He faced her. “Look at me,” he said, “and tell me that there is no way for me to win your people’s aid during my lifetime.”
“I won’t lie to you—even if I were willing to, you’d realize in due course and stop trusting me.” Full trust between us is the only chance we have of getting through what’s ahead, she seemed to be saying. “There is one way,” Lianne continued. “But don’t found your hope on that; it’s one I don’t believe you’ll ever use.”
“By the Mother Star, I will!” Noren swore.
“Hardly in that name, if you hold it sacred.” She tried to smile. “I’m speaking in riddles, as Stefred does to candidates, because I shouldn’t be speaking of this at all. And you’re not ready; there’s a lot you need to know before you can begin to grasp the situation we’re in.”
Noren was silent. I won’t plead with you, he was thinking, but if you’re going to tell me some of it, what’s wrong with right now?
“Are you up to that tonight?”
“Yes, of course,” he declared, his head spinning so that he scarcely noticed that she had answered his unspoken thought.
“I mean physically—or doesn’t the disorientation bother you?”
“Does it show?” Noren burst out, mortified. The odd giddiness did seem to have become physical, and his mind wasn’t quite clear; looking back over the conversation he found it hard to recall all Lianne’s words. Am I going crazy? he thought in sudden panic. It’s not as if I haven’t been through plenty of stress in the past; I should be able to handle it by this time.
“This is something you’re not equipped to handle,” Lianne said. “It doesn’t show from the outside, but I get your sensations.”
With forced levity he said, “Sometimes I think you’re a witch after all, and can read people’s minds.”
“I admitted long ago the villagers would have accused me of witchcraft if they’d known more about me,” Lianne replied, not laughing.
Why laugh? an inner voice told him. Mind-to-mind communication’s natural enough— Horrified, he cut off the thought. He must indeed be going crazy. Mind reading was only a superstition; he had heard of it in Six Worlds’ folklore, but never from any other source. Desperately, his thinking now under firm control, he reflected, If it were real, Stefred would have mentioned it, surely.
“Stefred would be even more upset by it than you are,” Lianne said dryly, “because he’s read everything in the computers about psychology, and he believes the same theories of the human mind the Founders did.”
Lianne, what are you doing to me? Noren cried out silently, aware at last that this was not mere imagination, and that it terrified him.
“Nothing I haven’t done before with both you and Stefred when I had need,” she answered calmly. “I’m simply doing it now on a level at which you’re conscious of it. You must know about it to understand my role here, and you wouldn’t have believed in it without a demonstration.”
“You’ve been reading our minds all along?” he protested, appalled. “This is what we’ve been calling intuition?”
“Well, yes, but ‘reading minds’ isn’t an accurate way to describe it. I can’t invade anyone’s private thoughts—I get only emotions, plus ideas people want to communicate to me. If you want to tell me something, consciously or unconsciously, I know without being told; but nothing you want to conceal is accessible.”
“I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that you have abilities we don’t,” Noren said slowly. “You’re a different species, after all. But your getting my thoughts wasn’t all that happened. I—I think I got some of your thoughts, too.”
“Yes. That was the frightening part. I induced you to knowingly accept mental input in a form that’s unfamiliar to you and beyond your control. I knew it would scare you, but I had to seize the opportunity that came to do it in a way that wasn’t dangerous.”
“Opportunity?”
“Strong emotion. That enhances everyone’s psychic power. For a person in a culture like yours where the existence of telepathy isn’t acknowledged, it’s essential, barring some artificial techniques I’d rather not try.”
Noren frowned. “Are you saying inhabitants of all worlds have this power?”
“This and some rather more spectacular ones I’m not even going to demonstrate. They are latent in all species. Full conscious control of them is possible only to those further evolved than yours, though people with exceptional talent sometimes have spontaneous psychic experiences when the circumstances are right.” She added, after a pause, “A few individuals, like Stefred, use telepathy unconsciously with their close associates.”
“Stefred? He does what you do?”
“Not to the same degree, and he’s not aware that he’s doing it. You know, though, that he’s unusually skilled in understanding people and in winning their trust.” She did laugh at Noren’s expression. “You needn’t be so shocked; there’s nothing sinister about it. It’s a gift like any other, and you’ve recognized all along that you don’t have the same gifts Stefred has. Yours are different.”
“I can’t learn to develop such skills, then.” The thought pained him.
“No,” Lianne said gently. “I could teach you to converse with me silently without feeling dizzy, but there are perils along that road. What comes naturally is harmless. Tonight I forced a level of rapport that was . . . well, let’s say a calculated risk. I won’t do that again because there’s no justification for it. I’ll stick to the sort of thing I’ve done with you in the past—for instance, last night when I convinced you I was serious about killing myself if you didn’t keep my secret.”
“I wondered why I believed you,” Noren reflected.
“It was because I communicated more than words or the idea the words expressed, I also communicated feelings. That level’s safe; it’s when telepathy is allowed to disrupt your thinking processes that we could run into trouble.”
“With your own people . . . you use even higher levels?”
“I have passed on all I’ve learned of the Six Worlds to the members of my team outside the City,” Lianne admitted. “That’s one reason you need to know I’m telepathic.”
Trying to seem unshaken, he asked, “Have you told them about me?”
“Not that you’ve learned my identity—they’re no longer within range. I’ve told them other things about you.”
“What?” inquired Noren, curious as to why she would have singled him out to be mentioned in what sounded like her official report.
“That the welfare of your species depends solely on you.”
He drew back, stunned. Lianne continued, “You’ve been assuming that only your knowledge of us has put you in a key position. But the position’s been yours all along, Noren. The Scholars who’ve been considering you the best hope for the future are right.”
“Lianne, it can’t be like that! The fate of a whole human race can’t depend on one person—it couldn’t even if no alien starship was around.”
“Normally it couldn’t,” she agreed. “We’ve had occasion before to judge a species’ chance of survival, and we’ve never been able to identify the person on whom it depended, or even say it was dependent on some unknown person. But this is a very abnormal case. There are so few of you, and you have such limited resources, that we know positively that no one else has the potential to do what needs doing—and there isn’t time to wait for another such person to be born.”
“But I’m not what people think,” Noren protested. “I’m not the genius they’ve been hoping for; if you’re telepathic you must know that! I’ll try to change things so we can survive here, but I may fail.”
“Yes. And your discovering who I am has increased your chance of failure, which is why I’m so worried about my mistakes,” Lianne confessed.
“You’ve no right to be so highhanded with us, to set me up as a gamepiece forced to win or lose this world according to your arbitrary rules,” Noren said bitterly. “You can’t take it on yourselves—”
“That’s just the point,” said Lianne. “We can’t. We’re not wise enough; our intervention could do more harm than good.”
“Yet you think I’m wise enough?”
“Perhaps not. But you do have the right to act on behalf of your own people.” She got to her feet. “There’s more to it than this, Noren. First, though, you’d better hear some background—and if we’re going to talk all night, let’s sit someplace that’s private.”
* * *
She was an agent of what she called the Anthropological Service, the representative not of a single species, but of an organization made up of volunteers from many worlds united in an interstellar federation. The Service was not easy to get into; candidates, it seemed, were tested even more arduously than Scholar candidates and must prove themselves trustworthy during a long and difficult course of training. That was hardly surprising, Noren thought, considering that these people had to be ready to die for their convictions at any time it became necessary on any planet where they happened to land. They also, he gathered, had to undergo hardships other members of their civilization never encountered. Planets were uncomfortable compared to orbiting cities. And the planets visited by observing teams not only had living conditions that were primitive by Federation standards, they were also too apt to be the scenes of disease, violence and wars.
The worst of visiting such planets, Lianne said, was not the danger. It was the horror of seeing evils one was powerless to prevent. People who didn’t find that painful, who didn’t care what happened to other species, were not accepted into the Service. One was required to have empathy.
It sounded like a strange life to volunteer for, yet still, it was the only way to truly explore the universe, see more than the orbiting cities and the planets kept like parks beneath them. Federation citizens outside the Service were not permitted to land on the worlds of species not yet mature; there was too much danger of their doing inadvertent harm. Furthermore, Service life was challenging. Lianne was a person who enjoyed that. Other challenges had been open to her—she was rather vague about their nature, and he had the uncomfortable feeling that she considered it over his head—but the Service was the one she had chosen. It was an irrevocable choice; the commitment she’d made was permanently binding, an arrangement that eliminated people who merely wanted a few years of adventure.
She had come to his world as one of three agents dispatched to investigate the undecipherable signal of a faster-than-light communicator in a solar system where no such communicator should be. “Only three?” Noren asked, surprised.
“We were among the few aboard who happened to look enough like your people to pass among you. A service ship carries agents of many species, since we never know till we orbit what sort of natives we’ll find.”
“But to commit a whole starship all this time, if only three of you could take action—”
“It orbited for a few weeks, then went elsewhere.”
“And stranded you here? With just two others?”
“No. Just me; the others went on. The ship will be back to contact me, don’t worry. I’ve been stranded on alien worlds before.” She smiled. “It’s not done just for efficiency—it’s a good strategy for preventing field agents from getting illusions of power.”
Their tangible support varied with circumstances, she told him. On some planets they did keep whole teams for the duration of the mission, and often even offworld equipment. On this one they realized, from having examined the Six Worlds’ stripped starship hulls they found in orbit, that they dared not possess any equipment a starfaring people could recognize as alien. Their shuttle abandoned them with nothing but native-style clothes and one concealed signaling device with which they could recall it. Being telepathic, they got the meaning of remarks villagers addressed to them, and since one of them was a skilled linguist they quickly learned the language. They knew from the Service’s vast experience how to be inconspicuous in the first village they entered and inquisitive in the second. It was a routine mission except for the presence of the mysterious City and the fact that the faster-than-light communicator, which had since been identified as an ancient artifact of a Federation species, was not in the City but in the outpost beyond the mountains—routine, at least, until Lianne’s unexpected arrest.
She’d communicated telepathically with the others during her night in the village jail. The team leader had advised her that she wasn’t obliged to accept the risk of entering the City—apparently there were situations in which she might have been, but in this case she was free to choose. She’d decided to take the chance. Not just to learn what was going on, though it had become obvious that they were dealing with something that didn’t fit known patterns; and not, evidently, to do anything against the Scholars if they turned out to be dictators, since that too would be interference. “There was a reason, Noren,” Lianne said, “and what I found here proved the risk was warranted. That’s something you’ll see later.” Having learned he must let her tell it her own way, he nodded and did not interrupt.
She had been thoroughly trained to deal with stress, and at the beginning, even within the City, she had the telepathic support of her teammates. When she was first brought before the Scholars, her only serious fear was that they would probe her mind forcibly by methods against which she’d be powerless. She had means to suicide if that seemed imminent, but the decision would be a hard one, for she could resist most drugs and might not be able to predict what sort they’d use. Fortunately, the inquisition turned out to be quite different from what she’d expected. A few minutes with Stefred and she knew her secret was safe from him, that even under the relatively mild drugs he did give her, he would not attempt to make her betray information she wanted to conceal.
But at the same time, she knew she was facing an experience unlike any that agents had previously encountered in fieldwork. She was being judged by the Service’s own criteria of worthiness—Stefred approached it as her instructors had, and as an individual he was equally expert. Yet it was not mere instruction. She was aware from his emotions that it was deadly serious, and that by her own code as well as his, it would be unethical as well as impossible to get through such a test by faking.
“According to what you’ve said about the training you had, you must have known you’d be able to pass it honestly,” Noren protested.
“That was the trouble,” Lianne said. “I did know, so I wasn’t scared—it was fear I’d have had to fake, and I couldn’t have, even if I’d wanted to; he’s too perceptive to be fooled. You know why he uses stress tactics even with candidates he’s sure of. They’ve got to be genuinely afraid of cracking up before he can proceed with the enlightenment, or else they’ll never be certain afterward that they couldn’t have been made to recant by terror. I was already certain; I’d been through similar experiences in my training, designed to give me that kind of confidence. But Stefred naturally assumed I simply didn’t know what real terror is like. He kept looking for ways to show me, and none of them worked since I’d picked up enough telepathically to realize he wasn’t going to subject me to any harm.”
“How much more did you pick up?” asked Noren, frowning.
“Not anything enlightening,” Lianne assured him. “I had no more access to his secrets than he had to mine. But of course, emotionally, he does want candidates to trust him—I knew the pressures he was using were for my benefit. And I knew he wanted me to resist them.”
“Is that why you didn’t recant in the first place? I’ve wondered, because from your standpoint, since you were there just to get information and weren’t part of our society, pretending to play along with the Scholars wouldn’t have been wrong. Especially not if you were offered knowledge in exchange for submission, as I was.”
“Stefred didn’t use that strategy with me. He never does in cases where he sees the candidate’s hoping to learn something that might be passed on to others who oppose the system. The bribe was a valid test of motivation for you only
because you were convinced that if you accepted it, you’d be the only one to gain.” She stopped for a moment; when she continued it was with telepathic overtones of intense feeling. “I didn’t know whether or not resisting recantation would be to my advantage, Noren. That wasn’t the basis on which I was acting. When we take on this sort of role, we act as we personally would if we’d been born into it. I truly opposed what the Scholars seemed to stand for. If I’d really been a village woman, I’d have refused to endorse the caste system, the Prophecy or the High Law; so that was how I had to play it—otherwise I’d have been lying instead of just concealing things.”
“I guess I see,” Noren admitted. “There’s a difference; he conceals without lying, and in fact we all do, as priests. I did with Talyra.”
“Yes. The scale of values in the Inner City is much like ours—on most worlds we don’t fit in as well, and sometimes we’re forced to lie. Here I’ve lived as if I were one of you. I want you to know that; it’s important.”
To her, Noren perceived, important not just because she values honesty or because she needs my trust . . . it’s important because of how she feels about me. “I owe you honesty, too,” he said. “I don’t doubt you mean all you’re saying, but there’s one thing you seem to have overlooked. The initial risk, the stress you let Stefred impose on you, your opposition to the caste system—all that may have been real. The ordeals of enlightenment and recantation may have been as rough for you as for any of us. But the sentencing, that was sham, Lianne.”
She didn’t reply. Noren went on painfully, “When we kneel in that ceremony and hear ourselves sentenced to life imprisonment within the City, we believe it. We don’t know what’s going to happen to us here, either the good or the bad; but we know it’s permanent, a real price, not something we can get out of when we’re through playing the game—”
The Doors of the Universe Page 22
