Out of Touch (44 page)

“Go ahead,” Sarah said and smiled. She saw the glow in Aliana’s face and wanted her to enjoy. A momentary longing for Reggie weighed down Sarah’s face and shoulders, but she physically shook it off.

The room was more than half-empty now. A few more couples left, and when Doug finished his music, there were only six people remaining. No one else had left alone, but Sarah wondered if she might now escape to take a shower and go to sleep.

Oliver, who had been leaning against someone’s legs, crossed over to the kitchen and returned with a bag of marshmallows. As he walked back toward the now empty couches by the fire, he said aloud to Sarah, “Come on, you can sit with me and Marian if you’re not taking off.”

So Oliver claimed the middle of a now vacant couch by the fire. The woman he’d been leaning up against, evidently his sister Marian, went to sit beside him. Sarah smiled at how she’d been left behind with the kid, his chaperone, the Druid, and whoever the other two were. But she walked cheerfully over to the empty spot on Oliver’s couch by the fire. The Druid brought an armchair over beside them, and the two remaining stragglers took the other couch.

Oliver tore open the bag of marshmallows and then began roasting one telekinetically over the fire, rotating it gradually near a pile of glowing embers.

“Come on Sarah, you can do this, too.”

Sarah thought she caught a raising of Doug’s eyebrows. “Wouldn’t it be easier to use a stick?” she asked.

“But that’s so messy. And it leads to slouching.”

Marian laughed and swatted her brother, evidently a family in joke. The other five around the fire seemed comfortable, used to sitting together this way.

“Shall I start with a story?” Doug asked.

The rest nodded, and he began a story of mind reading fair folk and strong willed peasants. Sarah took a marshmallow and demonstrated that she could roast, cool, and eat it quite nicely without leaving any sticky bits on her fingers or a stick, but it required a lot of concentration. Meanwhile, the heat from the flames made her face feel dry as scorched paper. Perhaps it was also chapped from her time at the shore today.

Doug finished his story, and the man Sarah didn’t know by name recited a humorous poem-story about gold prospectors in Alaska. He was several lines in before Sarah realized he had an American accent. She was pretty sure she’d never heard him speak before; so he was probably a mind reader. The woman beside him sang for her turn. During the song, Oliver curled up to lean against his sister and tucked his feet up next to Sarah. His feet ended up touching her leg, and Sarah wasn’t quite sure whether this was presumption, flirtation, or friendliness. But it seemed kind of sweet and strangely pleasant. She tried to pay attention to the singer, but found herself worrying that she’d have to go next.

Marian saved her by offering to tell a story. The story she told was thoroughly modern and possibly true. It was about a pair of young women who tried to find a boat that would take them from Ireland to Australia. After many humorous misunderstandings, they took off as crew on a small solar yacht, only to be arrested once they reached international waters. The person they’d thought was the captain was only a hired hand, and he’d been using them to steal the boat.

Sarah tried to think of an amusing story and how to tell it as Oliver took his turn sculpting water from the bucket by the fire. He did this without a word and without stirring from his sprawled position next to Sarah. His rendition of a small boy peeing was quite impressive, but it caused Marian to whap him with a pillow. And then Sarah knew she was supposed to entertain.

“I’m not really an artist or even very creative. I mean, I’m a gymnast, and maybe a dancer, but neither of those is really useful right now.”

“You could answer a question for me,” Doug spoke as if seizing the opportunity.

“Depends,” Sarah said.

“Yesterday morning, Aliana’s mental speech was fading. I wasn’t sure she’d make it to the full moon. Then you two went away for the afternoon, and tonight she did not need what we did.”

Sarah felt her face flush, but realized she might be able to learn as much from Doug as he hoped to learn from her. “I don’t know how much of what you do here is ritual and how much you think is necessary. But I accidentally triggered Aliana’s telepathy by wrapping her with my telekinesis for a few seconds several weeks ago. We knew the effect might wear off. So when she felt it fading, she asked me to do it again. Doesn’t anyone else do it that way?”

Doug looked at Oliver, who shook his head and sat up.

“We didn’t know that was possible,” Doug answered. “How do you do it?”

“I just wrap the person up, like applying direct pressure to a cut, but over the entire body.”

“Can you show me how?” Oliver asked, suddenly awake and eager.

“Want me to wrap your hand?”

“Sure.” He thrust his right hand forward. She enclosed it for half a minute, long enough for him to try to flex his fingers and then use his own telekinesis to try to remove her wrapping.

“That’s great, do all of me.”

Sarah looked to the others, feeling a little uncomfortable. But they all seemed fine with the situation. So Sarah wrapped up Oliver, just as she had wrapped Aliana, just for ten seconds or so.

Oliver’s face broke into an open-mouthed smile afterward. “I’m sure I can do it. Let me practice on myself first.” He started staring at his hand.

Doug asked Sarah quietly, “You do this to yourself, too?”

“Yes.”

“Do you have to plan ahead, to do it before your energies ebb?”

Sarah bit her lip and sighed. “I’m not sure that happens to me the way it does with you guys.”

“Meaning?” Doug asked gently.

“I went years without wrapping myself up like that, and my abilities never changed. Also, well, Aliana says her sensitivity to touch fades in between times. Mine doesn’t. I always just thought I was oversensitive that way.”

Doug’s eyes were off to the side, his brows tensed as if thinking rapidly. His voice retained a practiced calm, “Maybe when you’re asleep?”

“Could be, but I don’t think so. Do all of you have to bury yourselves in dirt every few weeks to keep your abilities?”

“I’ve heard of some very old movers who can go long periods in between. But if they use something like this, no one’s told me of it. You don’t go scuba diving or anything?”

Sarah laughed, “Does that work too? No, I’ve never been scuba diving. Do you know,” she wondered how much they already knew from when her mind spoke unprotected, “Do you know if scuba or these other things affect the telepaths who aren’t like you?”

“You touch here on matters usually left to Druids and planners. But given what we all know of your past,” Doug paused and Sarah saw some uncomfortable shifting from all except Oliver, “I think I could tell you a little.”

Doug leaned forward, pushing the sleeves of his white robe back to his elbows. His arms looked like dark wood against the white. “Our people sometimes joke that there are a curious number of Irish folk teaching scuba around the world. Mostly, they try to help those who discover their abilities in that way. But occasionally, they find a newly unshielded mind terrified at the loss of the other kind of mental speech. What happens then depends on certain details.”

Doug seemed to have come to the end of what he would say. There was an awkward silence, broken when Oliver said, “I’ve got it figured. Can I try it on you now, Sarah?”

Sarah nodded obligingly and Oliver went ahead. He held the pressure a bit longer than necessary, and Sarah realized she couldn’t breathe. But before she had time to worry, he let her go. Sarah tingled all over with the sensation of having been touched by another teek that way. Some feeling lingered, almost like afterglow.

Sarah blushed and said, “You’ve got it, but you don’t need to block the nose. It’ll work anyway, and then the person knows they can still breath.”

“Sorry, but I can do it! Doug, can I try it next time, instead of the dirt, to see if it works when I do it?”

Doug gave an almost paternal sigh and said, “Probably we should have you try it on yourself and one other person. But let me think on it first.”

              There was a pause, then Sarah said to Doug, “Could I ask you a question?”

“I expected you might.”

“You say there’s a network of some sort. Do you know if there are scientists, people working out the genetics of all this?”

He looked her in the eye, “That’s not what I expected you to ask. But yes, there are some. It’s not something most of us inquire about.”

“But you’ve got to be curious. You say all movers are part of your people. But the other teeps aren’t, except when they’re also movers, and then they aren’t as good, but is that just because they don’t renew their energy every so often? And just from talking to a few people, it seems like there might be patterns in your abilities. Movers seem to always have one mover or mind reader as a parent. Spotters seem to show up more randomly. And why aren’t there any of the animal people here?”

Doug closed his eyes and shook his head. “You’ve clearly never lived around an animal person. If even one were here we’d all be coated in cat fur or supporting a barn full of hurt wild creatures. As for the rest, if you really want to learn, I can make inquiries, see if there is someone who might teach you.”

“Yes, please. But with animal people, do they all have to be buried in the earth, too? There were people where I lived who seemed to have a way with strays, especially cats—“

“You’re speaking of someone close to you, a relative?” Doug was using his trained, soft voice again. “All of our abilities can emerge in limited ways without renewing the energy. Movers are usually the only ones who suspect. The mind readers think it’s intuition or empathy. The spotters are drawn to certain people without knowing why. Animal people do well with animals, especially smarter species.”

“I think my mother, and some of her friends might have had that.”

“She’s passed away?”

“Before I knew what to ask.”

“I’m sorry.”

Sarah stopped, looking away, then asked, “The spotters, do they ever spot the other kind of telepaths?”

“Some do, why?”

“Just a suspicion.”

“Parasites!”
James thought to no one. His toes bounced up and down as if he wore tap shoes.

He saved the thesis he’d been failing to read for an hour. Somehow, a treatise on “the genetic vulnerabilities in dopamine production among subjects with high pain tolerances” was not moving him today.

He pulled up a window with the new genotype Sarah had brought him last month. How had she known? She’d asked him to check for the sequence he thought was a predecessor to modern telepathy. The sample had been homozygous for that rather rare sequence.

“How did you know?” he’d asked.

“I did what I’d done to Tom, and she could read my mind.”

“But you’re silent to the rest of us.”

“This is big, isn’t it? You didn’t know there were others.”

“Was this part of some experiment?”

“No, and don’t say anything about me. That’s the deal.”

Sarah’s “deal” had been that he could have a blood sample from someone who might be a different kind of telepath. In exchange, he had to tell Sarah if the sample contained the presumed telepathy predecessor sequence, he had to promise not to help anyone identify who the sample came from, and he had to not mention that Sarah had anything to do with bringing it to him. The strangest part was that Sarah cared so much in the first place. Maybe he should encourage her to study genetics.

James hadn’t seen Sarah since he gave her the results, and there were rumors she’d disappeared. He spent days mining the new data, trying to solve a puzzle still lacking many pieces. He used genetic comparisons to predict common ancestors. The usual telepaths in his database needed two copies of the new telepathy sequence which may have only developed three or four hundred years ago. So he’d known they were all closely related. Most of the Thai telepaths had emigrated from China in the last two generations, usually as family groups, so there were all sorts of confounding factors when he analyzed their DNA.

But when he compared the new sample to the rest of the telepaths, they’re last common ancestor was probably four thousand years ago. Doing the same comparison with Reggie’s DNA and the Thai telepaths gave an estimate of eight thousand years, about what he’d expect for random samples from across the globe. But if he compared the new proto-telepath sample to Sarah’s or Reggie’s DNA, the estimate moved down to a thousand years, or less. They weren’t kissing cousins, but they shared some heritage. The new sample had the bipolar correlate the U.S. wanted to buy, too. He was glad Alak had let him refuse to sell, but not glad enough to tell Alak the news, at least, not yet. He still wasn’t certain if the sequence Minerva wanted was related to the other telepathy. Did all the other world players know about both types already?

What if the simple genetics of telepathy weren’t so simple? James ran tests on all his samples looking for any commonalities he’d missed. He searched and scanned with every computer in his lab. He almost didn’t hear the woman who asked about sandwiches. He typed hard and fast until his fingers hurt, but neither his hands nor his feet made any diverting movements.