LEARNING FEAR

by B. A. Chepaitis

  "Going to the Gone Girls Dance?" Carla asked Mariah. "David'll be there, setting up for it."

  "Depressing," Mariah replied. "All those speeches about safety take the edge off. How do you know David'll be there?"

  "He's on the memorial fund committee, stupid. Remember the dinner? The speech he gave with his fly down?"

  Alex paused. The Gone Girls. Local name for the sorority women that disappeared. But that was old news. He moved on through the messages, finding nothing more of interest, and then opened his own mail. He expected that by now he should have received at least one response to a message he had posted two days ago, offering information on the best way to spot an empath.

  Don't let the University bend your mind. Learn how to see the empath in the professor. For more information, use network Private Sanctions l—85@futureworld.

  His telecom showed three responses. One was from a nervous student asking if he knew how to tell if your girlfriend was "one of them" and explaining in great detail why he thought his might be. The second was a student offering herself as personal secretary on the networks for a rather exorbitant fee which suggested her duties would involve more than keyboard skills.

  The third was more helpful.

  Campus survey group seeking information about the following professors. Jibhul Alka, mathematics; Don Porter, history; Jaguar Addams, cultural studies; Beatrice Feda, languages; Ameda Blancorth, physics; Harrison Fish, fine arts. I've got some info on one—Jaguar Addams—because I'm taking her class. She makes radical gestures and talks about the unspeakable. Probably an easy A, but not very safe. For more info post reply Private Sanction 5-8@futureworld."

  "Doesn't that just figure," Alex muttered to the screen. Radical gestures. She'd been there four weeks and already she had a reputation as a radical. Couldn't she stay out of trouble anywhere?

  He glanced at the clock and saw that it was late, saw that he had been working more than four hours over his regular day. He would go to sleep, as soon as he completed two more tasks.

  The first was to set his computer to work gathering any available information on all faculty and staff of the cultural studies department at the State University. He collated it so that names would be matched to previous employment and personal histories. By morning he would have results. Then he picked up his telecom and punched in her office relay line, which would transfer automatically to her campus housing if she wasn't in the office.

  There was no answer on either line, and he left a message for her to call him back, though he had little hope that she would. Dammit, he just wanted to warn her.

  A small and honest voice that emanated from somewhere very near his center chided him, reminding him that he sent her there in the first place, with no backup, no real information, and the official blacklisting of the Governors' Board.

  Not much he could do about any of it, either. Except maybe the backup.

  He could get someone else down there. Someone to just be there, in case of trouble. Not that he expected any. Of course not. But just in case.

  He picked up his telecom and punched in Rachel's code. Her machine answered, and Alex remembered that it was late, and he was being rude.

  "Rachel," he said, "if you're there, pick up. If you're not, call me when you—"

  The blank screen was replaced by her face, looking puffy in sleep. "What?" She yawned at him.

  "Listen," he said, "do you know anyone who'd want to do some continuing education on the home planet?"

  She blinked at him, and caught on fast. "I can pack my bags tonight. Leave in the morning."

  "No," he said, glad he didn't have to waste time bringing her up to speed. "She'd know I sent you. Somebody less personally involved, I think."

  Rachel looked disappointed, then chewed on her finger. "You're right. How about Brad?"

  Alex's face brightened. "Brad Deragon," he murmured. "Perfect." He'd put in a request for school leave for the spring. Why not let him start a little early with a trimester course and some independent study. The paperwork was in process already.

  And he was reliable, almost impossible to unnerve, so if Jaguar caught onto why he was there, he'd just smile it away. Brad would be perfect.

  "Thanks, Rachel." Alex said. "Do you think we can get it started?"

  "I'll push the paper through. He'll need—let's see, I guess a Z20, and fund coding. It might take a week, if you want to do it without anyone noticing."

  "I'd like it kept quiet. I'll talk to him about it myself. Go as fast as you can, Rachel, without raising a wake."

  5

  "HOW ARE YOU LIKING YOUR STUDENTS?" Emily Rainer asked, her smile deliberately friendly as she reached for the raita, the sleeve of her embroidered muslin shirt catching in a bowl of curry sauce.

  "They like a little shaking up, I think," Jaguar said, handing a napkin over to her. She hadn't gotten the hang of Emily yet. She was always making friendly gestures, indicating that they were comrades in arms—women of the same age in the same situation—but her eyes remained cold and the baseline emotion under her deliberate friendliness smelled to Jaguar more like fear.

  Emily laughed and wiped at her wrist. "Shaking up? Dr. Addams, they're already horrified because we ask them to actually think. Isn't that right, Ethan?"

  "Alas, yes." He smiled, and offered the bottle of wine to Jaguar, who took it.

  The semester was in its fourth week, and the welcome dinner had finally become possible because they were past the crisis atmosphere of start-up and settling into a rhythm, which would build to near crisis for midterms, settle again, and reach critical mass at end of term, after which everyone would collapse and go on break, only to start again next term. University educators, she thought, were energized by the cycle of disaster their year represented.

  Not all faculty members were present at the dinner, partly because Jaguar had nothing to offer them in terms of career advancement, and partly because not all of them were speaking with each other. Ethan had managed to secure five and so far none of them had indicated any desire to hurt the others.

  "I heard you were behaving in a radical way with the poor innocents," George Norton offered. "Tearing up the syllabus. Having them jump around in class and so on."

  Jaguar kept her smile in place as she waved these words aside. "Attention-getting devices." She turned her gaze to Emily. "They work."

  "I'll bet," she said. "Try the papadum? It's very good here. Any trouble students so far?"

  "Trouble students?"

  "You know," Samitu said, licking at his thumb and making a fist, which he punched in the air, "Boxers. The ones who enjoy a fight more than an answer."

  "Steven Haigue," she said, without stopping to think.

  "Steve," Ethan said. "He's in my Rhetoric and Principles class. Very intense. Likes to go by the book. Always stops after class to continue discussion."

  "I had him last term," Emily said. "He was pretty broken up over the Rodriguez incident, wasn't he?"

  Jaguar looked around questioningly.

  Ethan leaned across the table to her. "Doris Rodriguez. One of the women who disappeared. The students, exhibiting their usual penchant for bad taste, call them the Gone Girls."

  "I know," she noted. "I see the memorial notices."

  "It was pretty bad," George said. "Four young women just vanished. One right after the other. The press was howling, the police were crawling up our pant legs and out our ears, the parents were frantically withdrawing their darlings. Did anyone mention it to you?"

  "Mention it?" Emily broke in. "George, we've spent two years working as hard as we can to develop amnesia about it. A semester of sheer hell while they dropped off the face of the earth, then a year of worse than hell when their faces were plastered on telecoms and beer bottles—beer bottles, if you can imagine. Some local brewery's idea."

  "Yes, and just when we think we can settle back into our dull routine, we lose the dean."

  George Norton leaned toward her and tapped at his chest.
/>   "It was a heart attack," he said to Jaguar. "Totally unexpected. He was more fit than anyone at this table, I'd venture to say. And only fifty. Maybe it was the stress."

  She bit back a comment about their definition of stress. "Terrible," she said sympathetically.

  George shook his head. "Never found out what happened to the Gone Girls, either. Oddly enough, all four were cultural studies majors. Police tried to make something of that, especially with poor Leonard, who had all of them in his class."

  Jaguar looked to Leonard, who shook his head and remained silent. He was being very quiet this evening. Barely visible. She wondered if that was intentional.

  "Like great-grandpa?" she asked.

  "Almost," he replied.

  "What?" George asked.

  Jaguar and Leonard exchanged very quiet smiles. "Nothing," Leonard said. "Family story I told Jaguar."

  "Oh," George said, "well. If you say. At any rate, they finally chalked it up to some elusive, and probably off-campus psychotic when a few more women in town disappeared. I hate to say it, but I was glad of those disappearances."

  "I still think it was a cyberspace jump. Ought to keep these kids off those damn computers," Samitu said. "They should be out rolling around in the grass making love with each other, not hooking themselves up to machines and making words do what their bodies won't."

  He tapped the back of Jaguar's hand with a spoon. "Lips should be locked together in passion, not laser overload. Don't you agree?"

  "Really, Samitu," Emily said, "leave poor Dr. Addams alone. You'll terrify her."

  He shook his spoon at her, spraying droplets of soup around. "Not her. One can tell at a glance that she's not bloodless, or easily terrified." He said this in such a way that Emily could easily have taken offense, especially as he scanned her from the top of her deliberately casual hair to the bottom of her appropriately heeled shoes. Ethan intervened.

  "Samitu is right that some of our students get their heads stuck in a VR unit with disastrous consequences to their GPAs. But I don't think any of the young women in question were involved in that. The police would have turned it up."

  "Yes," Emily said, "exactly. And I wish the whole thing would blow away, since it's pretty dried up by now. Ethan's been wonderful in implementing that process, of course. We were very fortunate to have him step in for the dean, and we're all hoping he'll take it on for the next term." She leaned in toward Jaguar and added, with deliberate lightness, "Somebody's got to keep the empaths under control."

  Jaguar laughed, with what she hoped was deliberate indifference. Emily leaned away, but kept her friendly eye on Jaguar, who ducked her head down to a plate of chicken tandoori.

  George lifted his glass. "Count on my vote," he said. "Now, I've heard something interesting. That the president's hired a professional empath to check faculty response to the new course. Have you heard anything about the empath investigator, Ethan?"

  Ethan frowned. "No. I heard no such thing."

  "I heard it, too," Emily chimed in, "From a rather reliable source. It's all being done very discreetly, I'm told. Someone disguised as a secretary or a professor or something. Between that and the empath course, we'll be crawling with them, Dr. Addams."

  Jaguar had the sudden sensation of being in an elevator that had lost its cable and was careening down toward a hard landing. She wasn't sure if it was her paranoia, or if Emily, Ethan, and Leonard were all watching carefully to note her response. She held on to her smile.

  "The course is a big issue," she noted in what she hoped was a detached and academic way.

  "Well," Emily said, "not so big as an elephant, but about twice as messy, if you know what I mean. Honestly, though. A course in empathic arts? You can imagine what these young and very impressionable people will make of it. They've grown up on a steady diet of virtual reality and holodisk infusion. They'll be wasting hours trying to bend spoons with their minds and see through some first-year student's clothes or—well, inventing dangerous sexual rituals. We'll end up with our own version of the Serials on a small scale."

  Jaguar felt her jaw begin to tighten, and asked it to relax. Just relax. This was nothing to do with her. All she had to do was keep her mouth shut and in a minute they'd be fighting fiercely over the ludic nature of reconstructionist movements. She told herself this, but apparently she wasn't listening.

  "The empathic arts weren't even named as such until after the Serials," she said. "I've never been sure why people insist on attaching the two."

  Emily's fork stopped between plate and mouth, and her face began to pinch in. Apparently, Jaguar thought, her friendliness wouldn't cover disagreement.

  "You're right, Dr. Addams," Ethan said quickly. "To establish a causal connection between empathic practices and the Serials is the height of non sequitur. At the time nobody was even discussing psi capacities as a scientifically established phenomenon. All we had was pseudopsychics on TV. However," he continued, smiling down Emily's scowl, "that doesn't mean we should run a course in either ritualized psi work, or ritualized killing." He let his smile drift from Emily to Jaguar, including them both in his good graces.

  Nicely done, she thought wryly. A little intellectual ménage à trois, and now everybody's friends. If only she could keep her mouth shut, which she apparently couldn't.

  "But doesn't it make more sense to allow study of an issue?" she said, speaking to Ethan rather than Emily. "Let all the relevant voices speak to it, instead of trying to pretend it doesn't exist."

  George picked up the water pitcher and poured into her glass. "But the ethical implications are too complex for students, much less their parents, who pay the bills.

  We can't give the appearance of condoning something as morally ambiguous as the empathic arts."

  Jaguar took in the faces circled around her at this table. They were part of a system she didn't know how to work, or even understand. She once thought University was about learning, but it seemed to be much more about grappling for positions of power on ground as ephemeral as theory. Or what they called power, which she thought was merely control. She could make them very uncomfortable. She could tell them the truth about herself and her work.

  "Are they?" she asked quietly.

  Everyone paused, waiting for her to complete her sentence.

  "Are they what?" George asked, when she didn't.

  "Morally ambiguous. The arts. I never saw them that way myself."

  George and Emily clamped shut on their surprise, Leonard's forehead creased, and Samitu raised an eyebrow, but Ethan leaned back in his chair and laughed. "Oh, come on, George. There's no moral issue here. The problem is we're scared to death. We've kept this stuff confined to primitive lore, forensics, classified military files, and social misfits for centuries. If we admit it's worth legitimate study, we're changing the way the whole world looks. It's revolutionary. Like Galileo, only now our church is rational theory and there are more people to excommunicate."

  Interesting, she thought, the way he saw the many sides of the issue, and seemed to agree with all of them. It was an art she'd never learned.

  "What's the matter with theory?" Emily asked.

  "There is none," Jaguar responded before Ethan could. "That's the trouble."

  Emily turned to her, her less than friendly eyes glittering. Maybe, Jaguar thought, what she hid under her deliberate friendliness was more anger than fear. And maybe the friendliness was a lot more fragile than Jaguar had realized.

  "I beg your pardon?" Emily asked, her voice as brittle as her eyes.

  "There isn't any matter in theory," Jaguar said. "It needs to be grounded in something physical, or kinetic, or emotional. Theory has to integrate with the rest of learning."

  "You see," Samitu said enthusiastically. "I told you. This is a woman who likes to be touched for real. None of this airy fakery for her, yes?"

  Jaguar inclined her head toward him.

  "Indeed," Ethan said, laughing lightly. "So you believe a course would ground
the problem?"

  "I do," Jaguar said. "It would at least take the fears out of the closet where they could be examined, instead of abstracting them into nothing, so that they seem to be everywhere."

  "One does wonder," George said, "how many closet empaths there are. Or—they're called cloaked, aren't they?"

  "Cloaked," Emily said, and waved a dismissive hand. "Best they stay that way rather than overwhelming our students with foolish notions."

  "Isn't that what they used to say about gays?" Jaguar noted, keeping her voice light and her smile high while she saw how the color rose to Emily's cheeks.

  Ethan leaned over and tapped her hand. "Check and mate for Dr. Addams. Did you know that Emily's brother is director of the New York City Gay Coalition? Or did you take it from her mind, empathically?" He moved closer to her and waved his fingers in her face. Without pause, she caught them, stopped them, and just in time remembered not to twist.

  Now what? she heard herself asking herself. You pull out your knife and slit his throat?

  She called up a smile, then a laugh. "What do you think it is, Dean? Research, or empathic arts?"

  He pulled his hand back from hers and regarded her with pure and unadulterated lust. "I think only further investigation would determine that, Dr. Addams."

  Jaguar thought she might suffocate in the palpable stoppage in conversation that followed, or be bled to death by Emily's eyes boring into the side of her face.

  "Jaguar?" a voice asked politely. She looked up and saw Leonard, the only one at table who used her first name, regarding her with very serious eyes.

  Empath eyes, she thought. Without a doubt. This was followed by the quickened feeling of empathic contact. She stayed closed against it.

  Leonard's forehead creased in thought. Then he smiled broadly. "Could you pass the bread, please?"

  Taking a piece out, she handed the basket to him.

  "I understand you'll be doing research while you're here," Leonard continued. He was helping her out, she knew. Reestablishing comfortable conversation around the table. She let him.

  "I've been doing some work," she lied. "Comparison of tribal funeral rituals." Now where, she wondered, was that from? She had no intention of saying anything specific.