9.
My mother was - from childhood until the day of her death - a psychic watcher with the ministry of knowledge, in the government of the land of Calinova. The last twenty years of her life she was one of nine deputy ministers, and I believe she might have become chief minister, but the governing oligarchs of Calinova and the chief administrators of security never quite believed that my sisters and I had no talent. In my opinion, they thought our mother was sheltering us. Nothing could be further from the truth. My sisters are plain and normal - lucky women - and I hid my talents from my mother, beginning in early adolescence when I first became aware I possessed such powers.
She did not know I had the gift - or curse - until the day she died. I was twenty-four, and already fairly well known among musical circles in the capital as a talented singer, struggling to break free from my mother's state security shadow. I remember being summoned from the club where I was performing, and whisked by unmarked sedan to my mother's bedside in the central hospital.
My mother died during the second year of terror bombings in Calinova, in a brazen strike at the central palace. She was assigned there that evening to monitor a formal dinner meeting of the council. The bomb was smuggled into a kitchen by an estranged cousin of an oligarchic family, and when it exploded it slaughtered everyone in the kitchen, blew out the wall of the dining hall, immediately killed perhaps another two dozen attendees at the head table, and severly wounded hundreds of others at the dinner, and in nearby rooms of the palace.
My mother, who had been seated a few tables away from the kitchen wall, died several hours after the blast, of complications resulting from shrapnel damage to her internal organs. In spite of being well-placed on the priority list, she refused immediate transplant therapy. There were hundreds of victims besides her, and a shortage of immediately available donors and artificial implants. The severely wounded included dozens of children of oligarchs, administrators, and diplomats, who were being cared for in palace childcare center, directly upstairs of the dining hall.
I know why my mother refused transplant. She told me. I looked into her mind and saw her guilt and remorse for all she had done, all those years of spying into people's minds, of interrogating high-level security administrators and scientists, of even recommending death sentences for some whose sole crime was knowing too much. She would not tell me what they had known - I had to find that out quite by accident from someone else - but she carried that guilt to her deathbed, and there, her body shredded almost beyond repair, she acted at last in favor of someone else's life, and gave up her own chance for organ reconstruction. Called to the hospital to see her, I sat beside the life-support tank where she spent her last few hours alive. I let her see me looking into her mind. I let her know that I understood her choice to let other people take the organ therapy. In return, I received, at last, the appreciation I had wanted from her for so long, but had not dared to ask for. She approved my decision to hide my psychic talents, and she took my secret with her into death.
I never knew my father. I was a pregnancy induced by artificial insemination, using an anonymous psychic donor's sperm.
It really was my mother's fault that I was able to hide my talents from her, when they bloomed in me during early puberty. My mother's career was her life. She had me as a deliberate attempt to advance her status by bearing a child psychic. It paid off, at first, since after her pregnancy she advanced steadily up the ladder of power at the ministry of knowledge, eventually becomming a deputy minister when I was four. But she was so busy with her work for the ministry that I was left in the care of nannies, and then child-care centers. Then, at age six, she decided I had no chance of developing childhood pyschic abilities, and I was sent off to begin a long series of upper-class boarding schools. But she rose no further. After another two children - my sisters, none of whom showed any signs of psychic talent, she was organically suspect.
At twelve she decided I needed to be farther away from her, on a more permanent basis. I was enrolled in a school in Larchos, and lived with distant relatives in that land at the other end of the continent. Two or three times a year I would come back to Calinova by maglev train and spend a week or two with my sisters, occasionally seeing our mother if she could break away from her assignments. During quarter-year vacations, I might even stay a month or more. Except, that bright winter when I was fourteen, I had the great good fortune to stay on in Larchos with my cousins. They were going skiing on the highest peaks, and I was permitted to accompany them.
That was the season my talents came forward from wherever they had lain dormant in my mind. My cousins were all pretty normal people, and Larchos - thank God - doesn't have the same highly regimented psychic service Calinova does. I quickly learned how to hide my budding talents, and by the time I saw my mother again, it was four months later, and I had cultivated a completely natural cover over my mind. Besides, I had become sexually potent, learned how to make myself come, and well, that change was more than enough to distract my mother when she looked into my mind. She was, at the time, more interested in forcing me to shave off my fuzzy new moustache, rather than trying to probe behind the bland shield of adolescent rebellion I threw up before her, and, I think, she didn't relish dwelling too long on my thoughts of how pleasant masturbation was for me, and how much I wanted to do it with a girl.
She was, I am sorry to say, a very frustrated woman in that way. Never was able to trust any man getting near her. Too bad. She might have made minister, or even become more powerful as a psychic mistress of the oligarch himself.... But not her. I can imagine how she would have responded to such a suggestion: "That may be how they do things in Tao Pablo, but I will never stoop to committing or condoning such behavior in Calinova."
I wonder sometimes if there isn't a kind of evolutionary selection operating in Calinova, deferring psychic development until adolescence. I mean, all the children who show signs of extreme empathy or telepathy during their early years are put into ministry of knowledge schools and registered, eventually forced into government service. Few of them ever have children. My mother was an exception, and even she had only one out of three, and I am a late bloomer. If only late bloomers, Rela, like me, end up having children, wouldn't this reinforce the tendency? I'm sorry, I'm losing track of my thoughts, here, and, what, Rela? Ah, yes, I love you too.
I feel her slip back from me, settling down into her silent, cross-legged form across the fire.
She smiles at me, - I did not imagine it would be like this... I have never dared to look so deeply into anyone before... and never been so willingly invited in. Until you said my name, I had almost forgotten that I exist. I was you, only you, remembering, listening to you remember your life for me.... -
It is dangerous, I think to her, then speak, You can lose yourself, if you are not careful, or not strong, or not practised at the art of passing into and out of another person's mind. These are all disciplines that the watchers have studied.
And... her thoughts some back to me: - This is something else you must teach me? -
Yes. While you learn who I am, you will also learn how to explore another person quietly, silently, leaving no footprints, asking nothing but the slightest of questions....
- What about becoming lost? I... I did forget, for a while, that I even existed... there seemed nothing but you, Jorak, and your memories singing to me. -
That is the most delicate of all. You must leave something of you behind, back in your own mind and body. Let your breath be your ear to your own self, or the feeling of your heartbeat, or the touch of your hand resting on your foot as you sit in lotus. Then, like a string stretched out through a maze, or a trail of pebbles through the forest, you leave a marker back to yourself, but... you must not let these marks get caught into the mind you are visiting, especially if you do not want them to know you are there. And when you leave, you must remember to carefully gather up every single sign, no matter how small, that points back to your own being.
- This is ever more strange and curious with each further step you lead me. You still want me to write all this down? Even though I am now looking at the world as if through your eyes? Will it be safe? -
Yes. You will find a way to show it. I will teach you a code to use in your writing, after you have seen more of my own memory, and know why I am running, and what message you must carry on to Tao Pablo for me, after they come from Calinova to take me from you.
- But why should I write it... oh, in case I fail, too.... -
I am sorry, love, but there must be a last plan. After they take me, there will be only you, and once you begin to move, if you do not succeed....
- ...Jorak, my love, I... I am too tired to look any farther tonight. -
Tomorrow, then.