The Godmakers

Chapter Eighteen

Evening light sent long shadows into Orne’s hospital room at the I-A Medical Center. It was the quiet time between dinner and visiting hours. The psuedoperspective of the room had been closed in to produce surroundings of restful security. Decoracol stood at low-green, lights dim. The induction bandage felt bulky under his chin, but the characteristic quick-heal itching had not yet started.

Being in a hospital made Orne vaguely uneasy. He knew why. The smells and the sounds reminded him of all the months he’d spent creeping back from death after Sheleb. He recalled that Sheleb had been another planet where war could not originate.

Like Amel.

The door to his room slid aside, admitting a tall, bone-skinny tech officer with the forked lightning insignia of Psi Branch at his collar. The door closed behind him.

Orne studied the man—an unknown face: birdlike with long nose, pointed chin, narrow mouth. The eyes made quick, darting movements. He lifted his right hand in a fluttery salute, leaned on the crossbar at the foot of Orne’s bed.

“I’m Ag Emolirdo,” he said, “Head of Psi Branch. The Ag is for Agony.”

Unable to move his head because of the induction bandage, Orne stared along his own nose down the length of the bed at Emolirdo. So this was the shy and mysterious Chief of Psi in the I-A. The man radiated an aura of knowing confidence.

He reminded Orne of a priest back on Chargon—another Amel graduate. The reminder made Orne uneasy. He said: “I’ve heard of you. How d’you do?”

“We’re about to find out how I do,” Emolirdo said. “I’ve reviewed your records. Fascinating. Are you aware that you may be a psi focus?”

“A what?” Orne tried to sit up, but the bandage restraints held him fast.

“Psi focus,” Emolirdo said. “I’ll explain in a moment.”

“Please do that,” Orne said. He found himself not liking Emolirdo’s glib, all-knowing manner.

“You may consider this the beginning of your advanced training,” Emolirdo said. “I decided to take it on myself. If you’re what we suspect… well, it’s extremely rare.”

“How rare?”

“Well, the only others are lost behind the mythical veils of antiquity.”

“I see. This psi focus thing, is that it?”

“That’s what we call the phenomenon. If you are a psi focus, then you’re… well, a god.”

Orne blinked, sat in frozen shock. He felt the wheel of his life turning, the sense of his one-being aflame with a terrifying passion for existence. An overriding awareness churned within him, bringing up all the ancient functions of life for his review.

He thought: Nothing can be excluded from life. It is all one thing.

“You don’t question that?” Emolirdo asked.

Orne swallowed, said: “I have questions, plenty of them.”

“Ask.”

“Why do you think I’m this… psi focus?”

Emolirdo nodded. “You appear to be an island of order in a disordered universe. Four times since you came to the attention of the I-A you’ve done the impossible. Any one of the problems you tackled could have led to ferment and perhaps general warfare. But you went in and brought order out of…”

“I did what I was trained to do, no more.”

“Trained? By whom?”

“By the I-A, of course. That’s a stupid question.”

“Is it?” Emolirdo found a chair, sat down beside the bed, his head level with Orne’s. “Let us take this in an orderly fashion, beginning with our articulation of life.”

“I articulate life by living it,” Orne said.

“Perhaps I should’ve said let us approach this from another viewpoint, just for the sake of definition. Life, as we understand it, represents a bridge between Order and Chaos. We define Chaos as raw energy, untamed, available to anything that can subdue it and bring it into some form of Order. In this sense, Life becomes stored Chaos. Do you follow this?”

“I hear your words,” Orne said.

“Ahhhh…” Emolirdo cleared his throat. “To restate the situation, Life feeds on Chaos, but must exist within Order. Chaos represents a background against which Life knows itself. This brings us to another background, the condition called Stasis. This can be compared to a magnet. Stasis attracts free energy to itself until the pressures of non-movement, of non-adaptation, grow too great and an explosion occurs. Exploding, the forms once in Stasis go back to Chaos, to non-Order. One is left with the unavoidable observation that Stasis leads always to Chaos.”

“That’s dandy,” Orne said.

Emolirdo frowned, then: “This rule holds true on both the chemical-inanimate level and the chemical-animate level. Ice, the stasis of water, explodes when brought into abrupt contact with extreme heat. The frozen society explodes when exposed to the heat of war or the burning contact of a strange new society. Nature abhors stasis.”

“The way it abhors a vacuum,” Orne said, speaking only in the hope of turning Emolirdo’s words off. What was he driving at? “Why all of this talk of Chaos, Order, Stasis?”

“We think in terms of energy systems,” Emolirdo said. “That is the psi approach. Do you have more questions?”

“You haven’t explained anything,” Orne said. “Words, just words. What’s all this have to do with Amel or your suspicion that I’m a… psi focus?”

“As to Amel,” Emolirdo said, “That appears to be a stasis that does not explode.”

“Then maybe it isn’t static.”

“Very astute,” Emolirdo said. “As to psi focus, that brings us to the problem of miracles. You have been summoned to Amel because we consider you a worker of miracles.”

Pain stabbed through Orne’s bandaged neck as he tried to turn his head. “Miracles?” he croaked.

“The understanding of psi represents the understanding of miracles,” Emolirdo said in his didactic way. “There is a devil in anything we don’t understand. Thus, miracles frighten us and fill us with feelings of insecurity.”

“Such as that fellow who supposedly can jump from planet to planet without a ship,” Orne said.

“He does do it,” Emolirdo said. “It’s another form of miracle to wish a device removed from your flesh and have that thing happen without harming you.”

“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.”