A Different Light (20 page)

Russell said, "Not especially."

On the horizon Jimson saw towers, spires, cutting into the lavender-blue sky. They sparkled remotely. "What does the rest of the planet do?" he asked.

Goryn shrugged. "They live."

Goryn was unexpected: small and intense, brown all over except for her hair and her eyes, which were grey. Her speaking voice, disconcertingly unlike her mental voice, was harsh and tense. "Now," she said, "we will take you to our clinic." She herded them both through swinging doors. "Starcaptain, you will wait downstairs." Russell stiffened. "Oh, I know. You do not like anyone telling you what to do. If you are planning to stay here, you had better get used to it. Otherwise, you can leave."

Russell faced the wall and would not look at her.

Jimson saw his big hands knot together. Then he turned around. His face was quiet. "I'm not leaving." He watched them put Jimson on a table. He laid his palm against Jimson's cheek. "See you later."

"X-ray first," chirped Goryn.

In the X-ray chambers Jimson made the technician promise not to take off his earrings. "The pain's in my leg," he said, "not in my head." He had started to come down from his narcotic high. Seeing himself in a full length mirror was a shock. He had eaten almost nothing during the trip. Lack of exercise and weight loss had stringed out the muscles in his arms and legs like used-up rubber bands.

He met Mahil and Nior. Nior was a short fat man with incredibly careful and gentle hands. He took the first set of blood samples. Jimson eyed the array of syringes with weary trepidation; Nior noticed. "Don't worry," he said as he patted Jimson's arm. "I always hit the vein on the first try." Mahil did the scans. In the middle of the second scan, while Jimson was lying naked and a little cold on a table, Ysao walked in.

"They treating you right?"

"You haven't exactly caught me at my best," Jimson said. "I hate all this. And I want to piss."

Ysao fetched him a urinal. Mahil came back. "Ysao, you're in my way." Ysao sat on the desk. Jimson allowed himself to be pulled and pushed and positioned on the table. "Tell me how you train a telepath," he said to Ysao as Mahil loped off again. "Explain this place. Talk to me."

"It's something like the way you teach art," Ysao said, obligingly.

"I know even less about teaching art than
you
do," Jimson said. "I
make
art."

"How
one
teaches art. It has to do with learning to identify mental patterns. Human beings have about twenty-seven basic mental patterns. The pattern gets masked by emotional and personality accretions, by the accumulation of experience, by the process of aging. The easiest person to touch telepathically is a baby. But what can you do with a baby?" Jimson nodded; he was interested in spite of himself. "Telepaths learn to key into the pattern of a mind. X-team telepaths learn human patterns, Verdian patterns, aberrants—because they have to be prepared to contact minds that they have no pattern for. It's hard to prepare for. The first telepath to meet a Verdian went into bad shock."

"Ouch!" Jimson said to Mahil. "How many mental patterns do Verdians come in?"

"About twelve."

"Verdians and us. Have we met up with any other alien races?"

"One," said Ysao. "The Verdians found them first. Only one so far. All the other worlds we've made contact with have been human colony, Verdian colony, or human non-colony primitive. But that's why there have to be telepaths on X-teams. Just because we haven't met them—"

"Doesn't mean they aren't there," said Mahil. "You know, Ysao, I would rather not have to work around you. You're too big. I'd like to get out of here before dinnertime, and I'm not sure I will be if I have to keep walking around you."

"All right," Ysao said. "See you later, Jim."

"Bye." Jimson shifted his shoulders and stared at the ceiling. There was nothing to look at on it, not even interesting cracks. It was white and as unpromising as a blank canvas.

His poem formed in his mind.

Death riding slowly through a countryside,

Unheralded, unstayed.

Suspended inbetween a sunset sky

And the darkened pitted earth below—

His scythe in one indifferent hand.

Young man passing on a short day's journey...

Death riding slowly through His countryside—

Noted;

Undelayed.

It seemed appropriate that the lines he had first thought of turned out to belong on the end of the poem.

* * *

Mahil was barely finished when the pain returned. Jimson clenched his fists and teeth and mind against it. Mahil muttered something and stuck him with a needle. It knocked him out. When he woke from the sleep he was in a bed. It was night. Russell was sitting in an armchair, watching him. He looked tired. He said, "They said they'd have the test results for you when you wake up. And a proposition. And food, if you want it."

"I'm not hungry."

In a little while Ysao walked in. "How are you feeling?" he asked.

"Morose," Jimson said.

Ysao grinned at him. "One morose artist, at loose ends, age thirty, size small. Receipt please."

Jimson said, "I'm not so damn small. You're oversize."

"One argumentative artist, age thirty—"

"And I'll be thirty-one in a month."

"Size medium," amended Ysao. "What am I bid, folks?"

Jimson said, "I'd be a bad bargain."

Goryn walked in. "I'll take him. You don't even have to wrap him up," she said. "It won't be for very long."

Ysao grabbed Russell and held him still as he came out of his chair. "Russell, don't be a fool. You can't attack a telepath. Goryn, you still have no use for tact?"

The brown woman perched on the end of Jimson's bed. "Tact is for cowards," she replied. "I am certainly not telling Jimson Alleca something he doesn't know. You know, don't you, my friend, that you are a dead man. That's why you came to me." She shifted to look speculatively at Russell. "Russell O'Neill, you've been running from this death for more than fourteen years. Will you run again? The door is open. Your ship is waiting for you. Or will you stay and face it now? Let him go, Ysao."

Ysao lifted his great hands from Russell's shoulders. Russell leaned back against the wall. His face was white.

Jimson said, "There are places I think I'd prefer dying in, now that you mention it."

Goryn said, "Then you should go to them. Better hurry. You think we invite just anybody here to leave a corpse on our pretty lawn?"

"The test results—"

"Show that you have two new tumors. As was only to be expected, your cancer mutated and then metastasized. You have two new tumors in the left femur and tibia for which there is no controlling medication." Her harsh voice softened. "There are, of course, always narcotics to blanket the pain."

"Yes," said Jimson. His mouth had gone numb. He wondered if that meant he was in shock. His mind felt remarkably clear. "How much longer?"

For some reason, Ysao chose to answer. "A month," he said. "Maybe two." Goryn nodded. Jimson understood: it was a death sentence. This small brown woman was his executioner.

"Thank you," he said.

Russell pushed away from Ysao and went to stand apart from them all, looking out the room's one narrow window.

"While I die on your lawn," Jimson said, "what is it that you have for me to do?"

"We want your mind."

"I didn't think you'd have any use for my body."

Goryn took him seriously. "No. Not at all. The body dies. The personality dies. But the talent—the vision— that we will take. It will be incarnate. Immortal."

Jimson said, "You are going to make me a god?"

"Of a sort. Shall I go on, or are you leaving?"

"Go ahead," Jimson said.

"You have a gift," said Goryn. "You have the artist's vision, the ability to see in patterns. You have expressed it all your life in your art. But all expression of a vision is imperfect. For me to understand it totally, as you do, I must become you. Teaching artistic techniques cannot teach it. And there is no way for me to suppress my personality enough to become you, and still function. We have experimented with impress upon the brain-damaged. We know how to do it. But the transfer cannot be made successfully or completely when the personality of the impressor is strong." She paused.

"I follow you," said Jimson.

"You know about telepaths, what they do, what they can do. You know that one member of an Exploration Team is always a telepath. It is tedious, tiring work, running from planet to planet, and there is little reward, unless you are lucky enough to
like
the work. It is dangerous, too. There is danger to the telepath, and danger to us all if one telepath should make a mistake. You studied history. Remember the history of the Earth wars? All through early history there are stories of wars because cultures meeting cultures could not understand each other, could not find the things they shared amid the differences. The Verdians, too, had wars. But even on individual planets within the Living Worlds, there are still sometimes violences which could be called wars. Our horizons enlarge. Can you imagine a war between worlds?"

Jimson tried. "I don't see what people could find to fight about," he said.

"People fight from fear, fear of domination, fear of difference. Let me tell you a story as an example of difference. Once an X-team telepath met a mind that she could not understand. It was a mind for which she had no prior pattern. When the rest of her team found her, she was catatonic. She remained so until she died, some fifty years later."

Russell said, "Is this a true story?"

"Certainly."

"Where are they—these aliens?" Russell laid his hand on the glass of the window. "Still out there?"

"They are. But they are not a threat. They do not seek out contact with human or Verdian worlds: They live alone, separate even from others of their own kind. So far, we have found only four of them. Consider my story only as an example. That telepath who first encountered them might have been spared her sanity, if, like an artist, or a musician, or a mathematician, she had had the ability to see patterns, to find them in chaos. That gift which you possess could have surmounted the gap which all her training could not fill."

"Might have surmounted it," said Ysao.

"Might have surmounted it," agreed Goryn. "We think it is worth an experiment to find out."

Russell asked, "Why don't you go out and find a dying mathematician to play your games with? There must be at least one in the Living Worlds."

Goryn said, "Because we have an artist. I thought Hypers believed in the luck."

"Was it the luck that arranged this?" Russell said. "Or was it you, and Ysao, and the others here?"

Ysao said, "Tell them what must happen, Goryn."

"We will take your mind," Goryn said, "and break it into pieces until the personality is gone. We have drugs to do that with. It is not painful."
How the hell would you know?
Jimson thought. "Then we will impress your mental pattern, the pattern of the artist, with that gift to see in patterns, to vision, upon the minds of our X-team telepaths. It will be like playing a tape over and over again until it cracks and melts; like shaving a hologram thinner and thinner, until the image blurs and can no longer be distinguished. You will be gone, Jimson Alleca, played like a tape into other minds. But your vision, your gift, frozen like ice, shorn of body and soul, will be immortal."

"And the body dies," said Russell.

"Oh, we can keep it alive," Goryn said. "We can stuff it. What does that matter?"

Russell said evenly, "It makes a difference." He walked to Jimson, and touched his face with trembling fingers. "I love your personality," he said. "I love your body. I don't want to lose you to this—vampire."

Ysao said, "Tell them how it is done, Goryn."

Russell whirled on him. "You tell it!"

"To maintain the depth and the precision necessary for these techniques," Ysao said, "some machinery must be used. Drugs to suppress the personality and lessen emotional interference. The intensity of communication is maintained by using resonating crystal."

Goryn said helpfully, "We took a piece off the Mask you brought us."

Russell's laugh was almost a sob. "Such efficient vampires!"

"Not a god," Jimson said. "A pattern."

"The Mask that should have gone to Roman De Vala—" Russell turned on Ysao. "This
was
your
idea?"

Ysao said, "Not exactly. But—" he faced Jimson. "You remember, on the way to Demea, when you suggested that artists learn to block without practice? It made me think about what other abilities artists have, or might have. When we landed on Psi Center, the first time, before Ast and I left the ship, I—mentioned it to Goryn."

"Be fair to yourself," said Goryn, unexpectedly. "You did not mention it to me. I am a telepath. I took it from your mind."