Mindsearch - ebook

CHAPTER 1

Twenty years after the Leone-Wandatta Treaty, twenty years after honest relations had opened between human and Dur-ill worlds, there were still ways in which the isolationism hadn’t changed. The races dealt with one another but still held themselves curiously apart, as though prodded by guilts of the old war that separated the two intelligent species for over a century. Humans traveled freely to Dur-ill worlds, but they did so mostly aboard human spaceships with other humans for companions. Humans visited and even lived on Dur-ill worlds, but stayed mostly within enclaves segregated by custom rather than law. The same was true of Dur-ill who traveled in human space. Dur-ill and humans both felt more at ease with their own kind than with each other; their differences and their memories could not easily be forgotten.

The _Hura-Nada_ was a Dur-ill spaceliner of standard class, neither luxurious nor spartan. Its passengers and its crew were all Dur-ill. Barring the usual minor annoyances, there should have been nothing to mar the shipboard feeling of unity.

But there was an alien presence on the _Hura-Nada_; crew and passengers alike could sense it like a tangible taste in the purified air. There was a difference hiding among the sameness—a difference that took no pains to disguise itself, a difference all the more frightening because it made no attempt to _do_ anything. It just was.

The strangeness was readily traced to three passengers, two males and a female. They had names—the males were Wisson-Dai and Gir-Thorna, the female was Ath-Agroda—but that hardly seemed to matter.

There was nothing about their looks that would set them apart from other Dur-ill. They were slender and bipedal with large unblinking eyes on either side of their heads, enormous mouths, and scaly gray skin, although the female was of a race that had pastel purple mottling patterns. The trio did not dress alike or share the same cabins. And yet there was some quality that set them apart from the other passengers and made people think of them as cut from the same mold.

The Three Strangers—as the other passengers, and even the crew, began calling them—did not talk much, either to other people or among themselves. When in public they were seldom separated from one another, and every so often would share knowing glances or smile as though at some private, unspoken joke. Sometimes they seemed to be mimicking each other’s behavior, although they stopped instantly when they realized they were being watched. During the com

munal steambaths they held themselves strictly apart from the general camaraderie. A few of the bolder passengers attempted to make friends with them early in the voyage, but the Three Strangers remained aloof and at last the others gave up trying. But there was no way to stop the shipboard gossip.

The _Hura-Nada_ was now nearing the planet Iwagen, final destination of this bizarre trio. The Three Strangers stood together in the central lounge, watching the planet grow in the oversized telescreen. Other passengers were also watching the image of Iwagen, but left a discreet distance between themselves and the threesome. The Strangers either didn’t notice or didn’t care.

A silent sequence of thoughts flashed through the air among the trio:

Iwagen is such a backward world, even having lost space travel until fifteen years ago.**Yes, but it requires seeding. The Mentad must flourish.**It will be good to get off this ship and away from the Depriveds.**There will be more Depriveds on the planet than on the ship.**But we will not be in closed confinement.**Once the seeding begins and we grow strong it will hardly matter anyway.

Six hours later, the _Hura-Nada_ landed at the tiny Iwagen spaceport in the city of Aladek. The Three Strangers and a few other travelers disembarked. The rest of the passengers and crew breathed a collective sigh of relief that the alien presence was at last removed from their midst. The Three Strangers could sense the feelings, but they did not care.

The Mentad had arrived on Iwagen.

***

As the _Hura-Nada_ sat on the landing field, another ship was in orbit around Iwagen, awaiting permission to land. This was a smaller ship, with no passengers and a crew of one. More to the point, it was a human ship, brand new and just completing its maiden voyage.

Richard Cheney floated in the webbing at the control station, surrounded by dials, readouts, and the computer board that ran the entire ship. He was feeling more smug than any eighteen-year-old had a right to be. There were parts of him, his older self, that disapproved of such behavior in general—but even that portion of his mind was relaxed today, reveling in the good feelings. Richard Cheney had just been away from Iwagen for the first time in his life, visiting a human world and surrounding himself with human contacts. His trip had more than accomplished every goal he’d set, and now he was returning home in triumph with a brand new ship to call his own.

There were very few people who could afford their own spaceship, large or small. The _Allaya_—christened after both of Richard’s parents—was built to be flown by one person, though there was room for up to six passengers. The controls were most compact; from this one spot, Richard could run virtually every shipboard function.

Richard turned to a panel and tapped in a set of instructions. The ship’s tiny galley automatically mixed a _khari,_ the mildly alcoholic beverage popular on Iwagen; from the galley, the squeeze-bulb was shot up a tube to an opening just across the control cabin from where Richard was positioned. The lanky young man considered unstrapping himself and floating through the zero-gee environment to get the bulb—but that would have been too much effort and he preferred showing off, even though there was no one around to appreciate it. He opened his hand and the squeeze-bulb, of its own accord, lifted off its platform and floated across the room to him.

There were still fifteen minutes before his landing clearance commenced. Richard sipped slowly on his drink and relived the events of the last month, allowing the exhilaration to wash over him once more.

He had never been around people very much before. His parents had established their farm in a sparsely settled corner of Iwagen as a deliberate attempt to get away from everyone, human and Dur-ill. Alain Cheney had been very ill, and the impinging presence of others was more than he could take. As a result, the two children, Richard and Mara, had grown up with a minimum of outside contacts—few Dur-ill and even fewer human beings. There’d been little reason to change the pattern after Alain’s death, even though Richard then knew his true calling. It was not until his mother, Laya, was nearing her own death that Richard and Mara started making contacts with the outside world.

Laya’s death last year had caused the big transition. The children began their recruitment drive in earnest then. At first they concentrated just on Iwagen, but Richard had set his sights on a higher goal. There were great things to accomplish, and Richard was impatient to do them all. There were long discussions that bordered on arguments, although Richard and Mara could never really argue, and Richard’s dynamic persuasion carried the day. Scraping together what money he had and lifting some more from bank vaults where it might never be missed, he bought a ticket to Nouvelterre.

Richard had never seen so many humans at one time before, and that fact alone was exhilarating. The constant flow of thoughts was a stimulant, even though he had his father’s calming influence to keep him under control. Still, he spent his first couple of days gawking like any young tourist. He felt he had it coming to him. Then he got down to business.

He had chosen Nouvelterre because it was a place where a person with his peculiar talents could make a lot of money in a very short time. A group of cities in the smaller northern continent were known throughout human space as wide-open gambling towns. With his father’s practical bent to guide him, Richard had no scruples against using the gaming palaces to further his own ends.

His first problem was to disguise his age. Most of the casinos would have looked askance at an eighteen-year-old gambling there and winning so consistently. His father’s knowledge of disguise served him well. There were tricks of makeup and clothing style that added years to his appearance; they wouldn’t make him look old, but he’d at least seem mature enough to belong where he was and to be doing what he was doing.

His biggest problem, though, was not to call attention to himself. Casinos were constantly on the lookout for people who won large sums of money too quickly. Thus, while he could have taken home millions in a single afternoon, he forced himself into a game of patiently building up his stakes in a consistent but unobtrusive fashion.

He started with the machines—slot machines, randomizers, and all the other mechanical devices that didn’t require a human interface. He avoided the machines with the large payoffs, contenting himself with a series of small victories. He had but to drop a coin in a machine and use his abilities to rig a jackpot each time. He never hit more than one jackpot per casino per day, and never a big enough one to come to the management’s attention.

When he’d built up enough of a stake, he moved on to bigger games. Again, he was careful to spread his winnings around. In one casino, he’d play at cards; it was easy to win—or at least avoid losing much—when he knew what all the other players had in their hands. He was considered lucky, but he always left the game just as the suspicion was starting to form in their minds that he might be cheating. In another casino he would play roulette; the tiny ball was a cinch to manipulate where he wanted it to go. In a third casino he would play the crap tables, where the cubes were hardly more of a challenge. Then to a fourth casino for more cards, and so on around town. Before his face could become too familiar, he’d move to a different gambling town. He was always a winner, but never a big enough winner anywhere for anyone to think he was anything more than a lucky stiff.

An unexpected problem was his reaction to the people around him—and, in particular, to the women. He’d been raised with only two human females, his mother and his sister. Now there were other women, available women. They were all around him as he sat at the gaming tables. His constant winning was pure aphrodisiac to the women who frequented the casinos; he didn’t need telepathic abilities to see the lust on their faces when he raked in a pile of chips. Being a good-looking young man only compounded the problem.

Mentally, Richard was quite mature for his years; under his particular circumstances, that was only to be expected. But his body was still that of a teenage boy, and occasionally it betrayed him. A woman with an attractive cleavage would smile at him and bend over, and suddenly he’d have to cross his legs to hide the rapidly growing erection. In crowded gaming halls he couldn’t help an occasional brush against a voluptuous feminine body. A dozen sensuous perfumes seduced his nostrils. There were times he left a casino earlier than he’d intended, just to calm his nerves and escape the distractions.

He knew he could have any number of beautiful women in his bed if he made an effort, and there were several times he was sorely tempted. But something in him held back. There was a feeling of wrongness, as though somehow having relations with another woman would mean being unfaithful to both Laya and Mara. He held back through sheer willpower—but this was still the only aspect of his trip he viewed in a negative way.

In less than a month, through careful management of his resources, he found himself rich beyond even the goals he’d set for himself at the start of the project. He could even afford to buy a luxury like the _Allaya_, handing the startled salesman the purchase price in cash without batting an eye. And there was still plenty of money left over to finance his recruiting expeditions anywhere he chose to go in human or Dur-ill space.

Now he was returning home to share his success with his sister. Together they would plan a further course of action. They both knew their destiny had decreed them greatness, but it was up to them to chart their future in the most effective manner.

An alarm bell rang, breaking Richard out of his reverie. It was time to begin his descent. Taking one last sip of his drink, he tossed the squeeze-bulb toward the disposal unit across the room. His shot was slightly inaccurate and the container would have bounced off the wall, but he caused its course to alter just enough that it fell neatly through the hole. Then he turned his attention to the control panel and switched on the radio to reverify his landing pattern with spaceport traffic control.

His next couple of hours were filled with the tedious but demanding job of landing the _Allaya_ on Aladek’s tiny field. By the time his ship touched down, the Three Strangers who comprised the Mentad had left the spaceport area, and Richard had no contact with them.

Richard had to go through routine customs procedures, and there was a long, boring task of arranging with the quasi-religious authorities who ran virtually everything on Iwagen for the _Allaya’s_ hangar space while Richard was home planning his next move. Richard dealt with these matters impatiently; all his thoughts were about the farm half the world away, and how well his sister had survived the past month without him.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 didn’t 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 farther 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. “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.

END OF SAMPLEABOUT STEPHEN GOLDIN

Born in Philadelphia in 1947, Stephen Goldin has lived in California since 1960. He received a Bachelor’s degree in Astronomy from UCLA and worked as a civilian space scientist for the U.S. Navy for a few years after leaving college, but has made his living as a writer/editor most of his life.

His first wife was fellow author Kathleen Sky, with whom he co-wrote the first edition of the highly acclaimed nonfiction book _The Business of Being a Writer_. His current wife is fellow author Mary Mason. So far they have co-authored two books in the Rehumanization of Jade Darcy series.

He served the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America as editor of the _SFWA Bulletin_ and as the organization’s Western Regional Director. He has lived with cats all his adult life. Artistically, he enjoys Broadway musicals and surrealist art.OTHER BOOKS BY STEPHEN GOLDIN

(most titles available at your favorite ebook retailer)

Science Fiction

The Eternity Brigade

Scavenger Hunt

Assault on the Gods

A World Called Solitude

_Ghosts, Girls, & Other Phantasms_ (short story collection)

Alien Murders

And Not Make Dreams Your Master

Crossroads of the Galaxy

Herds

Caravan

_Trek to Madworld_ (an original Star Trek novel)

Mindsaga

Mindflight

Mindsearch

The Rehumanization of Jade Darcy (co-written by Mary Mason)

Jade Darcy and the Affair of Honor

Jade Darcy and the Zen Pirates

Agents of ISIS

Tsar Wars

Treacherous Moon

Robot Mountain

Sanctuary Planet

Stellar Revolution

Purgatory Plot

Traitors’ World

Counterfeit Stars

Outworld Invaders

Galactic Collapse

Surreal Humor

Polly!

Quiet Post

Fantasy

Angel in Black

The Parsina Saga

Shrine of the Desert Mage

The Storyteller and the Jann

Crystals of Air and Water

Treachery of the Demon King