The Lost Perception (10 page)
Karen Rakaar reached under the quilt on the couch and retrieved a small box almost identical to the one Radcliff had called a suppressor. The only difference was that this one had a recessed green bulb instead of a red one above the knurled knob.
She placed it on the table.
“Is that the thing that…” He grimaced and passed a hand over his still feverish brow.
“… that brought back the Screamies in all their fury?” She laughed, but without derision.
“Yes. Radcliff has already introduced you to a rault suppressor. This is a rault caster.”
She came over and stood behind him and engulfed bun with a fragrance that was provocatively feminine as her slender fingers massaged his temples, soothing away the pain.
“Rault?” he repeated.
“Rault, in its natural form,” she said, “is the hyperradiance that causes the Screamies. A rault caster is an instrument for generating that radiance artificially, just as a suppressor is one for canceling it out.”
Her voice was soothing, like the rustle of soft velvet—silken, but coarse enough to suggest the capacity for deep feeling.
“The caster and suppressor—they are Valorian devices?” he asked.
They are adapted from Valorian technology.”
“What do the aliens use them for?”
“The casters? Just as we would a flashlight—to see better in the dark. The suppressors? To cancel out the rault when they do not wish other rault-sensitive persons to zylph what is happening. In general, they use both instruments to confuse and terrify us.”
Gregson remembered the Valorian he had chased in Manhattan. The alien had at first blundered into everything in his path. Then he had demonstrated superhuman coordination in his flight while three persons had gone Screamie in his wake and Gregson, himself, had suffered a seizure. A hyperperceptive who had turned on a rault caster in midflight, the better to zylph his way to safety?
Zylph?
But, of course—that was the word the Valorian had used at the hunting lodge just before the Guardsmen had beamed him. And, Gregson remembered too, it was also the word he had once seemed to hear bis brother shouting during an imagined empathic contact across billions of miles of space. Did that mean Manuel was still alive somewhere—perhaps a prisoner of the aliens?
“Then the Valorians are hypersensitive too?” he asked.
“Most hypersensitive.”
“Why has the bureau hidden the facts of a sixth sense?”
She stood before him and offered a benign smile. “Really, Greg—that’s what everybody calls you, I’m told—really, you ask so many difficult questions. I’m afraid Madame Carnot has complicated things by prematurely introducing you to these concepts. You will learn the answers to all the questions you can possibly conceive—but in due time. That is why you were ordered to Versailles, you know.”
“But the bureau has known…”
“… for several months now of the true nature of the Screamies,” she completed his sentence. “Yet they’ve concealed it. The fact is, as I’ve just said, we aren’t equipped to become rault-sensitive. Some people may argue that perhaps we are and…”
“/ am.
Carnot
is. And
you
must be.” He rose from the chair.
“True. But each one of us who has learned to handle hyperperception represents a thousand persons who died screaming. Too severe a price to pay for a sixth sense, isn’t it?”
Her features were suddenly tense with compassion. “No, it’s better that the hyperradiance—the rault—be canceled out by the bureau’s super suppressor.”
Yet, Gregson could not understand the bureau’s indirection. Why couldn’t Radcliff have told him all these things? Why had there been duplicity?
Carnot stirred, coughed feebly and went back to sleep.
Smiling, Karen gestured toward the old woman. “I suppose she even told you she was the most powerful person in the world. Well, she is. Using her hyperperception, she has guided the bureau’s fight against the Valorians for years now.”
She trapped his arm intimately and they started for the elevator. “If you’ll just place yourself in my hands,” she said, “I’ll set the proper pace of indoctrination. We can’t go too fast, you know. There’s still the danger of pushing you too rapidly—and throwing you back into the Screamies. I wouldn’t want
that
to happen.”
She squeezed his arm tightly against her and beamed up at him until he could feel the warmth of her nearness.
“What will
I
do at Versailles?” he asked.
“Work. Plenty of that. And you will meet others who are hypersensitive, like ourselves. You will all be trained to cope with the sixth sense so that we may continue to be the equal of any Valorian we meet. And so that we will be better equipped to set up the super suppressor on Vega Jumpoff Station,” she added with a smile.
As they waited for the elevator, she added, “But there will be opportunity for fun too. We shall see to that,” she promised, firming her grip on his arm.
Andelia shifted in her pod until she settled into launch attitude. But she stayed her finger on the disanimation switch.
How could she be certain everything was just right in all this insufferable stygumness—and optical darkness too? She forced her glial receptors to full sensitivity, but zylphed practically nothing. For, here on the fringe of the Stygumbra, it was like being in an oppressive fog while the launcher bore her toward the ejection coordinates.
But there was enough rault seeping through to permit token contact with other members of this new expedition—still huddled apprehensively in their cocoons. She could also zylph the automatic circuits engaged in computation of pod trajectories.
Andelia thought of the
Starfarer,
at anchor outside the cone of raultlessness and directing this complex operation. Indeed, it was a miracle of technological improvisation, with raultronic instruments useless for maintaining remote control over the crewless ejector.
Abruptly, subtle vibration betokened discharge of the first pod. And she tensed in anticipation of sudden, new velocity. A second before ejection, however, as she zylphed the spattering impact of hard and soft radiation against the hull, she sensed the artificially ordered probing impulses—radar. The savages below had detected the pod-dropping operation!
In the next instant Andelia’s cocoon shot from the tube, and she threw the switch that would bring on her disanimation.
The formal gardens at Versailles were particularly beautiful in the summer of 1999.
Terraced beds of blossoms and symmetrical hedging swept gracefully toward the Grand Canal. Effulgent sunlight silvered flowering pools and tinted the deep verdure of the chestnut groves.
Engrossed in the view from the palace window, Gregson started when Juan Alvarez rapped for attention. “So, Mr. Gregson,” the lecturer challenged, “receptivity of the glial cells is a matter of—what?”
Gregson made a stab at the answer. “Endocrinal balance?”
“Precisely,” acknowledged the small, unimposing Latin.
Glial cells,
Gregson repeated the words meaningfully to himself, remembering that a research technician in Rome’s Central Isolation Institute had guessed there was a relationship between the Screamies and those cells two years ago. Had the bureau known, almost as far back as then, what the glial cells really were?
Alvarez had paused and was now staring severely out over his class. “Miss O’Rourke, you aren’t trying to zylph, are you?”
An attractive young blond, seated next to Gregson, drew attentively erect and her eyes, blue and surprised, sprang open.
“This, Miss O’Rourke, happens to be a rault suppressor,” the instructor said, displaying the instrument with its glowing red bulb. “While it is in operation there can be no zylphing, which allows me to retain your undivided attention.”
Since most of the class spoke English, only a few translingual horns swung in Sharon O’Rourke’s direction. But she only smiled at Gregson, soliciting his sympathy. Embarrassed, he let his gaze wander off to the elaborately carved ceiling.
“We shall proceed then,” Alvarez resumed.
An elderly man in the front row held up his hand.
“Yes, Mr. Simmons?”
The only other American in the group, Simmons rose hesitatingly. “Where does rault come from? I mean natural rault—not the stuff put out by our casters.”
Alvarez folded his arms. “Since so many of you have asked that question, I believe we are ready for the answer.” He retrieved his rault suppressor and twisted the dial to zero.
“Now if you will open your glial cells to zylphing, I shall give you—Chandeen.”
After a while he coaxed, “Slowly—deliberately. Imagine you are simply lifting inner eyelids. There, now—everybody zylphing?”
It was a moment before Gregson could reestablish trans-sensitivity. And, when he finally managed to open his receptors, he was disoriented. For none of the rault-borne impressions of which he had become hypervisually aware could be associated with any of the things about him. Instead, it was as though he could
feel
a surge of ultraradiant energy exciting submicroscopic units into frenzied activity—until they split and rejoined and split again.
Then he recognized the fascinating molecular phenomenon in which his errant attention had been trapped. And he could only marvel at the chemical Tightness of photosynthesis as he zylphed it in progress in one of the leaves in the garden.
Gregson expanded his range of perception until he sensed in their entirety and as a harmonious whole the palace and all of its gardens and fountains. Finally he managed to focus his awareness within the classroom—on the transsensory impressions he was receiving of the lecturer Alvarez, the Irish girl Sharon O’Rourke, the American named Simmons.
Neither controlling his coordination nor identifying the component impressions had been easy. But then, he asked himself, didn’t an infant require months to master
optical
coordination?
“I direct your attention to Chandeen,” said Alvarez. “Just imagine you are zylphing deep into space—beyond the nearby stars—over your left shoulder, approximately.”
Gregson’s hyperperspective changed even as the instructor spoke. And now he was sensing the great, warm stars in their wheeling course around the center of the Galaxy, the nebulous wisps, the huge expanses of empty space. Then he zylphed Chandeen—majestic and shimmering in preternatural radiance as it sent out its flood of rault to embrace the billions of stars revolving in the galactic concourse.
“It’s beautiful!” Sharon exclaimed. And Gregson could almost feel her straining emotionally toward the magnificent wellspring of rault.
“Chandeen,” said Alvarez softly, “may well be likened to the sun. For the rault it showers upon the Galaxy is the medium which makes zylphing possible. By permeating all physical things, this hyperradiance joins each zylpher in an empathy of total relationship with the microcosm and macrocosm alike.”
Enthralled, Gregson continued to bask in the splendor of Chandeen, drinking in its shimmering deluge of rault—until he heard Alvarez say impatiently, “Yes, Miss Rakaar?”
Withdrawing from transsensitivity, Gregson saw Karen standing in the doorway. Hair drawn tightly back from her forehead and gathered into a streamer in the rear, she appeared lithe and sleek in synthetic stretch coveralls that illuminated her figure in sheening highlights.
She located Gregson, smiled, then went over to talk with Alvarez. Registering resignation, the instructor said, “Mr. Gregson will be excused.”
Twenty-one other pairs of eyes followed him toward the door—all ex-Screamers who, like himself, had been recruited by the bureau to help rid Earth of what was almost universally believed to be a plague. But only he was receiving special treatment. And the others resented that. He could sense it—almost hyperperceptively. And not the least fretful was the Irish girl Sharon. But, at the moment, her petulance appeared to be directed mainly at Karen.
Outside, his special tutor led him by the hand to a bench in the terraced garden and they sat before a spraying fountain amid the preserved horticultural elegance of Louis XIV’s France.
“That little Irish wench!” Karen exclaimed, only half smiling. “‘I wasn’t really trying to zylph, Greg. I was just sitting here thinking of you.’”
“Sharon didn’t say anything like that,” he protested good-naturedly.
“No, but she
thought
it!”
It wasn’t always easy to tell whether Karen was being coy or merely jestful. It would help considerably, he told himself, if he could acquire the faculty of zylphing thoughts.
“But it would put
me
at a disadvantage.” She laughed. “I prefer it this way. Did I zylph your reluctance to leave the lecture?”
“Alvarez was leading up to the Stygum Field.”
“But I’ve already told you about that.”
“I still don’t understand it.”
She took his hands between hers. “This helps concentration. First, we must zylph—on a cosmic level. Ready?”
He closed his eyes and glial receptivity came even more quickly this time. Once again he was sensing the scintillating, wheeling majesty of the Milky Way in its entirety. It was as though he could perceive each of its billions of stars, feel the warm and vibrant clusters, hear the gentle susurrations of fluorescing nebulae.
His attention wandered to the terrestrial level and, at once, he shared a unity of comprehension with Earth’s seething molten core, its restless, churning magma, the intricate pattern of gravitational and magnetic force lines that it wore like a mantle. These impressions were easy to recognize because they were ponderous concepts that forced their identities on him.
“So you get an ‘A’ for recognition,” Karen quipped. “Shall we return to Chandeen?”
Still clasping both his hands, she brought them against her bosom and he found it somewhat more difficult to concentrate.
But finally he recaptured his transsensory impression of the Galaxy, with Chandeen dominating its center like a fiercely lustrous jewel. Only, now he sensed the presence of an enormous, impenetrable shadow that held a conical wedge of the Milky Way in its grip, obscuring stars and clusters and nebulae alike. At the very edge of that malignant veil he could perceive Earth swimming through desolate, rault-starved space.
Karen elevated her voice to a thinner register, mimicking Alvarez. “You have succeeded in perceiving the Stygumbra, if I may be so bold as to borrow from the Valorian vocabulary. The Stygumbra is projected by the Stygum Field of hyperforce which revolves imperceptibly about Chandeen and has eclipsed Earth from all rault for the past fifty thousand years. But we are now drifting out of the Stygumbra—into millions of years of rault-filled space.”
So valid was her impersonation of the Latin instructor, that they both laughed, breaking the spell of zylphing.
“And dormant glial cells,” he said, “are beginning to respond to rault seeping through the fringe of the Stygum Field.”
“Exactly,” she said, in her own soft voice. “The more sensitive persons respond first, of course—by going Screamie.”
“How long before we’ll be completely out of the shadow?”
“Very shortly now. Then almost everyone will be responding to rault stimulation. But if we can complete our suppressor on Vega Jumpoff, we’ll cancel out all the hyperradiation.”
“Couldn’t we tell people what’s going on? Can’t we take the edge off then—fright by letting them know hyperperception is involved?”
“Not any more than you could prevent combat neurosis by telling a soldier he shouldn’t be afraid of the battlefield.”
They had long since quit zylphing. But still the Dutch girl hadn’t allowed them to stir from the “attitude for concentration” which she had imposed. They sat facing each other, only their clasped hands separating them. And, in speaking, her lips had been close to his ear and her satiny cheek had occasionally brushed his.
Finally he found himself staring into the depths of her eyes. She moved even closer, the synthetic material of her stretch coveralls rustling in small whispers against his thigh.
Fascinated by her attractiveness, he started to kiss her. But suddenly he turned away.
She released his hands. “This Helen—is she beautiful?”
He started at her mention of Forsythe’s niece. But then he remembered how completely open his thoughts were to her glial receptors. “I was wondering why she hadn’t called.”
“But that’s as you arranged it. Didn’t she say two weeks ago that she wouldn’t disturb you unless something happened?”
None of this had he told Karen before—nor was he thinking of it now. And he could only marvel at a form of perception capable of drawing at will from the unconscious.
She rose, appearing not in the least dejected, and said, “Time for lunch. Then we shall have a laboratory session.”
Gregson’s laboratory period that afternoon was particularly taxing, dealing as it did with recognition of familiar objects and coordination. Even Karen’s jocular approach failed to lighten the difficult session as he spent several hours groping blindfolded among the tables, ornate chairs, statues and
objets d’art.
The exercise was designed to sharpen his hyperperception. Through his glial receptors, however, the articles he encountered were seldom what they seemed. Geometrical shapes that displayed symmetry or harmony of design testified to their Tightness of form and dominated his attention. On the other hand, the bronze casting of a dolphin, awkwardly done, seemed ashamed of its wrongness and shrank from his attempts to zylph its location.
He collected many a shin bruise on its account.
Long before the session was over, it occurred to him that a newborn uncertainty might be responsible for bis inability to concentrate, for he had come to recognize the nonessential nature of everything in which he was currently involved. Why all this indoctrination to rault sensitivity? Why must he learn to
use
the sixth sense?
So he would be better equipped to cope with hyperradiation aboard Vega Jumpoff Station, they had said—which wasn’t an altogether satisfactory answer. For if they had suppressors that could cancel out all rault, couldn’t they simply use them aboard VJO to shield the workers who were constructing the super suppressor? Why did they have to go to the trouble of teaching rault sensitivity if, in a few weeks, they were going to make it impossible for anyone to be rault sensitive?
After the session he sought out the solitude of one of the palace’s gardens and strolled pensively along paths bordered with precisely trimmed boxwood and flowering hedges.
At the far end of a statue-lined lane, two International Guardsmen approached each other stiffly, about-faced and marched off again. Even here, in the beauty and serenity of Versailles, security was necessary. The Screamies, as Karen had explained, were too severe a price to pay for the sixth sense. So the bureau had decreed the public shouldn’t even know that hyperperception was involved.
But how had the secret of transsensitivity been so successfully guarded? Hadn’t Forsythe, groping in his own blindness, figured out what the plague actually was? Shouldn’t others have made the same discovery? Yet, somehow, only those in the Security Bureau knew the true nature of the epidemic.