“That’s just it,” Kira said seriously. “You don’t want to be Superman. Nobody does! For starters, people don’t want conscious control over their bodies—it’s too much responsibility to carry. Just as kids want the safety of home and parents, no matter how much they may think they long to escape, adults want someone to rely on for care. In modern society, that means medical care. It’s the reason people give control of their lives to the Meds. You’ve seen where that leads, but it’s not easy to accept the alternative.”
No. All your life, you assumed that your body would function, your heart would go on beating, without any conscious attention. That you didn’t have to worry about managing such things because they were totally beyond your control. Knowing that you could control them would involve loss as well as gain. . . .
Kira reached out for his hand and squeezed it. “To rely on your own mind, even in defiance of built-in responses like pain that nature supplied to protect you—that’s very, very scary, Jesse. The sooner you admit that to yourself, the better off you’ll be.”
Slowly, thoughtfully, Jesse said, “I didn’t want to turn off natural pain. I didn’t want so much power as that; I couldn’t trust myself with it.”
“That’s why we had to use artificially-induced pain—severe pain—to teach it to you. Given a choice between using that power and suffering mildly, your unconscious mind would have backed off from it—as today, in fact, it did.”
He did not intend to back off. He’d accepted a challenge, and he was going to see it through. Even though he felt shaky inside and wasn’t at all sure, underneath, that he still wanted to. . . .
Now wasn’t the time to think about that, Jesse decided. Tomorrow was the start of a new offshift, and Carla would be coming back to the Island.
~ 26 ~
Tonight I’ll be with Carla, Jesse thought, waking free of back pain to a sky clear of clouds. All his friends except Kira had gone; by lunchtime new planes were coming in. He was kept busy meeting yet another new set of people, hoping with each arrival to see her among them. Finally, from the Lodge porch, he saw Anne’s red seaplane circle, and went down to the dock to watch it land.
Carla was the only passenger. He ran to her and she embraced him, her smile joyous. But to his dismay it was a sisterly embrace, the hug customary among all Group members. When he moved to kiss her she clung for a moment—then dropped her arms and stepped back. “No,” she said gently. “It’s too soon.”
“Too soon, Carla? No, it’s not. I love you, you know that! Don’t you?”
“Yes!” she said. “I love you too, Jesse. If you hadn’t joined the Group, I don’t think I could have borne it. But for now—wait. Don’t expect more than what we had last week. Please.”
“But why?”
“Because I ask you to. Because it’s best, and I can’t give a reason.”
They walked back along the dock in silence, their footsteps loud on the wooden planks. Carla gripped his hand, but would allow him to come no closer. Bewildered, he had no choice but to let it ride.
And that was the way it was for the entire five days of her offshift.
Carla was vibrant, fun—to be beside her remained a joy to him. They were apart only during his sessions with Kira, although never, he noticed, alone. With the others, they swam and hiked and lounged on the beach. They ate together; they sat together before the fire. There was warmth and affection and an emotional closeness even greater than he’d known with her before. And there were undercurrents of desire. But nothing more. Not even, as the days passed, the mere friendly kind of touching with which they’d begun.
God, Jesse thought, was there some obscure colonial custom no one had told him about? Was he supposed to ask her to marry him first? Marriage was rarely mentioned in the Group and, he’d assumed, not viewed as essential. If Carla wanted marriage, though, he’d be more than willing to go through the formalities. He had already decided he wasn’t going back to Fleet.
But you couldn’t propose marriage to a woman you’d never even kissed.
Peter, Jesse recalled, had foreseen that there might be a problem. But Peter didn’t come to the Island; he was spending the offshift with Ian. So Jesse couldn’t consult him. The last day ran out with nothing changed, and before he knew it, Carla was gone.
The next five days without her passed slowly. He continued training with Kira, gaining control not merely of his heart rate but his blood pressure and, she claimed, his biochemical responses to stress. “Yes, the mind can do that,” she told him. “It’s long been known that under hypnosis, people can have biochemical reactions unlike those of their normal state. That’s true of multiple personalities, too—sometimes each personality has different medical disorders. So there’s no doubt that the unconscious mind controls biochemistry, and what your mind can do, you can learn to do intentionally.”
In addition to working with Kira he was required to spend time matching prerecorded mind-patterns, alone except for a computer operator in the control booth. This included sessions under mild stimulus; he must learn, Kira said, to manage pain without assistance. Surprisingly, it wasn’t hard. He went quickly into the state where pain didn’t bother him, and came close, in so doing, to getting high. It was a great feeling. He knew that once he could do it without feedback, he would be free of physical pain for the rest of his life.
And yet, quite apart from his worry over the way Carla had acted, inexplicable anxiety nagged at Jesse. The training troubled him more and more. Some sessions elated him, yet when the near-high wore off, he didn’t feel good about them. He was, in fact, feeling less good than in the beginning about everything, despite his liking for an increasing number of friends. He supposed this was due to stress, produced not only by Carla’s rejection of intimacy, but by the buried fears of which Kira had warned him. But there seemed to be something else, just below the surface . . . something that was not quite right.
He was glad when Peter arrived before Carla returned. Somehow, Jesse thought, he’d gotten off on the wrong foot with Carla. It had been made plain that a relationship between them would have the Group’s approval. Her desire for it had been unmistakable. So what unspoken rule had he violated? He was ready to seek the advice Peter had offered.
Jesse approached him after dinner, finding that he needed no words to convey that he wanted to talk privately. They went out into the dusk and walked along the beach. “You’re doing great, according to Kira,” Peter said.
“With the training, yes, I guess so. It—bothers me sometimes.”
“That’s okay, Jess. New ways of using your mind are bound to throw you off balance, but you are making progress. I hear you can manage pain by yourself, now.”
“I’m not quite comfortable getting elated by those sessions,” Jesse confessed. “Isn’t it akin to masochism?” He had not known he was going to say this, had not consciously thought about it, but realized as he spoke that it did concern him.
“No. Masochists get pleasure from suffering; you feel none till you are past it. You’re elated by achieving full control with your mind.”
“I’m—not sure there aren’t sexual feelings attached to this.”
Peter shook his head. “Not the unhealthy kind. Believe me, I know. I got as far as dual with a masochist once, through carelessness in checking him out beforehand. It was not an experience I’d care to repeat. Incidentally, he could not learn the new mind-pattern. He did not really want to.”
“I’ll take your word, but—damn it, Peter, there’s something wrong.”
Frowning, Peter asked, “You haven’t been on dual with anyone but Kira, have you?”
“With Michelle, once. I was—in trouble, and she pulled me out.”
“Oh, God. I should have warned her. She’s not fully trained and she hasn’t the background to predict misinterpretations.”
“It wasn’t her fault. I was overtired and she told me to quit, but I was stubborn. She came out of the control booth and went on dual, using the arm stimulators�
��”
“So then, I suppose, you got aroused without knowing why, which led to this line of speculation.” Peter sighed. “It was a reasonable concern, but it happens to be off base. Given a choice, would you have played kinky games with Michelle or gone to bed?”
“I see your point.” Jesse flushed with relieved embarrassment. He had indeed felt like taking Michelle to bed; if she’d been someone he’d met in a bar, before meeting Carla, he might have suggested it. And yet . . . it hadn’t been like seeing a woman in a bar. There’d been something more, something disturbing, though at the time it had seemed as if it would be better than any encounter, ever.
Peter appraised him. “You’re still troubled.”
With a psychiatrist you couldn’t hide anything. What the hell, with a psychiatrist of Peter’s caliber, why should he try? “It’s not just the masochism thing. I don’t know what it is. My—reactions, maybe. To people I’ve only just met.” He wet his lips.
“Yes,” said Peter gravely. “Jess, you are going to have some confused feelings for a while. I can assure you they’re nothing to worry about.”
“I’ve never worried about things like this before.”
“Don’t start. Your reactions are normal. Among us relationships are not quite like those in the society you’re used to, that’s all. They’re more—intense. And where no serious commitment is intended, things happen more quickly.”
Jesse stared at him, grasping, as he often did, more than had been said. “God, Peter, you know! It’s not only when I’m on dual. It’s all the time. When I first came here I felt like I’d known you people for years; now I’m starting to feel some sort of a current between us. Don’t get me wrong, but even with you—”
He broke off, horrified. He had felt this with Peter when they got the high. He still felt it. He had not admitted it to himself until now.
“It’s not what you think,” Peter said. “You’re not changing your orientation or anything like that. We do get people who’re bi and don’t know it, but you’re not one of them. I have your psych record, and in any case I can usually sense it.” Seeing the look on Jesse’s face he added, “I’m not, myself—bi, I mean. You’ll be able to sense it too, in time.”
“I always heard there’s no way for an observer to tell.”
“There are a great many things we sense that outsiders don’t. We have more senses.”
Jesse frowned. “You’re talking about ESP,” he concluded. “You and Kira read thoughts and project feelings. Are you saying all the others—”
“Yes. And to you, at first, those feelings may seem like sexual feelings, because they involve a closeness between people that comes only through sex in the culture familiar to you.”
“But Peter, I don’t have ESP.”
“Yes, you do. Most people do, and I certainly wouldn’t bring in anyone I couldn’t establish a two-way rapport with. I can pick up your thoughts and project concepts to you; you know that.”
“It takes ESP on my part for you to do that?”
“Certainly. Logic tells you it does, but you haven’t wanted to recognize it.”
Jesse pondered this. “I would not have trusted any of you as I did, if I had not sensed more than I knew I was sensing.”
“That’s right. Even though you weren’t consciously aware of it, you judged us by ESP and found us trustworthy; otherwise you wouldn’t have agreed to join us in the first place.”
“You say I haven’t wanted to recognize this—though I could have, from what you told me the first day. Why, Peter?”
“Because it is paranormal in your eyes and therefore frightening. As you lose that fear, you’ll learn to develop the ability consciously. Even before that, though, you’ll feel currents, because you’re interacting with those of us in whom it’s already developed.”
Jesse tried to piece things together. “Then when we were on dual, when you communicated the skill to me by telepathy, I felt something I’m misinterpreting.”
“Yes, but there was more to it than the skill, and more than trust. You and I have forged a strong emotional link because of what we went through together. With us it will have no sexual component. But in the case of potential sex partners a shared high, especially following stress, often does lead to bed. Such a link plus sexual attraction is better than either one alone.”
“That’s why you wanted me to work only with Kira?”
“Kira comes across as grandmotherly. You have enough to worry about without going on dual with an attractive woman like Michelle at this stage—she should have used her common sense.” As an afterthought, Peter added, “On the other hand, Michelle doesn’t know how you feel about Carla, so she may have assumed an offworlder would be lonely. She’s no tease; I wouldn’t have her on the staff if I couldn’t trust her intentions.”
“You’re saying whatever might have happened would have been okay.”
“If you had wanted it, yes. If it weren’t for your love for Carla, it would have had advantages.”
Jesse frowned. “I’ve never been one to move too fast, not with a woman I respected. This seems a bit like, well—”
“Casual sex? It’s the exact opposite. There can be nothing casual in telepathic sharing; what you’ll lose your taste for is sex with women who can’t offer that. Sharing bodies but not minds is what you object to in quick encounters anyway, isn’t it?”
“Yes.” Jesse laughed. “Did you know that on some worlds now it’s in to buy sex with androids? The idea always turned me off, and till now I didn’t know why.”
“I’d laugh too,” Peter said, “if that were not a symptom of the trends we’re fighting here. Perhaps you’re not aware that medical science now accepts androids as aides in sex clinics. In my outpatient work at the Hospital, I’m expected to employ them.”
“God, Peter. Do you?”
“You don’t want to hear about the things I do in that place.”
Though this was said lightly, Jesse perceived that something far more troubling than the use of androids lay behind it. Sorry to have stirred it up, he said quickly, “I still don’t understand. The first few days at the Lodge, before I was brought in, there was no sex between any of you. Now you’ve said there’s even more of it here than in the world outside.”
“We did hold off on your account,” Peter said, “as we always do with outsiders. It is—different, with us. You would have known there was more to it than what you’re used to, and we couldn’t have explained.”
“Different? Sex itself?” Jesse had thought he was past being surprised, but some things, after all, were basic. . . .
“Physically, it may or may not be, depending on whether you’ve previously experimented with so-called mystical practices that sometimes led to spontaneous telepathy even in ancient times. But that’s not what I mean. The real difference is what happens in the mind, Jess. You feel undercurrents between us when we’re not engaged in sex; those are nothing to what you’ll feel when we are. And that in turn is nothing to what you will feel during personal experience.”
Jesse thought about it. “Is this what Carla has been hiding from me? Why she won’t let me close?”
“Yes. It would be impossible for her to hide it if she allowed herself to become aroused to even the slightest degree. Since we live in the world outside, we do have to learn self-control in that respect. And when we bring guests to the Lodge, we sleep in bunkrooms; it makes things easier.”
“I’m not a guest anymore.”
“Don’t press her, Jess. Follow Carla’s lead; she’ll have good reasons if she holds back, and you’re not ready to understand them. But you mustn’t misunderstand, either. If you get mixed signals, bear with it, okay?”
An appalling thought struck Jesse. He burst out, “I didn’t misread her, did I? It isn’t just what you say has been going on with everyone?”
“No, Jess! With you and Carla it’s real! But among us, more happens in a long-term relationship than sex. The bond it creates makes things possi
ble that could not happen otherwise. It’s not all pleasure at first, and needless to say, Carla’s not an experienced teacher. Besides that . . . the past will haunt her. She’s a widow, you know, though there’s no such legal status here.”
“I didn’t,” said Jesse, wondering why Carla had never mentioned a former husband.
“She came to us young,” Peter went on, “and married a fine man, one of our leaders, with whom she was deeply in love. For many years they were happy together. Then, five years ago, he died in very terrible circumstances. It’s not my place to tell you about it; maybe she will someday, but I wouldn’t advise you to ask her, because it’s a painful subject. She has shown great courage in carrying on as well as she has. But she’s never considered a new relationship until now, and for both of you it will be extremely demanding. You will have to make allowances, Jess, and perhaps take a kind of responsibility you can’t yet imagine.”
“I’ll do whatever’s best for Carla,” Jesse declared.
“I know you will,” Peter agreed. “If you had not assured me that your interest in her is serious, I wouldn’t have allowed her to come here last offshift, perhaps not for several weeks.”
“Meaning that if I’m serious, I can wait even for a simple kiss?”
“Exactly. Absorb what you’ve heard so far. Before I leave for the city again, I’ll tell you more.”
But Peter was already telling more, telepathically, Jesse guessed. Or was what he’d now grasped merely his own double take on what had been said?
These people had paranormal powers to a far greater degree than he did, if in fact he possessed them at all. Carla expected a partner to have them. She would not be satisfied by ordinary sex; she would want mind-to-mind contact he did not know how offer. Would it be, for her, like making love with an android? Not quite that bad, yet there was a gulf between them after all, and he did not see how he could ever bridge it.
Michelle, evidently, had been willing to accept an amateur, had perhaps thought even to extend her instructor’s role! Was that how most of them did it? It was not his way; he could not imagine himself doing that . . . yet he sure as hell was not going to practice at Carla’s expense. And besides, it was all too true that he feared such powers. Fear and love were not a good mixture, not in bed, certainly. . . .
Stewards of the Flame Page 20
