To Save a World (8 page)

David admired the way that without moving, without raising his voice, he gathered all their eyes to him. For the first time David thought, at the back of his mind, that perhaps being a developed telepath who could use all the latent powers of his own mind might not be such a bad thing.

Regis went on: "As most of you know, telepaths were once abundant on this planet. They are now growing scarce, and their old powers are to a large degree lost, bred out or diminished for lack of knowledge on how to use them. To some extent I know what I can do with my powers, such as they are. I don't know exactly what they are or how I use them. I gather most of you are in the same situation. Hence this project, which at the moment is only a small pilot project to find out what powers, exactly, each of us has; how we got them and why; exactly what they are good for; whether training plays any part in their development; and so forth. In short, to find out what telepaths are made of. But as to where we start—I have no idea. Each of us has some experience. Each one of you is welcome to contribute ideas and questions and we'll follow up as many of them as seem to have the slightest bearing on the case. Meanwhile—" and he made a courteous gesture, "please consider yourselves my guests, and if there is anything any of you require, you have only to ask."

"Then as the only nontelepath in the group," Jason Allison said, "I'm going to suggest that we start in a peculiarly Terran way. There is a lot of superstitious rubbish talked about psi powers. The first thing we Terrans usually do if we run across something we don't understand is to
measure
it. So, if all of you will cooperate, I am going to start—with David Hamilton's help—by giving each one of you a physical examination to see if you have any physical features in common. This will mean, among other things, a full reading of detectable brain electricity and radiation. After that I am going to try and measure your psi abilities, although I'm prepared to find out that we don't have the right measuring sticks. You can't measure anything until you develop the right scales. But maybe some of you can help me find a scale for measuring. David, suppose I start with you, and then you can help me with the others. The laboratories they've given us are just a few doors from here; I'm sorry to keep the rest of you waiting, but it won't be long."

As they went into a small examination room—it was marked
SPECIAL PROJECT
,
A
,
Allison
—David said to Jason, "What's the idea? You have Medical HQ records on me on the big computer, covering everything from measles vaccine at six months to the time I broke my little toe as a fourth year Medic student playing tennis; I know these kind of records followed me to Darkover! You need to examine me like you need two heads!"

"Guilty as charged," said Jason. He went to the desktop scanner and punched out David's name and Terran Empire contract number. "Did they tell you you're on salary to Empire Medic, by the way? No, I wanted to start with a chance to talk to you. I do want your EEG; the ones they take for Terran Medic are only checking for epilepsy or overt brain damage, and if you had any of those I'd know. I want readings from all of you—" he was moving around, attaching the narrow electrodes to David's skull as he spoke, "and later I'll want them while you people are trying out your telepathic talents, to see if there's a measurable energy discharge. But we can skip your heart and lungs and digestion for the moment. Here, lie back." He connected the machine. "Just breathe for a few minutes."

"The one I'm dying to get my hands on," he continued a few minutes later, removing the taped EEG record from the reader, "is the chieri."

"Are they human?"

"Nobody knows, even on Darkover. I doubt if any Terran has ever spoken to one. If they have, they aren't telling. Fortunately I have permission to keep this project entirely under wraps, or the Terran Medical HQ would be all over the poor creature, just out of simple curiosity, of course. A new specimen."

"I can see why. I admit I'm curious too." David did not say that his interest was not medical.

"I lived with nonhumans—the trailmen—for a few years when I was a kid," Jason said, "and worked with Terran Medical during a bad epidemic a few years ago." He sounded vaguely bitter. "Oh, the Terran HQ was very nice to the trailmen. Did everything they could to make them feel at home here, but still—specimens in a zoo. Maybe you have to be Darkovan and live with nonhuman races long enough to take them for granted, before you start thinking of them as
people
."

"Are there so many nonhuman races on Darkover?"

"At least four that I know about," said Jason, "and more that I don't, I'm sure."

David thought about that for a moment. He said, "Could that be why there are so many natural telepaths here? Telepathy might be the only way of really communicating with nonhuman races."

Jason said, vaguely startled, "That's a viewpoint that hadn't occurred to me. That's why I want to use all of you on this project. Nobody but a telepath would be likely to know—how did Regis put it?—what telepaths are made of. Well, shall we start on the physicals for the others?"

Much of the morning was routine work after that, a reassuringly humdrum beginning to a project David had feared would be terrifyingly outré. They discovered little that they did not already know, and that afternoon, during a brief break for meals, sat looking over the results. Routine physical examinations of Conner had disclosed abnormal EEG patterns akin to, but different from, those associated with hereditary migraine and some psychomotor epilepsy; David showed these also, although in a subclinical degree. So, to some small degree, did Rondo and Danilo. Confusingly, Regis Hastur did not, and they had not finished with Desideria or begun with Missy or Keral.

"I wonder if this is going to be the one common factor?" Jason asked.

"I doubt it, or why doesn't Regis have it? I gather he's something extraordinary in the way of telepaths," David said,
and extraordinary in every other way
, he thought.

"He certainly has extraordinary charm," Jason agreed, and David laughed aloud. They were already, it seemed to him, close friends. "Jason, do me a favor. Let me take a reading from you."

The older man looked at him in momentary surprise, then laughed and shrugged. "Suit yourself. Eventually I'm going to feed all these records through the big Medic computer and find out if there is
any
common factor—minor blood fraction, whatever?"

"I can give you two common factors right now," David said. "They
all
have gray or blue eyes—all the Darkovans, that is, and all the offworlders except Conner. And his obviously isn't hereditary, but—with that history—post-traumatic."

Jason was thinking that over. He said, "Years ago, a group of Terrans worked for a while with a group of the Comyn, investigating telepathy and matrix mechanics—you know what that is?"

"I've read about the Darkovan matrices—aren't they jewels which transform brain waves directly into energy without fission or fusion by-products?"

"That's right. The simpler ones can be used by anyone, even those with no telepathic talents. The more complex ones demand a high degree of telepathic talent to use them at all, which is why the trade in them died out; not enough telepaths around to handle them; and for obvious reasons, telepathy is dangerous to the ordinary politician. So there have been subtle pressures against any publicity about the Darkovan telepaths. But as I started to say, over the last hundred years there have been sporadic efforts to work with Darkovan telepaths. The Darkovans haven't usually wanted to cooperate, until now, when it may be too late. We found out one thing; at least on Darkover, telepathy is linked to red hair. If you see a red-headed Darkovan, he's a telepath."

"That would suggest that telepathy may be linked to the function of the adrenal glands," said David. "I can tell you another thing they all have in common. They're all ectomorphs."

"Ecto—come again?"

"Body types—ectomorphs are tall and thin, mesomorphs run to muscle, endomorphs run to fat and gut."

"So far that's true," Jason said, pushing away his plate. "Let's get back and see if it holds true with the others."

It was true of Desideria, at least. The old lady was exquisitely cooperative, although she smiled her delightful wry smile when they punctiliously summoned a nurse to be present to assist her in disrobing:

"At my age, lads, this is the nicest compliment you could have given me!"

Even the nurse had trouble keeping her professional face on at that one, and David had to turn away to hide a grin.
God
,
what a charmer she must have been forty years ago.
"How old are you—for the record?" he asked.

She told him, but Jason, long acquainted with the Darkovan numeral system, had to work it out for David and convert it into standard Empire years. It worked out at ninety-two. Following the clue they had had, David asked her: "It's true that Darkovan telepaths all have red hair?"

"True," Desideria said. "When I was a girl mine was as red as fire. The tradition is that the redder the hair the more talent for matrix work and the stronger the
laran
gift, and in general we found that this was true. I was one of a small group of girls at Castle Aldaran being trained for matrix work with some of the Terrans. Let me see if I can remember the technical names. I used to have total recall," she mused, "but remember how old I am." She was silent a moment. "I have—or had—clairvoyance, a high degree of clairaudience, a small degree of precognition not exceeding three months, and limited psychokinesis, manipulating objects not exceeding fourteen grains in weight without the aid of a matrix," she said finally. "Perhaps the records have been kept at Castle Aldaran, if they weren't destroyed during one of the mountain wars. I can try to find out, if you like."

"We like," Jason assured her eagerly. "Did any of you ever run to fat? Or were you all tall and thin?"

"Tall and thin or small and thin," she said, "but again, they used to say: the taller they are for a girl, the stronger the
laran
talent. There's an old story that some of the mountain Comyn telepaths had chieri blood, and looking at Keral I can believe it."

Jason and David both caught the implications of that long before Desideria realized she had said anything unusual. They stared at each other in a wild surmise: "If humans and chieri could crossbreed—"

"That means the chieri are not nonhuman but a human subspecies," David finished.

"This is only a legend," Desideria cautioned, "from prehistory almost."

"Find us some of those legends, will you," Jason requested, trying to hide his eagerness, and turned back to the EEG machine. He began meticulously explaining how it worked before attaching the electrodes to her scalp, but Desideria waved him away. "Enough, enough. You Terrans have your technology and I'm too old to be curious about it. As long as it won't give me a shock, that's all I care about." She lay back, smiling, on the table.

David was calibrating the switches prior to turning on the recording needle when he felt it, completely out of context, like an electrifying shock wave and without any prior warning:

—Deep in his body, sharp, intense, almost painful surge of physical desire; sexual waking; intense, exquisite sensation—

Shocked and abashed, he straightened with an indrawn breath. Jason, frowning vaguely, had stopped what he was doing, but seemed oblivious. The physical upsurge went on; David realized that without any direct stimulus he had a strong erection.
What? How
—

—
Gentle woman's fingers, caressing him. Soft words, murmured almost too low to hear, in a language he could not understand. The softness of a warm, womanly body, under him, around him
—

Where the hell was this coming from? In all his experience of involuntary telepathy in his home hospital, David had never picked up anything like this, and it was shocking and somehow shaming; he felt like a voyeur. He looked at Desideria, wondering. Her eyes were closed, but he sensed quickly that she was equally baffled.
Was she feeling it too?
For an instant, the thin and frail gray form of the old woman seemed to shift and blur, and a young and lovely girl in a cloud of luminous copper gold hair lay there, smiling up at him, her eyes closed, in soft, sweet, feminine awareness. David felt his very guts wrenched with the agony of desire.

It spread like a sparkling net, a thin spider web of physical awareness. It was not in the room at all. Conner's anguished, deathly, aching loneliness, reaching out, clawing deep for contact—David suddenly knew: it was Missy he held in his arms, pinned down with his own naked body, thrusting deeper and deeper until the violent explosion came . . . .

In the aftermath, while his breathing returned to normal—
had he himself exploded in orgasm? No, not physically at least
—David felt on the fringes of the thinning net of spider web contact, Regis' puzzlement, Rondo's satirical, sated laughter, a flare of luminous brilliance which he already associated with Keral; it reached out, wrapped him in a sudden twist of closeness . . . .

David?
It was almost a voice, and David felt a soft surge of content, of gentle reassurance;
I'm here
,
Keral
.
I don't understand it either
,
but I suppose it's nothing to be frightened about
.

David was still bewildered. Desideria, still lying motionless, looked to his confused mind—
were his eyes open? Under oath he could not be sure
—like a double exposure, an exquisite young girl/an old woman, curled softly and sweetly in love. As if compelled, David reached out and touched her hand, raised it lovingly to his lips. She opened her eyes and was the old woman again, and her gray eyes were brimming with tears. She put her hand against his check and David realized that his own eyes were brimming. Abruptly the room was normal again, the overflowing waves of sexuality dimming, dying away. They were alone with the oblivious Terran nurse, still moving around quietly picking up scraps of gauze and assembling the paraphernalia of routine examinations.