... The televised failure has one good result. It brings the little girl to the attention of Dr. Reiko Sasaki, a respected parapsychologist. This woman becomes a second mother to the girl. The real mother is only too glad to relinquish care of her. Under Dr. Sasaki's kind tutelage, Ume again produces thought photos. She also shows evidence of being telepathic. Helped by the good doctor, the girl receives a fine education, becomes Dr. Sasaki's assistant, and cooperates in research that shows how her thought photos are made.
... Unconsciously, Ume directs photons to impinge upon a selected area of photo-emulsion, creating concrete images of her thoughts. She can affect emulsion even when it is heavily shielded. Many careful experiments prove that the photons are not derived from existing sources of light. Either Ume's mind excites the emulsion atoms or air atoms to a point where photons are emitted, or else she creates the photons ex nihilo — out of another aspect of the Greater Reality, as proponents of the new Universal Field Theory would say.
... The strange and lonely little girl is now a woman, pursuing her own goals. Dear Dr. Sasaki is gone, and so is the girl's mother. Her two sisters do not have metapsychic talent. Ume writes to them, and to her nieces and nephews. Sometimes there are answers.
Then Ume sang a poem:
Autumn light painting
shadow patterns bright and dark;
my mind reflects them.
Now her entire face was bathed in golden radiance, and her breasts became autumn moons, and her sex a mystery of midnight blue that I saluted as she sank down, enclosing me. Her hands seemed to weave a luminous fabric around about us, an auroral chamber that rippled in the remote sounds from the cascading stream outside.
She pressed her fingertips to my nipples, my breastbone, and my throat. My aura there kindled into lotuslike flames, no longer sickly but rose-gold and shimmering. Her fingers traced mystical patterns on my back, and I saw with my mind how the skin retained the cool blazing designs, and how they blossomed and became more intricate all by themselves after her hands had passed on.
I began to awaken. The penetration was very slow, a hesitant growth after a long, parched dormancy. She arched her body back and brought the fire-limning fingers over my shoulders. I kissed the golden roses of her breasts, reverently pressed lips and tongue to the aural mandala burning above her heart. It was incredibly sweet, and as I drank from it it throbbed and expanded, and became invested with rainbow colors. A blue brilliance now poured from her hands, becoming golden as it gushed over my lower limbs. She rose up, freeing me, and I groaned in protest.
Trust me! We have so long a time...
I kissed all of her turning body, now clothed in astral fire. There were pulsating symmetries of blue-white with aureate coronas at her mons, her navel, her heart, and her throat. Both breasts were blinding stars. I was fully potent again myself, burning crimson and gold. Please! I besought her. Let me return! But she only lifted my arms, that had hung helplessly at my sides, and delineated the pathway of every nerve with scarlet epidermal radiance.
I wanted to crush her, to devour her, to impale her on the incandescent blade and burn her to ashes. No, she said. No. Wait my dear one wait.
Tears of frustrated fury scalded my face. I was enveloped in a thundering inferno with her coolness flickering madly out of reach. And then she guided the star-fires to my eyes... and into my mind burst the most beautiful thing I had ever known, a psychocreative lotus-form revolving and ever-changing in a thousand glorious variations. A new rare energy spread from my loins, up my spine, and suffused my trunk and limbs. She was suspended in the flower's heart, her body golden and her hair and blazing ecu azure. I enfolded her at last and she descended. I penetrated her so profoundly that it seemed I would pierce her heart, and there we stayed, rapt together in contemplation of our own many-colored splendor. There was never a culminating orgasm as such, but we shared joy that persisted without cloying as we elaborated upon the beautiful thing flowering between us, our personal creation. Whatever it was, we had made it together, and we worshiped it for hour after hour until we seemed to pass effortlessly into dreams, separated, but still conjoined in the memory of that fantastic night's work.
We woke the next morning contented, at peace, and the best of friends.
Ume and I were never lovers in the conventional sense. We never lived for each other or felt a need for permanent commitment. We were more like two musicians coming together in a duet of perfect harmony, delighting in a work of art that neither of us could have created alone. Sometimes sex was a part of it, and sometimes not. Coitus was always sublimated in the service of creativity — and since what we made was abstract, vanishing as music vanishes, it was probably not a true creature of love. But it was marvelous and it did us both good.
Ume's experimental work with me at the Metapsychology Lab, on the other hand, was a failure. Under controlled conditions, I could not generate the least attoerg of detectable energy anywhere in the electromagnetic spectrum — let alone produce a coherent laserlike beam. The out-spiral yoga technique only left me with top-of-the-skull headaches. (The in-spiral, on the other hand, was a great adjunct to carezza!) I spent far too much time messing around in the lab during the eight weeks of experimentation than I should have, and at the end of it I was dismissed from the creativity project as a nonstarter and my zapped windowpane was relegated to some forgotten storage cabinet.
Denis told me, "There's an off chance your creative function might become operant with practice, but I don't hold out much hope. Our educative techniques are most successful with youthful subjects. You're forty-seven and your metafunctions are encrusted with a lifetime's accumulation of neurotic dross. The more psychoenergetic powers will probably always remain latent, except possibly under conditions of great mental stress. "
"No big thing, " I said, glad of having escaped guinea-pig status. "I can live very well without it. "
I was wrong about that. But then I've been wrong about a lot of things throughout my checkered career.
Lucille Cartier and Bill Sampson endured a stormy severance. In time — and most likely thanks to Ume's subliminal reassurances — Lucille came to understand that I had not acted maliciously. I was more to be pitied than censured, and she decided to forgive me. The peace pact was sealed during the Christmas season of 1992, when she presented me with what she said was a much-needed addition to my bookshop: a dark and shaggy Maine Coon kitten to chase mice, keep me company in morose moments, and lend the place tone.
The kitten became the first Marcel LaPlume. By the time I discovered that he was not only telepathic but coercive as well, I was too used to him to give him up.
2
excerpts from:
final conversation between captain, orbiter module and surface exploration team
joint soviet-american mars expedition noctis labyrinthus, mars
2 november 1992
GAVRILOV: What is your position now, Volodya?
KLUCHNIKOV: We are 32 meters [garble] top of the fog is perhaps 20 meters below us. It is not stable as it was yesterday but is rising as sunlight [garble] the fissure and melts [garble].
GAVRILOV: Say again, Volodya. You are breaking up.
KLUCHNIKOV: We're 32 meters down the canyon wall. Descent is easy. Top of fog bank 20 meters below but rising. Today fog bank is rising. Do you copy, Andrei?
GAVRILOV: Roger on the copy. Fog rising... I am scanning the other fissures of the Labyrinth of Night. Fog is filling most of them. Perhaps the small dust storm yesterday provided condensation nuclei. Is the fog hampering your operation?
KLUCHNIKOV: Not yet... Are you receiving any video yet, Andrei?
GAVRILOV: Negative on the video signal. Wayne, you had better give that fancy American camera a good kick.
STURGIS: Listen, I been pounding on this sucker ever since we went over the rim and she started cutting out [garble] seals on the housing when we bumped her. But if it's something else, like maybe a glitch in the power supply, I can likely
fix [garble] to put our money on the ciné camera today. She's doing fine, so we'll have the record. Tough luck about your travelog, Andrei.
GAVRILOV. [laughs] Well, you fellows will just have to give me a word-picture of your descent into Night's Labyrinth. Be sure to let me know at once if you see green men with four arms.
STURGIS: Hey, you betcha. Ol' Tars Tarkas himself creeping up out of the mist [garble] but red layers of rock. We're taking regular samples. It's sedimentary and a fast eyeball scan shows no evidence of macrofossils. There's a sizable dike of blackish igneous rock a few hundred meters to the east of us. On our way back up we'll work our way over and grab a specimen.
KLUCHNIKOV: Wayne, do you see how the dust in the crevices is not so dry and fluffy anymore? It is more like coarse sand. I will take some ... under the surface it begins to firm up even more. The outcroppings have that spongy look even more down here than on the surface. They are something like orange coral, but there is no coral structure. No regularity indicative of life.
STURGIS: Hey... you know? Hey.
KLUCHNIKOV: What?
STURGIS: Over here. Like a little, shallow cave. Does that look like a puddle of ice to you?
KLUCHNIKOV: It does. Sheltered [garble] from yesterday. There is no dust on it. I will chip some out.
STURGIS: Oh-oh. Here comes the fog.
KLUCHNIKOV: Helmet lamps.
STURGIS: Aye-aye, Commander... Helps a little. No problem climbing down [garble] goddam crunchy sand. And some of the outcroppings have sharp edges. But outside of that [garble].
KLUCHNIKOV: Wayne, do not descend so quickly. I cannot see you.
STURGIS: Sorry, Volodya, I wanted to... the damnedest thing. You got me in sight now?
KLUCHNIKOV: Yes. This fog, ulcers to its soul, is getting thicker than clotted cream and —
STURGIS: Hey. Hey. I don't believe this. Put your headlamp to a rock. Look. Just look.
KLUCHNIKOV: The rocks look wet.
GAVRILOV: Say again, Exploration Team? You found wet rocks?
STURGIS: It looks like a thin coating of ice on the rocky outcropping, with liquid water in a film on the surface. I'm taking a sample.
KLUCHNIKOV: Fog... it is the fog. Look — the porous rocks are all getting this — this icy rind. And if we go lower...
STURGIS: Now you wait for me.
KLUCHNIKOV: Usrat'sa mozhno.... This is incredible.
STURGIS: Sheesh. Oh, wow.
GAVRILOV: What is it? What have you found? What do you see?
KLUCHNIKOV: Down here there is plenty of light, you understand, but the fog turns everything to an orange haze... and the rocks have a glistening coating. It is much darker than the ice. In my helmet lamp it is sometimes dark blue-green, sometimes brown. Yey bogu. It changes before my eyes.
STURGIS: It's alive.
GAVRILOV: You think you have found Martian life?
STURGIS: Well, it's not like any chemical reaction I ever saw... but then I'm only a geologist. What this stuff is starting to look like is a gelatinous marine growth. It's swelling very slowly. It must be frozen — what's the ambient, Volodya? — but there's this glistening film of what sure as hell looks like liquid at the surface.
KLUCHNIKOV: The ambient temperature is minus seventeen Celsius.
STURGIS: Jeez — that's warm. There must be a thermal vent at the bottom of the fissure. That was one of the hypotheses about this damn Labyrinth, with the craters all connected by wormholes...
GAVRILOV: Life. Life on Mars. What a magnificent achievement for the Diamond Anniversary of the Revolution.
STURGIS: And Columbus sailed the ocean blue... 500 years ago, comrades. One for America, too.
GAVRILOV: Of course. Of course. This is wonderful.
STURGIS: Right where we half expected to find it: down in the cracks. ... We're taking samples. Damn. That's tough. The pick ain't gonna do her, Volodya.
KLUCKNIKOV: Let us see what [garble] diamond-bit drill?
STURGIS: Yeah, that might work. Stuff's like some incredibly tough plastic. Resilient. But it'd have to be, right? To live in this godforsaken place... Ah. You got that micro-sabresaw handy?
KLUCHNIKOV: Here. Yes... That looks like it will do it. I think I'll [garble] you get that specimen packed. Here, connect the life line [garble] another ten meters or so further down. I want to check out the temperature and take an atmospheric [garble] stay here much longer.
GAVRILOV: Are you descending further, Volodya? You are garbled.
KLUCHNIKOV: The outcroppings inter[garble]... reconnoitre a bit farther... [garble] on the rocks. Not amorphous, like the other, but with a kind of jellyfish radial symmetry. Like a thick pancake perhaps fifteen [garble] and two, three centimeters thick.
STURGIS: Jee-zuss. It's — it's corroding the stainless steel baseplate.
KLUCHNIKOV: Fantastic.. [garbled]... that stupid specimen, Wayne. Get your arse down here and look.
STURGIS: Oxidizing the thing like a house afire.... What the hell is it? God — I think the blade's going. And the drill bit —
KLUCHNIKOV:... are quite beautiful, with flowing structures of ultramarine blue that engulf and seem to eat the green-brown [garble] ... with a light of their own. Like lucite lanterns.
GAVRILOV: Volodya. Commander Kluchnikov, come in. Your transmission is breaking up and fading badly.
KLUCHNIKOV: It is a fairyland. The beauty. Wayne, come down.
STURGIS: Goddammit, Volodya, will you quit [garble] so sure this stuff can't get at us. It could be dangerous. The acids or whatever that I released when I [garble] a fuckin' vanadium-steel blade to a rusty nubbin. Do you hear me? Commander?
KLUCHNIKOV: I am coming. You will not believe [garble] right off the rock.
GAVRILOV: Exploration Team, this is Orbiter. Come in, please. Come in Exploration Team.
KLUCHNIKOV: Zakroy ebalo, Andryusha. We are too busy to [garble] life-forms of exquisite beauty. They are hard, but resilient, and some of them are biolu[garble] of them right off its rock and into my collection bag.
STURGIS: Listen... listen, Volodya. Get up here fast, hear me? Don't touch those things. Anything that can live in this awful place —
KLUCHNIKOV: Now, then. What ails you, little [garble] so active. How did you [garble? scream?]...
STURGIS: Volodya.
GAVRILOV: Vova. Commander. Vladimir Maksimovich.
STURGIS: I'm coming. I'm coming...
GAVRILOV: The thing, Wayne. The thing he picked up. The Martian.
STURGIS: Hey. You okay, Commander?... oh... oh, no. No.
GAVRILOV: Wayne, what's happened?
STURGIS:... [garble]... not a user-friendly world. No. Tell 'em that, Andrei. Anyplace but Mars! Oh, Jesus. I can still [garble] fly in blue amber dissolving [garble? scream?]... on my suit like little drops of blue soup. Growing. Primordial soup is blue-green, Andrei [garble].. love you dear Ruth... [garble]...
TRANSMISSION ENDS
3
DU PAGE COUNTY, ILLINOIS, EARTH
20 JANUARY 1993
As THE CHAIRMAN of the Republican National Committee came slowly to the point, Kieran O'Connor's attention wandered — and thus it was that he heard the unaccountable mental voice.
Desiccated embryos returned to water... floating in aloof sadness...
"Even though some people may think it premature to consider such a matter at this early date, let me assure you that the Nominating Committee of the Republican Party does not, " Jason Cassidy said. "We suffered a devastating defeat in November. The incumbent beat our ass into the dust. He's riding high on the platform of economic prosperity that the Democrats stole from us, and he's managed to convince the voters that the metapsychic peace initiative and the disarmament program are both personal triumphs. "
Floating in the lustrous sea... letting their dry blood reconstitute ... plumping out, regaining form...
Do any of the rest of you hear that voice? Kieran demanded.
Four of the five men sitting around th
e fireplace with him on that bitterly cold night strained their farsense, listening. The other man, Brigadier General Lloyd A. Baumgartner, USAF (Ret. ), only sipped his Drambuie and stared at the Aubusson carpet in front of Kieran O'Connor's hearth. He wondered, in a subvocalization that was clearly perceptible to the telepaths, just when the National Committee Chairman would get to the point and offer him the 1996 Republican presidential nomination.
Jason Cassidy said, "There was a time when candidates were picked in smoke-filled rooms at the nominating convention itself. Later, primaries influenced the nomination and presidential aspirants began their campaign a year in advance. " I hear absolutely zilch Kier.
Len Windham said: I don't get anything but the subvocals of our male Cinderella impatient for his glass-slipper fitting. Would you look at that noble profile? Holy Gary Cooper! And the silver cowlick will be a political cartoonist's delight.
Neville Garrett said: I don't detect anybody.
Arnold Pakkala said: Nor do I... The domestic staff was given the night free as you ordered. There is no one in the house except the six of us.
"Today, " Cassidy droned on, "the presidential nominating process is infinitely more complex and requires long-range strategic thinking. The National Committee has been working on that strategy ever since our November defeat, in consultation with Mr. Windham and Mr. Garrett, our Party poll and media specialists, and certain senior advisers. "
Like Mr. Moneybags Kieran O'Connor! General Baumgartner said to himself. And now it's all perfectly clear. Why he acquired McGuigan-Duncan Aerospace and kept me on as CEO in spite of the losses I'd incurred in the Zap-Star debacle. Why his media flunky Garrett was so interested in my glory days as a Moonwalker —
And now the embryonic music starts... peeps and squeaks and fidgets and flowing bloodhum... a song of rebirth from death...