“What if they have plans for conquest by war, Stet? What then? A new faction could’ve come to power on Amel. Why not?”
Stetson looked sad. “If you could prove it…” He shrugged.
“What’s first on the agenda?” Orne asked.
Stetson hooked a thumb at the cart. “Dive into that material. You’ll be going back to the medics later today for a new and better psi amplifier.”
“When do I go to the medics?”
“They’ll come for you.”
“Somebody’s always coming for me,” Orne muttered.
Chapter Eighteen
A universe without war involves critical-mass concepts as applied to human beings. Any immediate issue which might lead to war is always escalated to questions of personal value, to the complications of technological synergism, to questions of an ethico-religious nature, to which areas are open for counteraction and, inevitably, there remain the unknowns, omnipresent and likely of insidious complexity. The human situation as it relates to war can be likened to a multilinear looped feedback system in which nothing is unimportant.
Evening light sent long shadows into Orne’s hospital room at the I-A Medical Center. It was the quiet time between dinner and visiting hours. The psuedoperspective of the room had been closed in to produce surroundings of restful security. Decoracol stood at low-green, lights dim. The induction bandage felt bulky under his chin, but the characteristic quick-heal itching had not yet started.
Being in a hospital made Orne vaguely uneasy. He knew why. The smells and the sounds reminded him of all the months he’d spent creeping back from death after Sheleb. He recalled that Sheleb had been another planet where war could not originate.
Like Amel.
The door to his room slid aside, admitting a tall, bone-skinny tech officer with the forked lightning insignia of Psi Branch at his collar. The door closed behind him.
Orne studied the man—an unknown face: birdlike with long nose, pointed chin, narrow mouth. The eyes made quick, darting movements. He lifted his right hand in a fluttery salute, leaned on the crossbar at the foot of Orne’s bed.
“I’m Ag Emolirdo,” he said, “Head of Psi Branch. The Ag is for Agony.”
Unable to move his head because of the induction bandage, Orne stared along his own nose down the length of the bed at Emolirdo. So this was the shy and mysterious Chief of Psi in the I-A. The man radiated an aura of knowing confidence.
He reminded Orne of a priest back on Chargon—another Amel graduate. The reminder made Orne uneasy. He said: “I’ve heard of you. How d’you do?”
“We’re about to find out how I do,” Emolirdo said. “I’ve reviewed your records. Fascinating. Are you aware that you may be a psi focus?”
“A what?” Orne tried to sit up, but the bandage restraints held him fast.
“Psi focus,” Emolirdo said. “I’ll explain in a moment.”
“Please do that,” Orne said. He found himself not liking Emolirdo’s glib, all-knowing manner.
“You may consider this the beginning of your advanced training,” Emolirdo said. “I decided to take it on myself. If you’re what we suspect… well, it’s extremely rare.”
“How rare?”
“Well, the only others are lost behind the mythical veils of antiquity.”
“I see. This psi focus thing, is that it?”
“That’s what we call the phenomenon. If you are a psi focus, then you’re… well, a god.”
Orne blinked, sat in frozen shock. He felt the wheel of his life turning, the sense of his one-being aflame with a terrifying passion for existence. An overriding awareness churned within him, bringing up all the ancient functions of life for his review.
He thought: Nothing can be excluded from life. It is all one thing.
“You don’t question that?” Emolirdo asked.
Orne swallowed, said: “I have questions, plenty of them.”
“Ask.”
“Why do you think I’m this… psi focus?”
Emolirdo nodded. “You appear to be an island of order in a disordered universe. Four times since you came to the attention of the I-A you’ve done the impossible. Any one of the problems you tackled could have led to ferment and perhaps general warfare. But you went in and brought order out of…”
“I did what I was trained to do, no more.”
“Trained? By whom?”
“By the I-A, of course. That’s a stupid question.”
“Is it?” Emolirdo found a chair, sat down beside the bed, his head level with Orne’s. “Let us take this in an orderly fashion, beginning with our articulation of life.”
“I articulate life by living it,” Orne said.
“Perhaps I should’ve said let us approach this from another viewpoint, just for the sake of definition. Life, as we understand it, represents a bridge between Order and Chaos. We define Chaos as raw energy, untamed, available to anything that can subdue it and bring it into some form of Order. In this sense, Life becomes stored Chaos. Do you follow this?”
“I hear your words,” Orne said.
“Ahhhh…” Emolirdo cleared his throat. “To restate the situation, Life feeds on Chaos, but must exist within Order. Chaos represents a background against which Life knows itself. This brings us to another background, the condition called Stasis. This can be compared to a magnet. Stasis attracts free energy to itself until the pressures of non-movement, of non-adaptation, grow too great and an explosion occurs. Exploding, the forms once in Stasis go back to Chaos, to non-Order. One is left with the unavoidable observation that Stasis leads always to Chaos.”
“That’s dandy,” Orne said.
Emolirdo frowned, then: “This rule holds true on both the chemical-inanimate level and the chemical-animate level. Ice, the stasis of water, explodes when brought into abrupt contact with extreme heat. The frozen society explodes when exposed to the heat of war or the burning contact of a strange new society. Nature abhors stasis.”
“The way it abhors a vacuum,” Orne said, speaking only in the hope of turning Emolirdo’s words off. What was he driving at? “Why all of this talk of Chaos, Order, Stasis?”
“We think in terms of energy systems,” Emolirdo said. “That is the psi approach. Do you have more questions?”
“You haven’t explained anything,” Orne said. “Words, just words. What’s all this have to do with Amel or your suspicion that I’m a… psi focus?”
“As to Amel,” Emolirdo said, “That appears to be a stasis that does not explode.”
“Then maybe it isn’t static.”
“Very astute,” Emolirdo said. “As to psi focus, that brings us to the problem of miracles. You have been summoned to Amel because we consider you a worker of miracles.”
Pain stabbed through Orne’s bandaged neck as he tried to turn his head. “Miracles?” he croaked.
“The understanding of psi represents the understanding of miracles,” Emolirdo said in his didactic way. “There is a devil in anything we don’t understand. Thus, miracles frighten us and fill us with feelings of insecurity.”
“Such as that fellow who supposedly can jump from planet to planet without a ship,” Orne said.
“He does do it,” Emolirdo said. “It’s another form of miracle to wish a device removed from your flesh and have that thing happen without harming you.”