“Yet I could read the desire he lit in her. She’d had nothing to do with men, and never intended to. She will never marry; if there’s one thing I am sure of in this world, it’s that.
“How they came to mate, I do not know. She screened it from me. But he did not violate her; that would be
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totally foreign to his nature. And if he had, it would show through her screen. I seriously doubt he even initiated the mating, which took place not long before he left. She’d have spurned him.
The Dane shrugged. Nikko remembered Nils’s sexual magnetism.
‘ I was afraid she wouldn’t love the child, but happily I was wrong. She resents deeply, though, that the father is a barbarian. Regardless of his accomplishments and objectivity.”
They came to the pinnace. Matthew took the control pad from a pocket and keyed in the instruction. The shield flicked out of existence.
“Well,” said Raadgiver, “you have listened with patience and understanding to the plaints of a man no longer young. They are small matters, compared to those of our peasants here. It is good to be gifted; I have lived comfortably, without hardship or the harshness of labor. I neither freeze nor greatly sweat, and do not know real hunger, only appetite. I have had the advantages of a long and rich tradition of scholarship, and communion with the richest culture on the planet, the Psi Alliance, dispersed though it may be.
Yet our lives are not completely free of pain, though it might fairly be said that our pain is self-inflicted. We are simply humans with certain advantages.”
He nodded as if agreeing with himself.
“Well.” He put out his hand, and the Kumalos shook it. “If you wish to interview me again, I will gladly make myself available.”
Then he turned and walked back toward the castle. Nikko and Matthew boarded the Alpha, and Matthew regenerated the shield. Nikko saw the green light flashing on the control panel, and acknowledged the signal orally.
“What have you got for us, Allie?’ she asked.
“A message from Deodoro Baver,” the pinnace replied.
They listened to it at once, amazed and dismayed. In a prison in China! In the palace compound, guarded by
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soldiers and some sort of sentient predator, no doubt an ET left over from the pre-plague days. With telepaths around; one at least.
“How the hell do we get him out of there?” Matthew asked.
The question was rhetorical, but Nikko answered. “I suppose we stock up on provisions and water, fly to China, locate the palace, and park over it at four or five kilometers—high enough to be sure no one notices, and far out of ordinary telepathic range.”
Matthew nodded, taking it from there. “And see if we can identify the building he’s in, from his description. Then set the viewer on the entrance at high gain, and watch. Hopefully they’ll bring him out, maybe for exercise.” He patted the rifle rack. “Maybe there’ll be a chance to free him then.”
Anything like that might well endanger Baver, of course. They agreed that it would certainly be dangerous to radio him that they were waiting. Better for him to be ignorant than for his captors to know.
FORTY-ONE
Hsu Min was a novice in Jampa Lodro’s gomba, but he’d arrived as a telepath, and was full of himself. He had many opinions to outgrow.
Normally, the novice in meditation was beset by unwanted thoughts. These thoughts intruded from hidden depths. Some were enticing thoughts, some were ugly thoughts, and one undertook to contemplate them, observing them. One undertook to observe them until one perceived the pain or fear, or guilt or grief or false belief, that generated them. And until one perceived the false lessons one had learned from them. Thus one loosened the grip of maya.
When thoughts no longer intruded, one could begin to experience the Tao awarely. Ordinarily this took much meditation, the muchness varying with how evolved the soul was when it incarnated. Someone who had evolved to a relatively high spiritual level in their previous lives would progress more rapidly. And it seemed to Min that he knew how to recognize such a one: Usually he would be relatively delicate, physically, in order not to be tempted to violence. And normally he would be tele-