“Listen to me now. Don’t tell anyone what happened. And forget anything that you heard.”
“Aren’t you sick?”
“No. Don’t tell anyone.” His grip tightened. His fingers clamped her arm like steel prods.
“Are you worried what people might think?”
“It’s not for me,” he said. “It’s for you. If they think you know…” Something terribly urgent gleamed in his eyes. “Just don’t. You shouldn’t have been there. This has nothing to do with you.”
“You mean, you were expecting it?”
“Just… forget what you saw. What you heard.” He breathed deeply. “I’ll go back to the dorm alone. Don’t let anyone see you, all right?”
He seemed to have recovered. He set off down the trail, even making a jaunty imitation of his former confident stride.
“Hey,” she called after him. “You’re welcome.”
There was no reply.
Shomer again. Saturn’s lips curled in a smile. Courage and foolhardiness have much in common. In fact, the difference may be nothing but perspective. Donny Crawford had great intelligence, great athletic gifts, and no courage at all. He’d only Boosted after coldblooded calculation revealed an eighty-seven percent chance of winning triple gold.
Her emotional attachment to Crawford implied vulnerability, lack of control, and unpredictability. Any of which, in the right situation, could be of use.
Besides, she amused him.
The old bastard?
If she only knew.
For .24 seconds he considered her, and Crawford, and the idiot McFairlaine and the implications of Energy’s actions. They had been predictable, and within context even reasonable, but McFairlaine needed perspective.
Could McFairlaine be Feral? Sometimes one of the Linked, drunken with power, might step across an invisible line. To be Linked meant not only power in the external world, but growing control over your every mental process and sensation. Easy to sink into catatonic indolence or solipsistic power fantasies. To go Feral.
Saturn had to consider possibilities: an embolism for McFairlaine, or perhaps a lethal power surge. The extreme irony of that approach appealed to Saturn.
Not yet. Monitor McFairlaine. Give him his chance for a while.
Chapter 5
“In Matthew 26:11 Jesus said that the poor will always be among us,” Jillian said. Her words appeared as white strokes upon a blue visual field. They floated in the air like crisply perfect skywriting.
“And in that sense, he may have been the first theorist in the social applications of fractal geometry.
“The concepts of cognitive dissonance and the inevitable breakdown of communication therefrom have been understood for centuries. However, the unavoidable disintegration of systems as those systems become more complex and unwieldy has rarely been considered within a sociological lattice.”
She stopped for a moment, thinking and sipping cocoa. Sunlight filtered through the dorm window at an oblique angle. Despite the intensity of her concentration, the external world intruded. The air reverberated with the grunts and heavy footfalls of Olympians training outside.
Jillian had taken the day off from her grueling athletic schedule, protesting a sore hip.
It wasn’t her hip that was sore, it was her head. The headache had been a continuous thing, sometimes hovering in the background, sometimes thundering into her mind like a crazed animal, destroying calm and thought and sleep. And every pulse was Donny Crawford. Donny falling, Donny sick and weak on the ledge. Beautiful, perfect, confident Donny whimpering into the morning darkness.
Jillian was afraid. But worse than that, she was confused.
“Even surrounded by the greatest wealth and comfort, a human being will experience a measure of irritation. Confined in the most squalid and demeaning circumstances, he will find some small thing to take pleasure in.
“This trait, and others, make it impossible to eradicate the final bit of chaos from our minds, as well as our social systems. The powers which govern… one might even say oppress…”
Oppress?
Did the Council want a certain amount of suffering? More than the absolute irreducible minimum?
“Couldn’t be a war if he did something, old bastard.”
Leave it for the moment.
“A stable society functions much like an organism, with communications between the organ systems, the organs, the tissue structures, the cells, and the organelles. As instructions flow from one level to another, and the inevitable distortions in communication accumulate, what happens?
“At the top, a plan may be shaped to provide the greatest good for the greatest number. But no plan conceived at one end of the spectrum can take into account all of the individuals at the other end. It simply is not possible-there is too much breakdown in communication along the way. Conversely, any system which is modular enough to deal intimately with those at the bottom is too unwieldy to be governed from the top.”
She stopped, rubbing her temples fiercely.
“Fortunately for those who govern, the appearance of fair play is more important than the reality. At least that’s what Machiavelli thought.”
She looked at the words she had dictated, and knew what the headache had been about, and knew what she was about to ask Beverly to do.
God help her.
Carefully, with somber formality, she drew a mesh headset of wires, microphones, and black oval pads from a sandalwood box on her desk.
She prepared the apparatus: plastic electrode pads which clung snugly to her temples. Earphones. A combination throat mike and sensor. Dark eyecups like lightweight goggles.
“Void, Beverly.”
Anyone Linking into the Void must create her own kinesthetic analogy. For one it might be the Library of Congress, crammed to the skylight with talking books. For another, being seated in a vast lecture hall surrounded by experts who had the precise answers to all questions. Jillian’s programming teacher had taken her own image from literature: Gormenghast, an immense, sprawling castle-city of a million infinitely varied rooms.
The adult mind was too rigid, its worldview too set, to build such an analogy. It must be created in childhood; but after that, it grew.
Jillian closed her eyes and breathed deeply ten times, with each breath sinking into a world of total relaxation, a specialized trance leading to the Void state.
The earphones hummed gently. Breathing. Heartbeat sounds, slowing. The purr of breakers against a shore. Synthesized into and among those sounds was a chorus of voices too distant to be consciously perceived. Lights flashed in her goggles, so dimly and quickly that she could never focus upon them. At her temples, tickles of pressure and electricity buzzed and caressed her skin, eased her into a state combining deep relaxation and total awareness.
Gradually the speckles of light congealed into searchlights playing through a fog. Then smoky swirls of color, and she was in her Void, in a mental ocean of layered oils, a phantasmagoria of sensation created by the union of an exquisitely conditioned mind and a dozen seamlessly orchestrated channels of sensory input.
The water cleared. Only a few varicolored fish, dazzlingly bright, betrayed the chaos beneath the tranquil structure of her illusion.
She sank through the depths until she felt sand and shells beneath her feet. A dolphin playfully nosed against her, and then scooted away into the murk.
She walked along the ocean floor toward a ring of shattered coral reefs. This was her place. In the reef was set an ancient and barnacle-encrusted door, the entrance Beverly had created for her fifteen years ago.
The door yielded to her touch. In the middle of the ring stood a chair, and a wooden grade-school desk.
