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

by Sylvia Engdahl

  “He said to mention that I’ve seen the inside of Zach’s box,” Terry said quietly.

  After a short silence she conceded, “Maybe we’d better meet. Where are you now?”

  “The spaceport. There’s a woman with me; we’re on the porch of the spacers’ hotel.” At a small port like this one, frequented only by miners and local traders, he knew it would be safe to leave the shuttle unattended.

  While they waited he explained to Alison about epidemics—there had been no such thing on Ciencia, of course, considering the advanced skills of its biochemists and the fact that it allowed only rare, surreptitious contact with offworlders. Nor did contagious disease exist anywhere in the League except on backwater worlds with no stock of vaccines and antimicrobials on hand. “At the first sign of anything new, the rich colonies treat everybody,” he said. “Whatever’s broken out here must have been brought by a trader who’d been to the outskirts.”

  “But where could have it come from originally if the first settlers of each colony are disease-free?” Alison protested.

  “Bacteria and viruses evolve fast,” Terry said. “Those native to new worlds adapt themselves to human hosts, and even if vaccines and drugs are developed to defeat them, ships get away without everyone aboard having been treated. A jump takes so little time that they may not get sick until later, or they may be merely carriers who don’t get sick at all.”

  The dealer arrived in a dilapidated van that probably dated from the colony’s founding. “Okay,” she said. “I’m listening. But I’ll need to know how you came by what you’ve got.”

  “We brought it direct from Ciencia,” Terry said, “where we bought it legally.”

  “Ciencia? I’ve never been offered anything from there.”

  “It’s a closed world. But if you handle biochemicals you must have heard of Ciencian expertise in that field.”

  She frowned. “Ciencian . . . yes, I’ve picked up rumors. If they’re true, anything you have is worth more than I can pay.”

  “Not necessarily.” Terry decided to trust her; he could tell she was honest and in desperate need. “Look,” he said, “We’re not aiming to profit at sick people’s expense. We bought this stuff on speculation and we’ve got to recover what we paid, but that wasn’t as much as it would have been if we were offworld dealers. We bought direct from a local supplier and transported it ourselves.”

  “From a closed world? There’d have been risk in that.”

  “No more than we were taking anyway by leaving the planet.”

  “I don’t quite get it,” she protested. “If it’s illegal to export biochemicals, why do they manufacture more than enough to meet local demand?”

  She was worried that the drugs might not be genuine, Terry realized, and her skepticism was reasonable. “The Ciencian government runs a racket,” he explained. “They encourage illegal exports as long as they get their cut. Offworlders can’t go to the surface and there’s a leash on local captains, so any cargo picked up would normally be priced accordingly. But as I said, my crew was mainly concerned with getting away. We couldn’t have transferred our credits so we invested in medical supplies.”

  “How much have you got, and what are you asking for it?”

  “That depends on what percentage Zach expects from you.”

  “He won’t expect anything on pharmaceuticals; he knows I don’t profit from them. I’m a part-time accountant at the clinic—I do all their buying, legal and otherwise, and I don’t add a markup.”

  “I just need to get back what we put in,” Terry said. He named a figure. “That includes the antivirals plus some antibiotics, and I’ll give you a hand transporting them to the clinic.”

  “We’d like to help out,” Alison added, “if the clinic’s shorthanded.”

  The woman stared at them. “How did a couple like you get mixed up with Zach? You’re not much like his usual clientele.”

  “So I gathered,” said Terry, “but my crew’s Ciencian citizenship had to be erased.”

  “And Zach put you in his box for that?”

  “I guess I looked clean-cut enough to be an undercover law officer.”

  She smiled. “I’ve never met him myself, but we’ve talked. He’s not as ruthless as he may seem, but God help the man or woman who betrays him after being judged trustworthy.”

  “How widespread is the illness here?” Alison asked. “Has everyone in the colony been exposed?”

  “No, only those who came into contact with the crew of a prospector that came in last week, and their associates. We’ve got it pretty well contained, but they’re in bad shape.” The woman pulled out her phone. “Let’s get on with this. I’ve got to get back to the clinic; I’m volunteering as a nursing aide. My name’s Claudia.”

  “I’m Terry, and this is Alison.” He held out his arm for her to swipe his ID implant, and Claudia transferred credits from her phone to his. Then all three of them went out to the shuttle and moved the boxes of drugs to her van.

  The clinic was a long, low prefab, more recently built than the adobe structures of the original colony and unshaded by the genetically-engineered trees that surrounded the older ones. As they entered Terry froze, struck by a wave of agony so startling that he nearly stumbled. Every muscle in his body screamed in pain.

  “Oh, my God,” he gasped, struggling to regain his mental balance.

  “Terry, what is it?” Alison asked, sensing his distress.

  White-faced, he murmured, “The patients—the ones sick with the virus—they’re hurting bad, all of them. I feel it just like I did with the neurofeedback clients.”

  ~ 16 ~

  It was the flip side of his telepathic sensitivity—when someone was suffering physical pain, he felt it in his own body. At least he had since becoming consciously psi-gifted, and according to his Maclairnan mentors it was probably why, as a child, he had suppressed his gift. Maybe he shouldn’t call it the flip side, Terry told himself, because it enabled him to help people. That was how he’d gained his reputation as a healer in Alison’s neurofeedback clinic.

  He had never wanted that reputation. Ever since learning of his psi-giftedness he had shrunk from the idea of being idolized in such a way. But when clients came to Alison with the hope that psychotherapy and neurofeedback would lessen their pain from ills medical treatment hadn’t cured, he couldn’t refrain from helping; and though he’d never admitted to them that anything more than neurofeedback was occurring, before long some had caught on. Word spread, and to his dismay he had gone from a mere technical assistant to the clinic’s central attraction.

  It had proved fortunate not only for the clients, but for his own status among the Ciencians after his arrest. People whose suffering he had relieved had appeared at his trial, and his telepathic influence as the Captain of Estel had been magnified by his rapport with them. But he was not a miracle worker. The pain relief wasn’t permanent; it lasted only during the neurofeedback session and for a little while afterward, though a few people had learned, after repeated sessions, to achieve it briefly on their own. They did not become immune to suffering from the physical sensation, as he and others trained by the mentors were. And he had worked with them one at a time.

  Now, overwhelmed by the simultaneous agony of many people, Terry was close to panic. He had shifted easily into the mental state that eliminated his own suffering; that was second nature now. But to pass it on to a patient he would have to shift back. That was how the healing worked—only by briefly sharing the pain of the other person could he enable that person to make the transition. How could he do that for a whole clinic full of sick people, one by one?

  Alison saw his turmoil and covered for him. “What does this virus do to people?” she asked Claudia, glancing around the large room into which far more beds than would properly fit had been crammed. The patients lay flat on their backs, yet their eyes were open and they were obviously all too conscious of what they were feeling.

  “It attacks the muscles,�
�� Claudia answered. “Even the slightest movement produces severe pain. And there’s no way we can lessen it; we ran out of painkillers long ago. They just have to wait it out.”

  “But they do recover?”

  “Most of them. We’ve had a few deaths where breathing muscles were affected. Usually the acute phase lasts only a few days. They’ll have aching muscles for weeks afterward, though.”

  Terry, dazed, was scarcely aware of Alison and Claudia recruiting orderlies to bring in boxes from the van, or of the nursing staff unpacking the antivirals and beginning to administer them. Once he managed to pull himself together he went to the nearest bed and crouched beside it, taking the hand of the girl who lay there staring up at him.

  “Relax,” he told her, forcing a reassuring smile. “You’ll hurt less if you quit fighting it.” Realizing that in the absence of a neurofeedback display she would need a tangible sign that something was happening, he added, “When you’re relaxed enough to feel better, I’ll squeeze your hand.” Then he dropped back into normal consciousness and let her pain envelop him.

  We don’t have to suffer, he told her silently. Follow me—go where I go, into a place where pain doesn’t matter. Where you don’t have to let it hurt you as nature programmed you to feel hurt when it warned you of danger. You’re safe here; you can turn the warning off. . . . When he sensed her response, knew she was in unconscious telepathic rapport with him, he shifted back to freedom from suffering and gripped her hand tightly, carrying her along.

  “The pain just—stopped hurting!” she murmured incredulously. “What did you do?”

  “I showed you how to turn off the brain programming that made you suffer from it. I can’t stay with you because there are a lot of other people who need help, and I’m not sure how long the respite will last. But you know it’s possible now. When your pain is really bad, relax and remember—perhaps it will happen again.” He rose and went to the next bed, where he repeated the procedure with an old man.

  Six hours later he had made the rounds of the entire clinic and was starting over with the first patients. Alison had come along behind him, comforting, reinforcing their relief with her calm reassurance as she always had with her own psychotherapy clients. They had lost track of time, and of the fact that they were both shaking with exhaustion from constant immersion in other people’s agony.

  Vaguely, Terry perceived that the psychic atmosphere in the room he’d first visited was different now. It was a makeshift ward, normally the clinic’s cafeteria, and held about twenty beds lined up with barely space for nurses to walk between them. The patients, unable to sit up, could not see him or each other; only when he bent over someone was it possible to make eye contact. Yet he felt a linkage with them not only individually but as a group, and he sensed that they had begun to feel it, too. The telepathic rapport he’d established with each was spreading, so that they were soothed not merely by the memory of the short-term alleviation of their own suffering, but by what he was doing for others.

  These people’s latent psi capability had been enhanced by the stress of pain, as his own had been during his training, Terry realized. Their rapport with him had merged with the awareness of each other’s response—and had thereby been magnified—in the same way as during his speech at the trial. It was likely that he could now reach them simultaneously.

  He stood and raised his voice. “Pain doesn’t have to hurt,” he said. “What we feel with our nerves isn’t what hurts us; it’s how we process the sensation in our minds. That’s automatic when we’re born because we might get injured without a warning we couldn’t ignore. It’s got to stay automatic with animals and children—but we’re grown up, now. We don’t need a built-in warning and we can turn it off when we know there’s no danger.”

  This was how it had been explained to him, long ago when his mind training had begun. Far more than the explanation was needed for a person to learn how to do it alone; but the clinic patients did not have to gain that capability. They needed only to believe that suffering was unnecessary in this particular situation. That when he was here to help, they could free themselves from it by just letting go. Only through mass telepathy was this possible. He had set the stage for it and, he thought dazedly, he must seize the chance to make them believe.

  “The human mind has greater powers than most people know about,” he declared. “Not just the power to learn and to reason. Ever since the first humans evolved on Earth, people have been developing more abilities—to speak, to use tools, to create ideas and technologies—step by step, we’ve gained conscious control of our thoughts and actions. But the process isn’t finished. We can gain the ability to control things that are normally unconscious, so that we’re no longer bound to the way animals and children are programmed to react. An animal’s body readies itself to fight or run when threatened, but doing that over and over to no purpose leads to illness and pain. Instinct isn’t helpful anymore. We can ignore it and make our own choices.”

  They were absorbing this from his mind more than from his words, Terry knew. They were receptive because he had shown them it was true. The ability he was giving them was only temporary, only an aid in coping with this emergency. But it was a start. And perhaps it could also engender the wider hope he was aiming to spread.

  “There’s more to be gained,” he said. “Responses to danger aren’t the only functions of our unconscious minds that can become conscious. We can communicate by telepathy, too, and we can perceive things we can’t detect with our physical senses. Throughout history there have been a few people who could do this, and a time is coming when many will be able to. Some will find it frightening because it’s new to them and changes the way they think; some may even turn against those who welcome the change. But you will know that it’s good, because you have found it’s possible to turn off suffering when you’re in pain.”

  Terry, oblivious now to anything apart from the emotion he’d shared with these people, drew breath and plunged ahead without thought of possible consequences. “There is a ship named Estel, which means hope, and it travels from star to star to tell of the coming change—of the time when people will gain awareness of much that is now unconscious. Of the time when they communicate mind to mind, and live in harmony because there’s no misunderstanding between them, no isolation from each other’s feelings. And in days to come, when you hear rumors of that ship, remember me—”

  He broke off, realizing just in time that he could not identify himself as Estel’s captain because if he did it would get back to Zach, and it was too soon for Zach to know. But at least, he thought, knowledge of the name Estel might plant a seed.

  Claudia, who was still on duty as a nursing aide, had come into the room while he was speaking. As he turned to move on to another, she came up to him, obviously shaken. “Who are you?” she asked, awed.

  “Nobody special,” Terry said. “Just a guy who’s been lucky enough to have training that’s not widely available.”

  “Is there really a ship like you said, or was that only a figure of speech?”

  “It’s real, all right.”

  “Have you seen it?”

  “Those who’ve seen it are not allowed to say so,” he told her, avoiding a direct lie. “Someday, maybe, it will show itself. Meanwhile I’ll go on believing in what it stands for.”

  Claudia nodded. “I knew from the start that you’re no ordinary free trader. It must have been fate that sent you here from Ciencia just when we needed what you brought.”

  “Well,” Terry said, “fate’s had a way of thrusting me into all sorts of surprising situations that turn out to mean something. I’ve stopped trying to guess where I’ll end up next.”

  ~ 17 ~

  For three days and two nights Terry and Alison continued to make the rounds of the clinic, giving patients encouragement along with temporary relief of pain. They got a few hours of sleep in a small room vacated by the first few people to recover, and Claudia brought them something to eat f
rom time to time. “The antiviral pills are working fast,” she said on the third afternoon. “The incubation period’s short and we’ve given them to everyone left who was exposed, so I don’t think there’ll be any new cases. Already most of the patients can sit up. It looks as if the crisis is nearly over, thank God.”

  Terry was by this time dizzy with exhaustion and unable to fly the shuttle without a full night’s sleep. He had sent someone to the spaceport the first evening with a message to be passed on via the controller to Coralie, telling Jon they’d be staying on the surface for a few days. So when Claudia invited them to her home to rest up, he accepted gratefully.

  They ate an early dinner, reveling in the warm sunlight that streamed in through Claudia’s window—a novelty to Alison, deeply gratifying to Terry after his years on Ciencia and the days since in space. He had almost forgotten what it was like to be touched by the sun.

  “I don’t really understand what you did with the patients,” Claudia said. “Did you hypnotize them?”

  “No,” Terry explained. “A person who’s hypnotized can be made to believe things contrary to reality—a false memory, for instance—or in the case of surgery, won’t feel the cut. It’s the opposite of taking full conscious control of unconscious functions. I don’t tell people they won’t feel pain, I tell them they needn’t suffer from it. They remain aware of the physical sensation; it just doesn’t bother them. They switch their own minds into that state; I just show them how.”

  “Could you show me how?” she asked hopefully.

  “No. For an untrained person it only works with severe pain. If that weren’t true, the inborn purpose of pain would be defeated; little kids would learn on their own and their bodies wouldn’t be protected from injury by a compelling warning.”

  “Then how did you learn?”