 |
RosettaBooks are available in a number of eBook Formats |
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
|
Mutant
 About the Book
|
|
|
|
Preview
Chapter 1
Somehow I had to stay alive until they found me. They would be hunting for the wreck of my plane, and eventually they´d find it, and then they´d find me, too. But it was hard to wait.
Empty blue day stretched over the white peaks; then the blazing night you get at this altitude, and that was empty too. There was no sound or sight of a jet plane or a helicopter. I was completely alone.
That was the real trouble.
A few hundred years ago, when there were no telepaths, men were used to being alone. But I couldn´t remember a time when I´d- been locked in the bony prison of my skull, utterly and absolutely cut off from all other men. Deafness or blindness wouldn´t have mattered as much. They wouldn´t have mattered at all, to a telepath.
Since my plane crashed behind the barrier of mountain peaks, I had been amputated from my species. And there is something in the constant communication of minds that keeps a man alive. An amputated limb dies for lack of oxygen. I was dying for lack of . . . there´s never been any word to express what it is that makes all telepaths one. But without it, a man is alone, and men do not live long, alone.
I listened, with the part of the mind that listens for the soundless voices of other minds. I heard the hollow wind. I saw snow lifting in feathery, pouring ruffles. I saw the blue shadows deepening. I looked up, and the eastern peak was scarlet. It was sunset, and I was alone.
I reached out, listening, while the sky darkened. A star wavered, glimmered, and stood steadily overhead. Other stars came, while the air grew colder, until the sky blazed with their westward march.
Now it was dark. In the darkness, there were the stars, and there was I. I lay back, not even listening. My people were gone.
I watched the emptiness beyond the stars.
Nothing around me or above me was alive. Why should I be alive, after all? It would be easy, very easy, to sink down into that quiet where there was no loneliness, because there was no life. I reached out around me, and my mind found no other thinking mind. I reached back into my memory, and that was a little better.
A telepath´s memories go back a long way. A good long way, far earlier than his birth.
I can see clearly nearly two hundred years into the past, before the sharp, clear telepathically-transmitted memories begin to fray and fade into secondary memories, drawn from books. Books go back to Egypt and Babylon. But they are not the primary memories, complete with sensory overtones, which an old man gives telepathically to a young one, and which are passed on in turn through the generations. Our biographies are not written in books. They are written in our minds and memories, especially the Key Lives which are handed down as fresh as they were once lived by our greatest leaders. . . .
But they are dead, and I am alone.
No. Not quite alone. The memories remain, Burkhalter and Barton, McNey and Linc Cody and Jeff Cody-a long time dead, but still vibrantly alive in my memory. I can summon up every thought, every emotion, the musty smell of grass-where?-the yielding of a rubbery walk beneath hurrying feet-whose?
It would be so easy to relax and die.
No. Wait. Watch. They´re alive, Burkhalter and Barton, the Key Lives are still real, though the men who once lived them have died. They are your people. You´re not alone.
Burkhalter and Barton, McNey and Linc and Jeff aren´t dead. Remember them. You lived their lives telepathically as you learned them, the way they once lived them, and you can live them again. You are not alone.
So watch. Start the film unreeling. Then you won´t be alone at all, you´ll be Ed Burkhalter, two hundred years ago, feeling the cool wind blow against your face from the Sierra peaks, smelling the timothy grass, reaching out mentally to glance into the mind of your son . . . the piper´s son. . . .
It began.
I was Ed Burkhalter.
It was two hundred years ago-
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Kindle
Sony Reader
Palm Digital
MS Reader
Adobe Reader
Mobipocket