Golden Torc - 2 (26 page)

"Aiken Drum!" said Felice. "Little tricky-pockets!" Claude's greenish eyes flashed. "He could! If anyone could decipher that antique photon weapon, Aiken could... But would he? They made him a silver, emember. He might have thrown in with them by now. He was always out for the main chance."

"He was our friend," Amerie said. "He's a human being. He's got to help us against those monsters!"

"Felice could twist his arm," Claude suggested, his smile bland. "Or isn't that your style any more, little girl?" The athlete ignored him. "Basil-I think your idea is a winner. We'll take the Spear, even if I have to shlep it on my back the whole thirteen hundred kloms down to Muriah. One way or another, we'll get Aiken Drum to make us a can opener." Chief Burke said, "We can hope for the best... Anything else?"

Nobody said anything. Uwe tapped the dottle from his pipe into the empty bowl before him. "Marialena is always furious when I do this. But perhaps one last time?"

"She'll forgive you," laughed Gert.

Chairs scraped back. Everybody got up and stretched. Those with cottages in the village prepared to leave. The others would spread sleeping bags upon Madame's floor.

Amerie laid a hand on Kawai's shoulder as the old man turned toward the door. "One favor, old friend."

"Only name it, Amerie-san."

The nun picked up the tiny pet wildcat. "If you could give a home to Deej-" He bowed gravely and took the little animal into his arms. "I will keep her safe for you until you return to Hidden Springs. And you will. I have made a most formidable vow to the Martyrs of Nagasaki."

"Crazy old Buddhist," said the nun, pushing him out the door.

6

"THIS JUDGMENT THEY DEMAND OF ME CONCERNING YOU," Brede began.

"Yes?" Elizabeth replied aloud, as always.

"It must be made consonant with their own racial destiny here. I have foreseen my dear Tanu and Firvulag people united and operant. This is my vision as of the most ancient days, before we ever came to this galaxy, to this planet of the Many-Colored Land. This destiny will happen, even though my prolepsis fails in showing me the how and when... I would like to think that we have become friends, Elizabeth. I am deeply aware of your desire for noninvolvement in our affairs. But I cannot believe that you are an extraneous factor here! You are part of the pattern! And so are all of these others, your companions of Group Green, who have so gravely influenced Tanu and Firvulag and even the poor lost ones of the northern wilderness. I can see the lines of destiny reaching toward a sure convergence at the Grand Combat in three weeks' time. I see it, I tell you! And your role... is strongly interwoven. But if not as racial genetrix-then what?"

"Brede, I will not be used." Even with her mental screens firm, the determination behind Elizabeth's statement had an adamantine luster.

"Then choose to help us," the exotic woman pleaded. "Your own human race, your own close friends, are bound up in this climax."

"No judgment you make concerning me will satisfy all of the Tanu factions. You know that. Your High King wants his new dynasty. But the Host of Nontusvel won't be satisfied until I'm safely dead. As for my friends... they seem to be in better control of their own destinies than I am! Why won't you consider strict justice for me for a change, rather than viewing me as a chess-piece in your proleptic game? Let me go free and harmless away from this place if that's what I choose." And I do. Soaring the world alone splendid at peace. "But-the pattern! I tell you, I see it! If it is not your genes that are to influence us, then there must be some other factor. O Sister of the Mind, help me to focus my faltering vision!" "Prescience was not a metafunction that was understood in my time. It was a wild talent. Unpredictable. The foreseeing was dangerous enough... but any attempted manipulation of future events foreseen was known to us to be futile. Whether I go free or not, your vision must come to pass. So let me go." Brede seemed not to have heard. They were sitting together in the limitless room without doors where the ambient atmosphere was enriched to the exotic's special need. But she had gone rigid and gasped in shallow exhalations while her features worked and her partly open mind showed a whirlpool of faces-human and Tanu and Firvulag and Howler-all gyrating and pulsing around Elizabeth's own image, and that generating filamentous probability lines forming and reforming in what was almost a Lissajous fabric of incoherence-unordered, ununified.

"The psychounion!" Brede cried. "Not the genes-the mental Unity!" The mind of the Shipspouse brightened in such sweet hopefulness that even Elizabeth faltered in continuing to refuse empathy.

"What-are you saying, Brede?"

"That is your role! It doesn't matter when my people achieve their coalescence with the local Mind. It will happen. And when it does, I must be able to guide them into the orderly levels of metapsychic union that were the basis of the governing forces of your own Galactic Milieu, the reconciliation of divergent intellectual energies into an operant organic whole. You are to teach me how this is to be done! That is your role among us. You guided young children of your own time into the Unity. This was the focus of your life's work, as you have told me. In your Milieu, immature metafunctional minds were not left to flounder and make their own way. They were taught, led, enlightened. Show me how this was done. So that I will be ready. And then, if you still desire it, I will help you to... leave us."

"You don't know what you're asking of me, Brede."

"But this must be the solution! So elegant, so logical an extension of the work I have already done for my dear ones. Consider them as they are now, in their disunity! My poor Firvulag, operant but weak and impotent, their psychic energies diffused into silly byways. Their kinsmen, the Howling Ones, festering in bitter despair. And will the Tanu be any different when they in turn achieve true operancy, delivered from their golden torcs? Your operant human race on the Elder Earth might well have perished if it had not been helped in its extremity by other entities who were wiser. Help me to help my people. And then, when they are ready, I also will be ready."

"You foresee this outcome?" Elizabeth inquired, dubious.

Brede hesitated. Again the pained, gasping breaths. "I have-always been the guide and teacher of my people. Even in times when they were unaware. Whence shall the Unity come, if not from me? And where can I learn, if not from you?"

"The difficulties would be enormous. Not only is your mind exotic and therefore unfamiliar to me, but you are also a mature psychic entity conditioned to the torc device over thousands of years. I have never worked with any but humans. Almost all of them were very young children, still flexible and able to absorb the training with a minimum of painful catalyst. I can only compare the process with a child's first acquisition of language. This is a process that seems nearly effortless to a baby; and yet when an adult attempts to learn new languages without using sophisticated ancillaries, he labors and suffers. The bringing of latent metafunctions to fully adept operancy is infinitely more difficult. First, you would have to become operant-and then make the much greater leap to adept status before absorbing the masterclass teaching techniques. There would be atrocious suffering."

"I will endure whatever is necessary."

"Even if you survive my education with your sanity intact, there is no guarantee that you will attain full operancy-much less the adept level. If your strength failed at any point, you would surely die. And then what would become of your people?"

"I will not die," said Brede.

"There are other... technical difficulties. The catalyst I spoke of. I can't think of an algetic source of sufficient intensity that would be available to us here in your room without doors."

"Pain? Is this the only way that the psychic enlargement can be accomplished?"

"The only sure way. There are others. In my own world, latent humans have attained operancy when certain psychobarriers were overcome through sublimation of the will to the cosmic Unity. But these other roads are uncertain-and in any case, I'm only qualified in the one technique. It has its roots in the preliterate cultures of my own era. The primitive people of Elder Earth were fully aware that pain, endured steadfastly and with dignified acceptance, acted as a psychic refining agent that opened the newly sensitized mind to wisdom otherwise inaccessible-as well as the individual spectrum of metafunctions." A panorama of pre-Milieu adepts flashed before Brede's mental eye. Elizabeth showed her monks and nuns and prophets and yogis, shamans and warriors and consecrated leaders, aboriginal healers and seers from all of the wild places of pre-Intervention Earth-humans enduring self-imposed ordeals in the belief that they would emerge transfigured. Elizabeth said, "As we humans attained high technology, the creative use of suffering was nearly lost. Most high-tech civilizations are zealous in the eradication of pain, both physical and mental. Up until the time of the Intervention, very few of our intellectuals would have placed any value on it-this despite the teaching of earlier philosophers and the clear evidence to be gleaned from anthropology and even from developmental psychology itself."

"My race was as yours in this respect," said Brede. "Understand that I speak of my original home planet-not of these Tanu and Firvulag, who are different. The best of the dimorphics still celebrate life-passages with ordeals. The very Combat itself has roots therein."

"But still perverted! Immature! Among the advanced human cultures of pre-Milieu times, we had comparable kinks. One form of physical suffering that was esteemed was that endured by athletes. Ritual game playing. Do you see the parallel? But our human race never valued any form of psychic pain. That attendant upon the normal education process was tolerated as a necessary evil-but there were constant attempts to ameliorate it or eliminate it altogether. It never occurred to our primitive educators that suffering per se had a positive influence upon mental growth. A few religious groups did discover how pain worked as a tool for mental enlargement. My own church had a rather muddled concept of algetic offering that at least produced the proper endurance-discipline. But the faithful saw algetics only from the spiritual angle. When certain practitioners happened to levitate or read thoughts or perform other metapsychic functions, everybody was highly embarrassed."

"Yes... yes." The great jeweled headdress nodded. Exotic reminiscences floated through Brede's mental vestibulum. "We of Lene also held to the belief that suffering was evil. And those who denied it were sadomasochists and hopelessly anomalous. For example-these exiles! My dear foolish people. I have never, until now, completely understood my deep motives for adopting them and helping them to escape from our galaxy. But now it becomes obvious that my prolepsis recognized that tiny kernel of psychic validity in their aberrant mind-set. The Firvulag, especially, who endured the greatest rigors in their natural environment, were keenly appreciative of ordeals. And yet they stalled in their mental evolution. As did the Tanu, seduced by their torcs, and most of the other people of our federation as well... As I have told you, all but the incompatibles embraced the mind-amplifying device after the last of the wars."

She paused, touching the gold at her own throat that was half-hidden behind the lowered respirator. "And this torc, which seemed such a boon, resulted in a dead end for the Mind of an entire galaxy. Unless... the evolution continues here. And it must! But, Almighty Tana, why is my vision so dim?" Elizabeth said, "The time-dimension may be much greater than you ever suspected. Our Milieu perceived the past manifest in the present, the present manifest in the future." "Elizabeth!" Brede's voice caught. "Six million years? Ah, no!"

"We had legends. And there is the compatibility."

"And the Ship," Brede whispered. "I told my dearest one to choose the best."

She raised her glittering mask. Tears fell onto its red metallic smoothness, losing themselves in the crystal ornamentation. The women sat silent for a long time. Between them on the table rested the exquisite glass model of the interstellar organism that had been Brede's mate. Together the disparate spouses had shared a kind of psychounion that, inadequate as it was, had partaken in a small measure of the true mental conjugation Elizabeth had known among her own kind. But Brede's Ship was dead. And she-like Elizabeth-was alone.

"Whatever the risks," came the amplified voice from the hidden mouth, "you must teach me. I know that the Mind of my people will mature, just as I know that the destinies of Tanu and Firvulag and humanity are interleaved. Perhaps the Unity of my people will perfect itself soon and perhaps late. But there must be a teacher. And if not me, then you."

Elizabeth flared in anger. "Oh, no you don't! Damn you! Can't you understand the way it is with me? I don't want to sacrifice myself for your people. Not even for my own people! Can't you accept that operancy doesn't equate with sainthood?"

"There have been saints among you."

The person behind the mask seemed to melt, to change. Elizabeth stiffened, shocked by the metaphoric thrust that she instantly repudiated.

"No! You can't trick me that way. You're no saint and neither am I! I'm an ordinary woman with ordinary flaws. I once was able to do unusual work because my natural talents were trained up for it. But there was never any... consecration. When I seemed to lose my abilities, I didn't offer up the loss and make the best of it. I chose this Exile route. I'm a flyaway and glad of it! My being trapped here in the Pliocene, separated forever from the Unity, with my metafunctions restored and monsters nipping at my heels, is a cosmic joke. And you are, too, whoever you are! And I still want my balloon back!" And that is enough for you loving none loved by none 0 highflyingfleeing Elizabeth?

"I loved once and suffered the loss. Once was enough. Love costs too much. I won't be a mother to your people. Not physically and not mentally."

Brede's mind and mask mirrored only Elizabeth.

Bitter mind-laughter underlay the vocal speech of the human woman. "Oh, that's clever of you, Two-Face! But the ploy won't work. I know all about my sin of Olympian selfishness. But you can't prove that my duty lies with your people, or with exiled humanity, or with any hypothetical merging of the races."