June 2000
Rating: PG
…Is Lost
by Sängerin
Prax noticed, though it was only momentary. A lapse
of judgment, perhaps. A flash of memory.
There
were sixty on the ship. Only two left to be dealt with. They were terrified -
not so much by us, by me, by what they knew would be their fate - but by what they
had lived through.
Slow, agonising suffocation. Hearing in
your mind as well as with your ears the death gasps of your friends and family.
Feeling their mind tone disappear. Feeling
each person die, even though it is too dark to see them. Knowing exactly
how many of you are left, how close each one is to dying.
Not
daring to cry out for fear of discovery. For fear of putting
those still alive at risk of capture. Protecting
yourself and the gaharay who, too, is risking their
life for yours.
And in the end, only that deafening silence. Of sixty, only two. And so nearly none at
all.
For
the first time, I felt pity for a telepath.
And I
hesitated. The memory of a story I told her floated back - of a tiny
telepath girl, pulled, almost suffocated, from her hiding place. She thanked me
for rescuing her. I patted her on the head and sent her away to die.
Telepaths
are a threat to decent society. They have no respect for privacy, no respect
for confidentiality. They will read your mind as an open book, and no matter
how you try to close it, to keep that book from them, they will wrest it from
your grasp and lay the contents out for all to see. They cannot be allowed to
live.
Even
the young telepaths must be dealt with. For they, in time, will grow. They will
be as their parents - a thorn in the side of the Devore, in the side of any civilised people. And as those young telepaths grow, they
will share information wider and wider, and then they will themselves
reproduce. Far better to cut the rope here, than to allow
this phage to spread throughout our people. Far
better.
Sometimes
the lengths to which telepaths will go surprises me.
After all these years, they should be resigned to their fate. They know that if
they try to avoid me - the Inspectorate, the Imperium
- the camps await them. And they know that the camps mean death.
Yet
still they try. They risk death - by suffocation, by molecular destabilisation, by all forms - they risk death to escape
death. Or to avoid dying at our hands.
And
still they are able to find gaharay to help them. No
Devore would smuggle telepaths. No Devore would dare. But these gaharay seem fearless - or else lacking intelligence on a
grand scale. Do these captains hesitate when the telepaths approach them? Do
they stop to think of the end that awaits them?
Sometimes
I think that these other gaharay are braver than she.
Her crew were at risk, too. She already had three to
protect, why not protect more? Simple efficiency. Yet
I believe she would have opened her ship and her technology to those telepaths
even if her own crew had not contained any.
She
is that sort of person. She comes, I believe, from that sort of culture. The sort that will not hesitate to help those in need. Where all are as welcoming as she and her crew.
It
should have been their downfall. It should have been her downfall. To accept
those telepaths without hesitation was folly, and folly must not be rewarded.
She hesitated before accepting me, and then, it was her hesitation that saved
her.
So
why am I so sure that my hesitation today, at the stench of those bodies, at
the pain in the eyes of the telepaths, hesitation at their pleas of mercy - why
am I so sure that it spells the end of my career? Possibly my
life.
She
who hesitated was saved. And yet he who hesitates…