“Are you so certain of that? Recall what kind of misfit human beings make the decision to come to Exile. We Tanu have a great deal to offer them. Better things than they ever dreamed possible, if they possess latent metafunctions. And we really ask so little in return.”
Something came jabbing Elizabeth.
Stop that.
Jabjabjab.
Go away.
Jab. Jabjab. Come out help I’ve screwed it.
Stop small pecking childmind Aiken.
JAB!
Vexing insect swat you Aiken! Bother someone else.
JabscratchPOUND. Dammit Elizabeth she’s going to bollix up STEIN.
Slowly, Elizabeth turned in her saddle and stared at the rider next to her. Aiken’s mind nattered on as she brought into focus a woman-form in dark flowing robes. Sukey. A tense face with plump cheeks and a button nose. Indigo eyes set too closely together for beauty, glazed with panic.
Elizabeth went into her without invitation and grasped the situation in an instant, leaving Aiken and the late-arriving Creyn to watch from outside in helpless impotence. Sukey was in the grip of Stein’s enraged mind, her sanity almost overwhelmed by the mental power of the wounded man. It was plain what had happened. Sukey was a potentially strong latent redactor and her new silver torc had made the metafunction operant. Egged on by Aiken, she had tested her ability by snooping into Stein, intrigued by the apparent helplessness of the sleeping giant. The young woman had slipped in beneath the low-level neural bath generated by the gray torc, which Creyn had set up to soothe the berserker and block out residual pain from his healing injuries. Under this lid, Sukey had seen the pitiful state of Stein’s subconscious mind, the old psychic ulcerations, the newly torn rents in his self-esteem, all gurging about in a maelstrom of suppressed violence.
The tempter had whispered to Sukey, and her innate compassion had responded. She had begun a hopelessly incompetent redact operation on Stein, confident that she could help him; but the brute resident in the pain-filled Viking soul had reared up and attacked her for her meddling. Now both Sukey and Stein were caught in a fearsome conflict of psychoenergies. If the antagonism were not promptly resolved, the outcome could be total personality disjunction for Stein and imbecility for the woman.
Elizabeth sent one blazing thought to Creyn. She dove in and folded the great wings of her own redactability about the frenzied pair. The young woman mind was flung unceremoniously out, to be fielded by Creyn, who let Sukey down easily and then watched with a respect tinged by some other emotion as the mischief was undone.
Elizabeth wove restraints, stopped the psychic whirlpool, calmed the heaving pit of fury. She plucked away the jerry-built mind-alteration structure confected by Sukey, with its naive and impudent drainage channels that were too puny for true catharsis. She bore Stein’s damaged ego up with loving force while melting the edges of the wounds and pressing the torn parts back so that healing could begin. Even the older psychic abcesses swelled and burst and vented some of their poison through her. Humiliation and rejection diminished. The father-monster shrank toward pathetic humanity and the mother-lover lost some of her vesture of fantasy. Stein-Awakened looked into Elizabeth’s mirror of healing and cried out. He rested.
Elizabeth emerged.
The party of riders had come to a halt, crowding closely around Elizabeth and her mount. She shivered in the sultry evening air. Creyn took his own soft scarlet-and-white cloak and draped it about her shoulders.
“It was magnificent, Elizabeth. None of us, not even Lord Dionket, our greatest, could have done better. They are both safe.”
“It still isn’t complete,” she forced herself to say. “I can’t finalize him. His will is very strong and he resists. This took, all I have now.”
Creyn touched the circle of gold about his neck. “I can deepen the neural envelope generated by his gray torc. Tonight, when we reach Roniah, we will be able to do more for him. He will recover in a few days.”
Stein, who had not once moved during the metapsychic imbroglio, uttered a vast sigh. The two soldiers dismounted and came to adjust his saddle cantle so that it became a high supporting backrest.
“There’s no danger of his falling now,” Creyn said. “We’ll make him more comfortable later. Now we had better ride on.”
Bryan demanded, “Will somebody tell me what the hell is going on?” Lacking a torc, he had missed a great deal of the byplay, which had been telepathic.
A stocky man with tow-colored hair and a vaguely Oriental cast to his features pointed a finger at Aiken Drum. “Ask that one. He started it.”
Aiken grinned and twiddled his silver torc. Several white moths appeared suddenly out of the darkness and began orbiting Sukey’s head in a crazy halo. “Just a little do-goodery gone baddery!”
“Stop that,” Creyn commanded. The moths flew away. The tall Tanu addressed Aiken in a tone of veiled menace. “Sukey was the agent, but it is obvious that you were the instigator. You amused yourself by placing your friend and this inexperienced woman in mortal danger.”
Aiken’s golliwog face was unrepentant “Ah. She seemed strong enough. Nobody forced her to mess with him.”
Sukey spoke up. Her voice had a ring of stubborn self-righteousness. “I was only trying to help. He was in desperate need! None of the rest of you seemed to care!”
Creyn said with asperity, “This was not the time or the place to undertake a difficult redaction. Stein would have been treated in good time.”
“Let me get this straight,” said Bryan. “She tried to alter his mind?”
“She tried to heal him,” Elizabeth said. “I suppose Aiken urged her to try out her new metabilities, just as he’s been testing his own. But she couldn’t handle it.”
“Stop talking about me as though I were a child!” Sukey exclaimed. “So I bit off more than I could chew. But I meant well!”
There was a harsh laugh from the towhead, whose silver torc was nearly concealed by a plaid flannel shirt. He wore heavy twill trousers and woodsman’s boots with lug soles. “You meant well! Some day that’ll be humanity’s epitaph! Even that damned Madame Guderian meant well when she let people pass into this hell-world.”
Creyn said, “It will be hell for you only if you make it so, Raimo. Now we must ride on. Elizabeth, if you feel able, would you help Sukey to understand something of her new power? At least advise her of the limitations she must accept for now.”
“I suppose I had better.”
Aiken rode close to scowling Sukey and patted her shoulder in a brotherly fashion. “There now, sweets. The past mistress of mind-bendery will give you a flash course, and then you can work on me! Iguarantee not to gobble you alive. We’ll have lots of fun while you straighten out the kinks in my poor little evil soul!”
Elizabeth’s mind reached out and gave Aiken a tweak that made him squawk out loud. “Enough of you, my lad. Go practice working your will on bats or hedgehogs or something.”
“I’ll give you bats,” Aiken promised darkly. He urged his mount forward along the wide track, and the cavalcade began to move once more.
Elizabeth opened to Sukey, gentling the woman’s fear and discomfiture. I would like to help you. Little mindsister. Be at ease. Yes? (Bloody-minded stubborn chagrin breaking down slowly.) Oh why not. I did make a terrible hash of it.
All over now. Relax Let me know you…
Sue-Gwen Davies, aged twenty-seven, born and raised on the last of the Old World orbital colonies. A former juvenile officer full of sturdy empathy and maternal concern for her wretched young clients. The adolescents of the satellite had mounted an insurrection, rebelling against the unnatural life chosen for them by technocratic idealist grandparents, and the Milieu had belatedly ruled that the colony must be disbanded. Sukey Davies had rejoiced even as her job became redundant. She had no loyalty to the satellite, no philosophical commitment to the experiment that had become obsolete at the very moment that the Great Intervention commenced. All of Sukey’s working hours had been spent trying to cope with children who stubbornly resisted the conditioning necessary for life in an orbiting beehive.