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Stories from the Verse
Con Version
Chapter 178: Brown 348
Table of Contents
Previous chapter: Takano 138
Gathering the last of their laundry they climbed the stairs. Tommy was just coming in from work. “Oh!” she said. “I’m glad I caught you. Back in the underground world, Lauren said she couldn’t teach me any psionics or magic because the conditions were wrong--she said the psionics were what she called ‘flatlined’, that she could do only very basic things, and although she could do all kinds of magic it always had weird results.”
“Weird?” Vashti asked.
“Yeah, like she prayed for light, and the electric lights came on, and she prayed for healing and the medical robot appeared. One time she prayed for guidance, and the computer sent a map to my phone. It always got the right result, but in completely unexpected ways.”
Derek thought that magic was like that anyway, but he could see that this was different.
“So I was wondering,” Tommy continued, “since Lauren says you’re very good at psionics and know a bit of magic, too, whether you might teach me a few things.”
Derek paused a moment. He had been meaning to teach Vashti for quite a while, and kept putting it off. This might be a good time for this. “Is now a good time to start?” he asked.
Tommy seemed surprised. “Oh, sure--I mean, I guess so. Why not?”
“Good,” he said. “I’ll run the laundry upstairs, you and Vashti set up in the kitchen with drinks for us, and I’ll be right back.”
Without awaiting an answer, he took Vashti’s share of the wash along with his own and scampered up the stairs with overladen arms. His face was pressed into the warm, fresh smelling clothes. He tossed it all on the bed; they would be able to sort and fold it later. Then he headed downstairs and found them at the kitchen table with glasses of soda fizzing lightly for each of them.
“O.K.,” he began. “Here’s what I’m thinking. I already taught Vash how to read minds. I think the next thing I should teach her is how to show someone a skill pattern. I used that skill to teach her the other, and I’ll use it again to teach it to her. But she won’t really know how to use the skill until she uses it--so we’ll have her transmit the read minds skill pattern to you, and you can then use it to learn to read minds.” He thought for a moment. “Just to be safe, after she does, I’ll do it, so you’ll have two examples. But then you’ll have to use it to read one of our minds.”
He looked at Vashti, then at Tommy. “Lauren always teaches one skill a day, to be safe. These are really dangerous--you can damage your own brain, or someone else’s, or create shock waves, or any of a lot of other things, if it goes wrong, and it does sometimes go wrong. But if you’re ready, we’ll give it a try.”
Both girls nodded, so he turned his attention to Vashti. He thought for a moment about how he transmitted a skill pattern, and then he reached out to her mind and sent that to her. She had closed her eyes, and she smiled.
He took a deep breath. “Have you got it?” he asked.
“I think so,” she said.
“O.K., go over it carefully, and then go over how you read minds--maybe read Tommy’s mind, both so you are sure of the pattern and so you’ve had some contact with her already. Then send the read minds pattern to her.”
As Derek watched, Vashti was staring at Tommy, and it was about a minute before Tommy’s eyes suddenly lit up.
“Wow!” she said. “That’s--that’s amazing.”
“O.K., just to be sure, let me do it--we don’t want to be getting this wrong.” He read Tommy’s mind, finding that she was quite excited at the possibility of doing this, and then transmitted the pattern to her again.
“O.K.,” he said, “you try.”
She closed her eyes, and then opened them again. He was thinking, we won’t know if she succeeded; we won’t even know which of us she contacted. Mind reading is so non-invasive in that sense you couldn’t know if you were a target. On the other hand, it’s hard to think of something more invasive than reading someone’s thoughts. What he said, though, was, “Every person has a sort of frequency. You can find their frequency if you’re looking at them, but once you’ve found it you can remember it and find them again when they’re somewhere else. I’m told you can contact minds that are in other universes, but it’s very difficult and I’ve never tried it and don’t know anyone who has. But, did it work?”
“You don’t know? No, of course not--that’s what you were thinking.”
Derek smiled. “Congratulations, Kreskin. You can now read minds. Tomorrow, we’ll teach you something else. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have laundry to fold.”
There is a behind-the-writings look at the thoughts, influences, and ideas of this chapter, along with eleven other sequential chapters of this novel, in mark Joseph "young" web log entry #519: Versers Congregate. Given a moment, this link should take you directly to the section relevant to this chapter. It may contain spoilers of upcoming chapters.
As to the old stories that have long been here:
