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Chapter 13

 
"There is a difference between refusing a helping hand and dismembering it. I would never refuse one."
—Conrad Bland

 

Jericho and Dorcas stood at the railing of the ship, watching the water rush past them as the sun began rising in the east. Suddenly he turned to her.

"Well?" he asked.

"Well what?" said the girl.

"I was wondering how many miles it is to Tifereth if I manage to stay on the river," he said. "I thought you could read minds."

"No," replied Dorcas.

"Then I'm confused," he said. "What use are you going to be if you can't get messages from the White Lucy?"

"That's an entirely different matter," she said.

"Oh? How?"

"Let's get some breakfast and I'll explain it to you while we eat," said Dorcas, leading the way to the ship's galley.

They found themselves alone, the small crew having eaten earlier. Dorcas had eggs, cereal, and toast, while Jericho stuck to soybean products.

"It's not that I wouldn't like the taste of what you're eating," he said when she queried him about it. "It's just that not every world had the foresight or the money to import colonies of farm animals from Earth, but just about all of them managed to bring along some soybeans. You've lived your entire life on Walpurgis; I've been on perhaps two hundred worlds, each with different home-grown food. My system had trouble adapting to the constant changes after a while, so I stick to soybean creations whenever I can. They taste pretty much the same—a little blander, perhaps—and I don't get sick from them."

"I find it hard to imagine such a successful killer having a bellyache!" laughed Dorcas.

"I don't have them," he pointed out. "It's one of the things that makes me successful: attention to detail. And I believe you were going to explain another detail to me now?"

"Yes," she said, swallowing a mouthful of cereal and washing it down with a glass of milk. "What you must understand is that we're not superhuman beings. We're just people with a gift. A very limited gift. I'm a receiver, not a reader. I can receive thoughts sent by the White Lucy or one of the other senders, of which there are about two thousand. But I cannot read your thoughts, or the thoughts of anyone who doesn't have the capacity to send them. Only the White Lucy can do that"

"How many of you are there?" asked Jericho.

"In the galaxy? I have no idea."

"No. On Walpurgis."

"About six thousand, so far," said Dorcas, starting on her eggs. "The White Lucy has gathered us together from her excursions all through the Republic. Of course, she hasn't made any lately; the last one was more than five years ago."

"I'm surprised she can make it from one room to the next," remarked Jericho, "let alone travel between planets."

"She's a strong woman, the White Lucy. Stronger than you suspect. She's forced herself to live this long while she's tried to find a successor."

"To herself?"

Dorcas nodded, waiting a moment to speak until she had swallowed her food. "We're all just partial telepaths, all except her. She'll stay alive until we find another one with her powers."

"She's well over a century old," said Jericho. "What makes her think that there will ever be another one like her?"

"She's already found one," said Dorcas. "A woman on Gamma Epsilon IV. But she was insane."

"And that's the only one?"

"Yes. But the existence of one implies the existence of others. That's where most of our senders are—on other worlds trying to find a true telepath. And in the process they recruit more partials for Walpurgis."

"Recruit?" asked Jericho. "You make it sound like a military operation."

She giggled.

"Have I said something funny?" he asked.

"Comparing us to an army," she said. "I find that funny. Haven't you figured out why we've banded together?"

"Suppose you tell me."

"We're lonely!"

"Why?" said Jericho with a smile. "In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king."

"Not if they all live in the dark," replied Dorcas. "Growing up in a normal society is like, oh, I don't know—like turning on your radio and finding that no one in the world can broadcast a signal."

"Why Walpurgis?"

"Why have we all come here? Because the White Lucy is here."

"And why is she here? She doesn't believe in all this supernatural hocus-pocus."

"But they believe in us," said Dorcas. "This is an isolationist society, which means that except for you we don't have any busybodies from the Republic nosing around. And it's composed of some pretty strange beliefs and customs, which makes it very tolerant of the odd talent. They leave us alone and let us earn a living while we try to find out how to reproduce our gift."

"Reproduce it? How?"

"I don't know. Here, I'll let the White Lucy tell you." She closed her eyes for a moment, then looked back up at him. "To begin with, it's sex-linked, since only women have even a partial power. And it's probably recessive, but we can't be sure if it's a simple or complex recessive, because we have no way of testing male carriers. I'm just repeating what she told me; does it make sense to you?"

"Some," said Jericho. "It seems to me that your best bet would have been to breed the hell out of your White Lucy."

Dorcas closed her eyes again for a few seconds. "She's sterile. So is the one on Gamma Epsilon IV. The White Lucy thinks that anyone with her abilities will be sterile, but she doesn't know why."

"I'm not the person to ask," said Jericho. "Maybe you'd better ask the White Lucy if Bland has tightened his defenses since last night."

"She says that he hasn't, that they're not defenses in the normal sense of the word so that he has no need of tightening them."

"What does she mean?"

"That he's killing anyone within his radius, regardless of whether he has reason to suspect them or not."

"Including his own men?"

"When he feels like it," said Dorcas.

"Interesting," said Jericho, pursing his lips. He fell silent for the remainder of the meal, then spent the rest of the day on deck, watching the barren landscape as the ship continued at a steady rate.

It was a strange world—nothing he hadn't been led to expect from the map he'd seen in Ubusuku's apartment, but strange nonetheless. Every few hours they'd come to a city or town, but in between was nothing: no suburbs, no exurbs, no country estates. There were a few farms, and these he questioned Dorcas about.

"Most of them are cooperatives, owned by city dwellers," she told him. "Most Walpurgans don't like country life."

"Who works them?" he asked, wondering if farmers were relatively free from Bland's scrutiny.

"Robots."

"Nonsense," he said. "No one uses robots these days."

"Walpurgis does."

Another anomaly. Men had given up on robots when it turned out that enforced leisure was not all that it was cracked up to be. They weren't outlawed, merely shunned. And yet since Walpurgis, thanks to its isolation from the Republic's community of worlds, was an essentially agrarian society, here robots formed the basis of a planetary economy.

"Have they any human supervisors?" he asked aloud.

"Very few," said Dorcas. "They're pretty sophisticated machines."

"They wouldn't be humanoid in structure, would they?"

She shook her head. "Why would anyone want a human structure to work a farm? They're harvesters and threshers and combines, all with functional brains. The White Lucy says that it was a nice idea, though."

"Thank her for me," Jericho replied ironically.

Three more days passed without incident, and Jericho, for lack of anything better to do, furthered his education concerning the ways of Walpurgan society. It was easier than he had anticipated, since the White Lucy was one of the original settlers—one of only three still alive, in fact—and was able to shed some historical light on many of the customs which mystified him.

The trick, he learned, was not to assume that anything he had discovered in Amaymon necessarily applied to any other city. Amaymon was a thriving river city, a melting pot of Walpurgan culture, and a debarkation point for visitors. Its rituals were more symbolic than substantive, and while the people paid lip service to all religions, they believed deeply in none of them.

Most of the other cities were different. They did more than mouth platitudes about evil and devil worship and black magic: they practiced them, sometimes to the point of anarchy. The White Lucy assured him that as he drew closer to Tifereth he would see sights that would shock even his flat, passionless mind. There would be torture rituals, not like the ones Bland seemed compelled to conduct, but rather born of a fervent religious belief; there would be ceremonies that had evolved from grotesque rites back on ancient Earth; there would be perversions—not just sexual—that existed nowhere else in the galaxy. The White Lucy would help him sort out one city's customs from another's, but since he would frequently be unattended by her receivers, she was already teaching him the basics of protective coloration on this world.

She related scores of small details to him, details of the type Ubusuku could only hint at, that would help him protect his identity and his life. And always, overriding everything else, was the constant reminder not to underestimate the sincerity and the conviction of these people. The concept of live and let live might apply to the White Lucy and the rest of the outside world—but in their own cities one obeyed their rules, both legal and religious, or one suffered the consequences, none of which were likely to be very pleasant.

On the morning of the fifth day, when they were a little more than halfway to Tifereth, Dorcas looked up at Jericho suddenly during breakfast.

"It's time," she said softly.

"The White Lucy?" he asked.

Dorcas nodded. "She says we'll reach a blockade within the next three hours."

"Should we chance it?" he asked, though he had already made up his mind to go ashore.

"No. The crew will be tortured, and sooner or later one of them will admit to having taken us on board just north of Amaymon. Once that happens you will never escape alive."

"What about the ship?"

The captain is one of the few outsiders who knows of the White Lucy's abilities. When I tell him to turn around and head back to Amaymon, he will do so without question."

"I see," said Jericho. "Well, there's no sense calling attention to myself by taking a rowboat. I think I'd better swim. Wait for ten minutes after I've made it to shore, then speak to the captain."

"All right," said Dorcas.

"What's the nearest town?"

"Kether. It's about eighteen miles north, along the river."

"Don't let the ship get that far before you turn it around. I don't want any connection between me, the ship, and Kether."

"I understand."

He went to his cabin, gathered together those few things he felt he would need, put them into a waterproof bag, and went back on deck.

"I hope this Kether is one of the cities where the White Lucy has a contact," he said.

"It is," Dorcas assured him. "A fortune-teller named Cybele. You can find her shop at the Plaza of Forras, a shopping center in the heart of the city."

"All right," he said, throwing a leg over the railing. "Remember: ten minutes."

Without another word he dove into the cold murky water of the Styx and vanished beneath the surface.

 

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