Earthsmith Part 7

Serious. She was serious. She thought he was joking. Post-suggestively you tried to get someone to do something--anything, and it was very very funny if they did. Funnier yet if they didn't, because then they beat you at your own game, made fun of you, laughed at you, but eventually with you. Of course it was like that, let her think it was like that.

He smiled. "All right, I'll--stop."

And together, laughing, they walked out of the room. Smith was surprised to find he had no trouble at all with the door.

Jorak had a friendly smile for Smith when he entered their room.

"There's a card for you in the box, Smith. Read it." Jorak, it seemed, had stopped playing with his name.

Smith took the card, read it. "_Smith of Earth, report to Registrar at once._"

"You know why, don't you?" Jorak asked him. But the smile was no longer friendly.

"How should I know?"

"Trouble, that's what. But you asked for it. Psi and Wortan don't mix, barbarian."

Smith was glad when he hardly felt any impulse to strike the purple man.

But he said, mocking Jorak's own tones, "Don't provoke me," and Jorak cowered in a corner.

Smith looked into the banks of the Registrar's lights, spoke into the speaker. "Smith of Earth," he said. This time his voice didn't boom with loudness. And it didn't seem to matter much anymore.

And this time, the Registrar's voice wasn't so femininely petulant. It sounded masculine, authoritative.

"Smith of Earth. Item. Garnot of Jlob feels you are an inferior history student, recommends withdrawal from the school.

"Item: Sog-chafka of Wortan announces your wanton use of psi-powers in Wortan fighting, recommends clemency because you are a barbarian.

"Item: Kard of s.h.i.+lon wants to meet you in Wortan again. Promises to kill you.

"Item: both Jorak of Gyra and Geria of Bortinot have questioned your mentality, want you tested."

Vaguely Smith listened. He felt removed, resigned. But then certain words struck hard....

"_ ... Geria of Bortinot questions your mentality...._

"Smith of Earth. Are you listening?"

"I'm listening," Smith said.

"I feel you have two choices," the Registrar said. "We can request your withdrawal from the school, or we can keep you here under observation and give you an exhaustive battery of tests. The decision is in your hands."

"_ ... Geria of Bortinot questions your mentality...._"

"_ ... the decision is in your hands._"

Jorak moved, slipped along the wall. His face was sneering and fearful too. The purple mask of his face seemed to swim before Smith's eyes like something seen through watered gla.s.s. Smith was pacing. He felt the emotions beginning to work yeastily and he longed to take that face and twist it off its snaky neck.

"You had better go back to Earth, Smith," Jorak said. "Wherever it is."

Abruptly, Smith felt the tendons writhing between his hands. He lifted.

He held the squirming figure off the floor, held it there and looked into it curiously.

"You'd better use some of your psi-power, my little green friend," Smith said, "While you can."

The green face was turning purple. Words choked off somewhere down in the tubular length of the neck. Smith could feel it now! He could feel it! And he knew. The desperate tendrils of psi-power flailing out. And Smith began to smile.

"I could tell you some things, Jorak. You have some psi-power, but that and anything else you've got, including some very bad features, you got them all from Earth. You got the germs for it all a long time back. And what you have left is just something that's a kind of left-over after a few thousand years. The Earth has forgotten more psi-power, friend, than you'll ever have."

Jorak's eyes popped. Veins were coloring thickly through them.

"You're here to learn something, Jorak. Listen. We developed psi-power on Earth so long ago we don't bother remembering when it was."

Smith felt the power all right. Latent psi-power, dormant and unused and unneeded and uninteresting for aeons.

He threw Jorak into the corner. Jorak curled up there, sucking in air and rubbing his bruised neck.

"We had it. We threw it away," Smith said. "We had a defense against it too. But we don't use psi, or the defense anymore. We outgrew it. It had its day and then we forgot about it, Jorak. Why? We lost interest.

Individual sanct.i.ty was better. Privacy of the human mind was something a lot more to be desired than being able to pry into someone else's brain, or vice versa. But you take a lot of pride, Jorak, in having a little residue floating around."

Smith grinned more widely. It was funny in a way, and sad too. And he didn't particularly care about pus.h.i.+ng it any further.

"_ ... the decision is in your hands._"

He wished his thoughts would organize, fuse somehow with the stirring, rebelling emotions. Integration right now was vital. You lose, or you're not equal to something. And a really top-notch defense-mechanism will turn the whole thing around and say IT is not equal to YOU. That's a danger. And of that he was afraid.

Could he, should he, pa.s.s judgment? On a culture that had left Earth wallowing in the cosmic back-waters? Twice, thrice, he had tried to pa.s.s that judgment, but he could not. He should be judged, theoretically, not the school.

So what if their concept of history was primitive, basking in its own importance, ignoring the philosophical precepts upon which the social sciences are based? Surely they had reason, and he shouldn't question....

And if they valued Wortan fighting above all else ... if it made their women look like eager animals waiting to see the blood spill ... how could he question? Why should he dare a.s.sume that the whole culture was depraved, simply because he regarded it that way by Earth standards?

And their dream empathy was enjoyable, he had to admit that--but it was too enjoyable. No wonder Earth had dropped that sort of thing long ago.

It was a good gimmick to divert attention from important things. It was also regressive, a kind of sick introversion. It was decadence, an invasion of privacy, an offense against the dignity of human privacy of the mind--the individual's last precarious citadel.

He jumped a little when the Registrar barked: "Your decision, Smith of Earth."

He smiled at the bank of lights. He had broad duties. He had a duty to Earth. And an indirect duty to the Galaxy. He should report all this.

And Earth should try to do something to bring many worlds out of sloth, decadence, regression and inverted self-importance.

But first of all, a man had a duty to himself, his own psychic health.

Maybe the two weren't inseparable either. Maybe Earth would share the humiliation if he, Smith, suffered its scars to remain on him.