Stewards of the Flame (59 page)

Was he with you, too?

Not literally, not as a ghost. Departed spirits, if they exist, surely wouldn’t stick around one small planet when there’s a whole universe accessible! The notion that they would is the flaw in legends of ghosts on Earth.

How did we see him, then? It was more than remembering.

Everyone’s unconscious mind contains some image, some concrete symbol, that emerges as a source of deep wisdom—wisdom that comes from beyond the limits set by space or time. In my mind, and I think in yours, it takes Ian’s form.

And from now on I’ll trust it, Jesse thought. “Whatever doubts I may have had about the validity of what we’re doing, they’re gone,” he told Carla. “Before tonight I wanted a new colony; I knew we had to escape from Undine. But for us to give up all the concrete benefits of civilization, for ourselves and for generations to come—I was willing, yet I didn’t see what more than freedom we stand to gain. Now—”

“There’s so much, so much beyond what most of us guessed, that we have to learn,” she agreed. “Telepathy over all those miles . . . and if that’s possible, there must be other powers we’ve only begun to control. If our kids grow up in a world that fosters such powers, who knows what they’ll be able to do?”

We’re just beginning,
came Peter’s wordless thought.
And you, Jesse—you are the proof Ian and I always hoped for. If you, an outsider without natural paranormal gifts, have begun to tap these powers, then someday they can be attained by many . . . by our children and by the whole culture we establish. . . .
He drifted off into unconsciousness, letting go of all worry about the coming day.

With Carla’s hand warm in his, Jesse gazed up into star-studded darkness. “My sister and her friends had it wrong,” he mused. “They were always talking about some mythical past age, Atlantis or something, claiming civilization had fallen instead of risen. That was what I never could buy. Human abilities grow, they don’t decline. I couldn’t see why if the paranormal was real, they’d be looking back instead of ahead.”

“Well, that’s a universal attitude,” Carla said, “expressed in the Garden of Eden myth, too. People have always sensed the existence of advanced human abilities, and a few have even gained paranormal ones. But they’re frightening, as you know, and to think of their use as uncharted territory is even more scary than to imagine that something lost is merely being regained. A metaphorical tie with the past is comforting.”

“She—my sister—claimed to
remember
,” Jesse recalled. “She said she could remember past lives. Of course I thought that was crazy. But could the so-called memories really have come from her unconscious mind, like Ian’s precognition in reverse, maybe?”

“Probably. That’s one of the mysteries for which we don’t have a full answer. We don’t favor the reincarnation idea, at least not in the sense of returning to Earth, because as Peter just told you, it’s unbelievable that if souls survive death they’re tied to one particular planet. I mean, if you died, Jesse, would you be reincarnated on Earth where you were born, or on Undine, or Maclairn—or somewhere else you’ve never been in this life?”

“Wherever you were, I hope. But otherwise, I’d prefer someplace new.”

“Exactly. What are the odds that a person would have successive lives in the same or related societies—especially if there are nonhuman civilizations in solar systems we haven’t discovered? To say biological form determines spiritual destiny is a contradiction in terms. Yet people like your sister do sometimes have knowledge of the past that they couldn’t have gotten through normal channels. We suspect it’s unconscious telepathy, like so much else that orthodox science can’t explain. It would have to be some kind of ESP anyway, after all, since transmission of such data obviously isn’t physical. And psi communication across time with your former self is a lot less likely than contact with another person.”

“But why does it seem like memory if it happened to someone else?” Jesse wondered.

“Lots of things are interpreted by the conscious mind as memory, even childhood events that never happened at all—ask Peter sometime. He encounters that often with his patients. And on Earth in different eras, it’s been common to remember talking with the gods or being abducted by aliens. Those aren’t mere imaginings, they’re metaphors from the collective unconscious. The human mind actually perceives them as memory; the brain hasn’t any other way of processing them.”

“Greg once told me that the collective unconscious doesn’t extend from world to world. That the metaphors meaningful on Earth don’t emerge here. Does that mean nobody born in this colony has such memories?”

“Not of past lives. That in itself is evidence against a simplistic form of reincarnation, because we in the Group do experiment with the kinds of altered states in which people on Earth perceive them.” Carla hesitated. “We have other metaphorical perceptions, but maybe this isn’t the time for me to describe them to you.”

No, it certainly wasn’t, Jesse thought. He still was uneasy about altered states unlike those he’d been taught to deal with, and Carla knew it. “Metaphorical perceptions” was, he suspected, a euphemism for “hallucinations.” He was aware that much that went on in the Group had been kept from him. In the years ahead on the new world he would have to face up to whatever he’d been deemed unready for; but right now, getting there—managing as Captain to get everyone there—was more than enough to worry about.

Still . . . he had seen Ian tonight, and it had seemed as real as if Ian were actually present. And if that hadn’t happened, he might not have come to the Island. . . .

The stars dissolved into the dark and for an hour or two, Jesse slept. When he woke the moon was near the horizon. His wound fully healed, he took the bloodstained cloth containing the microchip to the Lodge ruins and threw it into the deepest hole he could see. Tomorrow the Meds would search for his body, but by then it wouldn’t matter that they’d fail to find it.

With Carla’s help he got Peter into the copilot’s seat, where he could keep an eye on his condition during flight. Carla, after helping to untie the mooring lines, squeezed into one of the back seats among the boxes. Without further discussion, Jesse powered up the plane and taxied out into the bay for takeoff. His last sight of the place showed him the blue seaplane that was his no longer, floating calmly in the moonlight; at least he would be spared the ordeal of crumpling its floats in a crash landing. As they rose above the Island, he did not look back.

After moonset, he flew on in the dark, on autopilot in both the literal and the figurative sense. He was past the point of decision, now. What was coming would come. He felt good about it.

It was dawn by the time they reached the city. As he flew over the shoreline, he could see that there was indeed an ambulance parked at the pier near which Peter’s plane was normally moored. The men standing next to it looked up, staring, as the plane headed inland. “Carla, check the park and the road past it!” Jesse said. “Make sure nobody’s still there.” Within moments he was over the park, and she reported that it was deserted. Everyone who belonged at the spaceport must have reached it by now.

His first approach was too high. At the last moment he pulled up to go around again, and Peter was jolted into sudden awareness. The drug was wearing off. “Where are we?” he asked groggily, and then, seeing the ground beyond the window, he yelled. “God, Jesse! We’re too low! We’re over land!”

“I know,” Jesse said. “Close your eyes, Peter. Pretend you’re still dreaming.”
And for God’s sake don’t touch the controls!
he added silently.

The ground rushed up to meet them. Perhaps, Jesse thought, it was just as well that he’d never landed a lightplane with wheels—he wouldn’t miss the feel of a runway under them. He hauled back on the yoke, raising the nose just in time. The plane hit the concrete hard, bounced, and then sank with a loud crunch as its floats folded beneath it. But it was intact. Its passengers and cargo were intact. And they were now forever free of the Meds’ authority.

~
 
64
 
~

Many shuttle trips were needed to get more than three hundred passengers aboard the starship. Jesse, as the only one among them who had previously experienced the effects of liftoff and of weightlessness, had told those he’d personally talked to what to expect, and the word had been passed around. Spacesickness was not a problem since all members of the Group knew how to control physical reactions. The Fleet officers in charge of boarding were a bit surprised that the preventative shots offered were uniformly turned down, and even more surprised that there proved to be no need for sick bags. Everyone was in an exuberant mood. Even Peter, who rested for a while under Kira’s healing care while his head cleared and therefore waited for the last departure, was fully enough recovered to enjoy the flight.

Jesse went aloft in the first shuttle to lift after his arrival at the spaceport, wanting as much time as possible to inspect the starship.
Mayflower XI
normally carried more passengers than it now held, so the quarters into which the Group settled were not cramped. He and Carla chose a cabin large enough to accommodate staff meetings after he became Captain. The dining hall would be a tight fit, since the ship’s original design had assumed passengers would eat in shifts during the relatively short time they weren’t in stasis, but the committee decided that the advantages of community gatherings would be worth some crowding during meals.

The crew’s mess was separate, and had its own galley—unlike the officers of liners, those of colonizers did not socialize with passengers at dinner. Thus Jesse knew that once the ship left orbit, the entire crew, except for the watch officer on the bridge, would be together in one place at mealtime. It was not a large crew. The operation of the starship was fully automated; the crew, apart from the Captain and medical officer, had little to do except in emergencies. The main difference between a freighter and a passenger ship was redundancy for extra safety.

Of course, had this been a large colonizer officially intended to establish the first colony on an unopened world, there would have been staff officers trained in the skills needed for such an undertaking. The ship would have remained in orbit while they assisted the colonists in the building of their settlement. But
Mayflower XI
had been chartered merely to provide transportation to the existing colony on Liberty. The trip was, from the crew’s standpoint, a mere milk run.

Jesse became familiar with the ship’s layout by introducing himself as a retired Captain to the first officer he encountered. A message soon came from Captain Quinn, saying that he would be pleased to personally escort Captain Sanders on a courtesy tour of the sections normally off-limits to passengers. Jesse accepted thankfully, feeling a good deal of chagrin over the fact that he was about to betray the man’s hospitality. Quinn was friendly; before long Jesse realized that he was as bored with routine trips as he himself had been, and was happy at the prospect of having someone new to talk to along on this one.

After visiting the various work areas of the ship, they paused before a sealed hatch. “What’s in there?” Jesse asked.

“A relic of the past,” Quinn replied. “That’s the companionway to the stasis deck left over from when this ship was young, before the hyperdrive was installed. It was incredible what colonists were willing to undergo in those days—think of the courage it must have taken to climb into those boxes and be rendered unconscious, with no guarantee that they’d ever wake up. We don’t give our predecessors enough credit. It’s too bad that Fleet has so little regard for historical preservation. The ship’s to be decommissioned after this run, and I don’t suppose they’ll save it as a museum even though it’s the last one in existence.”

Jesse nodded, but did not comment. “The units are still in prime condition,” Quinn went on. “The AI has maintained them automatically. Do you want to look them over?”

“Well,” said Jesse, “I saw some years ago in training, and I’ve seen similar units on Undine.”

“Oh, yes,” Quinn reflected. “I’ve heard they preserve dead bodies in stasis there, that the population views it as immortality. If so, I’m surprised that your people are willing to give it up.”

“We’re eager to leave stasis behind us,” Jesse replied. “It’s more or less the root of our disagreement with Undine’s government—we don’t think of immortality that way.”

“That’s understandable. I can see how it might lead to religious objections. You’ll be better off on Liberty. They’re tolerant even of oddball religions there. That is—I didn’t mean—” Quinn reddened visibly. Jesse sympathized with him; it was evident that he was wondering how a former Fleet officer happened to have hooked up with a local cult called Stewards of the Flame that was emigrating to escape religious persecution. Deciding this wasn’t a safe line of speculation, he moved on past the entrance to the stasis deck and hurried to change the subject.

“I’d like to see the bridge,” he said. “That is, when we’ve left orbit and you have time on your hands before the jump. Incidentally, when is the jump scheduled?”

“Midnight, local time, which is what we’ll be running on as long as we’re in normal space. You’ll be welcome on the bridge anytime after we break orbit. I’ll send an aide to escort you—would you like to eat dinner with us? My crew and I would enjoy hearing about your travels.”

Jesse agreed, inwardly dismayed at the shortness of the time between dinner and midnight. Quinn had evidently calculated the planned jump ahead of time and was allowing barely more than the minimum safe distance from the planet before going into hyperdrive. So they’d get just one chance to overpower the crew. What was worse, they wouldn’t be as far from Undine as he had hoped when they sent the Fleet officers back in the shuttle. It would be dangerous to keep them onboard after the takeover—he was counting on the shock factor to make them leave. Yet he would have only a few hours to study the charts and plot a new course before they’d be back in the armed freighter.