Telempath

by Spider Robinson

  The message was “Come at once.”

  I started to explain the difficulty of this to the Zephyr spokesman, but reflected that his presence here unmolested put that difficulty in considerable doubt. Undermind perception told me that his entire Name was within the immediate vicinity. I got rustily to my feet again, discovered that I could walk if I compensated for a tendency to float, and shook Alia from a slumber that I was too dopey to perceive as ominously deep.

  “Alia.”

  “Go away. Lemme sleep.”

  I pinched her in an awful place, and she yelped. “Wha…whassat?”

  “Get your toothbrush and your comic books. We’re checking out.”

  She blinked. “Yes, Isham.” If the presence of a Musky unsettled her, she didn’t show it. Probably congratulating herself on what an imagination she’s got, I thought dizzily. Maybe she’s right.

  We were not fired on in the tunnel. It opened, after what I vaguely estimated as a quarter mile, onto a comparatively enormous cave, the size of a prosperous farmer’s barn. Three male corpses and one female lay around it like sacks of grain, their faces the characteristic blue-green of someone who has breathed a Musky. The smell of death was not too bad yet. I giggled at them. The Musky led us down a much bigger tunnel to a much bigger cave. Along the way I saw occasional terrified people staring at us from side tunnels that were blocked by hovering Zephyrs. None spoke. I found none of this remarkable.

  The new cave was enormous. Daylight came through a great beamed door in its far wall. There were eight corpses here, two with the front of their skulls blown away—Faceless Ones who hadn’t survived the operation. The air stank of fried Musky. I thought that last hallucination was a noisy one, I thought, and giggled again. The giggle got louder, and kept on getting louder, and it might have gone on forever if I hadn’t tripped over my feet and smacked my face on the rock floor.

  That cleared my head—which was as well, as it turned out. One of the people huddling against the far wall, ringed in by Muskies, was Jordan himself. He glared at me with a ferocious bloodlust that his white mask didn’t begin to hide.

  “Mighty funny, ain’t it?” he boomed. “Seein’ my people lyin’ dead at your feet. Fat city for traitors and Uncle Toms. You Musky-lovin’ sonofabitch, I get loose an’ you lose that other arm an’ your balls. I’ll eat your baby, boy!”

  For a moment I marveled at his courage in the face of what must have been his most persistent and recurring nightmare—I wouldn’t have believed any Faceless One could be capable of speech in the presence of so many Muskies. But my admiration was tempered by practical considerations.

  “Not a chance, Jordan,” I hollered back, disgusted at how thin my voice sounded beside his. “I’m just like you: a practical man. You’re just too powerful to live—and too dangerous an enemy to leave behind me.” I sat down and began smoothing out my conscious mind, refining my thoughts to a gestalt essence that I could carry into the undermind. It was surprisingly difficult to reach the undermind state, but I was getting close when a hand slapped me sharply in the face.

  “No, Isham!”

  I shivered hugely like a sleeper awakened with ice water and forced my eyes to track. Alia’s face was before mine, a drawn, tangle-haired scarecrow face stained with anger and urgency. Muskies hovered at her shoulder like angry bees, a terrifying spoor, but she ignored them utterly. “You can’t!” she shouted, shaking my shoulders. “Oh, you damned fool, haven’t you learned anything? Are you still the same bloodthirsty shithead I turned my back on six years ago?”

  And as I blinked, Jordan sprang through the cordon of Muskies around him and yanked her away from me by the hair.

  I extricated myself from the full lotus and went for him low. He was big, but I was skilled.

  And half-starved. Fast as he was at drawing that long knife, I’d have beat him otherwise; but instead I must pull up short and watch the shining blade caress my Alia’s throat. He held her oddly, face-up across one knee, as though he were about to lift his veil and kiss her. “Who the man on top now, boy?”

  “You can lose the other half of that face mighty easy, ugly man.”

  “Sky-devil come near me, I put my nose on hers, an’ you bet your ass I’ll hold my breath longer’n she can. Now call your dogs off, or I cut the roast.”

  I cudgeled my brains, trying desperately to think, to function, to pull a scheme or trick or double-cross from my terrific combat computer. I came up dry, utterly at a loss. Collaci’d have my ass. Hot-shot hero.

  End of the road.

  “All right, Jordan. God knows your word is worthless, but I guess I haven’t got any choice. You win.”

  “I’ll let her live, boy. You too. Hope for you both yet.”

  I didn’t bother answering that one. I sank back into lotus, and began again the extended mantra that led me into the undermind state. It was easier this time, but I was too heartsick to wonder at that.

  I felt the cave vanish, and then my body, and then my thoughts themselves. My identity refined itself to a kernel, in a place unrelated to space and time. Scattered about me in that place were the Zephyr Muskies, all pulsing in an identical sequence that was, somehow, the name of their Name. The “color” of the pulsing was the “feelings” that were going through their “mind,” a clumsy analogy-series that is the best English has to offer.

  The emotional sum conveyed was extreme confusion, with an undertone I could not identify. In effect, they were puzzled by the inexplicable delay, by this odd detour I was taking on the way to New York. The emotions produced were clearly unpleasant—why didn’t I get on with it?

  I informed them that the trip was off. Sorry, fellas. Something came up—you go ahead without me. I’ll be along when I can.

  They rejected this flatly.

  I attempted to explain that I was not unwilling but unable. The reply was oddly like an echo—my projection seemed to bounce off them and return. Were they refusing communication? Why?

  I tried again, and then again. The Zephyr Name would simply not hear of delay. The journey was to be made, at once. I was baffled by their intransigence—this was not the lack of understanding I had encountered so many times before with Muskies, but a willful refusal to understand.

  I gave up. I could not command them to go, and I dared not bid them attack Jordan. So I had to ignore them. I figuratively jettisoned my weight-belt and kicked for the surface.

  Random dots resolved into a picture again, the weight of air pressed reborn flesh, distant roaring became local sound, and the stench of fear, hate and death was everywhere. Jordan was glaring at me with expectant triumph, that cut off as he saw my expression.

  “No good, Jordan. They won’t listen. They don’t care about Alia—but they want me to go with them, now, and they won’t take no for an answer.”

  He growled. “Lyin’ motherfucker, I told you what’d happen! Watch your woman die.” Alia’s eyes were wide, but she made no sound.

  “Kill her if you have to. Then you’ll be twice my size with a full belly and a knife in your hand, and I’ll pull your brains out through your eyesockets. Either way, these damfool Muskies won’t leave until I do.” My voice was flat and dead, and his forehead wrinkled as he read my sincerity. I think he was recalling that I was Collaci’s star pupil.

  “You too far gone to bluff,” he said at last. “I guess the sky-devils don’t do what you say at that. What happen now?”

  “Beats the piss out of me. As soon as they figure out that you’re what’s holding me up, you and Alia will die. I guess I walk.”

  He turned it over in his mind. “I guess you do.”

  “I’ll be back, Jordan. She’d better be alive—and unharmed—when I do.”

  “Don’t worry, boy. I got plans for this here lady. Be seein’ you.”

  Muskies were swarming angrily, projecting for the first time a concerted mood-pattern that impinged on conscious thought. It was impatience, with an overtone of menace. I understood why ghosts had so terrified
mankind for centuries—sweat broke out all over me, coldest in armpits and groin. “Maybe not,” I answered cheerily, “but we’ll meet again. Bye-bye, Alia. I’ll be back for you when I can.”

  “I know,” she said quietly, smiling at me from her awkward position across Jordan’s thigh. “Take care.”

  I nodded, got to my feet and walked from the cave into daylight, followed by a phalanx of Muskies.

  It was a chilly day, clouds moving south overhead. The trees were achingly green, and the purple of lupines around the mine entrance stabbed at eyes that had seen only black for a long week. The world was so intolerably beautiful that I spared it a full two seconds as I turned from the road that led into the cave-mine, and headed for the nearby forest. By the time I reached its cover I had finalized my plans as well as I could. Speed was essential—the only possible assets I had or was likely to get were surprise and audacity. A quick smash-and-grab had at least a slim chance of success. I began circling north so as to hit them from an unexpected direction.

  And ran into a wall of Muskies.

  The damned things would not let me by. Intangible individually, in the mass they formed something through which I could not pass, cohering by a means I didn’t understand. Whether the constraint was physical or psychic I don’t know—but in my weakened condition I lacked whatever kind of strength it took to push my way through. I battered at them with my body and my mind, raving and cursing in English and Swahili, but it was useless. They were gentle, but insistent—I was to go south or not at all. No more detours.

  After ten minutes of concentrated effort that left me aching in every cell I gave up and staggered, sobbing with frustration and rage, through the forest, heading for the Big Apple.

  Chapter Fourteen

  As I trudged, showered with coins of sunlight, through mounds of new-fallen leaves, my thoughts kept returning to that last confrontation with Jordan. I couldn’t understand why Alia had prevented me from asking the Zephyrs to kill him. It didn’t make sense. She had suffered as much at his hands as I had, could envisage just as clearly the untold damage he could cause to the world with the ammunition I had given him. Didn’t she understand that he was in his own way as dangerous to the world as Hitler or Rockefeller had been? Why, his death was imperative, as necessary as had been…

  …Dad’s?

  “Haven’t you learned anything?” she asked. “Well, have you?”

  I had regretted having killed my father at least a dozen times, one way or another, ever since I heard the flushing of the booby-trapped toilet. In a hundred ways it had been brought home to me that the hasty killing of anyone (let alone anyone possessing as much stature and power as Dad or Jordan) could only bring chaos and sorrow, no matter how apparently evil the victim or heinous his crime. Every evil action can be redeemed—if its perpetrator lives long enough. Hadn’t Dad dedicated himself to the most spectacular life of reparation since St. Augustine?

  Even if Jordan were that favorite construct of adventure fiction, The Man Too Dangerous to Live, even if he represented as much potential harm as a Hitler (which I felt he did), I could not kid myself that that had had anything to do with my wish to kill him. I had thirsted for his blood because he had harmed my woman, my child, and myself, and because I hated him for the ease with which he had peeled secrets out of me. I had tried to kill him for ego reasons.

  Just as I had killed Dad.

  Just as the Council had condemned me.

  Was passing that sort of moral irresponsibility back and forth the best thing to do with it? Wendell was the only man I knew who had refused to return evil for evil, and could that be why I respected him so much? If killing were ever truly necessary, it ought to be approached dispassionately, even compassionately, after due deliberation. I hadn’t wanted Jordan to not-be; I had wanted him to suffer. Now, I was not certain either alternative was desirable.

  This notwithstanding the fact that a portion of my hind-brain, knowing Jordan held my Alia hostage, wanted to rip out his entrails. No doubt close friends of his had died in the first wave of the Zephyr assault—Jordan probably wished at least as earnestly to see my own bones bleaching in the sun. Upon which of us, then, did the homicidal impulse confer moral superiority?

  It’s wrong but it seems necessary. It’s necessary but it seems wrong but it seems necessary but it seems…

  With a flash of pain I recalled one of the sporadic, terse conversations Alia and I had attempted during the last days of our fast. We had reached that point of hunger when brain cells begin to die, producing a natural state of stonedness far beyond pot-high, something like what I imagine the Hippie old-timers must experience when they eat amanita muscaria and psilocybin mushrooms. We had both simultaneously experienced the cosmic revelation that we were unique, an insight so stupendous that we accorded it a half hour’s awed contemplation. One of those conversations.

  “I mean,” Alia said at last, “everyone needs to feel unique…but it’s okay, because they are. Look at me: I’m the best blacksmith in the known world.”

  “I’m unique,” I heard myself say. “I am the second-best killer in the world.”

  And the expression that passed over Alia’s face sent me careening into a safe haven of visual hallucinations and metaphysical speculations of an abstract nature.

  Isham Stone, by any other name, would smell a damn sight better.

  Was this the identity I had chosen for myself? Or had I let myself be driven, like a child star thrust out onto a stage, ready to spend the rest of my days in the tortured belief that what I had been made was what I wanted to become?

  With a flash of empathy/sympathy I recognized the previously inexplicable aspect of the Zephyr tribe’s collective demeanor which had so puzzled and frustrated me. The poor bastards were under compulsion, from one they regarded as superior…and they didn’t like it a damn bit. Perhaps they had doubts about what they were doing—but they were somehow forbidden to entertain doubt. I wondered how Dr. Mike could pull off a tall order like that, but it felt too right to be wrong.

  All of a sudden, I understood them a bit better. Maybe.

  I came to a clearing in the woods.

  The forest fell away from the spot where I sat: between balding treetops the sunset lingered, a sunset so muted I could not say just where grey became pink. The undersides of the two rain clouds visible were a pink-related color I could not name—but only when I didn’t look directly at them. Winged things flew widening arcs, some silently, some not. Some thirsted for my blood; some did not.

  I smelled sweet cloves, smelled wild raspberries somewhere nearby, smelled a rich stew of spruce and pine and acres of ferns, spiced with traces of yarrow and Queen Anne’s lace and distant deer-berries. There was a deer to the northeast—a doe—but she would not come close enough to be seen. Brilliant orange butterflies flew broken-field through swaying ferns at ground level; branch-bound leaves fluttered in pale imitation above.

  Someone had lived here once, not too many years ago. Bleached, fire-charred eight-by-eight beams lay strewn about the clearing, barely visible in thigh-high grass. Here and there a baby spruce rose six or eight feet from the lighter green of weeds and wildflowers, first footholds of a forest reclaiming its territory. In twenty years there would be no way to tell that there had ever been a clearing here, let alone a dwelling, a structure within which humans had lived and laughed and loved and cried and hated and died. The forest always wins in the end, I thought, and suddenly I understood for the first time a thing which had always puzzled me: why men would want to build cities.

  Until the coming of concrete, a man battled nature for land, cleared a piece of forest with ax and shovel and held that piece by main strength, fighting primeval forces like weed, weather, and wild animal. If a man died without issue, nature would destroy his works and reclaim his fields within the space of a generation or two. Nature was mysterious, ubiquitous, powered by forces so diverse and tenacious that they dwarfed and terrified man. Naturam expelles furca tamen usque re
curret, said the Romans: you may drive nature out with a pitchfork, but it will return.

  Well then: rip it up. Tear it asunder with great machines and seal the earth against reseeding with an impenetrable shell of stone. Make the city man’s forever, his its only life-force. Kill the trees and flowers and grasses and brush, drive out the animals and insects, sterilize the region and roof it over. Keep on a few pigeons and dogs, reluctantly, as pensioners. Retain a few tamed bits of nature on exhibit, but thinned, gelded, dependent on man.

  Then discover that there is something more terrible than nature to be locked in with: yourself.

  Where once men linked arms in common cause to withstand a mystifying and hostile nature, they built a place so safe, so secure that they had nothing against which to strive, save each other. No wonder they built their cities. And no wonder they left them.

  I stopped in my tracks, sat down on crackly autumn leaves and rolled my eyes upward. Almost before I began the mantra, I was in that sidewise plane of being Wendell had named the undermind, and this time a visual analogy was by far the strongest perception I had of the Zephyrs: I “saw” them as points in a lattice, a three-dimensional and not at all symmetrical network of amber fireflies against a field azure, all this with a clarity I had never before experienced.

  I assembled my thought into a gestalt, refined it to its essence. (Pawns?) is about as close as I can render it in English.

  The response was a joyous blast combining elements of agreement, delight in our mutual discovery, and respect; all somehow compressed into one concept-unit.

  (Me too) I sent back, connoting don’t feel so bad: I walk the same road. (All/one?) Are we not all part of the same thing?

  Their reply translated best as a maxim I have heard attributed to the Vikings: no man escapes his weird. It contained neither despair nor resignation, but calm acceptance. As stated, it did not seem to conflict with free will.