However, it was late in the day and Warick would not see Valerie until tomorrow. She would be locked in a room alone, terrifyingly alone, for the night. Possibly Peter could find some way for her to escape before morning, despite the fact that escape from the psych ward had always been deemed physically impossible. In any case, Carla saw with relief, she would be able to visit Valerie uninterrupted. Like other staff personnel, she knew the keypad code for the rooms in the main ward, although it wouldn’t get her past the security of the locked ward where violent criminals were kept.
She waited until the end of her workday, knowing that in the confusion of the shift change nobody was likely to notice who belonged where in the maze of corridors. Then she moved fast. There was a master chart showing patients’ room numbers; Valerie’s was at the far end of a hall. Closing the door quickly behind her, she found the woman huddled on the bed, with her knees drawn up and her face buried in her hands. Valerie? Carla probed. It’s just me, Carla. I’m Peter’s friend, you know. . . .
“Is Peter coming?” Valerie whispered, raising her head.
“He won’t be able to come. Peter is in danger, Valerie. You have to help him.”
“Me? I can’t—I’m no good at anything. He’d be better off if he’d never tried to cure me.”
The element of truth in this made it all the more tragic. Low self-esteem was another symptom of depression; Carla knew better than to argue. But she saw that she had struck the right note. Peter’s welfare was the one thing Valerie still cared about, the one concern that could rouse her out of her apathy. Valerie, you have to remember! she insisted, throwing all the force of her own turmoil, her own fear, into the projection. Remember the Ritual, your hand touching Peter’s and not being burned, remember what you promised then. . . . Though Ian had presided at Valerie’s Ritual, Peter had been her sponsor. It was likely that she was attracted to him—many of the young, unattached members were, although he tried to discourage that.
What can I do to help when I’m locked in here? Valerie ventured.
Remember your pledge to keep the Group secret! If you let anyone find out about that secret, Peter will be arrested . . . he might even die.
I don’t want him to die!
No, of course you don’t. So you must keep his secret, the secret of all of us who are his friends. Most of the other doctors aren’t his friends. Promise me, Valerie, that you won’t tell the other doctors anything about Peter.
I promise. . . .
And you won’t even tell them his name. No matter what happens, you won’t mention Peter’s name.
Valerie nodded. I won’t say his name. Carla hoped she would hold to that.
~ 40 ~
As Jesse waited for Carla to get home from work, apprehension rose in him. She was late. She had never been late before without calling. He could not help remembering what the long-term Group members seemed not to mind: they were in danger, all of them, always. And especially Carla, because of the hacking she did.
When she came in, one look at her face told him his fears weren’t groundless.
He took her in his arms, sharing thought without words. They no longer needed sex for their minds to be open to each other when in the grip of strong emotion. Carla didn’t attempt to hide anything from him. He knew, with despair, that the event he had dreaded—that they had all dreaded without letting themselves believe it could happen—had finally caught up with them. They were on the verge of exposure. By tomorrow, the Group’s existence might be known to the authorities.
And if not tomorrow, then some day in the not-too-distant future. Whether Valerie was given truth serum or merely subjected to repeated electroshock, no promise she had made would have any bearing on the outcome.
After a few minutes Carla broke away. “I have to warn Peter,” she said.
She used the Group’s emergency password, alerting Peter to circumstances worse than she could reveal on the phone. After talking to him she was more scared than ever. Peter, she said, had understood the message, but hadn’t implied that he would take action beyond informing the other Council members. That meant he didn’t know of any action he could take. If he’d had a backup plan, he would have said something reassuring.
They waited. As a staff doctor, Peter could call up Valerie’s chart remotely; he would know if anything happened during the night. It wouldn’t, of course. Nothing would happen until morning, when he was on site, and then it might happen all too quickly. Jesse realized, somewhat to his surprise, that Carla loved Peter—as a brother, to be sure, but nevertheless as deeply as she had loved Ramón. He, too, cared about Peter. He could not bear the thought of his being arrested. But that thought was obscured by his overwhelming fear for Carla.
She had hacked Valerie’s chart using her own ID. If there was an investigation of the discrepancies, that would be detected. It would be unsafe, she said, to repair the log remotely. She had never hacked the database from her apartment because a record of unauthorized outside transmissions would be a sure tip-off that hacking was going on. She couldn’t go to Peter’s apartment, which he had left to consult Ian; nor could she go back to the Hospital without arousing suspicion. There might be opportunity tomorrow. Then again, by tomorrow it might not matter.
Abruptly she turned pale and ran to the bathroom. Jesse heard her being sick, heard the toilet flush repeatedly. He had never seen her like this; after all, Carla knew from her Group training how to deal with the physical effects of fear. Normally she was imperturbable. Was there something she had not told him? he wondered. His own dread grew; he was dizzy with it, sensing her agony even through the closed door. Finally, when he believed he could endure it no longer, she came back to him, wordlessly communicating the horror that had suddenly struck her. What if Valerie does keep the secret, yet they arrest me for hacking and I’m examined by Warick because of the connection with her case . . . what if I’m given truth serum and Peter is found out through me?
Jesse held her close, soothing her as best he could. There really wasn’t any answer to that. The risk had always existed; every one them must have known underneath that they might someday involuntarily betray each other. Peter certainly had known it, and yet in the effort to forestall trouble he had rashly created a situation with more potential for betrayal than usual.
“Why did Peter ever think the surgery scheme would work?” he burst out . “I mean, it must have been obvious there was a risk of Valerie being picked up again.”
“Yes, but if she’d been normal at the time—not in a depressive phase—they’d only have questioned her. And Peter . . . he just didn’t want to believe she wasn’t yet cured. He’d promised her that she wouldn’t receive more shock treatment.”
“Yet the ruse was based on the fear that she might be treated.”
“That was Valerie’s fear, not Peter’s, except for his outrage at the whole idea of electroshock. He can’t judge objectively when that’s involved, and in any case he knew she couldn’t handle the thought of being taken back to Psych.”
“Aren’t all of us pledged to face our fears?”
“Well, but she was his patient, Jesse, not someone who joined us from strength.”
Kira had been right, Jesse thought—Peter expected much from his followers, but if they weren’t able to live up to those expectations, his empathy was so strong that it overrode all other considerations. He was torn between his commitment to advance humankind and the compassion that had led him to become a doctor. How could he survive in a world like this, where his attempts to help people only put him in danger?
Perhaps he couldn’t.
They didn’t talk much more. There was nothing left to say. Eventually they went to bed and attempted to sleep. So far Jesse hadn’t given thought to his own possible fate. Beside Carla’s and Peter’s, it hadn’t seemed to matter. He himself had not done anything illegal yet. Unless they rounded up the whole Group, the worst that could happen to him was that he’d be retreated for alcoholism. But how could he stand
it if Carla was drugged and punished? How could she endure if Peter, like her husband, was put into stasis?
In the morning she got up and mechanically pulled on her clothes. She had to go to work, of course, to cover her hacking tracks if for no other reason. They lingered over their kiss before she left, agonizingly aware that it might be a long while before they kissed again.
After calling Kira to break his appointment for visiting the healing house, he settled on the couch, prepared for a long day with nothing to do but wait and worry.
Barely an hour later, Carla returned. “Jesse,” she said quickly, “It’s okay. Peter’s safe, and so am I. He told me to take a sick day.” But she wasn’t smiling.
Slowly Jesse asked, “How much longer will you be safe?”
“From now on, unless something else happens. I fixed the data entry log, and the missing MRI scan will never be noticed. Valerie’s file is—closed. Closed for good.”
Seeing that it was hard for her to speak, Jesse held back his questions. Finally Carla added wearily, “Valerie killed herself last night. She slit her wrists.”
“Oh, my God. Was she that depressed, or was it from fear?”
“Both, partly, Peter thinks. But it was more than that. She left a note. It said ‘They’re going to shock me again, and I don’t want him to die.’”
~ 41 ~
Because even in desperation Valerie had remembered her promise not to name Peter, her suicide note was dismissed by the authorities as an irrational outburst of a sick mind. No one bothered to wonder what she had meant by it. Peter, however, was called to account by the department head, Warick, who as her current doctor was blamed for not having put her on suicide watch. Why, Warick demanded, had there been nothing on her chart about suicidal tendencies? This Peter could answer with complete honesty: Valerie had not been suicidal at the time he was treating her. Depressed though she’d been, she had never given any indication that she might take her own life. Since nothing could be proved to the contrary, and since Peter declared that the threat of more electroshock was enough to trigger suicide in anyone whose brain was already damaged by it, Warick was forced to let the matter drop. But the never-cordial relationship between the two had deteriorated into enmity.
There was no hope of the Group retrieving the body for burial, of course; it was still warm when found and had been sent immediately to the Vaults. Suicide was a felony in the eyes of the Meds, and the supercilious remarks made by news commentators on the Administration’s mercy in keeping perpetrators “alive” made Jesse want to vomit.
Carla was deeply shaken by Valerie’s death. At the Lodge, after a simple candlelight memorial service, she was finally able to talk about it. “I drove her to it,” she said miserably. “She was weakened by depression, and telepathically I convinced her that she would harm Peter if she was questioned.”
“Which she probably would have,” said Kira. “Tragic as it was, her death was what saved him, and at least some of the rest of us.”
“In the end, she wasn’t weak,” Peter said. “Make no mistake, I don’t condone suicide. It’s wrong, as the Group has always maintained. But it can be excused when the aim is to save others.”
“Even though she didn’t plan it rationally?” Carla protested. “It was an impulse that came from her fear of electroshock combined with the worse fear I implanted in her! She wasn’t in shape to know what she was doing.”
“She knew,” Peter replied gently. “Carla, I spared you the graphic details earlier, but it’s best that you know them now. People don’t die from slitting their wrists as easily as the public thinks—it’s often a mere gesture, a cry for help. Even if they’re not found quickly, the blood tends to clot before they bleed out. Valerie lost a lot of blood, fast, despite the fact that she had no sharp knife and needed effort, plus her pain management skill, to cut herself up with eating utensils. And that means she bled out deliberately.”
“Deliberately?” Jesse questioned.
“Our control over bleeding works both ways,” Kira told him. “Valerie evidently hadn’t forgotten her mind training.”
“It’s true that the aftereffects of electroshock predisposed her to suicide,” Peter admitted, “so that when faced with more such treatments, she welcomed the thought of dying. And I’d be the last to say that’s not a terrible thing. But we do her injustice if we assume she didn’t have free will.”
“That’s what you’ve always said about mental patients,” Carla recalled. “That their free will shouldn’t be denied by well-meaning caretakers.”
“Yes. Mental imbalance does not make people less than human. Warick, like the rest of the Meds, thinks anyone likely to commit suicide should be locked up for his or her own protection. He knows I disagree, so he’s convinced that I purposely failed to note it on Valerie’s chart. Ironically, I didn’t, though I did alter other things when I put through her discharge. She wasn’t in any sense suicidal until they arrested her the second time. But it’s true enough that I wouldn’t have recorded it if she had been, because nothing except danger to others can justify depriving patients of their human right to freedom.”
Carla frowned. “I don’t like the way Warick’s been bugging you.”
“There’s not much to like about Warick,” Peter agreed. “Unfortunately, he’s my boss, so I have to put up with him.”
“But he’s going to get suspicious someday—”
“Of what? He has no reason to guess I’ve done anything illegal; the worst he can do is fire me, and he hasn’t the power even for that without proof of misconduct.”
“I suppose that’s true,” Carla conceded. But later, to Jesse, she said, “Warick makes me nervous. I get a bad feeling whenever he and Peter have an argument.”
The next week, with the crisis past, Jesse began visiting the Group’s city healing house with Kira. It had long ago been determined that he lacked the natural talent to be trained as a healer. Self-healing of relatively minor conditions was as far as he would be able to go. He wanted to learn all he could by observing, however.
The healing house was merely a safe house to which Group members came with illness or injury not amenable to self-healing and to which members of the front group were occasionally directed. The latter could not, of course, be given spectacular treatment like the rapid healing of wounds, nor did they need it, since injured people didn’t hesitate to seek official care. Outsiders sought help only with problems the Hospital had been unable to cure. Back pain, undiagnosed stomach pain, headaches—these and other conditions brought on by stress were often severe and recurrent. Kira and others skilled in healing dealt with such problems telepathically, using mystical hocus-pocus as a facade.
“But can you trust the patients not to mention it to their doctors?” Jesse asked.
“Oh, yes—they’re afraid their mental health would be questioned if they let it be known they were involved in any kind of mysticism. And even if they did report us, what we do with outsiders isn’t illegal. We don’t call it treatment. If a safe house were compromised we’d simply close it and go elsewhere.”
The treatment Group members received was illegal. Though serious illness was rare among them, it did occasionally occur. Jesse was surprised to learn that even major surgery was done within the Group. But, he realized, it was not dangerous when no anesthetic was needed; surgical patients could remain awake, help to control their own bleeding, and afterward heal their own wounds. The Group included several skilled surgeons besides Susan Gerrold, the gynecologist who had operated on Valerie. Medical equipment was kept hidden in the city healing house for emergencies, though when possible members were taken to the Lodge.
With Carla, Jesse gradually developed his telepathic skill to the point where she pronounced him ready to learn how to relieve pain in others. He had seen it done by Kira in the healing house; people arrived in extreme pain and left free of it, for a time, when the healer, ostensibly, had done no more than touch them lightly. “It would be easier if we used a
placebo or spoke of some mysterious form of energy,” Carla said, “just as healers have traditionally done on Earth. But as a matter of principle, we don’t want to encourage the notion that the cure is physical. Calling it prayer would also work, but we don’t want to encroach on anyone’s religion, or lack of religion. So we tell them the literal truth, that under our guidance their inner minds can free them of pain.”
Her explanation of how to guide was a bit frightening at first. You had to sense telepathically what the patient was experiencing and deliberately not turn off suffering until you felt it fully in your own body—a technique that had been practiced in ancient times by shamans. Then, and only then, could you go into the state where you didn’t mind pain, projecting into the patient’s mind the way in which you did so, carrying her along. Jesse perceived that this was what Peter had done in teaching him, and was uncertain of his own ability to manage it.
“It won’t be as hard as instructing,” Carla said, “because the patient doesn’t have to learn to do it herself. You suffer for only a brief time.” During that time, you would have to be absolutely calm and steady, he knew. Any fear or doubt in your mind would be passed to the patient, who would then be left in worse pain than before.
During their next offshift at the Lodge she took him to the lab to try it, with Ingrid as a volunteer victim under stimulus. He found it easier than he expected to wait before banishing pain. When he knew he could banish it, the pain he shared with Ingrid didn’t seem bad. And of course, that was what Peter had told him in the first place: the fear of losing control was much worse than pain itself. He could sense that the relief, when it came, had been initiated by him—that Ingrid hadn’t cheated by using her own skill—and he found it a deeply moving experience.
Nevertheless, Carla was there to help and Ingrid had past experience with the state of not suffering. Jesse knew his own projection into her mind wouldn’t have worked if she’d been a frightened novice. He was not telepathically gifted, despite his new-found ability to communicate with other trained telepaths. A healer had to be able to project to untrained people.
Stewards of the Flame Page 30
