Telempath

by Spider Robinson

  Something in his eyes made me answer honestly. “Not a lot. Life Force, isn’t he?”

  “Pan be the force behind all that lives, yes,” Jordan said quietly. “Pan be the burstin’ of the earth with life, the thing that make a tree come bustin’ up through a sidewalk and the thing that make a kitten struggle. He the changin’ of the seasons, an’ the risin’ of the tides an’ the sap in the trees. He be nature, Isham, the god our fathers forgot, an’ he live in the soil an’ in the sea. He live in the five-acre garden I work with my own two hands.”

  I felt the same weirdness I had felt making small talk with Wendell while planning his assassination, the same lingering aura of unreality. I was sitting in a hole in the ground with the faceless giant who was my kidnapper/jailer, discussing theology, while my wife squirmed in the clutches of a lesser gorilla.

  “It ain’t right for us to turn away from that force, Isham. Plastic an’ concrete an’ metal an’ glass, they the straitjacket we built for Pan, the thing we pave him over with. Man try to be god, he do a damn poor job. Them things you people make in the smelly place, they ain’t natural.”

  “It ain’t natural to take aspirin, but I wish I had some right now.”

  “Hell it ain’t. Ever hear of sassafras? Grow right up out of the ground, an’ the tea you make from it cure any headache in the world. That tek-knowledge-y shit make it so any weak ignorant idiot can survive, life-stuff Pan woulda scrapped an’ started over. Ever since they turned their back on Pan, people been gettin’ weaker an’ weaker, leanin’ on their false god, their tek-knowledge-y.”

  “So we go back to stone axes and handsaws?”

  “Damn right. Indians was hip to Pan before the white man come, livin’ in balance with the world. Then come Mister Charlie with pop’lation explosion an’ atom bombs an’ seas of concrete. Gotta get back in planetary rhythm, gotta put our faith in Pan. Tek-knowledge-y mean cities, an’ everbody know where they was at.”

  I couldn’t answer that. I couldn’t answer anything he said; my thoughts had that soap-slippery elusiveness that talking theology always gives them. Then I saw a hole in his logic.

  “Are Muskies part of Pan, too, Jordan?”

  “I wondered about that considerable, for many many years,” he said slowly. “Seemed like they was an’ it seemed like they wasn’t. But you give me the answer tonight. Sky-devils feed off of what you do in the smelly place, so they anti-Pan. Sky-devils be the force of anti-nature itself, grown so evil it poisonin’ itself. What you people call entropy. They the proof that science be no friend to us—they Satan chewin’ his own leg in frustration. They’ll go when the smelly place go.”

  “So where’s the consistency? You don’t want anything to do with Fresh Start—but you buy our Musky-killing ammo through middlemen, and use it in weapons that are a far cry from stone axes.”

  “Self-preservation, boy. When you fightin’ evil itself, you use its own weapons if you can. Day comin’, won’t need nothin’ from you. Then we can lay down our guns an’ go back to tillin’ the soil.”

  “By hand.”

  “Boy, I lived in New York City when there was such a place, an’ I’d rather break my back in the fields than see that evil come again.”

  “It’s not just your own back that you’re proposing to break.”

  He flared up. “I’m sick of talkin’ to you. You talk like a white boy, like your daddy.” He stood up angrily. “I thought maybe you could see his evil—but you shot through with it yourself. I think you need a little meditation, a little time to open up so Pan can come into your soul and give you guidance. In fact, just to help you, I gonna arrange a little fast for you.” I gasped in dismay; I was starving. “Say a week.” He turned to the guard who was not holding Alia. “See that they get water—nothin’ else.” The guard grinned. Jordan turned to go, and the two gorillas watched me for a false move, the second one releasing Alia to free his hands.

  I didn’t feel much like moving at all, especially if the raging hunger in me was not to be sated for a week. But I had some unfinished business to transact. “Jordan.” I stood up.

  He turned back. “What?”

  “What about Alia? You gave your word to let her go if I spilled my guts.”

  He paused a moment in thought, nodded briefly. “I’ll think about it.”

  “Think about it?” I snapped. “I thought you were a man of honor.” It was a risky thing to say with witnesses present, but it didn’t faze him at all.

  “Boy,” he said, eyes twinkling above his ghastly mask, “What I am, I’m a practical man. End justify the means.”

  “Feed her, Jordan. Or there’ll be death between you and me.” He saw my eyes then, and his stopped twinkling.

  “I’ll do what I’ll do,” he said curtly, and left.

  Chapter Thirteen

  I didn’t know whether Jordan sincerely believed that we could be converted to Pan worship; or whether he had some planned P.R. purpose for hanging on to us, or whether he was just keeping us on ice. To tell the truth I didn’t especially care. I was about at the end of my psychological rope: just too many traumatic things had happened to me in too short a time. I told myself that Jordan had had me over a barrel by possessing Alia as a hostage, but I was nonetheless filled with bitter shame and chagrin at the way he had opened me up like a clam. I could have reminded myself that Jordan was a much older, more experienced man whose particular genius lay in the ability to manipulate people into serving his ends. But instead I allowed myself to be demoralized. I was feeling my calendar age, the confidence of pseudomaturity gone, feeling adolescent for the first time since I’d been fifteen.

  My only consolation was that I hadn’t spilled that last secret which would have made utterly certain Jordan’s victory in the battle for the hearts and minds of surviving mankind. But almost, I wished I had told that secret to the Council. I had decided—correctly, I still believed—that they would use the knowledge for the wrong ends just as surely as Jordan would. But possessing it might have evened the odds in the coming crisis in their ideological struggle with Jordan.

  Crying over spilt milk, yeah: I did a lot of that during my first day of fasting. About the only thing I did that didn’t fall under that heading was futile—I tried to escape. There was no guard immediately outside the exit from our prison-cave, and the tunnel beyond it was mighty dark. I figured I would see a guard silhouetted by light behind him better than he could see me, and tried tip-toeing out into the tunnel. The darkness covered sight, and extreme care covered sound, but there was nothing I could do about smell. Before I’d gotten ten yards up the passageway a bullet came spanging around the gentle curve of the tunnel from the darkness ahead, whined past my ear like an angry bee and went through a really amazing number of ricochets inside the cave where Alia waited before spending itself.

  I followed it, in a similar hurry. Alia was shaken but unhurt.

  That was my only quote constructive act unquote. After water had been fetched for us by a grinning Agro, Alia and I spent the rest of that first day sitting together in silence and thinking about soyburgers and hamburgers and ham with brown sugar and pineapple gravy and mashed potatoes with butter and carrots and rice and turnips and parsnips and buckwheat and lentils and cabbage and steak and onions—oh god, onions—and apple pie and chili and milk and beer and garlic and honey and ice cream and beets and corn and pancakes and eggs fried in bacon grease and drip coffee and squash and peppers and cheese and trout in lemon sauce and bananas and chocolate and peanut butter and strawberries and peas and stringbeans and cauliflower and lettuce and molasses and broccoli and celery and radishes and tomatoes and spinach and tofu and popcorn and bread and chapatis and cornbread and beans and raisins and peanuts and cashews and walnuts and almonds and peaches and pears and plums and grapes and cherries and wild raspberries and blueberries and a big heaping steaming bowl of oatmeal with maple syrup. We made love repeatedly that night, but sating one hunger only stoked the other.

  On the morning
of the second day (according to our biological clocks) even thinking about food was intolerable, so we talked. I told her more about Wendell, and a lot about what had happened to me during those years she and I had been keeping out of touch. She told me of her own experiences during those years (including the straight of what had happened with Tommy Ostermyer), and we spoke, as lovers will, of what fools we had been to wait so long.

  “Isham,” she said suddenly, “there’s something on your mind that you aren’t talking about—something you didn’t tell Jordan.”

  I said a filthy word with considerable volume. “Good old Isham Stone! If he’s not around to tell a secret to, you can always make it into a musical and take it on the road. Thirty-six point Times Roman lettering across my forehead. Fuck!”

  She moved closer and put a hand to my cheek. “You’re wrong, Isham. There’s nothing written on your poker face—anyway, with your complexion, it’d have to be written in chalk. What Jordan read was the handwriting on the wall, there for all to see. What I read is the writing on your heart—which only I can see. You needn’t tell me your secret.”

  “I don’t see why not. Pan never created hidden microphones, as far as I know, and nobody’s in smell.” I was considerably mollified, and I needed to share my burden. “It’s a secret I didn’t dare tell your father or the Council, the most potentially destructive piece of information I know, and I can say it in three words:

  “Muskies are plasmoids.”

  She made a puzzled noise. “I don’t understand.”

  “Hmmm. Look, do you know about the four states of matter?”

  “Four? I thought there were three.”

  “And here I thought Dr. Mike was giving you kids an education. Okay. For centuries it was thought that there were only three states of matter: solid, liquid and gas.

  “Then about twenty or thirty years ago, someone remembered the silly superstition of the ancients, who spoke of earth, air, water and fire. Fire doesn’t fit under the heading of solid, liquid or gas—it’s a fourth thing: a plasma. So is ball lightning. Plasmas are ionized gases…you savvy ‘ionized’? Good. It was the understanding of the existence of plasmas that made those last exploratory efforts with fusion power possible, just before physics went to hell with the rest of the world. Because plasmas have certain qualities that gases don’t have. One of them is that they can be affected by electromagnetic fields. For fusion reaction you need such uniformly hellish temperatures that you can’t let the target matter contact the walls of a container—heat loss at the fringes kills the reaction. So you use a plasma, and suspend it within an electromagnetic field, to oversimplify it enormously.

  “Well, Muskies are plasmoids—masses of ionized gas held together by a self-generated magnetic bottle.”

  “Then Muskies can be affected by electromagnetic fields?” Alia interrupted. “That’s why you couldn’t tell Papa and the Council—because you were afraid they’d use EM as a weapon against the Muskies?”

  “Close, but no cigar. Right now, using hot-shot, you can kill a Musky that’s at the limit of your olfactory detection range—EM alone wouldn’t make that much difference. But the reason I couldn’t tell the Council about Wendell’s attempts to contact High Muskies with EM, the reason I concocted that ridiculous scheme about building a balloon, was that I didn’t dare let them suspect that Muskies are plasmas rather than gases, didn’t dare let the concept come into their minds. Men have thought of Muskies as living gas-clouds for years, and it had to stay that way.

  “Because plasmoids show up on radar.”

  She gasped as the implications struck her.

  “Plasmoids,” I went on, “were one of the phenomena that the Air Force dug up to explain flying saucers, years and years ago. That theory differed from weather balloons and thermal inversions and such only in that it was correct. It simply never occurred to the Air Force that the plasmoids were sentient.”

  “Oh, lord,” she whispered. “That increases detection range from a couple of hundred yards of smell to…”

  “Miles, baby. Lots of miles. If the Council learned that, in its present state of mind, there’d be such a Musky pogrom as would likely make peace forever impossible. Conceivably the Musky race could be exterminated—Wendell thinks EM of the right type and frequency will disrupt a Musky quicker’n hot-shot. Radar-aimed, that’d be pretty unbeatable.”

  “But…but…Isham, my mind is spinning, but…why mustn’t you let Jordan find out? He’s fanatically opposed to any kind of technology. He knows nothing about how to reactivate radar, or run it if he did.”

  “He’s a ‘practical man,’” I quoted. “He’d learn. That knife at his hip was Sheffield steel, and that carbine that blew off Shorty’s scalp was government issue. He’s willing to compromise to an extent—he thinks it’s only for the time being.”

  “But how could he learn something so complex?”

  “There are quite a few military installations and airports within walking distance, and lots of libraries, public and private. If necessary he could kidnap all the Technos he needs. He’s got two already,” I added bitterly.

  “Then…”

  “So he becomes the world’s most efficient Musky-killer. Then who are the Saviors of the World: Technos or Agros? Our popularity declines by an enormous percentage, and the bottom falls out of the hot-shot market. Bye bye Fresh Start.”

  “But Fresh Start has much more to offer the world than just ammunition. Medicine, commercial power…”

  “Baby, the man who rids the world of Muskies can name his own price. All we have to offer folks is brotherly love and convenience. Hate wins hands down.”

  “Oh God, Isham, this is terrible. You mustn’t tell Jordan. You…you shouldn’t have told me.”

  I took her by the ear, smiled fondly (and invisibly) and said softly, “Don’t be a jerk. I’d watch you flayed alive with our baby inside you before I’d spill this secret—and you’d do me the same favor.”

  I felt her nod. “Yes, I would. Thanks—for the second time—for trusting me.”

  I shook my head. “Don’t thank me. It’s not as if I could help it.”

  And after a remarkably short transition we were making love again. The sharing of the secret had brought us even closer than plighting our troth, and making love was only the symbol. But there was nothing else about it that was “only”—I took most of the remaining skin off my knees, and didn’t notice till hours later.

  The next few days were very disjointed; our emotions went through vast manic-depressive cycles, that only occasionally coincided. After a time the manic part stopped happening so much.

  The overriding keynote at first, of course, was hunger—a hunger such as neither of us had ever experienced or imagined before. Then we woke from our third or fourth sleep with the sharp, clear awareness that we weren’t much hungry for anything at all—except intellectually. Our bellies had given up caring whether or not they ever got filled again, and turned to meditations of their own.

  It didn’t make me feel much better. I don’t know about Alia, but I passed the silent times I had previously spent daydreaming of food in mourning. Just mourning, for anything and everything. I mourned my failure to outsit Jordan. I mourned my failure to get through to the Council. I mourned my failure to protect my woman and our child. I mourned my failure to realize my love for her until it was too late. I mourned my lost arm.

  I mourned for my father.

  I mourned Wendell’s unjust loss of honor and heritage, and the loss of his only friend—me. I mourned the loss of Civilization, which I had never known, and all it had promised for the future. I mourned the end of the world, which seemed to me only days or weeks away. I mourned the inability of man to rise above his own attachments and stupidity. I mourned the cussedness of fate.

  Once I actually howled aloud, beating my fist against the rock floor. Alia held me and rocked me, but neither of us spoke.

  Three more “days” passed in this fashion. Time did not pass; it tailga
ted. On the sixth day Alia and I began to see great subtle interrelations in everything we knew, began to perceive previously unseen universal patterns and cosmic knowledge which stupefied us by its sudden obviousness. It seemed that all of a sudden a switch was thrown and we understood everything that had ever puzzled us about the Universe and its workings. We babbled joyously of it for awhile, then realized the inherent folly of speech and fell silent. We achieved satori.

  This did not dispel my grief. But it seemed to make it a grander, subtler thing, the awareness of Cosmic Irony. There was an Olympian detachment to my perception of the magnificent tragedy that was life.

  On the seventh day we began having visions.

  It was in fact while I was in the middle of a stupendous eight-color four-dimensional hallucination that the situation suddenly changed.

  The hallucination in question was a breed of pageant, in which all my friends and enemies were represented. But the last one through the door was out of uniform—he’d forgotten to wear his body.

  It was a Musky, and my nose said it was really there.

  The rest of the procession, which had been doing a sort of zero-gravity snake dance around the cave, faded as though a heavy fog had roiled in. I rose from lotus, went to the only remaining full five-gallon bucket of the four Jordan had provided us, and plunged my head into the water. The Musky was still there when I finished spluttering, so I sat down again and reached for the undermind. It was very very near. Four’s corin’ heaven years and I was under.

  I won’t go into the exact conversation, as I did with the one I had with the Sirocco Name. Some of the concept-units we used can’t be crammed into a single English word, so it wouldn’t be accurate anyhow.

  Briefly, we swapped Names, and I learned that his Name was called Zephyr. He told me that he had a message, and it took me quite a bit of time to learn the identity of the message’s sender, a question that began as a conversational formality. The concept is not a simple one—to a Musky. I would, of course, have assumed the message was from Wendell, but I was groggy and got involved in the slapstick semantic business of asking the question. And so I learned that the message was not from Wendell. It was from Dr. Mike.