and amplify it so we can dissociate ourselves from the gravitational bed of local spacetime. Then we can join in the Allesseh, the great Cooperation, the telepathic harmony of all myconeuralized creatures throughout the galaxy—”
“Wrong!” Paul shouted, shaking his sandy-haired head in disgust. “A crazy ethnobotanist and forty-odd half-naked aborigines as humanity’s first ambassadors to the galaxy? Do you have any idea how insane that sounds?”
With the expanded empathy the ghost people’s prized fungus had already granted her, Jacinta saw the swelling rage igniting deep inside Paul’s skull, saw a vision of an icy bright pinpoint exploding outward like a cold Big Bang, a blizzard of invisible light radiating out of Paul’s temples, a crown of white thorns working its way to his forehead from the inside to finally storm outward in all directions, away and away. Paul paced heavily and furiously in the mud, the terrible anger rising through him, seemingly bringing with it all the memories of all Jacinta’s strange times past.
“I thought you were acting crazy,” he yelled, “when you said you were getting secret personal messages from TV programs! I thought you were acting crazy when you said you were under surveillance by a secret network of shadowy operatives! I thought you were acting crazy when you were convinced They were monitoring your thoughts through some guy trained as a ‘telepathic receiver’ living in an apartment down the hall! I thought you were acting crazy before, but this—this is the craziest of all!”
In full fury her short, wiry-muscled brother ran about on the death island, kicking fiercely at the phallus-brain shapes of the ghost people’s totemic mushroom where it grew by the dozen, rising out of the corpsebeds of the ghost people’s deceased members. Again and again Paul kicked, desecrating corpse after corpse. The fungal fruiting bodies split apart against his muddy, boot-clad feet, tender new flesh defiled.
When, breathless, Paul at last stopped his sacrilege, Jacinta was already plopped down in the mire, rubbing tears from her eyes.
“You’ll never understand, will you?” she moaned. “Yeah, you’re right—out there I am crazy, a freak! Always trapped between what I am and what I’m supposed to be! Always letting people down! No more! This is my world now, these are my people. It’s better here! Paul, please, get beyond your demons! Don’t you see? We were meant to be telepaths, part of the Great Cooperation, but we went wrong, we were overlooked, we developed consciousness and intellect, but not the fullness of empathy we misunderstand as telepathy. All human history is a result of a mistake, an accident.”
She turned to him, almost pleading. “The contact ships missed us, every one. We became a preterite planet, but now we have a chance to gain our rightful inheritance, our place in the bliss of the Cooperation! Stay with us! Come with us!”
“Where?” Paul asked, winded, seeming suddenly tired but still unwilling to concede a single point. “Where are you taking them? Where are they taking you? I don’t get it, Jacs. If you really think these ghost people prove your theories right, then why are you trying to help them escape the scrutiny of your colleagues? If you’re really trying to preserve their culture from our civilization, then why’d you bring all that high-tech gear up here for them to mess with? Industrial autoclaves. Diamond saws. Generators. Power cables. Foldout satellite dishes. Uplink antennas. Language acquisition and translation programs. Cameras and optidisk player recorders. Fifty microscreen TV sets—fifty!”
Jacinta, still shocked and numbed by her brother’s profanation of the ghost people’s funerary isle, said nothing. Her brother in his ranting barely noticed.
“I saw what was going on in all those small side chambers on the way down here,” he said. “Don’t think I didn’t. All those alcoves with power lines and cables snaking into them. In one room naked tepui kids were watching a Chinese television documentary on Han dynasty artifacts—real-time computer translated into French! In another I saw a young ‘indigene’ watching an American news broadcast about an Indian monsoon. In another your friend Talitha was checking an enormous crystal column for flaws as it came out of an extrusion autoclave! Someone else was carving up quartz bricks with a diamond saw right next door. I saw tepui kids randomly sampling music—madrigals and rap, Tibetan temple gongs and rock ’n’ roll, Sufi chants and Europop and worldbeat. Do you want me to ignore the evidence of my own eyes? Doesn’t that exposure alter their ‘lifeways’?”
Jacinta’s numbness and shock, however, still had not lifted enough to allow her the energy to reply.
“That wasn’t the strangest, either,” her brother continued. “A boy and an oldster, both in loincloths, sitting in front of computer terminals, running through complex mathematical equations! Then what looked like star charts and astrogation data zipping across screens in front of half dozen operators of various ages. Think, Jacinta! Doesn’t all that already change the ways of these people beyond recovery?”
At last Jacinta started to rouse herself from her numbness, but her brother in his ranting noticed not at all.
“Why should I want to stay here, Jacinta?” he concluded. “Why should I want to end up a flipped out fungus-head—excuse me, ‘myconeural symbiont’—with a parasite mushroom growing inside my skull? Like these throwbacks? Is that the kind of life you want?”
“They’re happy!” Jacinta shouted, turning reddened eyes on Paul—eyes that would not break contact, would not flicker away this time, no matter how much he might have wished it. “We are happy! What kind of life would I have out there in your ‘real’ world? In and out of institutions all my life, dosed up on ‘meds,’ watched over by high-school dropout ‘psychiatric aides’ in case I ‘go off’—giving them the chance to execute a well-planned ‘take down’ so they can strap me into a floor-bolted cot in the ‘time out’ room? Out there, even freedom is my jail—a prison as big as the world! No thanks. Not while there’s even a chance of real freedom, and the stars.”
They both felt like crying. It was all wrong, all so wrong.
“Jacs, we’ve never institutionalized you,” Paul said, a quaver in his voice. “All I want to do is take you home.”
“This is my home,” Jacinta said, turning away.
“What about Mom and Dad?” he asked. “What about Professor Manikam and your career?”
“Tell them I quit school,” she said without turning around. “Tell them I quit work. Tell them I disappeared into the backcountry. Tell them I went native, stopped communicating, fell beyond reach. Tell mom and dad they only gave us everything so we would owe everything to them.”
“What about me then, you ingrate?” Paul shouted, his sorrow turning once more to anger. “I came all the way down here after you! What about me, huh? What would your mushroom people do if I grabbed one of these long bones from their graveyard here, clubbed you over the head with it, and took you out of here in a fireman’s carry? Have they foreseen that future? Would they try to stop me?”
“Probably not,” Jacinta said with a deep sigh, turning slightly toward him, glancing over her shoulder. “But I would. I’ll fight you to the last breath. I won’t let you sentence me to a life in prison—not even if it’s ‘for my own good.’ Not even if I should be ‘grateful’ to you for doing it. Leave me here, or you better leave me alone.”
In the flash of determination in her eyes as she turned away, Paul must have seen something too strong for him to challenge. He turned away too, then. After a moment, Jacinta turned and watched him go, plodding away through the shallow water, squelching back tiredly through the plain of muck, flashlight flickering before him in the hollow emptiness of the cave. She watched as Paul came onto solid ground
