out. I will be imprisoned for the rest of my life because the authorities believe I am a Ciencian who has defied that law, but the rest of you are already imprisoned inside the shell of the restrictions they have placed on you. You may think you are free because you can live and work as you choose and spend your money as you wish—but you are not free as long as knowledge available elsewhere is withheld from you.”
He could feel the listeners’ surge of agreement and knew he was communicating telepathically in a way possible only because of his psi-giftedness, and that through unconscious telepathy, they were responding. He had felt nothing like it before except at the Ritual, and for the first time he understood the full power of mass mind-sharing. And he knew, too, that during his years as a healer he had done more than help people who were suffering. Many of those people were here—as he became aware of this, he recognized them not only by faces he spotted among the spectators, but by the touch of minds once joined to his in the crisis of pain. They idolized him as he’d feared they might, yet it wasn’t a bad thing, for when he himself disappeared into the oblivion of prison, they would remember what he was saying now.
“You may wonder what knowledge they have withheld,” he went on, “though some of you may have read pieces of what I have hidden on the Net. It is knowledge of the power of the human mind. The mind can do much more than reason scientifically. It can perceive truth that today’s science is unable to define or analyze. It can create stories that express such truth through metaphors, or acknowledge its existence through how their characters feel and act. And the mind can also do greater things that even on Earth are not fully understood. It can banish pain, as I helped people do in the clinic where I worked; it can perceive things the eye cannot see; and above all it can allow people to connect with each other without words, so that that they can understand what others are feeling and can live in harmony.
“The government does not want you to know these things because if you did, you would not give the dogma of science and its champions full control over your lives. You would use science for the good it can achieve, but you would also use the other aspects of your minds. As this would lessen the power of the authorities, they have, since the founding of this colony, taken drastic steps to keep it from happening. They have made offworld contact the most heinous crime that can be committed here, though everywhere else it’s recognized that to travel between the stars is the destiny of humankind—that to explore varied worlds, and ideas, is the essence of our human heritage. People of Ciencia, don’t remain blind to what’s being withheld from you! Break through the clouds that confine you, and see the sun—”
The people in the courtroom were on their feet, applauding, and the judge was banging his gavel for order. As the police moved to restrain Terry and take him away, a woman ran forward, crying “Estel! We believe you, we’re with you!” It was Nina, her face flushed with excitement. She alone among the conspirators had dared to come, the danger of discovery outweighed by her hopeless love for him. Inspired by her boldness, other citizens, knowing nothing of Estel beyond the hints they’d read, took up the shout: “Estel! Estel!”
And beyond the transparent wall of the room the people in the street were shouting, too, pressing close to the building’s façade. A few were waving hastily-made signs bearing the slogan. Terry, at first bewildered, realized that the trial must have been shown live on the Net with the expectation that the legend of the ship Estel would be discredited, and that passers-by had been watching on their smartphones.
With unanticipated elation Terry saw that the idea behind the symbol he’d created, the desire for an end to suppression of ideas on Ciencia and faith in the powers of the human mind, had been firmly established in too many people for it ever to be extinguished. Thousands had seen at least some of the texts secreted on the Net; now hundreds more would find them every day. That might
never lead to political change, but neither would the population of Ciencia remain unaware of what was missing in their world. Estel, hope, had become part of the collective unconscious.
~ 68 ~
“That was a foolish performance,” Quaid said when they arrived back at the prison. “You’ll regret it.”
“No, I won’t,” Terry retorted. “The government will regret it, though. You may not find the public quite so docile as in the past now that they’ve laid eyes on an offworlder.”
“Do you think I believe that nonsense?” Quaid demanded. “How could you have gotten here? How could your ID say you’re a native Ciencian?”
“Well, as to the first,” Terry said, “I’m a pilot, after all. A starship pilot.”
“I’ve got to admit you managed to fly a mining ship and even rendezvous with a starship,” Quaid agreed reluctantly, “though I don’t see how you learned without there being any record of your flight training. But a starship pilot? Don’t stretch your story too far if you don’t want to lose credibility.”
“As captain of a starship I’ve made a good many jumps,” Terry declared, amused by fact that this was truer than Quaid, who assumed he meant Estel, could imagine.
“You’ll lose your cockiness once you’ve told me who hacked the Net to produce these fantasies,” declared Quaid grimly.
“I’ve already told you. I did.”
“A sharp swindler, a psychic healer, a starship pilot, and the most skilled hacker the world has ever seen? Come on, Rivera. I am not as stupid as the people you’ve duped.”
“Well,” Terry confessed, “It’s true I haven’t done all the hacking. There was another man—”
“Now we’re getting somewhere.”
“A man named Elrond, who was killed by you or your cronies some years ago. I don’t think you knew he was the hacker while you had him in prison; at any rate, you obviously didn’t get him to name me as his accomplice. But since he was indirectly responsible for the existence of Estel, it may interest you to know now that he’s beyond your reach.”
Quaid was livid; evidently he hadn’t known. For a moment Terry was afraid he’d said too much—Nina had spoken out at the trial, and she was Elrond’s cousin. But she didn’t have the computer skills to be a hacker, nor was she acquainted with the people who did. She had helped only with the pickups, about which no evidence remained.
“Ancient history doesn’t interest us,” said Quaid. “I want the names of your present accomplices, and I’m sure you know I have the means to make you tell me.”
“What, don’t you believe I have the power to end pain, either?”
“Of course not. You may have convinced some hysterical women that you do, but they evidently didn’t have any real pain to begin with. You will.”
As this was an issue about which he was totally confident, Terry, thankful for the thorough training he’d received from Aldren, went on taunting Quaid throughout the man’s attempts to break him. While it was true that the various methods employed produced far more severe pain than clients at the clinic had experienced, there was never any question of his suffering from it. Quaid, of course, continued to doubt that such a thing could be controlled by the mind, and eventually came to the conclusion that Terry’s nervous system was physically abnormal. When he discovered that Terry could also control bleeding, his own nerve snapped and he retreated in fear that he was losing his grip on reality.
Which, Terry reflected, was the root of the fear that all opponents of mind powers displayed. He was glad Quaid had no contacts in the League and didn’t know Maclairn existed, because if he had, he’d have been among those trying to find some malevolent way to prevent contact with it.
Though in most respects he was past caring what might be done to him in prison, one possibility did frighten Terry, so much so that he thrust it out of his mind whenever it began to emerge. They might subject him to drugs. Darrow had said long ago that uncooperative captains were intentionally addicted to drugs in prison and were thereby forced to become drug dealers. This was bad enough, but still more alarming was the question of what sort of drugs they were made to sell.
Psychoactive drugs, Darrow had said. Nasty ones that didn’t exist elsewhere. Recreational drugs to be pushed on the streets of Earth, where due to blanket prohibition the demand was insatiable? Undoubtedly, but that was not the worst. Terry had heard rumors; he had seen allusions in some of the political texts he had posted; and his imagination was all too able to fill in details. If the government produced such drugs it might also produce other illicit biochemicals, and street dealers were not the only potential market—terrorists were another. And there were all sorts to uses to which they might be put by governments or agents of governments. He had read that in the past they had even been used for genocide.
Would his mind training enable him to overcome the effects of drugs? Terry wondered. He could control his brain’s production of neurotransmitters, so perhaps it would—unless the drug interfered with his brain itself to extent of depriving him of volition. Hopefully, any drug powerful enough to do that would be useless to interrogators because it would render him unable to remember the information they wanted from him, but he wasn’t sure of that; he recalled episodes from Maclairnan history involving narrow escapes from truth serum. And what if they used the drugs as a threat rather than directly, telling him that it wouldn’t matter if his mind was destroyed, even permanently destroyed, if he refused to tell them anything?
There was a still more chilling possibility. Ciencia’s scientists were extremely proficient in biochemistry—they couldn’t produce unique substances if they were not—and there was no way they could have gained such capabilities without the use of test subjects. There were not many animals on Ciencia, since none were native to the planet; presumably they bred lab rats, but there was a limit to what could be proven with rats. People sentenced to life in prison, on the other hand . . . The lifers were isolated and at least some were under the control of the racketeers. Nobody knew exactly what happened to them. Terry did not look forward to finding out.
He adjusted to the monotony of his surroundings. Whether the days passed quickly or slowly he could not tell, for his permanent cell was never either dark or bright; he existed in a sort of half-light that approximated dusk under Ciencia’s gloomy sky. Quaid, he decided, had given up on him, as there were no more interrogations. No form of activity replaced them; he was locked up alone and he realized that the authorities wanted him forgotten.
During his years on Ciencia he had hated everything about the planet, from the unending snow and fog to the stark design of the closely-packed buildings that huddled together as if to conserve warmth. Installations on Earth’s moon and on worlds without breathable atmospheres had never bothered him, although they were no less stark and considerably more compact—but they were oriented toward space, never allowing their inhabitants to feel isolated from the larger universe, whereas Ciencia was intentionally self-contained. It was merely a psychological difference, perhaps, but one he had never been able to forget. Yet looking back on the city now, he knew that he missed it. There was evidence of human aspiration in it, one-sided as that evidence was. And the current of Net communication ran through it, as through all inhabited worlds, carrying the shared thoughts and feelings of its people, far deeper and more vital than the limitations of the physical environment suggested.
He had no access to the Net in prison. That, more than the steel bars, was what confined him. All his life, except on Maclairn, he had been a loner, or thought he had; but he had lived actively on the Net, and he found he was terrified at the thought of being permanently cut off from it. Looking ahead, the life sentence began to seem worse than he had imagined it could.
To be sure, he was safer in prison than he would be if released. At least in prison they could not kill him; execution was contrary to Ciencian law and there were enough uncorrupted guards to get the word out if it happened. But outside, an accident could be arranged, a
s it had been for Elrond, and that would certainly solve the problem he presented to the government. It was, to his satisfaction, a problem that was growing.
The people outside were still demonstrating in support of Estel. Terry knew this because sometimes, when the walls pressed so closely that he was not sure he could bear it for another hour, he reached out with his mind and he saw them, not just with imagination but through the remote viewing skill in which he had long ago been trained. He had avoided using it during his years on Ciencia; not only would it have served no useful purpose, but he could not forget that it had been the cause of his losing everything. If remote viewing had not led him to seek out the Elders’ ship, he would have had the fulfilling life he’d expected as a Fleet officer and defender of Maclairn. So he’d wanted nothing more to do with viewing; but now, in desperation, he turned to it and sensed that there were people, many people, who believed in what he had told them and who from time to time came to the prison gates with signs that bore the slogan he had created: Estel! Estel! And Estel meant hope—not for him, because he was past hoping, but for Ciencia and for the flame of belief in mind power he had kindled here.
He dreamed of Maclairn a good deal, and of Kathryn; and more and more he allowed himself to slip into the dreams even when not asleep. It was pointless to resist—why should he, when his life was over and the time on Maclairn was the only part of it that had been happy? The years on Ciencia held nothing he cared to remember . . . except Alison, and Alison’s grief was too painful to dwell on. As for the dream he’d once had of exploring the stars, he could not bear to think of it, knowing that never again would he even see them.
He was not aware that he had in fact been drugged into passivity until one morning when he realized his head was clear. He felt more alert than he’d been for a long time, and this continued for what he guessed was a period of several days, until he began to fear that they were readying him for a trial of a different drug for which they needed a fresh start. He felt like himself again; but with this came the torment of longing for action, and for freedom.
The Rising Flame: Box Set: Defender of the Flame + Herald of the Flame Page 41