The Out Campaign: Scarlet Letter of Atheism

MINDSEARCH

CHAPTER 2

As always, the vision came without warning.

She was in a strange place that bore no resemblance to her reality. The ground was hard and flat, without the waving fields of thistlefruit she was used to on the farm. Vegetation grew sparsely here, hardy bushes that jutted up from the ground and defied wind and weather to work their worst. High craggy mountains on the horizon scraped at the rim of the sky--and that sky was not the familiar pale green of her native Iwagen, but a rich purple-blue like imminent nightfall even though it was broad daylight. Overhead the sun was not orange, but a small white ball, hot, intense, and half the size it should be. The air was warm and dry, and laden with dusty scents of some arid springtime.

There was life all about her, continuing on its business and taking no note of her presence. Small insects crawled, flew, or hopped. Strangely marked birds darted through the alien sky. Larger land creatures--some furred, some feathered, some scaled--moved about more slowly, always at the limit of her vision, never quite leaving the protection of the scant brush to give her a clear glimpse.

Mara made no movement, no sound to disturb the peaceful scene. She was not sure she could move even if she wanted to; always before she'd come to this exact spot and never stirred from it. Sometimes it was day, sometimes night; sometimes the weather was clear and sometimes it was cloudy or rainy. Mara had no idea how she came to be here or why the transitions occurred--if, indeed, there was any purpose behind them at all. The not knowing was what scared her most.

A breeze picked up, coming from her back. Mara did not feel it. exactly, but she could tell it was there by the way it blew the loose dust and the plants. Small bits of earth rose and fell in an aerobatic ballet, whipped around by the wind into eddies and dust devils. Overhead, a sudden gust caught a bird unprepared, and it squawked as it flapped about to right itself....

Mara sat up in the branchbed, eyes wide open. It was the dream again, of course, the second time she'd had it since Richard went away. She could recognize it perfectly well after the fact, but somehow she was always motionless, paralyzed, while it was actually happening. She coughed as a trickle of saliva ran the wrong way down her throat, and that reflexive act broke the stillness, setting the world in motion once more.

There were thoughts around her, minds touching and caressing her own--worried minds, caring minds. She was supposed to be the one caring for them, she knew, and yet ever since she and Richard had begun taking in their "patients" the farm had grown into a more cooperative venture, a commune in the truest sense.

Are you all right? Your mind was gone from us for a while. Was it the dream again? The thoughts were from no one person, but a distillation of concern from the eighteen other telepaths scattered about the farm.

Yes, it was the dream, but I'm all right now. Mara sent out the answer to calm their fears, wondering whether she could fool them that she'd calmed her own.

Stretching, she climbed out of the tangle of closely woven branches lined with downy "leaves" that comprised her branchbed. She stepped onto the spongy floor, took her simple blue frock off the gnarly peg where it hung and slipped it over her supple young body. She ran a brush quickly through her long black hair, removing the worst of the night's tangles, and ran a tatsit leaf over her teeth to polish them and freshen her breath; since she wore no makeup, that simple ritual was all she needed to face the new day.

Fully awake now, she stepped outside her sleeping chamber and climbed down the knotty ladder inside the house-tree past the lower sleeping rooms to the common dining area at the base. Privacy was a strange phenomenon in a telepathic community; as long as everyone was within detection range, Mara could not prevent her thoughts from reaching them, nor theirs from reaching her. It was a background noise that was always buzzing in her head, and in a way it was comforting to know her friends were always there. A form of courtesy had arisen, however, that when someone was in his own room there was no detailed communication unless the person requested it. Mara's strange dreams were more like an emergency, prompting the concern that led the others to invade her privacy. It did not upset her that they'd done so, and once she assured them she was well they'd left her to herself.

Now that she was in the common room, however, all privacy vanished. Thoughts swirled around her--busy thoughts, working thoughts--and she joined in the current as though born to it, which she was. There were always things that needed doing on the farm, and the more she and Richard had succeeded in bringing other telepaths here, the more mouths there were to feed. Since some of their new friends were in various stages of telepause and unable to care for themselves, that imposed an additional burden. It was a burden Mara and Richard welcomed, though, for it promised greater things to come.

The common room at the base of the house-tree was a large open chamber the full diameter of the bole. The "tree" itself was a system of stems from a single root stock, interwoven so tightly it kept out the elements. The wood was so hard there was little danger from the fire that was kept lit in the center of the packed-earth floor. Water ran through a clay pipe down from the treetop reservoir into a basin, where it could be used for cooking or for washing utensils. Smooth-hewn stumps of differing sizes were scattered about the room to serve as tables and stools, with a couple of stumps specially carved to fit human anatomy. The interior walls had been dyed with streaks of color to lend a festive atmosphere to the place, while smells of previous meals lingered in the air.

Luose had already prepared breakfast for the workers, and Mara was one of the last to arrive. Dur-ill and human chemistries were similar enough that a common diet sufficed for both, though Mara occasionally ate some things her Dur-ill friends disliked to supplement the regimen. She ate quickly now, steeling herself for the ordeal that was to come. Then, as was her habit, she set out for her early morning check of the hospital compound.

The farm had grown rapidly in just the past year. One house-tree had served as home for the Cheney family all her life; she still thought of it fondly as the house-tree, even though they'd brought in others and transplanted them to hold the increasing population. As she walked through the arched bower of branches that served as a canopied entrance to the house-tree, she could see her friends working in the fields tending the thistlefruits. Mara had worked there for many years herself when the farm was just a family endeavor; now that it was something greater, she had little time for such simple labor.

Emerging from the bower, Mara turned left and began the long walk to the tree that housed the telepausal patients. That tree had been planted as far from the main complex as possible, both for the patients' comfort and for everyone else's. Even so, it was not quite far enough; the pain and the heightened powers of the patients could be felt by all the others on the farm. No one liked it, but it was a necessary evil; it was the reason this whole project existed in the first place.

The Javier daPaz Memorial Hospital--Richard had insisted on naming it after the doctor who'd sacrificed his life to save Alain Cheney--was the smallest of the three house-trees on the farm. At present there were six patients, two of whom were in the late stages of telepause. This bothered Mara, since there were as yet no children for them to move to. A couple of the other women were expecting at any time; it was simply a question of making the telepausal patients hold on as long as possible, even though Mara knew how difficult life was for them right now.

The hospital was Mara's special province. She cooked for the patients, tended to their needs, kept the house-tree neat and tidy, and--more than anything else--provided the moral support these people desperately needed. Even though she was barely seventeen, Mara's mind provided balm to cool the fires of their telepause.

Even before she entered, Mara knew that two of the patients were having sex in one of the upper chambers of the house-tree; the passion of their coupling was so strong it sent delightful shivers through her own body. Sex was not discouraged at the hospital. Quite the reverse, in fact; it was an indispensable part of the telepause treatment, and one of the few benefits that condition had to offer.

Mara entered the hospital and went about her chores, trying to ignore the sexual activities above although she occasionally had to stop and gasp as an echo-orgasm rolled through her mind and body. Dur-ill sex was not too different from human sex although their body parts were incompatible, and it was impossible not to strike a mutual chord now and then. At last the couple upstairs became too tired to continue and came down the ladder into the common area. Mara smiled at them and continued with her work.

Halfway through her morning chores Mara felt the approaching minds. They were still a good way off, but she had a greater range than anyone else on the farm and could detect things even further away than her brother could. She stopped for a moment to focus on the approaching pair.

Nisoth's returning, she broadcast when she recognized one of the approaching people. He's got someone with him. She seems strongly telepausal. Who's near the south fence?

Me, Karonal-ess, answered a thought.

Go help Nisoth with our new guest, Mara ordered. I'll get a branchbed ready here.

Mara was all prepared by the time the new patient was brought in. The Dur-ill woman was middle-aged, but Dur-ill seemed to enter telepause later than humans. Despite the fact that Nisoth must have warned her, the patient was startled at the sight of Mara, a human, and her mind was filled with confusion about whether she'd done the right thing by coming here. Mara reached out with her own mind to form a blanket, wrapping the woman's fears securely and not allowing them to run riot through her head.

"Welcome," Mara said aloud, using her mind to amplify her speech. The Dur-ill, like all newcomers here, was not a trained telepath, and could not be expected to converse solely by mental images. "We're your friends," Mara continued on. "We want to help you. What's your name?"

"Tatada-go," the woman answered with hesitation.

"My name is Mara Cheney; everyone calls me Mara. Did you have a nice trip here with Nisoth?"

"I--Yes, it was pleasant, but my head, it always felt funny when I was with him."

Mara smiled. The physical gesture was lost on Tatada-go, who was not used to the facial expressions of humans, but Mara projected a smile with her mind as well and the meaning penetrated. "Things will feel that way from now on. What seems funny at first will soon feel perfectly normal, and then you won't even want to do without it. Did Nisoth explain anything to you?"

"He said I was reading other people, their minds," Tatada-go said, and the confusion returned. Instinctively she believed that, but the common sense part of her mind didn't want to accept such a thing.

"That's true. There are a very small number of people who can sense the thoughts of others, and you're one of them. You've had the power since you left childhood, haven't you?"

"I don't know. I think so. That is, I could always tell, me myself, when someone, he was lying or if he was angry or happy even when he himself pretended he wasn't. Sometimes I could see things that I knew weren't coming through them, my eyes. I don't like to be around a lot of people, it makes it hard for me, myself, to think. There's such confusion in the air."

"And no one believed you when you told them about it, so you learned to keep quiet, right?" When Tatada-go reluctantly agreed, Mara went on, "That's the way it always is. When people don't recognize telepathy for what it is they'll think it's crazy. If you're trying to stay normal, you ignore the feelings as much as possible. There are probably people who've lost the talent completely because of that. Once we start really looking I'll bet we find some of our strongest telepaths in mental hospitals. It's such a terrible waste...."

She broke off sharply and looked straight into Tatada-go's eyes. "But that's not your problem now. Has the situation gotten worse recently? Have you had bad headaches?"

" Yes."

"And sexual urges?"

Since the Dur-ill culture put no negative connotations to sex, Tatada-go was not the least bit embarrassed to discuss the subject. "Yes, very strong, almost continual. Sometimes almost uncontrollable."

"How much did Nisoth explain about what we're doing here?"

"He said you call this condition 'telepause,' and that it happens to all people who themselves can read minds. He said you could help me. Please, can you make it, this feeling, go away?"

Mara turned slightly. She would not look Tatada-go in the eyes, even though she knew the woman could read the truth in her thoughts; even untrained, the Dur-ill would see what Mara was thinking, especially with her sensitivity heightened by the telepause.

"There is no cure," Mara said slowly, "but we can help to make it bearable until the changeover."

"Changeover?" Tatada-go gave the tiny head shrug that indicated puzzlement in a Dur-ill.

"Let me start the story at the beginning. About fifty years ago the humans' home planet, called Earth, discovered there were people who can read minds. They kept that secret because not all human worlds get along with one another, just like so many of the Dur-ill worlds fought after the break-up of the Empire despite the rulings of the Synodic Council. In order to stay ahead of its enemies, the government of Earth wanted to know what the governments of other worlds were planning, so it trained its telepaths to use their abilities, then sent them out to spy on the other worlds. A spy who can read minds is a great advantage."

"I can understand that," Tatada-go agreed.

"Even the best telepaths had trouble with mindreading. All they could get were strong emotions, pictures that were near the surface of someone's thoughts, a word here or there--but it still put them ahead of everyone else. The telepathic spies were very important.

"Unfortunately, the spymasters of Earth learned there was such a thing as telepause. It only happened to the best telepaths--the ones who weren't very good never got it. Humans seem to get it in their middle to late thirties; in Dur-ill, it comes a little later. Dr. daPaz, who explained a little bit of this to my father, thought it might come from hormonal changes in the body. We don't really know much about it, but we know what it does.

"The trained telepaths had to take a drug to drown out the background noise of everyday thoughts around them, so they could concentrate on reading only the minds they wanted to read. But telepause makes a person so sensitive the drug doesn't work any more. That's what's causing your headaches--all the thoughts coming in, day and night, from people around you, and you can't shut them out. We try to separate the telepausal people here at the farm as much as possible so they don't have to feel as many incoming thoughts as they'd normally get."

"What about the sexual desire?" Tatada-go asked.

"Again, that's a hormone change--and there's a very good reason for it. I'll get to that in a moment, but let me continue my story.

"Because of the headaches and the increased sex drive, the spies with telepause became very unreliable--at least in the opinion of their bosses. The government of Earth was very strict--if a tool no longer served its purpose, they got rid of it. As soon as the government learned a spy had telepause, they killed him--although they kept that secret, because they didn't want the normal telepaths to get scared and run away.

"My father, Alain Cheney, was one of these telepathic spies for Earth about twenty years ago. He was just on the verge of telepause when Dr. daPaz warned him about it. That was a very brave thing to do; daPaz ended up being killed because of it, but he did manage to warn my father.

"Earth didn't want my father to get away and let the other planets know about the secret of telepathy, so they tracked him down. While he was running from them he met my mother, Laya Mendes. My mother was another telepath, but she grew up on the planet Leone where they didn't know about telepathy, so she never got any training. She and my father fell in love, and they finally managed to escape from Earth's agents by coming here. This was just at the start of the contact between humans and Dur-ill, so there wasn't much chance of anyone from Earth following them here.

"They were in pretty wretched shape when they got here--they didn't speak Illnik and they were hated aliens, but here on Iwagen that didn't matter as much as it might have somewhere else. The planet is so backward and unpopulated that people tolerate anything as long as it leaves them alone. Because they were telepaths, my parents could understand what people meant when they were spoken to, and they managed to get by with signs and gestures until they learned Illnik. They started the farm here and lived quietly out of everyone's way, and no one bothered us.

"My father's telepause got worse and worse. He only lived about four years after coming here, and during the last year he was almost totally bedridden. I never really knew him. I was only a baby when he died--or at least, when his body died. That's the strange thing. Death by telepause is not an end, it's just a changeover. By that time, my brother Richard was about three years old, and all my father's mind and memories were transferred over to him."

Mara paused to let Tatada-go absorb this fact. After some thought, the Dur-ill woman asked, "Is this like reincarnation? I've heard of some religions--"

Mara shook her head. "Not as far as we can tell. If there's anything like a 'soul' that lives on after the death of the body, we don't know about it. All that transfers is the pattern of thoughts and memories."

Tatada-go looked confused. "I don't understand. What's the difference?"

Mara was used to this reaction, and she sighed patiently. "Look at it this way. Even as an untrained telepath, you can tell something of what's going through my mind, right?"

"I myself see dim visual images, occasional flashes. It's funny when you're looking at me to see me, myself, talking to myself--a sort of double vision."

"Exactly. As a trained telepath, I can help you by putting images into your mind even more clearly. Like this." Mara visualized the common room in the big house-tree, projecting the image directly into the other woman's receptive mind.

Tatada-go rocked back on the bed, unaccustomed to such a strong invasion of her thoughts. Her mind understood what was happening, but it still took her several seconds to accept it. "I ... I see. That's a very powerful experience."

"What I gave you was a mild tap compared to the real transfer. In my father's case, all his memories and all the ways he used to think were transferred completely at the instant of his death into Richard's mind. It was a hard thing for a three-year-old boy to take in; I'm told Richard was in shock for a couple of weeks before he finally adjusted. It was a big surprise to everyone; neither my father nor my mother knew it was going to happen. But my mother knew instantly that some part of my father was still around, even though his body was dead; she could still read the thoughts and the memories. It just took a while to sort out what happened."

Mara paused again. "Last year, when my mother died, the same thing happened--all her thoughts and memories came into my mind. I was ready for it and I was older than Richard was when it happened to him, so it was a lot easier for me. Now it's like having my mother around all the time in the back of my mind, remembering things, teaching me new things. But I'm still me, I'm not just a copy of her. I can do things she wouldn't do, I can ignore things she tells me. It's like she's always there to advise me, but I don't have to listen. So it's not like she's really dead, after all."

Mara could see the idea spurt suddenly into Tatada-go's mind. "Then that's what the sex drive is for," the Dur-ill woman said, "to make sure you have children to pass on your mind to."

"That's what we think," Mara said. "There's so much we don't know about all this. Richard and I are the children of two telepaths, and we inherited a double set of genes; we don't know if that makes us more receptive to the transfer or not. We happen to be the children of Alain and Laya, but we don't know if that's necessary for the transfer to work. We do have much greater powers than our parents did. We can detect thoughts more clearly, at a much greater range, and we can shut out the background noise without using drugs. We can even do other things--watch."

A small metal cup was resting on a table a few meters away. Without apparent effort, Mara caused it to rise into the air and float gently into her hand. Tatada-go was suitably impressed.

"It's called telekinesis, moving objects with just the power of your mind. There are limits, of course," Mara said, reading the unasked questions in the other's mind. "It takes energy to do anything, and the heavier an object is the more effort it takes to move it, just like it would be by hand. You could throw a pebble quite a long distance, but you couldn't throw a heavy rock nearly as far and you probably couldn't even budge a boulder. It's the same thing with telekinesis. It all depends on the weight of the object, how far away it is, and how far you're trying to move it."

"What about you yourself? Can you jump from place to place by thinking?"

"You mean teleport?" Mara nodded slowly. "Yes--but I weigh about forty-eight kilos. Just like with anything else, I can't move something that heavy very far, and it's very tiring." She smiled again. "Mostly I walk, just like everyone else."

Tatada-go sat for a few moments digesting all this strange new information. Mara could see a thousand questions forming and swirling in bright patterns through her mind. "So what happens to me, myself, now?" the Dur-ill woman finally asked.

"Richard and I formed this commune to help all telepaths take the next step in our development. Telepause was hard on Alain and Laya. We want to make it easier for those who follow. Perhaps someday we'll build a new race of telepaths.

"We've still got a lot of questions to answer. After telepause does a telepath's mind transfer only to a second-generation telepath, or can it be transferred to a first-generation telepath as well? Does the transfer have to be between parent and child, or can it be between unrelated telepaths? Can a male mind be transferred into a new female body, and female into male? Can a human mind be transferred into a Dur-ill body? Can a single body accept more than one transfer? So far there've been only two transfers--Alain into Richard and Laya into me; there's still so much we don't know, and we're still in the long, slow process of finding out.

"That's why we asked you to come here, and that's why we need your help. This farm is run for the good of all the telepaths; with our minds linked together, we share almost everything. If you can help out with work around the farm, we'll be happy to accept you. If the telepause is hurting you too badly, we'll take care of you and you won't have to work at all. If you want sex you'll find plenty of willing partners, but no one will force himself on you. You're--"

I'm back.

That single thought touched her mind at the very limits of perception, but Mara knew immediately what it meant. The thought came from Richard. He had returned from his offworld quest and was riding an aircar toward the farm. It would be some minutes before he was physically present, but his mind came bounding ahead like an eager puppy scenting home.

Part of her own mind stretched out to embrace his, relief and happiness mingled in equal proportions. Another part of her mind was spreading the news along the network; the other telepaths on the farm, all first-generation, were not as sensitive as she was and would not have picked up the faint traces of Richard's thought patterns yet.

Tatada-go could sense that something was happening and sent Mara a quizzical thought. Mara remembered she still had a duty to perform here, and tried to restrain her excitement.

"I just picked up some thoughts from my brother," she explained. "He left Iwagen about a month ago to raise some money for our project. We've never been separated that long before. I'm glad to have him back."

"I can tell," Tatada-go said. "The feelings, they are so strong even I myself can read them."

"I'll want to go greet him," Mara said. "But as I was saying, you're always free to leave here if you like. We want to help, but we don't want you thinking of this farm as a prison."

"Everything here, it has been friendly enough so far," Tatada-go said. "And if what you say is true--and I can see enough of your thoughts to believe it is--then this farm, it is the best place for me to be."

"We hope you'll always think so."

Tatada-go could sense Mara's impatience and responded with a gentle, "Go to him. I'll be all right for a while myself."

Mara beamed a thank-you, turned, and walked out of the ward. Her thoughts were more and more distracted as Richard approached the farm. She could feel him coming rapidly; he must have rented--or bought--his aircar, judging from the speed. That was a luxury on Iwagen, where large areas of the planet were still at a primitive technological level--but Mara could tell from the texture of his thoughts that he had missed her as much as she'd missed him.

She tried to control herself and remain dignified, but her steps quickened the stronger her brother's thoughts became. As his aircar began kicking clouds of dust up over the nearby hills, she abandoned decorum altogether and ran full speed toward the approaching vehicle.

The car topped the near rise and veered toward her, cutting carelessly across the fields of newly-planted thistlefruits. It screeched to a stop as she reached it, and Richard jumped out of the driver's seat. Mara threw herself into his arms, tears of joy streaking her cheeks. There were no sounds uttered, but the interchange of thoughts was warm and rich.

For a while, then, all nightmares and problems evaporated. Richard was home again and, for Mara, that was enough.

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