A Lunatic Fear. B. A. Chepaitis
“Give the women to me together. If we’re right, I’ll know pretty quickly. Can I get a home planet site?”
That, Alex thought, was just like her. She leapt over any considerations of danger, any possible complicating factors, and went right to the job at hand. “Why home planet?” he asked.
“They’re out of phase. They need to kiss the earth.”
He considered the difficulty of a home planet rehab, and quickly decided against it. “Right now, I want you close. Besides, we’ve got our share of the Mother here. It’ll have to act in loco parentis. What’s your program for the women?”
Jaguar ran a hand through the walnut and honey-streaked length of her hair. “If I can’t go to the home planet, I’ll want something in the old forest eco-site. I’ll do a series of sweats to clear them.”
He raised his eyebrows at her. Sweat lodges with women in Phase Psychosis. She’d be literally breathing in what they released. If he knew her, she’d use empathic contact at the same time.
“The sweat lodge?” he asked. “Isn’t that risky?”
“Necessary. The ceremony creates a container. A safe place to open up while they detox.”
“How do you avoid eating the toxins?” he asked.
“The same way you avoid eating any shadow. Block what you can, release the rest. You know the routine. Besides, I’ll be sweating, too. “
Yes. He knew the routine. In fact, she’d taught him a few of her own blocking tricks, learned from her shaman grandfather, from Jake and One Bird at 13 Streams. Exceptionally skilled and trustworthy teachers showed Jaguar how to preserve her integrity, and she’d kept her spirit inviolate all these years, in spite of the criminals whose psyches she’d touched. She allowed just what she wanted to come in, and nothing or no one else. He sighed.
“What’re you looking at for core fears?”
She shook her head. “I’m not going for fears. I’m going for desires. If they have any big fears, I’ll find them in the same place “
Now that was interesting, and unexpected. The Planetoid system was based on the premise that crime grew out of fear, and prisoners needed to face the fears that generated their crimes. Desires weren’t usually a part of the program.
“Explain, please,” he invited her.
“These women don’t have any criminal background. Most likely they don’t have the deadly fears we usually see here, either. And you know what Phase Psychosis does. All emotions get maxxed out.”
“Then why not focus on joy, or rage or – anything at all? Why, specifically, desire?”
She pulled in breath and let it out. “It’s complex. Elusive of linear explanation. A three body problem, like the orbital relationship between moon, sun and earth. Or Planetoid, moon and earth, in this case.”
“What’s the triangle?”
“Fear, desire and power,” she said. “You know this quote - ‘True power gives birth to desire and true desire is the walkway to power.’ “
“Davidson, The Etiquette of Empaths, writing about how to avoid shadow sickness. ‘But fear chokes desire into greed, and greed is a washing of blood over power,’ ” he finished the quote for her.
“That’s right. These women ate too much power, and that made their real desires visible, but they’ve got nothing to ground them in and it’s scaring the hell out of them. That’s my working premise. The program will work, if I’m right.”
He swiveled back and forth, seemed to engage in discussion with himself. “If you’re right, Jaguar,” he said.
She turned her sea-green eyes to him. Pieces of gold light swam endlessly there. Crescents of moon-gold, caught forever in her eyes.
What will you do if I am, Alex?
She couldn’t have asked an easier question.
I back you. All the way. Don’t you know that by now?”
She let the answer settle in, then pulled back from contact. “Okay,” she said, “but maybe the most important question is what the big boys will do.”
That, meaning the corporations, the politicians, the pirates. He swiveled his chair away from her and stared out the window.
“One step at a time, Dr. Addams,” he said. “Get it rolling. I’ll call in the eco-site people and set up a spot for you.”
“Good,” she said. “I’ll start tomorrow if it’s ready.”
“It will be.”
He paused, checking to see if he’d left anything out. Nothing, except to remind her that working with Phase Psychosis was tricky. Unpredictable, especially for empaths. And especially when the psychosis ran as strong as it did in these women. If she didn’t block it, she risked getting caught in their illusions. He swiveled back around to face her, and looked blankly at an empty room. Silently, without even the sound of breath, she was gone.
He drummed his fingers on his desk, shook his head and went back to work.
He turned to his computer, and pulled up a file he’d compiled on another interesting criminal from Ranalli, Connecticut who’d recently arrived on Planetoid Three. Brendan Farley, convicted of setting off a pesticide bomb in a local mall.
As soon as Alex began to suspect his three new prisoners were exposed to Artemis he’d started checking on other crimes in their town. If there was a processing plant nearby, odds were high that other women would be feeling the results. He found aggravated assaults were way up among women, and there were an unusually high number of suicides in the last month. But the crime that really interested him was the mall bombing.
There was no evidence that Artemis affected men, so this could easily be some other form of madness, but Farley was from the same town. And now he was on the Planetoid, in his zone, under Supervisor Sheila Radowitz and Teacher Nance Faddegon, two women he had a good working relationship with. He could certainly pay Brendan a visit and see what turned up.
The information Alex had on him was just local news reports, so he continued staring at it only as a place to put his eyes while he waited for more. A knock on the door signaled that it had arrived.
“Enter,” he said, and the door opened. Team member Rachel Shofet came in and put three disks down in front of him.
“You find Jaguar?” she asked.
“Here and gone,” Alex said. “Is this the Farley material?”
“It is. You know he’s with Nance Faddegon?”
“I do. She’s good with recidivist con men and frauds.”
“I thought he was an ecoterrorist.”
“He just wants to make it look that way.” He shook his head at her questioning glance. “It’s just something I suspect.”
“Oh. That,” she said. She had reason to know the kind of empathic skills both he and Jaguar regularly used. “You need anything else?”
“Just some research,” Alex said.
Rachel’s face lit up at the prospect. She was his best researcher, and quickly becoming his best hacker, though he knew he probably shouldn’t encourage her in that.
He tapped a finger against his lips and thought. Brendan Farley’s file would include his testing report, psychological profile, personal and professional history. Alex wanted more.
“Just in case, go ahead and set up interview time with some of Farley’s co-workers, friends, if he had any. The usual.”
“Won’t that be in his prelims?”
“I’m guessing nobody asked how he felt about moon mining,”