The weird eyes rested calmly on him, their unconvincing blue glass without pupils or irises. “I will not take you,” Nils said reasonably. “You can find your own way; there’s no reason to get lost.”
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No reason to get lost! Baver turned to Mager Hans. “Hans, you take me. I can make it worth your while.”
The boy shook his head. “I have come to be with the Yngling and continue the saga of his life. It is my duty. You’re a man. A man can easily make his way back from here alone.”
Baver hadn’t actually considered it before. Now he did, but only for a moment. He could get lost; he was sure it was possible. Even probable. His horse could throw him, or a wild bull could gore him. Or worse—
He turned to Nils. “Ores could get me,” he said.
“It’s not likely. They’re afraid now. Their hope lies in going unnoticed. And after what happened—since their defeat at the river, and the fall of the tower—they’re afraid of the star folk. Besides, you have your gun.”
Baver stared at Nils, then at the gangling boy poet. These people didn’t care about danger. They didn’t understand, and he was sure he couldn’t make them understand.
Nils Järnhann looked away, to the northeast, and thumped his horse’s flanks with his heels. It started, moving briskly, Hans following. After a moment, Baver followed too.
PART TWO
THE JOURNEY
SEVEN
From—”Frequency of Psionic Talents on Post-Plague Earth,” by Ruta-Helena Chatawba. Pages 102-127, in Advances in Philosophy Following the First Two Earth Expeditions, Kathleen Murti, ed. University Press, A .c. 867.
Introduction
Wizardry and magic were widely practiced when mankind was young, and for a long time were not differentiated from the purely physical manipulation of material objects. “Nature” had not yet been differentiated in man’s mind, nor had superstition been recognized as separate from knowledge.
in the 1st century a.d., alchemy arose out of this more or less undifferentiated mass of human activities. Alchemy strove primarily to produce eternal life and transmute “base metals” into gold. These goals made it particularly susceptible to fraud. At the same time, alchemy produced an incidental but increasing catalog of observed and measured qualita-
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tive data on the chemical properties of substances. Thus, out of alchemy grew the organized and rational science of chemistry, which may best be dated from the 18th century and the work of Priestley, Scheele, and Lavoisier. And with the rise of chemistry, the superstitious and groundless—or at least unattainable—facets of alchemy gradually died.
The “field” of wizardry and magic, which was more or less related to alchemy, took much longer to produce a science, psionics. Psionics as a term first appeared in the 20th century literary phenomenon called science fiction, in stories using the premise that some areas of magic and wizardry contained elements of reality.
As an actual science, psionics might be said to have its true early roots in mathematics, specifically in the area of complex numbers. By itself, however, this led only to interesting speculations that would bear no fruit until bridged to physical reality by developments in mathematical physics some decades later.
Meanwhile empirical research had been taking place, though it stretches the term to call it science. Sporadic early studies of telepathy began at Standford and Harvard Universities in the United States of America as early as a.d. 1915. These produced little, however, beyond statistical evidence that telepathy occurred and that it tended to be weak and unreliable. They did not establish mechanisms, or even establish conditions and limitations of occurence.
Mid-20th century psychological and psychiatric studies on the well-documented but unexplained performances of so-called “idiot savants” were not productive. A psychic photographer named Ted Ser-ios was studied in the seventh decade of the 20th century, primarily by the Psychiatry Department of the University of Colorado School of Medicine. These studies established the phenomenon as genuine, and also tentatively established some operating
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rules. But the physical theory and instrumentation were lacking to explore them.
Except for the statistical studies of telepathy, information and evidence remained very largely anecdotal, however, until the 21st century. Even then, progress was seriously limited by a lack of adequate physical theory to accommodate and make scientific sense of observations. And by a lack of serious interest, at least by funding agencies, during a seventy-year period of social, economic, and geopolitical instabilities that indeed threatened civilization itself at times.