‘Which area are we talking about?’
‘The mind, Pol. Up until now you’ve been learning to use your talennt
in the outside world. Now we’ll go inside.’ She paused as if searching
for a way to explain a very difficult concept. ‘All people are different,
she began, ‘but the various races have distinguishing characteristics. You
can recognize an Alorn when you see one because of his physical
appearance
. You can also recognize his mind when you encounter it.’
‘You’re going to teach me how to hear what other people are
thinking?’
‘We might get to that later. It’s more dificult, so let’s concentrate on
this one right now. When you’re trying to pinpoint a stranger’s race or
tribe, you’re not concentrating on what he’s thinking, but rather the way
he’s thinking.’
‘Why’s this so important, mother?’
‘We have enemies out there in the world, Pol. You’ll need to be able to
recognize them when you come across them. The Master’s taught me how
to imitate the manner of the various races, so I’ll be able to show you how
to tell the difference between a Murgo and a Grolim or between an Arend
and a Marag. There’ll be times when your safety and the safety of those
in your care will hinge on your ability to know just who’s in your general
vicinity.’
‘I suppose that stands to reason. How are we going to go about
this?’
‘just open your mind, Pol. Submerge your own personality and feel the
nature of the various minds I’ll show you.’
‘Well,’ I said a bit dubiously, ‘I’ll try it, but it sounds awfully
complicated.’
,i didn’t say it was going to be easy, Pol. Shall we begin?’
None of it made much sense at first, mother threw the same
thought at me over and over, changing only the way it was
presented. The major break-through came when I realized that the
different thought patterns seemed to have different colors attached
to them. It wasn’t really overt, but rather a faint tinge. In time,
though, those colors grew more pronounced, and my recognition
of Murgo thought or alorn thought or Tolnedran thought became
almost instantaneous.
The mind of the imitation Murgo mother conjured up for me was
very dark, a kind of dull black. The Grolim mind, by contrast, is a
hard, glossy black, and I could see – or feel – the difference almost
immediately.
Sendars are green. Tolnedrans are red. Rivans. of course, are blue.
I increasingly recognized those colors, and by midday I’d become
fairly proficient at it.
‘That’s enough for today, Pol,’ mother told me. ‘Go back to the tower
and spend the afternoon with your books. We don’t want your father to
start getting suspicious.’
And so I returned to the tower, establishing what would become
a pattern for quite a number of years – mornings belonged to mother
and.afternoons belonged to father. I was to receive two educations
at the same time, and that was just a little challenging.
The next morning mother reviewed what I’d learned the previous
day by flashing various thought-patterns at me. ‘Sendar,’ I said in
response to a green-tinged mind. ‘Murgo,’ I identified the dull black
thought. ‘Arend.’ Then, ‘Tolnedran.’ The more I practiced, the
quicker the identifications came to me.
‘Now, then,’ mother said, ‘Let’s move on. There’ll be times when you’ll
need to shut off the minds of your friends – put them to sleep, so to speak,
except that it’s not exactly sleep.’
‘What’s the reason for that?’
‘We aren’t the only ones in the world who know how to recognize
thought patterns, Pol. The Grolims can do it, too, and anybody who knows
the art can follow the thought back to its source. When you’re trying to
hide, you don’t want someone standing right beside you shouting his head
Off.
‘No, probably not. How do I go about putting the loud-mouthed
idiot to sleep?’
‘It’s not really sleep, Pol,’ she corrected. ‘The thought-patterns you’ve
come to recognize are still there in a sleeping person’s mind. You have to
learn how to shut down his brain entirely.’
‘Won’t that kill him? Stop his heart?’
‘No. The part of the brain that makes the heart keep beating is so far
beneath the surface that it doesn’t have any identifying color.’
‘What if I can’t wake you up again?’
‘You’re not going to do it to me. Where’s the closest Alorn?’
‘That’d be the twins,’ I replied.
‘Don’t reason it out, Pol. Reach out and find them with your mind.’
‘I’ll try.’ I sent my mind out in search of that characteristic
turquoise that identified a non-Rivan alorn. It didn’t take me very
long. I knew where they were, of course.
‘Good,’ mother said. ‘Now, imagine a thick, wooly blanket.’
I didn’t ask why; I just did it.
‘Why white?’ mother asked curiously.
‘It’s their favorite color.’
‘Oh. All right, then, lay it over them.’
I did that, and I noticed that my palms were getting sweaty.
Working with your mind is almost as hard as working with your
arms and back.
‘Are they asleep.
‘I think so.’
‘You’d better go look and make sure.’
I used the form of a common barn-swallow. The twins always
throw open their windows when the weather’s nice, and I’d seen
swallows flying in and out of their tower many times. I flew to the
towers and flitted in through the twins’ window.
‘Well?’ mother’s voice called out to me, ‘are they asleep?’
‘It didn’t work, mother. Their eyes are still open.’ I didn’t want to
alert the twins to my presence, so I sent my thought out silently.
‘Are they moving at all?’
‘No. Now that you mention it, they look like a pair of statues.’
‘Try flying right at their faces. See if they flinch.’
I did – and they didn’t. ‘Not a twitch,’ I reported.
‘It worked, then. Try to find their minds with yours.’
I tried that and there was nothing around me but an empty silence.
‘I’m not getting anything, mother.’
‘You picked that up very quickly. Come back to the Tree and then we’ll
release them.’
‘In a moment,’ I said. Then I located my father and turned his mind
off, too.
‘ Why did you do that?’ mother asked.
‘just practicing, mother,’ I replied innocently. I knew that wasn’t
really very nice, but somehow I couldn’t resist.
In the weeks that followed, mother taught me other ways to
tamper with the human mind. There was the highly useful trick of
erasing memories. I’ve used that many times. There’ve been
occasions when I’ve been obliged to do things in out-of-the-ordinary
ways, and when I didn’t want the people present at the time to start
telling wild stories to others. Sometimes it’s much easier to just blot
out the memory of the event than it is to come up with a plausible
explanation.
Closely related to that trick is the trick of implanting false
memories. When you use the two tricks in tandem you can significantly
alter someone’s perception of what really happened during the
course of any given event.
Mother also taught me how to ‘grow’ – to expand myself into
immensity. I haven’t used that one very often, because it does tend
to make one conspicuous.
Then, since every trick usually has an opposite, she taught me
how to ‘shrink’ to reduce myself down to the point of near
invisibility. That one’s been very useful, particularly when I wanted to
listen to people talking without being seen.
These two tricks are closely related to the change of form process,
so they were quite easy to learn.
I also learned how to make people ignore my presence. This is
another way to achieve a kind of invisibility. Since I was still infected
with adolescence at the time, the notion of fading into the
background didn’t appeal to me very much. All adolescents have a
driving urge to be noticed, and virtually everything they do almost
screams, ‘Look at me! See how important I am!’ Invisibility isn’t the
best way to satisfy that urge.
The business of ‘making things’ – creation, if you will – was in
some ways the culmination of that stage of my education, since, if
looked at in a certain way, it encroaches on the province of the
Gods. I started out by making flowers. I think that might be where
all of us start. Creation is closely related to beauty, so that might
explain it, although flowers are easy and making them is a logical
place to begin. I cheated a little at first, of course. I’d wrap twigs
with grass and then convert the object thus produced into a flower.
Transmutation isn’t really creation, though, so I eventually moved
On to making flowers out of nothing but air. There’s a kind of ecstasy
involved in creation, so I probably overdid it, dotting that shallow
swale where the Tree lived with whole carpets of brightly colored