“What would happen if I wished you removed from my presence?” Orne asked.
An odd half smile flickered across Emolirdo’s mouth. It was as though he had fought down an internal dispute on whether to cry or laugh and had solved it by doing neither. He said: “That might be interesting, especially if I countered with a wish of my own.”
Orne felt confused. He said: “I’m not tracking on this.”
Emolirdo shrugged. “I am only saying that the study of psi is the study of miracles. We examine things that happen outside of recognized channels and in spite of accepted rules. The religious call such things miracles. We say we have encountered a psi phenomenon or the workings of a psi focus.”
“Changing the label doesn’t necessarily change the thing,” Orne said. “I’m still not tracking.”
“Have you ever heard about the miracle caverns on the ancient planets?” Emolirdo asked.
“I’ve heard the stories,” Orne said.
“They are more than stories. Let me put it this way: Such places held concealed shapes, convolutions which projected out of our apparent universe. Except at such focal points, the raw and chaotic energies of the universe resist our desires for Order. But at such focal points, the raw energies of outer Chaos becomes richly available and can be tamed. By the very act of wishing it so, we mold this raw energy in unique new ways that defy our old rules.” Emolirdo’s eyes blazed. He seemed to be fighting for control of great inner excitement.
Orne wet his lips with his tongue. “Shapes?”
“The historical record is clear,” Emolirdo said. “Men have bent wires, coiled them, carved bits of plastic, jumbled odd assortments of apparently unrelated objects… and miraculous things happen. A smooth metal surface becomes tacky as though smeared with glue. A man draws a pentagram on a certain floor and flames dance within it. Smoke curls from a strangely shaped bottle and suddenly obeys a man’s will. These are all shapes, you see?”
“So?”
“Then there are certain living creatures, including humans, who conceal such a focus within themselves. They walk into… nothing and reappear light-years away. They have only to look at a person suffering from an incurable disease and the disease is cured. They raise the dead. They read minds.”
Orne tried to swallow in a dry throat. Emolirdo spoke with such an air of confidence, of conviction. This was something beyond blind faith.
“But how does it help to call these things psi?” Orne asked.
“It takes these phenomena out of the realm of blind fear,” Emolirdo said. He bent toward Orne’s bedside light, thrust a fist between the light and the green wall at the head of the bed.
“Look at this wall.”
“I can’t turn my head,” Orne said.
“Sorry.” Emolirdo withdrew his hand. “I was just making a shadow. You can imagine it. Let us say there were sentient beings confined to the flat plane of that wall and they saw the shadow of my fist. Could a genius among them imagine the shape which cast the shadow—a shape projected from outside of his dimension?”
“It’s an old, but interesting, question,” Orne said.
“What if a being within the wall plane fashioned a device which projected into our dimension?” Emolirdo asked. “He would be like the legendary blind men studying the elephant. His device would respond in ways that would not fit his dimensions. He’d have to guess at the new patterns, set up all sorts of optional postulates.”
The skin of Orne’s neck began to itch maddeningly under the bandage. He resisted the urge to probe there with a finger. Bits of Chargon’s folklore flitted through his memory: the magicians of the forest, the little people who granted wishes in ways that made the wishers regret their desires, the cavern where the sick were cured.
The quick-heal itching lured his finger with almost irresistible force. He groped for a pill on his bedstand, gulped it, waited for the relief.
“You are thinking,” Emolirdo said.
“You put a new psi amplifier in my neck,” Orne said. “For what purpose?”
“It’s an improved device for signaling the presence of psi activity,” Emolirdo said. “It detects psi fields, the presence of focal shapes. It amplifies your latent abilities. It enables you better to resist psi-induced emotions and you can detect motivations in others through the reading of their emotions. It may enable you to detect dangers to your person when those dangers still are some distance away in time—prescience, if you will. I’m laying on some parahypnoidal sessions for you which will make these effects more understandable to you.”
Orne felt a tingling in his neck, a vacant sensation in his stomach that wasn’t related to hunger. Danger?
“You’ll recognize the prescient sensation,” Emolirdo said. “It’ll come upon you as a peculiar kind of fear, perhaps mistaken for hunger. You’ll sense a lack of something, perhaps inside you or in the air you’re breathing. It’s a very trustworthy signal of danger.”
Orne felt the vacant sensation in his stomach. His skin was clammy with perspiration. The room’s air tasted stale in his lungs. He wanted to reject the sensations and Emolirdo’s suggestive conversation, but a fact named Stetson remained. Nobody in the I-A could be more coldly skeptical and Stet had said to go through with this.
There was also the matter of the transceiver he had wished from his flesh.
“You’re a little pale,” Emolirdo said.
Orne managed a tight smile. “I think I feel your prescient warning right now.”
“Ahhhh. Describe your sensations.”
Orne obeyed.
“Odd that is should happen so soon,” Emolirdo said. “Can you identify a source for this danger?”
“You,” Orne said. “And Amel.”
Emolirdo pursed his lips. “Perhaps the psi training itself is dangerous to you. That is odd. Especially if you do turn out to be a psi focus.”
Chapter Nineteen
When a wise man does not understand, he says: “I do not understand.” The fool and the uncultured are ashamed of their ignorance. They remain silent when a question could bring them wisdom.
There was no real excuse to wait on the transport’s ramp any longer, Orne told himself. He had overcome the first staggering impact of Amel’s psi forces. But the prescient awareness of peril remained with him like a sore tooth. He felt the heat, the heavy toga. Perspiration soaked him.
And his stomach said: Wait.
He took a half step toward the escalfield and the sense of vacancy within him expanded. His nostrils caught the acrid bite of incense, an odor so strong it rode over the oil-and-ozone dominance of the spaceport.
In spite of training and carefully nurtured agnosticism, he experienced a sensation of awe. Amel exuded an aura of magic that defied disbelief.
It’s only psi, Orne told himself.
Chanting and keening sounds lifted like an aural fog from the religious warren. He felt memory fragments stirring from his childhood on Chargon: the religious processions on holy days… the image of Mahmud glowering from the kiblah… the azan ringing out across the great square on the Day of Bairam—
“Let no blasphemy occur, nor permit a blasphemer to live…”
Orne shook his head, thought: Now’d be a great time to get religion and bow down to Ullua, the star wanderer of the Ayrbs.
The roots of his fear went deep. He tightened his belt, strode forward into the escalfield. The sense of danger remained, but grew no stronger.
The escalfield’s feathery touch lowered him to the ground, disgorged him beside a covered walkway. It was hotter on the ground than on the ramp. Orne wiped perspiration from his forehead. A cluster of white-clad priests and students in aqua togas pressed into the thin shade of the covered walkway. They began to separate as Orne approached, leaving in pairs—a priest with each student.