Furthest Read online

  We have now come to the end of our brief summary of the nature of your duties. We caution you, AS YOU VALUE YOUR ETERNAL SOUL, if you now feel that your nature is such that you will find it difficult or impossible to carry out the procedures described, it is time NOW to request release from your post. We remind you that telepathic sexual communion is experienced only by those of our men who are the rare beneficiaries of this honor on the part of the nation. That you should yourself experience it, through the attention of not one but many of the holy mindwives, when it is otherwise denied to all but our finest men, even though you serve only as a training mechanism, is evidence of the high esteem in which you are held. We repeat what was said at the beginning of this discussion—with the exception of the mindwives themselves, there is no higher or more sacred office than that of Training Elder. And with no exception, there is no office more dangerous spiritually. Think well, before you continue; if you are not strong enough, you must say so at once and before you put yourself in a position of eternal damnation.

  We close this introductory chapter with a brief poem from the personal works of Dekh Habid’dah, revered Training Elder of the Third Cycle:

  Let it be, Most High,

  that in the midst of flame

  I feel only the quenching wave;

  that in the midst of scarlet

  I see only the purest white;

  that in the midst of bliss

  I feel only serenity…

  Swim well, Elder.

  NOTE: THE BALANCE OF THIS MANUAL IS AUTHORIZED FOR RELEASE ONLY TO THE TRAINING ELDERS OF THE HOLY PATH. IF YOU ARE A TRAINING ELDER THE COMSYSTEM WILL RELEASE THE REST OF THIS MATERIAL TO YOU UPON PRESENTATION OF YOUR CREDENTIALS.

  NOTE: THE MATERIAL AROVE IS AUTHORIZED FOR RELEASE ONLY TO MALES ABOVE THE AGE OF FOURTEEN. IT IS YOUR RESPONSIRILITY, IF YOU NUMBER IN YOUR HOUSEHOLD WOMEN, AND CHILDREN OF EITHER SEX BELOW THE PRESCRIBED AGE, TO SEE THAT THIS TEXT DOES NOT FALL INTO THEIR HANDS. SHOULD ANY SUCH ACCIDENT OCCUR IT IS TO BE REPORTED AT ONCE, IN ORDER THAT IT MAY BE DEALT WITH.

  CHAPTER TEN

  “To have proved yourself able to defend your property is to have proved not that you are a man, but that you are a slave.”

  (from the Devotional Book of Tham O’Kent)

  Coyote put the MF viewer down and slowly pulled out the film cassette. His head was aching from the succession of shocks he’d gone through this night, pleasant as well as unpleasant, and from lack of sleep, and from a state of overwhelmedness unparalleled in his memory. And now, instead of his former condition—an almost total lack of data—he found himself with too much of it, and not sure what to do next. The revelation about the mindwife system on Furthest raised a number of interesting questions when an attempt was made to integrate it with known facts.

  He pulled a stylus and a senslate from the shelf by his bed and sat down to attempt just that sort of integration. Perhaps then he would be able to decide if not what to do, at least where to look, next.

  FACT ONE: The communications system of the Three Galaxies is dependent upon the Communipaths, a select class of state-trained, highly skilled telepaths to whom the interstellar distances are irrelevant.

  FACT TWO: Every child born throughout the Three Galaxies is tested at birth for the mutant blood characteristic called Factor Q, which is the unfailing mark of an unusual potential for psi activity, and for telepathy and telekinesis in particular. There are no exceptions to this rule.

  FACT THREE: The children who grow up on Furthest to become mindwives are obviously possessed of extremely high telepathic abilities.

  PUZZLE ONE: Given the first three facts, then, how does it happen that the potential mindwives are not taken from their parents at birth for raising and training in the Communipath Creche at Mars Central?

  FACT FOUR: At the end of the introductory chapter of the manual on the training of mindwives is the phrase, “Swim well, Elder.”

  FACT FIVE: There is only one illustration in the introductory chapter of the training manual, and that single illustration is completely unlike anything previously noted in Furthester culture. There are no curiously antique houses with cumbersome furnishings; there are no elaborate costumes swathing hidden bodies till nothing shows but faces and hands. Instead the picture shows a naked group, both males and females, without even the ever-present ear coverings. And their surroundings appear to be an underwater cave—full to the top with water and growing water plants.

  PUZZLE TWO: Facts Four and Five.

  Coyote stared at the list, weighing the combination of all these things with the fake citydome that covered nothing at all, with the strange over-structured secretive behavior of the Furthesters he had met, with all the little bewildering pieces of data that he had accumulated. He willed his mind to achieve some synthesis, some breakthrough that would show him at least the proper direction for his further investigation.

  But he didn’t know enough, obviously. It was still just a collection of unintegrated motley facts. What else could he add to his information?

  He could add the fact that these Furthester religious were a pack of bastards so sadistic that his stomach was threatening him with rebellion. Tying gagged little girls to chairs for days at a time… rebuffing their every touch or word… arousing them to a sexual fever pitch and putting them under twenty-four hour guard by servomechanisms… He was going to be sick if he didn’t keep busy.

  It was beginning to get light outside; he could tell from the crack of pale white that streaked the bottom of the heavy door to his room. Soon RK would be awake and calling him to breakfast. Whatever he was going to do had to be done rapidly.

  He went back to the comsystem console and requested the Book of the Holy Path, hoping that it would contain some facts and not just theological claptrap, and knowing how very unlikely that was. The comsystem delivered the MF with a minimum of delay, the cassette emerging within a minute or two from the duplicator slot.

  It was obviously a sacred book like any other sacred book, he saw, divided into sections which themselves were divided into “verses” like the ancient Holy Bible of old Earth and the inner planets. The dialect was not the same as that currently spoken on Furthest, and he was going to have trouble translating it into Panglish.

  He was flicking through the pages in his viewer, nervously trying to decide where to begin, when the knock came at his door and sent him into a panic. He left the MF viewer loaded, but attached it again to the chain around his neck, grabbed a robe almost as voluminous as Furthester garb, and called out, “Yes, RK? What is it?”

  “It’s not RK,” said a voice coolly. “It’s Bess. I suggest you let me in.”

  Bess! His stock of wonder was too depleted to allow him to be surprised, and he went straight to the door and let her in as if he were accustomed to having her come to his room at dawn and demand entrance. She was wearing her usual costume—head to foot total enshroudment, fancy earmuffs—even at this hour.

  “Come in, lady,” he said wearily. “Come in, and astonish me some more.”

  “Were you astonished, then?”

  She sat down facing him on a low bench against the wall, folded her hands in her lap, and looked at him with merry eyes, and he hadn’t the remotest idea what to say to her. Confronting him in the flesh, she was his Scenic Wonder, cool and remote and cynical; but he had his memories of the past night, when she had danced an ecstatic mind-dance with him in his bed and in a world that he had not known existed.

  “Didn’t you enjoy my skilled services?” she asked him. “Wasn’t it satisfactory, Citizen? You could complain to the Elders, you know.”

  “Bess—”

  “Oh, you could, Citizen. It is your right. We mindwives are supposed to be good at what we do. A great deal of time and money and rather perverted energy goes into ensuring that we are.”

  “Oh, Bess,” he said weakly, “there’s no question about it. You are superb at what you do. It’s just that I can’t, somehow, tie what you do together with what you appear
to be.”

  “Ah,” she said softly, “I see. Well, I suppose that depends somewhat upon your preconceptions about the way a government whore should look, doesn’t it?”

  “Bess!”

  “Oh, it’s quite true,” she said, her voice flat as the floor. “What we mindwives do, after we get through prattling about our sacred duty and our holy office and our service to the faith, what we do is whore for the state. I should not want you to misunderstand me—I’m a very high-class whore, but a whore all the same.”

  “You weren’t whoring with me, Bess,” he said firmly. “What you may do for the Furthester government is between you and them, but what you did for me was absolutely beautiful.”

  “You were in need,” she said. “I might say you were in need to the most incredible degree—it reminded me of my old fun days back at the Training Temples… I used to be in need like that, a great deal of the time. And I couldn’t leave you like that, not when I was able to do something about it.”

  Coyote smiled at her. “I thank you, Bess,” he said seriously. “With all my outworld heart, I thank you.”

  “And now you have questions, I suppose?”

  He reached over and retrieved the MF on mindwife training, and tossed it to her.

  “I thought I was going to get some answers from this,” he said, “but all I got was more questions.”

  Bess whistled under her breath.

  “How did you manage to get this?” she asked tensely. “The police should be here by now.”

  Coyote held up her brother’s credit disc and said, “This, first of all. And as for finding that specific item, I just kept requesting general bibliographies until I found a listing that was pertinent. Clever?”

  Bess put her hands to her face and let her breath out slowly.

  “Oh, my,” she said, her voice shaking, “yes, that was clever. But isn’t it funny? Wouldn’t you think that by now I would be a little less impressed by the dangers of being a criminal?”

  “I wouldn’t have risked your safety, Bess,” he said. “You should know that.”

  She shrugged, strong slender shoulders eloquent in dark brown velvet under the flowing silken hair.

  “It was I who risked my safety,” she said, “not you, Citizen.” Her voice turned bitter. “I have betrayed my people once again… this time perhaps I really have. Except—except that I could not have left you so in pain, Citizen. And I trust you. For some strange reason, I trust you.”

  “I’ve got something else,” Coyote told her gently, fighting the urge to draw her close and try to comfort her in her all too obvious misery. He had no idea how she would react to physical contact after the mindwife conditioning regime. “Look here, Bess.”

  He handed her the MF of the Book of the Holy Path, hoping that he was not defiling it in some way by the way he handled it.

  “You can’t read this,” she said at once. “How did you know to ask for it?”

  “It’s mentioned in the other one,” he said. “How do you know I can’t read it?”

  “Well, can you?”

  “Probably not.”

  “I thought not. What good will it do you, then?”

  “I suppose none. Unless you care to tell me something more about it. You can trust me, you know.”

  “Would you like to duel, Citizen?”

  The barbed mockery in her voice startled him, and he stared at her, astonished.

  “Well, would you?” she said.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” he said.

  “Nonsense. Let us have no games of lies between us, Citizen. I am sick to death of lying and hiding. What I mean is that if you would like to test your full projective strength at convincing me that you are to be trusted, I am willing to try my own strength at distracting you from that goal.”

  “I see.”

  “I’m sure you do.”

  “I would lose, I think,” Coyote chuckled. “I’m sure I couldn’t concentrate.”

  “For shame, Citizen. Where’s your devotion to your work?”

  “Where’s yours?”

  She smiled, acknowledging the point, and then turned the full sweetness of her eyes upon him, empty of all the sardonic goading they usually held, and he felt blinded and naked before her.“

  “I do trust you,” she said. “I don’t know what it is that you are here to do, but I believe that I could safely tell you what you want to know. At least I can make a beginning.”

  “Tell me, then!”

  “Ask me, then!”

  “How does it happen that the children who become mindwives are not sent to the Communipath Creche, Bess? They’re obviously telepaths, they must bear the Q Factor—how is it that they are excepted from service?”

  “They aren’t excepted, Citizen. They don’t have Factor Q in their blood.”

  “You’re not serious.”

  She nodded. “Indeed I am. Factor Q does not appear in the blood of the Ahl Kres’sah.”

  “But that is very, very strange.”

  “No. It is fortunate. If that were not the case, and if someone were to try to take away the mindwife novices from Furthest, there would be war—our men would die, to the last one, before they would surrender them.”

  “I understand that,” said Coyote. “That is, I understand why they don’t wish to surrender the mindwives. What I do not understand is why there’s no Factor Q in your blood.”

  Bess sat silent, looking at him and waiting.

  “Wait a minute…” He had a sudden thought. “Bess, this is going to sound foolish. No, it’s too foolish. Tell me something else, first. Why are the mindwives kept secret?”

  “I’ll quote for you,” she said, “from that book you cannot read. And put it in good Panglish, too.”

  “Please do, Bess.”

  “‘And it shall come about, that the day will dawn at last, when the mindwives shall be laid naked before the Three Galaxies by reason of the loose tongue of a wicked man; and beware, then, ye people, O Ahl Kres’sah, for the holy women of the mind shall be taken from you and sold throughout the Galaxies and shall serve as the slaves of evil men forevermore.’”

  “That’s in the Holy Book, Bess, just like that?”

  “Word for word, Citizen.”

  “And your people believe it?”

  “Of course they do.”

  Coyote nodded. “I begin to see,” he said slowly. “Bess?”

  “Yes?”

  “What does it mean—Ahl Kres’sah? Can you put that in Panglish for me, love?”

  “Are you that wicked man,” she mused, “the one named in the Book, the one who shall make me whore for the galaxy instead of just for my own world?”

  “Bess, I would not—I would not ever harm you. It is just really necessary that you believe that.”

  He went over to her then, slowly, to allow her time to pull away if she wanted to, and put one hand on her arm, feeling her shiver at his touch as if she had been burned.

  “Tell me, lady,” he said casually, “what does Ahl Kres’sah mean?”

  “It means,” she said, “I’m not sure… yes. The closest thing would be ‘Children of the Dolphin.’”

  “What!” Coyote stared at her. “Bess, I just don’t understand.”

  “‘In the first days,’ ” she said, and he realized that she was quoting again, “ ‘when the ancient ones went out from their mother world under sentence of death, it came about that they met the dolphin and that they drew near them and bore children by them, as they were instructed by the Most High. And He blessed their union, and bid them hide from all the universe, for all men would curse them and turn upon them and kill them, and He spoke and said that they should be known thereafter forever as the Ahl Kres’sah, Children of the Dolphin. And they praised His name, and they swam for joy.’”

  There it was, at last. Coyote sat down again and tried to ignore the whirling of his head, and she watched him without speaking.

  “That’s why there is no Factor Q among your
people,” he said finally. “The mutation doesn’t show up in your blood because it is of very different composition, that’s all.”

  “That must be right, Citizen,” she agreed. “I wouldn’t know.”

  “Let me see if I have this straight, Bess,” he said. “Your people came here originally, a thousand years ago, fleeing religious persecution. And there was a race already here—an amphibious race, with which you intermarried, something like the dolphin. Is that right, lady?”

  “Yes.” She smiled sadly. “I think ‘dolphin’ is the nearest Panglish equivalent. And now, if I have made a mistake in trusting you, the armies of the Three Galaxies will come, with rockets and bombs and lasers, and they will exterminate us, from the smallest baby to the oldest man, as an abomination in the sight of all humankind.”

  “And your people have kept this secret, all these hundreds of years? And the earmuffs you wear—of course, they cover gills of some kind!”

  Bess leaned back against the wall, arms behind her head.

  “And what are you going to do now, Citizen?” she asked quietly. “Have I given up my people into slavery and death? It is said, in our Holy Book, that you others will kill us, one and all… will you give us up to be destroyed, Citizen Jones, owner of a failing MESH? Is that what you are about to do?”