One of the requirements of being a bona fide psychic is to be registered with a duly authorized organization that can help train and monitor the activities of psis, as a reassurance to the general populace. The most widespread one, of course, is the PsiLeague, but the second largest, if less known than most people realize, is the Witan Order. Where the League is very much a scientific organization, devoted to the study, dissection, training, and improvement of paranormal abilities with a careful methodology and a healthy—but not excessive—dose of skepticism, the Witan Order is very much a religious organization. In fact, only a small part of the Witan Order actually deals with psis, with the rest being devoted to what it’s really known for, the unification of wisdom and worship across religious and secular boundaries. But they do deal in psychic abilities on a larger scale than most people realize.
This is not to say they don’t use the same training methods as the PsiLeague, since they are indeed effective. It’s just that, as a religious order, the Witan Order is capable of doing more things than a nonreligious one like the League. For instance, for certain subsects of the Witan Order, you have to be a psychic in order to be ordained as a priest or priestess for that sect. Others, you can be, and are presumed to be, but it isn’t necessary to actually be one. More than that, the Witan Order may be required by law to keep files on who is psychic, so on and so forth…but those files can be sealed to the subsect of the Order if someone is a duly ordained priest or priestess of that sect, revealable only upon a court order. And they don’t always talk about which subsects within the Order have these requirements…because to the Witans, that falls under the confidentiality of the confessional.
In my case, it was listed in my military application that I was a duly ordained priestess of the Witan Order, subsect Zenobian. And there actually is a Zenobian Sect of the Witan Order. It’s just a very, very small one, confined to Sanctuary itself, which at the time contained no more than a couple dozen duly ordained clergy. And yes, you do have to be a duly registered psi to be a priestess of the Zenobian Sect. They just don’t talk about the requirements.
So the information has been there all the time, which by law it has to be…but also by right of privacy law, I didn’t have to go around blaring it to everyone that I was indeed a psi. Provided, of course, that I was duly registered and that I underwent the required yearly ethical exams by duly authorized telepathic examiners…which, conveniently, the Zenobian Sect just happened to possess.
~Ia
AUGUST 3, 2492 T.S.
“No, no, and no,” Ia admonished the group of grimy, gritty, coverall-clad youths lined up in front of her. “You do not go into any of these side tunnels alone. I know it seems more efficient, but it isn’t.”
She was just as dirty as they were, with good reason. For the last three hours, they had been climbing, rappelling, sliding, scuttling, and otherwise surveying yet another stretch in the maze of lava tube tunnels beneath the foothills of the Grampnell Mountains east of the capital. Some of it had been done in the wall-climbers Rabbit had bought just for this, but much of these tunnels had to be surveyed on foot for accuracy. Curved stone walls surrounded them, some charcoal grey, some reddish brown, and many streaked with either mineral stains, water marks, or the local equivalent of mold spores.
“You will not violate the basic laws of spelunking,” Rabbit added. She held up one petite finger per point, lecturing them. “Nobody goes caving alone, nobody goes without a beacon transponder in case of an emergency, nobody goes anywhere down here without a pack carrying enough emergency rations to sustain them for two days…and nobody goes down here without telling someone else in the gang.”
“We do need these three-dimensional surveys,” Ia added, pointing at the wall-crawler vehicles waiting to be manned again, “but we will not be careless about it.”
“I don’t feel comf’ble, lyin’ to my uncle,” one of the girls mumbled, arms crossed tightly over her chest. “What if he needs to get down here? And gets lost tryin’ t’ make sense of the maps we’re givin’ ’im?”
“As much as it pains me to have to deceive your uncle, too, Jula, he works for the Department of Geology, and the DoG is one of the places the Church will swarm with a thousand microscopes when it comes to open war between the colony’s two main factions.”
“I could’ve fit,” the slender boy next to Jula argued. “And Rabbit, too.”
“Until we can get the right equipment to widen those side tunnels, it’s too dangerous. If either of you got stuck, the rest of us would have a near-impossible time trying to pull you back out,” Ia stated.
“And while I’m small enough to go in after you, I’m nowhere near strong enough to pull you back out,” Rabbit reminded them.
“So when do we get that equipment?” Leuron asked Ia, lifting his chin. That flashed his headlamp into her eyes, but only for a moment. “You keep promising a bunch of fancy equipment will show up. When?”
“When the time is right. I can’t exactly pull a sandhog out of my kitbag, you know. As it stands—” Ia cut herself off, bemused by the beeping of her arm unit. The bracer-sized brown plexi device beeped again. Flipping open the lid, she arched a brow at the sight of the woman peering up at her from the screen inside. “Yes, Leona?”
“There’s been a change in our schedule. We’re going to have to move up your exams by two days.”
That was unexpected. Ia frowned. “Two days early would make it today.”
“Heddie had an attack of Fire Girl Prophesy, followed by a bout of precognition. She says she has to be elsewhere today, which means she’d be on duty in two days’ time. You know as well as I do that sometimes two precogs cancel each other out, which was why she wasn’t going to be on duty. But now she is, and I don’t think it’ll be a good idea for you to be scanned by her.”
“She’d blab half the things she hears to her best friend, who will tell her cousin, who just happens to be dating a Church member, you mean,” Ia muttered.
“You’re the expert on intercausality chains, not me. How soon can you get up here? You’re in the tunnels, right?” Leona asked her, squinting at the cavern ceiling beyond her view of Ia’s head.
“About two hours out from the city, maybe a little more. I’ll need a few minutes for instructions, and a few minutes to get cleaned up, once I’m topside.”
“Call me when you’re on the surface, and I’ll get everything ready,” Leona instructed her.
Nodding, Ia ended the call by flipping her wrist unit lid shut. Sighing roughly, she turned to the others. They had spread out a little, murmuring among themselves. “Okay. I’d much rather give you your choice in where to go and what to do for the rest of today, but I’m out of time. While for most things, I can predict certain probabilities with great accuracy…they still remain probabilities. So I’m going to show each of you where to go spelunking today, and what pitfalls to avoid. Line up and present foreheads; this won’t take long.”
Thankfully, they obeyed. It didn’t take long, either. This wasn’t an explanation of her greatest war and the reason why; this was simply a skimming of their immediate futures, showing them which paths were the best to take and which were the ones to avoid.
The volcanoes that had formed these lava tubes in the ancient days of this planet had long since gone extinct, but they had left behind a veritable maze of passages. The Space Force, which had dug bunkers and shelters into the bedrock when it had looked like the Terrans and the methane-breathing Dlmvla were on the brink of going to war, had stumbled across these tunnels. Their solution had been to seal them off with tough plexcrete walls, though the Department of Geology had insisted on doors being added for future spelunking needs.
Ironically, attempts had been made to prospect for ores, but the Terran Space Force had shut that down, locking the bunkers with security codes so that they could only be opened in a genuine emergency. The star system containing Sanctuary also hosted two methane gas worlds, prime targets for the Dlmvla, so the bunkers had to remain inviolate. Naturally, Ia knew the release codes in advance. And just as naturally—or rather, precognitively—she knew these tunnels would form the starting point for sheltering the saner half of the coming civil war.
Leuron hesitated when she reached for his forehead. Ia did as well, arching a brow. “Yes?”
“Why do we gotta build stuff down here?” he asked her. “Why can’t we just move people to the other side of the planet?”
“Duh,” Rabbit answered before Ia could. “Because the Church will simply bomb the shakk outta whatever settlements we have on the surface. Gerald Fortranger runs the Department of Defense, and he’s one of the Elders of the Church.”
“Then why use the Terran bunkers?” another teenager asked. “Fortranger probably has the access codes memorized.”
“Because the codes can be changed,” Ia told him. “The next time I come back here, they will be changed. In fact, the locking mechanisms will probably be updated as well…and the new codes, the real codes, won’t go to anyone on the Church’s side.”
“If you wanna keep up, Leuron, you’ll have to start following religion and politics,” Rabbit stated wryly. Then wrinkled her nose. “Add in sex and sports, and you’ll have the Forbidden Four Topics.”
One of the other teen boys grinned and nudged the girl next to him. “You wanna go off in that side passage we found last week, and get to ‘third base’ while the Prophet’s handing out assignments?”
His target wasn’t the only one to groan at the bad pun. Ignoring them, Ia touched her fingertips to Leuron’s forehead, giving him a touch of forewarning on what to look for while he was busy surveying the network of lava tunnels. She finished going down the line, then nodded at the last two, a pair of girls. “You two are with me. The laws of spelunking apply even to myself, so you’ll escort me up, then help each other back down before resuming the surveys. Whatever you do, don’t drop your scanners. They cost Rabbit a glossy cred chit, and you’ll make her cry if you break one.”
Rabbit mock-rubbed her eyes, miming crying if they should ruin the equipment, then grinned. Her child-like soprano voice echoed off the rough, rounded walls. “Well, you heard Ia. We have a long, hard slog ahead of us, but it’ll be fun! Pizza and topado cakes when we’re done, everyone!”
Leaving her to marshal her unlikely, cave-crawling troops, Ia nodded to the two girls and turned toward one of the wall-crawlers with four seats instead of two. “Come along. As fun as it is down here, I have to get back up to the surface.”
“You think this is fun?” one of the girls asked, wrinkling her nose. She plucked at her coveralls in distaste. “I’m only down here because Rabbit and you asked me to help.”
Ia looked down at her grime-covered clothes, then eyed the younger woman, equally smeared in lava grit. “Compared to being covered head to toe in alien guts? Yes, I do think this is fun. Unfortunately, I have to go and get my head cracked open now.”
The Witan Church of Contemplation was quiet, peaceful, and well-lit. Not just from the tasteful spiral-galaxy chandeliers in the foyer, narthex, and sanctuary, visible through the large plexi windows separating each section of the ground floor, but also by the lightning flickering outside. It lit up the stained glass windows with their geometric, almost crystalline patterns, and brought the scents of ozone and a hint of rain into the front hall with her, the smells that said she was home.
Closing the door behind her, Ia pulled off the light jacket she had donned to ward off the slight chill in the air. She had stopped long enough at her parents’ home to shower and change into clean civilian clothes, a flowery blue shirt and plain dark blue slacks left over from the years before she had left for Earth and the Space Force. They weren’t quite SF-Navy blue, but she’d be wearing those colors soon enough.
Leona, an older woman with greying auburn brown hair and hints of gravity stress-lines creasing her face, met her in the narthex beyond the foyer. Befitting her rank in the Witan Order, and the fact that she was on duty, she wore a white tabard over a blue robe. The Unigalactan sword-in-galaxy had been embroidered in silvery thread on the front and back of the tabard, and she had embellished it further along the edges with stylized flames intertwined with lightning bolts.
On the pommel-nut of the downward-pointing sword, a tiny, gold-threaded Radiant Eye had been stitched. Originally done in black as the symbol for the PsiLeague, it had been adopted by several psychic registration organizations, including the Witan Order. The difference from a standard sword-in-galaxy was subtle, but the Order preferred discretion for its psychic associations. Even in the late twenty-fifth century, there were still those who feared to let others know they had actual paranormal abilities.
Then again, with the Church of the One True God declaring such things an abomination of nature and a sin against God, who could blame anyone for wanting to be a little cautious?
“Are you ready to confess your sins, meioa-e?” Leona asked her. The older woman quirked her mouth up on one side as she did so, acknowledging the irony of those words on this world.
“I am ready, yes,” Ia replied, twisting her own lips.
“This way, then.” Gesturing, Leona led the way to the stairs to the basement level. Not that Ia needed guiding, since this was the church nearest her family’s home, the church where her gifts had first been diagnosed and trained.
There was something new about the place. She eyed the mottled shades of blue underfoot as they descended. “New rugs?”
“A bit of an extravagance if you ask me, since most people take the lifts going back up, but the Church committee insisted,” Leona told her. “‘One day soon, our people won’t get breathless just going up and down the stairs, so they might as well look good,’ and all that.”
“If it’s any consolation, they do look good,” Ia offered.
“Have you gone into fashion and interior design, then?” Leona asked dryly.
“Not in this life,” Ia retorted crisply. “It’s just a nice change from military hues, that’s all.”
“Ah, yes. I received a vid-call from a Chaplain Benjamin, regarding you,” the older priestess told Ia. “She wanted to know if you were handling civilian life alright.”
Ia refrained from rolling her eyes. “She’s something of a friend, and something of a watchdog. I think the Department of Innovations asked her to keep a closer eye on my mental and emotional stability, considering how I’ve been constantly deployed in a combat hot spot for the last two years. You’re listed on my personnel file as my family pastor, so naturally she’d call you.”
“Department of Innovations?” Leona asked, leading her down a side corridor. “What’s that?”
“It’s part of the Branch Special Forces in the Terran military. They oversee merit-based promotions, and fast-track those with leadership potential,” Ia explained. “Or slow the advance of those who have, ah, reached their maximum capacity for competence.”
Leona smiled. “Then let us hope they do not have reason to slow you down. We’re in the east conference room,” she told Ia, opening the door. “Your examiners will be myself, Priest Ortuu, and Priestess Kaskalla. Be gentle on Kaskalla, as this will be her first time participating in these sessions.”
Ia nodded at the familiar figure of Ortuu. Like Leona, he had the white tabard of the Witan Order arrayed over his blue robes. Like his compatriot, his was decorated around the edges with fire and lightning, symbols of the Zenobian Sect. Unlike her, he was resting in a chair with his feet propped up on a second seat, sipping from what smelled like a cup of caf’.
Beside him, perched somewhat nervously on her own chair at the round, white-topped table, was the young woman Kaskalla. Like Ortuu, her complexion was dark, her eyes brown, and her hair black and fuzzy. Her tabard contained the sword-in-galaxy of the Unigalactans…but the edges of hers were marked with fanciful rauela feathers, each long, curving shaft stitched in a different rainbow hue.
“She’s…not a member of the Zenobian Sect,” Ia observed, glancing at the older priestess. She didn’t like this second surprise sprung on her. If she had probed the future in more than just a light skimming, if her instincts about the timestreams hadn’t remained calm, she would have called an end to this session before even arriving.
“I thought it best that you have at least one ‘neutral’ observer on record. Don’t worry; Kaskalla’s one of us in heart, if not in vows,” Leona added.
Ia shook her head. “I’ll have to scan her, first. Introducing any new element, however seemingly benign, can shift the paradigms too far.”
“Scan me?” Kaskalla asked, brows lifting. “I’ve already undergone my ethics probes for the year, meioa. In fact, it was just last month.”
“It’s not that kind of scan,” Ia corrected her. She glanced at Leona.
“I haven’t told her much about you,” Leona confessed. “I figured it’d be best that way. But I’ll vouch for her. I was one of the ones who scanned her, last month.”
“I’ll still have to scan her,” Ia demurred. Crossing to the younger woman, Ia addressed her concerned look. “My abilities are a bit…touchy, meioa. Oversensitive, I suppose you could say. I need to make sure you and I can interact without triggering them the wrong way. It does not, however, involve reading your thoughts. It’s sort of more like scanning your aura than anything else. Do I have your permission to do so?”
Kaskalla looked at the other two. “Is this safe?”
Ortuu shrugged. “Ia is a duly ordained priestess of the Zenobian Sect. She’s passed all the required psychic ethics and appropriate conduct classes, the exact same as you.”
“Do you need me to lower my shields?” the young priestess asked Ia.
Ia shook her head. “That shouldn’t be necessary. But I do need you to refrain from reacting psychically to anything you may sense.”
That earned her a skeptical look, but Kaskalla shrugged and acquiesced anyway. “Alright, you have my permission.”
Nodding, Ia touched her fingers to the other woman’s forehead. This wasn’t quite like touching the minds of the youths Rabbit had gathered around her. Kaskalla was Ia’s age, maybe a little younger, but she was a fellow psi. That changed all the variables.
Back when the kinetic inergy, or KI, machine had first been crafted and proven to be capable of reliably measuring psychic emanations—weeding out the con artists and the merely delusional from the actually gifted members of society—scientists had discovered that different people had different “frequencies” of psychic abilities. Some of these frequencies could augment fellow psis, while others could negate, counter, or otherwise interfere with the abilities of two or more gifted people.
Touch almost always concentrated that effect, though personal effort via mental “shields” could quell some of it, and the stronger the gift, the more likely it was to overpower or override a fellow psychic’s abilities. But by a quirk of quantum probabilities—namely, the butterfly effect—even a weak ability could mess with a very strong one. Highly subjective as most psychic abilities still were, despite the advances of modern detection and training methods, they did operate under the same general rules of physics as other energy phenomena.
So Ia eased her mind open very slowly, very carefully. Leona’s mind, she knew. Ortuu’s mind, she knew. Kaskalla’s mind was rife with curiosity and touches of wary caution. It wasn’t telepathy, per se, but it was a pathic-level awareness of the other female. Opening her precognition a tiny trickle, Ia probed carefully into her timestream possibilities, skimming lightly to minimize the chance the other woman would sense what she was doing.
What she was looking for…she didn’t find. Kaskalla wouldn’t betray Ia or her fellow colonists to the Church. Not on any potential level of possibility, not in the timeplain paths Ia was trying to guide everyone into. There was a chance Kaskalla’s gifts could augment her own a little, since she was apparently a very strong telepath, but she was a polite one, remaining safely within her mental walls.
Relieved, Ia backed out of her probings. Removing her fingers, she nodded. “I think we’ll be compatible enough.”
“Good. Then we can get started?” Kaskalla asked, glancing at the others.
Ortuu put down his caf’ cup with a heavy sigh, visibly reluctant to give up the hybrid version of coffee. The Terrans and the V’Dan had developed it between themselves shortly after the two disparate branches had been reunited, smoothing out the bitter flavors and increasing the caffeine content pleasantly. Leona took a seat at the table, a cup of water resting in front of her. Ia sat as well, picking a seat between her and Kaskalla.
The younger priestess eyed her. “Um…I thought we were going to move to one of the testing rooms. You know, where the KI machines are?”
Leona, Ortuu, and Ia all shook their heads. Ortuu, dropping his feet from the spare seat, answered her question. “We can’t have an active KI machine in the same room while we do this.”
“Ethical Scan regulations clearly state that the psi in question needs to be monitored with a KI machine to ascertain whether or not they’re straining away from the probe,” Kaskalla argued, tapping the table.
“Yes, but the cost of those precious KI machines argue against using them in Ia’s presence,” Ortuu countered just as tartly. “Her gifts and those machines are incompatible during an ethics probe. Unless you yourself want to pay the twenty-three thousand credits per machine to replace them, we do this without any active ones—speaking of which, I’d better go and double-check the ones in the testing rooms are still turned off,” he added, pushing to his feet. He snagged his mug as he rose. “I know I checked them earlier, but paranoia is only prudent. I’ll be right back.”
Kaskalla gave him a confused look as he left. She shifted her gaze to Ia. “I don’t get it. How can you damage a KI machine, unless it’s done physically?”
“You didn’t tell her anything about my gifts?” Ia asked Leona. The older woman shook her head. Sighing, Ia gave the younger woman a brief explanation. “As I said, my gifts are overly sensitive. Particularly when someone is mucking around in my brain. Three of my gifts are telekinesis, pyrokinesis, and electrokinesis, all of which can affect the KI machines. Particularly the electrokinesis, if it’s triggered inadvertently by you stumbling around inside my head.
“Unfortunately, while the actors in Space Patrol pull down huge piles of creds for each vidshow they make, I’m in the real Space Force, and my pay is a laughable pittance by comparison,” Ia said, holding Kaskalla’s gaze. “I had to save for two years just to be able to afford to come home. I literally cannot afford to replace the Order’s testing machines on my salary.”
“She killed four of them before we figured out what she was doing, back when her gifts fully blossomed,” Leona added dryly. “Thankfully, one of her other gifts was precognition.”
“Precognition?” Kaskalla asked. “Why be thankful for that?”
“Because I gave the Order the exact numbers to win just enough money in the Alliance Lottery to cover the replacement and shipping costs for four new machines,” Ia told her.
The younger priestess opened her mouth, hesitated, then closed it. She shook her head. “That…skims the grey lines of ethics rather neatly. You didn’t benefit directly from doing that, and it is covered under the ‘reparations’ addendum. Which technically leaves you clean, ethically. Though I wonder how you could pluck the exact numbers out of the air so readily,” Kaskalla murmured, frowning. “Or was that a lucky touch of your gift?”
Ia lifted her left arm, checking the chrono display on the lid of her arm unit. “Tonight’s local lottery drawings will take place in…forty-three minutes. Considering this session will take over two hours to complete, it doesn’t violate any ethics to give you the winning numbers for tonight’s games, since you won’t be free to go buy a ticket. The Sanctuarian Daily Lotto’s numbers are 4, 37, 18, 9, and Blue. The Lucky Draw’s cards will be Queen of Diamonds, Three of Clubs, Seven of Clubs, and Ace of Spades.
“I’d give you the Alliance Lottery’s Power Pick winning numbers,” Ia added, smiling slightly, “but those won’t be drawn until tomorrow, and that would be a violation of ethical use of precognition in predicting gambling outcomes, because you would have time to go buy a handpicked ticket, which in turn could be construed as a bribe to you…not to mention it would be a violation of the future, since you’re not scheduled to win any of the drawings this week. Sorry.”
“You didn’t even strain to pick those numbers,” Kaskalla protested. “How can I know they’re real?”
“Write them down, and check them after the fact—welcome back, Ortuu,” Ia added as the priest reentered the conference room. “Everything shut off?”
“Everything’s shut off, and I have a fresh cup of caf’,” he agreed, setting the refilled mug back on the table. “Let’s get started, then. Everyone scoot a little more evenly around the table. I’ll be the anchor, the one not in direct contact with her mind. Kaskalla, you are only to observe in this session. Make sure you do not say or think the word time while you are observing, while you’re at it. Leona will be leading the probe and the questions. Ia, when you are ready, bring us in.”
“Right.” Closing her eyes, Ia calmed her thoughts. Running through the grounding and centering exercises was by now an old habit, but she consciously took herself through each visualization step, until she felt stable, calm, and controlled. Opening her eyes, she reached for Kaskalla’s hand, gently bringing the Witan priestess into mental contact with her.
(Hello,) Kaskalla greeted her. (By the code of the ethics probe, what is yours will remain yours until the end of this session, where my fellow scanners and I will debate the legalities of your psychic-related actions. You have the right to defend each point of contention during this scan. You have the right to a second scan. If any illegalities are uncovered and sustained upon a second scan, you have the right to legal counsel and legal representation in a court of law. Do you understand these rights as I have explained them to you?)
(Trust me, I’ve been doing this since I was a little girl. Just don’t prejudge until you have all the facts,) Ia warned her. (Don’t leap to any conclusions, and limit your questions. Let Leona take the lead. She knows which questions to ask. Brace yourself; I’m bringing her in.)
She could sort of sense the older woman already, who lurked beyond Ortuu’s thoughts, who lurked at the edges of Kaskalla’s mind. When she held out her hand, accepting Leona’s grasp, the circle of thoughts jolted. Now Leona was a strong presence on her right and a weaker echo from the left. Kaskalla was strong from the left and an echo from the right. Ortuu was a double echo, anchoring the far side of the ring. Not in direct, physical contact with her, he would remain the clearheaded member of the trio, much more of a dispassionate observer than either woman, who would be in direct contact with Ia’s thoughts, emotions, and memories.
(You know the standard rights and waivers, Ia, so let us begin. Your last probe took place on February 13th, 2492 Terran Standard. Examiners were myself, Priestess Miranda Fyodore and Priest Ortuu Wickenne of the Zenobian Sect of the Witan Order of Sanctuary,) Leona stated. (We will therefore start with the day of February 13th of 2492 T.S. Today is July 27th, 2492. Have you consistently used your psychic abilities every single day between the thirteenth of February and today?)
(I have,) Ia stated, putting conviction and honesty behind the mental words. It was exceptionally difficult to lie mind-to-mind. It could be done, if the person lying possessed both very strong telepathic abilities and were a talented method actor, but with three trained and strongly gifted examiners watching her every thought, Ia didn’t bother.
(God, every single day? We’ll be here all night!) Kaskalla protested.
Leona frowned at her. (Keep your kibbitzing to a minimum, Priestess. It will not take all night. Ia, have you, to the best of your knowledge and honesty, used your abilities in the vast majority of instances with ethical care and consideration for obeying the laws of the Alliance?)
(In the vast majority of instances, I have,) Ia stated. She could feel Kaskalla start to form a protest and squeezed the younger woman’s fingers in silent warning to stay quiet. (I am prepared to show you any example you wish of legally acceptable use of my psychic abilities.)
Leona nodded. (We will exercise that option at our discretion. Regarding instances which do not fall firmly into the category of ethical care and consideration for obeying the laws of the Alliance…are you prepared to submit those instances for our examination and consideration?)
(With the understanding that I have the legal right to call upon the statutes covering Johns and Miskha versus the United Nations, regarding the rights of precognitives to act or not act in accordance with the betterment and benefit of future lives and their overall safety as foreseen in advance…I am prepared to submit all potentially questionable instances of my psychic behavior to this ethics inquiry,) Ia replied.
(You’re going to use Johns and Mishka as your main defense?) Kaskalla asked skeptically from her left. The echo from the right was flavored with Ortuu’s amusement and Leona’s impatience.
(If you keep interrupting to ask questions and make comments, this will take all night,) Leona admonished the younger woman.
(Skipping over the vast majority of the instances in which she used her abilities with a broad, generalized statement of…of dismissal is a violation of procedure!) Kaskalla argued.
(In Ia’s case, since she does use her abilities near-constantly, examining each and every single instance on an individual basis would take as long as the entire span of time between her last probe and now,) Ortuu retorted. (Possibly longer.)
(Oh, for God’s sake,) Ia muttered as Kaskalla marshalled her thoughts for another attack of procedures versus expediency. (We don’t have Time for this.)
The word dumped them onto the timeplains. A jerk hauled them up out of their individual timestreams. Kaskalla gasped, clutching at Ia’s hand. Metaphorically, she was dripping wet and shivering, more strongly affected by that brief dip into her own existence than any non-psychic. Ortuu and Leona, veterans of the inadvertent effect, merely waited for Ia to stabilize them.
“Look, you silly little rules lawyer,” Ia stated, impatience sharpening her tone. “This is why I can call upon Johns and Mishka with impunity. This is Time.” Thunder rolled at the word, washing across the endless sea of grass and streams. She zoomed them upward, making Kaskalla gasp and Leona sway. Ortuu blinked a little, but said nothing as Ia reshaped the timeplains into a sepia-toned chart on a wall, standing them in an amber-hued version of the same conference room their bodies still occupied. “Everything I do is so gods-be-damned interconnected with the future that it would take your mind literally a year to understand just how much I have to use my gifts every single day.
“Every single day, I spend hours sifting through the future possibilities and probabilities so that I can find the right path to ensure that the maximum number of sentient beings have the maximum possible chance at a good quality of life overall.” Releasing their hands in the vision, though not in reality, Ia tapped the chart of interbranching lines on the wall, thumping it to highlight each section in different colors as she spoke. “Do try to keep up?
“I have one shot at stopping the destruction of our galaxy three hundred years into the future. The Fire Girl Prophecies have already shown this coming invasion in the symbology of the great Wall. The physical source of that Wall is a Dysun’s Sphere filled with intergalactic locusts coming to devour the entire resources of the Milky Way. Since so many of the key events needed to aim for that one shot will happen long after I’m dead and gone, I must seek out the key focal points and write precognitive directives for people to follow. The right people must be born at the right point in time, the right decisions made…and the wrong decisions and the wrong people must be carefully calculated and guarded against.
“Bump into the right person here,” she stated, thumping the tangle of lines so that some of them turned blue and streaked toward a star-shaped point on the far right of the map, “and two people will meet, fall in love, have the right kids who will go on to have more of the right kids, who will eventually befriend this person here,” Ia added, thumping another section which turned yellow, intersected with the blue lines, and formed green streaks toward the star as well, “who will provide the right focal moment for this line of people to have the right life-experiences to be in the perfect place and time to help this person, who will stop the coming invasion.
“But in order to get this yellow line to exist, I have to throw off this person here from their current path in life, or this entire branch vanishes, the blue doesn’t turn green, but instead goes purple, and poof, no Savior, no stopping the locusts, no Milky Way and no octillions of sentient lives still able to live free and enjoy their lives four hundred years from now,” Ia told her. “If throwing off that one life here at the start of the yellow path means killing that person, I’d say a ratio of one to octillions is worth the stain on my soul.
“But losing that life when it isn’t necessary is also a sin against the future. So I have to be damned sure that it’s the absolute best option…because if I can find another option which keeps that person alive and gives them a good quality of life without destroying the future for everyone else, then I have to find it.
“That is the only ethics I have to defend. Not deciding whether or not Mary and John should get married so that the blue line can be correctly formed with the right kids at the right time. That chain of events is relatively harmless and benign, compared to the fact that, elsewhere, I literally have to decide who lives and who dies.”
Ia eased back on the illustration, returning them to the timeplains.
“Your job is not to sit on your sanctimonious little butt debating the scale and scope of a problem beyond your meager comprehension. Your job is to make sure that I comprehend it, and am doing my best to sufficiently agonize ethically over the worst of my decisions before following through on any choices I must make,” Ia finished tartly.
“Even the laws of physics can seemingly be bent, though never broken,” Leona said as Ia finished, unruffled by the rapid changes in venues. “So, too, can the laws of ethics. This woman is one of the most ethical, honorable beings in the known universe. She has proven it consistently time and again in these ethics sessions.”
“What if she told you that you had to die? And by her hand?” Kaskalla argued. “What if she said she had to kill you?”
“Having already examined her and her ethics several times over the years, I would know she had already spent untold hours agonizing over the decision, searching for any other possible way to avoid such a fate,” Leona replied calmly.
“And you’d just…accept it?” Kaskalla asked, clearly bewildered by that thought.
“Would you run into a burning building with children trapped inside? Would you do it knowing you would probably die in the attempt to save them?” Ortuu asked mildly. “But still knowing they needed to be saved?”
“Well…”
“It’s the same thing,” the priest dismissed, flicking his hand. “The only difference is that Ia asks it of everyone, not just of herself. You should know these things, being an ordained priestess of the Witan Order. The vast majority of known sentientkind, all the races of the Alliance, believe in certain principles of kindness, compassion, and cooperation. These are the trademarks of sentient civilizations, however disparate we may be in physiology. A Dlmvla is as likely to rush into a burning building to save its progeny as any Gatsugi or Human.”
“Yes, but we don’t go around ordering other people into burning buildings!” Kaskalla protested. “Normal, sane people don’t do that!”
“The military does,” Ia told her. “That’s the burden of every officer, as well as the duty of every soldier. And we are normal and sane, all jokes set aside.”
“Firefighters, Peacekeepers, and other emergency, safety, and support services also order their fellow sentients into danger,” Ortuu reminded the young priestess.
“Those who have the experience to direct the fight against the fires will give those orders to those who have the will to save property and lives. Now, if you don’t mind, we’ve wasted enough…seconds…on this subject,” Leona stated, carefully skirting the T-word. “Ia, please take us to the first potential psychic ethical conundrum you have faced since our last probe in February.”
“Of course.” She slid them through the timeplains, back into the past, and transformed it into the same presentation display of different colored lines. “The first one took place during a boarding inspection of a Gatsugi merchant vessel, the Plump-Brown, at the end of February. I knew in advance that they were smuggling hallucinogenic drugs, which carry the strong possibility of harming people. But I also knew the effects of this particular shipment on the settlement of Ceti Omega IV would positively affect the future in the following ways…”
Two hours later, they were done. Ia knew the presentation board visualization dehumanized the impact of what she was discussing. Unfortunately, it was necessary; the sheer scope of time and lives involved required a vastly simplified version. She herself was used to skimming the timestreams more directly and kinesthetically feeling her way through the effects that would happen downstream, but she couldn’t do that in this session. Not without traumatizing the others.
At least the pulses from Kaskalla’s mind, laced with irritation, confusion, and the urge to comment on anything she didn’t understand, had slowly quelled as the session continued. Pulling them fully out of the timeplains at the end, Ia flexed her muscles subtly. The others also shifted in their chairs, stiff from having sat for too long. (So. That, I believe, was the last of the moral ambiguities on my plate. At least to date. Any questions?)
(Yes, actually,) Kaskalla stated, her thoughts crisp but guarded.
Ia’s instincts prickled. Worse, the clarity she could usually sense the future with had thickened, turning misty and obscure. Not overall, but for the next day or so. Warily, she asked, (What do you need to know?)
(Can we go back to the, ah, timeplains, you called them?) she asked.
Ia didn’t trust her motives. Grey patches on the timeplains were often dangerous points of transition. Sometimes it was just a matter of too many choices. Sometimes it was a matter of too much interference from others. In this case, the interference came not only from a fellow psychic, but from the fact that Kaskalla was young enough to want to enjoy her position of power, and young enough to not quite have learned the life-lesson that having power was not the same as wielding power. Not where true wisdom was concerned.
Partitioning off a corner of her mind from the others, Ia examined the streams which exited the fog. The quick peek showed that whatever happened here wouldn’t badly mangle the necessary paths of the future, but if she didn’t pick the right choice, the wrong side-stream would increase her workload to lay and strengthen the correct courses for the future.
(Or are you going to refuse a direct request to view your psychic abilities and activities during your current ethics review?) Kaskalla added smugly. She tightened her grip on Ia’s hand as she projected her thoughts, proving physically that she wasn’t about to let go.
Ia did not trust her. It was fairly obvious the younger woman wasn’t about to retract the request. She glanced at Ortuu and Leona, who were frowning slightly, but who weren’t contradicting Kaskalla’s request. Unfortunately, there was nothing Ia could do to probe the young woman directly, since an unasked, unauthorized telepathic scan, particularly of one of her own ethics session examiners, would violate psychic ethics beyond redemption.
There was only one path she had available to safely navigate this grey patch of uncertainty, and that was to do some legal asteroid-covering.
(If you insist. But I’ll remind you that, whatever you wish to see, you are to keep to yourself under the seal of the confessional,) Ia added, holding her gaze.
(I wish,) Kaskalla stated, staring back, (to go back onto the timeplains and ask one more question.)
(So be it.) Since Kaskalla was determined to make this a part of her ethics probe, Ia had no choice but to haul all four of them back onto the timeplains. Amber sunlight replaced artificial white, with the walls of the conference room dissolving into waves of wheat and wending streams.
“So. What did you want to see?” Ia asked her, facing the other woman.
Kaskalla lifted her chin. “I wanted to know why you don’t like anyone to say the word Time while you’re here.”
Ia winced as the word rolled through their current plane of existence. “Please, don’t.”
“Why not? It’s just a word. Time!” she asserted.
Ia flinched again, struggling to control her gifts. The timeplains trembled under their feet, streambeds rippling as alternate possibilities tried to shift into existence.
“Kaskalla, you’re a fool!” Ortuu berated her, tugging on the younger woman’s hand. “Haven’t you figured it out, yet? For someone like Ia, word and thought and will are combined. You say that word in this place, and it will trigger her abilities involuntarily.”
“That is the point, Ortuu,” Kaskalla retorted. “If she is not in control of herself, she is a danger to others.” Turning, she projected the word right in Ia’s ear, deep into Ia’s mind. “Time Time Time Time TIME!”
Ortuu and Leona broke their link the moment Kaskalla shouted, ripping their minds and their hands away from Ia and the other girl with a jolt. Kaskalla clung, despite the way Ia tried to shove her away. The other woman was too strong a telepath to be dislodged, her intent too piercing. With that word echoing and bouncing around them in multiple thundering rumbles, the timeplains heaved, lurching up around them like tsunami waves. This had only happened twice before in the early exploration of her newly awakened abilities…but despite being much more practiced in her gifts, Ia could only roll herself up in a ball and endure.
Time swallowed her whole, drowning Kaskalla’s shrieks as she clung to Ia’s mental back. Eons, seconds, months, minutes, centuries, years. Turn right or turn left, the fish in the river no longer had a choice in how to get around the rock in its path; the rock split, the fish split, the waters split and shattered. Existence shattered…
Children grew, aged, died. Trees shot up, split, decayed. A thousand leafer beasts nibbled new paths through the forests and valleys. Rocks reassembled themselves in reverse from weathered shards and sand. Silver spheres shat golden dust on everything in sight. Fire blossomed in obscene bouquets, volcanoes exploding, starships shattering, flames boiling up explosively from the base of a cathedral where giant projection screens were showing a man whipping a half-naked girl who screamed, not in pain, but a word, a phrase, a name distorted by the warping of Time.
“Iiiiiiaaaaa! Iiiiaaaaa’nnn sud’dhaaaaa’aaaaaaaaaa!”
It was the only thing that could have anchored both of them. Ia could weather anything Time threw at her, but Kaskalla had nothing to help her cope with the onslaught of infinite possibilities, save for her limited experience with this one, definitive, local moment. She grabbed at it, still clinging to Ia, dragging both of them into the scene.
The whip rose, snapped onto flesh, fell, swung, disjointed images of too many times, too many tries, too many variables. The girl bled, the girl burned; the girl lived triumphant, and simultaneously died. The Church fell, the Church thrived, a thousand golden birds took flight…
At least from here, Ia could find her way—their way—back. It felt like she was pulling that ground bus all over again, the one she had hauled on in Basic Training, but she pulled on it. Like moving a thousand, no, ten thousand minds back into a semblance of sanity.
Pain cracked across her face, mostly in her chin and nose. Groaning, Ia rolled her head to the side, sinuses throbbing from the blow. It was only the edges of the table—indeed, all furniture on Sanctuary—which were padded with the resilient, rubbery, forgiving version of plexi. The main surface of the conference table was hard and white, suitable for writing. Not for smacking into headfirst.
The inside of her skull hurt. Worse, her inner reserves were low. Dreading what that meant, Ia probed cautiously into the timestreams, holding most of her awareness at a safe distance. It took a few moments to make sense of what she saw. When she did, Ia lurched upright. Almost making it to her feet, she dropped back onto the padded seat with a thump and another groan.
“Slag!” Grimacing, she gingerly touched her face, then reached over and slapped the dazed-looking girl at her side. “Wake up.”
Kaskalla squeaked, the blow more of a sting than a bruise. Ia slapped her again, just hard enough to redden her cheek. When the younger priestess focused on her for a glare, Ia pressed her finger to the girl’s forehead. Not to touch the other woman psychically, but to imprint her message physically, with focus-grounding pain.
“Congratulations, meioa. Because you wouldn’t listen, your stubbornness has just caused a citywide mind-quake.”
“Guh…wha…?” Kaskalla asked, blinking.
Ia shoved hard with her finger before releasing the girl. She lifted her fingers to her aching nose and focused her inner biokinetic energies into the bruised flesh, healing the inadvertent damage. Once that was done, she dipped two fingers into Leona’s cup of water and dragged them across her brow, trying to use evaporation to cool the heat burning through her forehead, her sinuses.
Slumped back in her chair where she had collapsed, Leona lifted her hands to her face and groaned. “Oh, gods, not another mind-quake…”
“Ugh…what’s a mind-quake?” Kaskalla asked, still a bit dazed but finally regathering her wits.
Grunting, Ortuu lifted his dark head from the table. Like Ia, he dipped his fingers in his drink and streaked them around the bridge of his nose before puffing air upward in the hopes of soothing the mental burn. “A mind-quake…is when an especially powerful psi…ungh…affects everyone within a set range. You grew up down by the sea, but even you should remember the Night of the Prophecy, from four and a half years back? It was in all the news Nets.”
“The Night…? I did a report on it in high school, but everyone thought it was just some strange mass attack of the Fire Girl Prophecy!” Kaskalla protested. “No one had ever found a triggering cause!”
Lifting her free hand, Ia fluttered her fingers. Kaskalla gaped and shook her head in denial. She subsided when both Leona and Ortuu nodded in confirmation.
Leona lifted her own hand. The older woman’s cheeks turned a bit pink as well. “I made the same mistake you did just now. Except I at least had Ia’s permission, since we didn’t know what we were doing at the time. After our second try did the exact same thing that night, we knew better than to try again.”
Nose still throbbing but on its way to being healed, Ia gave Kaskalla a hard, dark look.
“People are going to come looking for the epicenter of the mass Prophecy attack, and that means they will come here. All three of you will simply say, ‘I honesty cannot say what happened’…and if you have any qualms about lying, you are forbidden to say what happened, so therefore you cannot,” Ia stated crisply. She aimed it mostly at Kaskalla, since Ortuu and Leona already knew what not to say. “If anyone asks about me, I was only here for a brief stop to say hello to some old friends…and I left over an hour ago. You will put the truth into my official evaluation, because the truth must be put into it, but then you will seal it. Got that?”
“Ah…I…guess so,” Kaskalla agreed. She half shook her head, still looking a bit dazed. Then quickly grabbed her temples, grimacing. “But…I just can’t believe that you were the source of…of thousands of people all experiencing a massive surge of prophetic visions! And…and you’ve been offworld for two years, yet we’ve still been having these Fire Girl attacks. How can you be the source of them when you’re not even here?”
“That’s because I’m not the source of them, normally,” Ia admitted, though she carefully avoided saying what that source was. “However, you are a very strong telepath, and you were hooked into my brain, with my gifts. We were in gestalt, which amplified my precognitive visions right across the city. Luckily, most everyone had enough warning to brace themselves…but because you triggered a broadcasting of my abilities, strong enough that people lost control of their senses, you have directly caused sixteen traffic accidents. Thankfully, none of them were lethal, and everyone will recover with medical aid.”
Pushing to her feet, Ia swayed, then slumped back into her chair once more. Grunting, she touched her forehead, then shoved up the lid of her wrist unit.
“Great…I’m drained. I can’t walk very far.” Punching in the numbers for her brother’s unit, she waited a few seconds. The moment Thorne answered, Ia spoke. “Thorne, to answer your question, yes, it happened again. But I’m in no shape to walk all the way out of here. Meet me in the bunker tunnels under the Church of Contemplation.”
“I’m hardly in any shape to carry you, myself,” he retorted, hand coming into view at the edge of the screen. He rubbed at his face, then sighed. “Fine…I’ll be there shortly. Stop giving people slagging headaches.”
Nodding, Ia shut the lid, ending the connection. “Remember, as far as anyone else is concerned I was here only for a short time, and not for anything psi-related. I was just here to catch up with my old church friends, and left a while ago. Volunteer nothing, because otherwise you’re as clueless as anyone else as to what just happened here. And don’t embellish.”
Gathering her willpower, Ia pushed one last time to her feet. Head aching, mind throbbing, she shuffled toward the door. Thankfully, the access hatch to the bunker tunnels was only a few doors down from this particular conference room.
“I’m…I am sorry,” Kaskalla offered. She was rubbing the side of her head, which no doubt still ached.
Ia paused at the door, glancing back over her shoulder. “Try to listen a little better next time. Other people do occasionally know better than you…and some experiments should not be repeated.”
Pulling the door open, Ia left them in the room. She had to brace her hand on the corridor wall to keep her trembling body from staggering, but she left. It would be another twenty-plus minutes before emergency services realized the mind-quake was more or less round in shape, and another ten minutes to realize that this location was the focal point of its kilometers-wide radius. She needed to be back home long before then, without anyone seeing her near the church.
On the bright side, the fog has cleared…and Kaskalla will indeed do whatever I or Leona or Ortuu tell her to do. She’ll rise in the ranks of non-Church religious politics, and be an added touch of leverage for saving everyone when the revolution comes.
So this moment was a literal headache, and I’ll have tidying-up efforts to make, based on the few people whose accidents might adversely affect the shift and flow of the future…but overall, a net gain. Small, but good.