Allie's War Season Three (173 page)

Humans got addicted to wires, too.

The effects were slightly different, as well as the relative intensity of the addictions, but the prevalence of some form of 'space addiction' remained almost as high in human users as it did in seers. Moreover, humans could become addicted not only to specific spaces marketed along with the different street brands of wires, they could also grow to hate their own material existence in time, just as seers did.

According to Revik, long-time human users turned into raging animals when deprived of the relative serenity of the Barrier spaces, just like their seer counterparts did.

Revik also said Menlim used wires initially to get some of his more difficult recruits addicted to the spaces of the Dreng.

Ultimately, however, wires proved to be a failure for this purpose, in that they rendered even the most highly-skilled of those recruits virtually useless. Wires fell into disuse again until near the end of the Second World War, when the Nazis determined that they had value as interrogation tools. Any seer, and most humans, grew completely pliable once they got addicted to the wires. They would tell the interrogator literally anything, partly because they no longer cared about the consequences in the material world, and partly because addictions quickly grew so intense that they would betray anything and anyone to appease them.

Wires turned seers into animals, according to Revik. Debased and unfeeling animals.

Some infiltrators even theorized that the more highly-structured the aleimi of the seer in question, the worse this debasement could become.

Getting a seer off the wires once they were addicted was difficult, to say the least. It could be done, apparently, but it wasn't easy...and a significant percentage of seers let themselves die rather than return to a life without the wires. The ethical implications of that hadn't exactly bothered Menlim any, but most infiltrators, especially the Adhipan and Seven, while not explicitly barring their use for military purposes, had pretty much avoided using them in any but the most extreme or life-threatening of cases.

Balidor told me he'd brought seers back from wires before.

He'd mostly been talking to me about Revik, though, when he'd been considering using wires on ‘Revik-as-Syrimne’ while we still had him in the tank. Balidor had been trying to convince me that whatever damage he did to Revik's light, it wouldn't be permanent. His words hadn't reassured me even a little, not even then.

I’d hated the idea. Luckily, Vash vetoed it, too.

Still, I couldn't help remembering what Balidor had said when we had the same discussions around what to do with Ditrini. I admit, it was a lot easier to convince myself that the process could be made safe, when it wasn't my husband we were talking about. What that says about me I guess is pretty clear, in terms of ethics.

Wires disappeared for over a decade after the end of World War II.

They reappeared sometime in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as purely recreational sport for humans. Human addicts didn't become quite as dysfunctional as seer addicts––mostly because they didn't have a lot of control over their aleimi in the first place, according to Revik, and their minds were deeply rooted in their physical bodies––but wires created problems in human society, too. Revik said, if nothing else, wires made it pretty much impossible for a human addict to learn how to control their light, all other factors and innate talents notwithstanding.

Also, humans could get really addicted to the spaces sold with those street versions, and not all of those spaces were particularly 'enlightening'...no matter what the proponents of using wires for 'mind-expansion' might proclaim.

In fact, a lot of those spaces had a suspiciously Dreng-like feel to them.

Revik said it actually made human addicts pretty much aleimic vegetables, just like it did seers. The only difference was that humans were less likely to notice. Humans got visions and so forth from using the wires, sure, but mostly because normally their light bodies were so strongly tied to the physical that they couldn't see much in the Barrier at all.

Wires gave them access to the Barrier, in other words, but at a stiff price.

Still, I'd toyed with that idea a bit.

Jon and I even discussed it once or twice, meaning the idea of trying to use wires the way Kardek seemed to have intended, to help humans learn about the Barrier, or at least to see that it existed in the first place. I even brought it up with Jon and Vash together once, and the three of us tossed around ideas on how we might use the wires to jump-start humans at the beginning of their Barrier training. Jon claimed he'd had a number of more 'theoretical' discussions with Balidor on that topic, as well. According to Jon, the Adhipan leader hadn't been as adverse to experimentation along those lines as I would have thought.

I hadn't brought it up with Revik yet, though.

In any case, Revik still didn't like the idea of me interrogating Ditrini. He argued with Balidor about it right in front of me, but they took the discussion offline a few times, too, with Revik even pulling Wreg into it, trying to get Wreg to back him up. Some of this was for the reasons he gave Balidor, which were that he thought I was still too connected to the Lao Hu, that Ditrini's fixation on me would be counter-productive, etc., etc.

I could tell that wasn't all of it, though.

I didn't argue with him in front of the others, but I did push the point when we were alone, and he still wouldn’t own up to whatever was really bugging him.

Balidor refused to budge in terms of his recommendations to me, in any case. So unless he had a sudden rush of overprotective weirdness along with Revik in the next few days, I fully intended to be in that cell as soon as a definite time got scheduled.

Until then, I didn’t really want to think about Ditrini at all.

Luckily, or unluckily, I was a little too busy for the next few days for it to matter.

By the time everyone finally got sleep and got laid and crawled out of bed, we were already discussing how we were going to handle losing Wreg and Jon for the next three to five weeks, and who would be filling in for their various roles in their absence. We were also stuck trying to figure out what to do about finding any remaining humans or seers on the lists who were currently lost somewhere outside the quarantine zone...along with our continued attempts to find Shadow, Cass and Feigran themselves, as well as to discern the design of Shadow’s Barrier network for the Dreng here on Earth.

Between that ever-lengthening list and the increasingly erratic weather, earthquake warnings and the occasional riot and/or other disturbance going on in the streets outside the hotel, I didn’t have time to worry too much about Ditrini, or whatever was going on with my light.

A few days later, Revik approached me with yet another distraction...a more personal project he wanted my help with, emotionally more than physically.

He wanted to talk to his son.

REVIK ASKED ME to come with him.

Not to actually go into the interrogation room with him while he spoke to Maygar, but to wait outside...and just to be there, I guess.

Given that it would be the first time Revik spoke to Maygar since he’d found out Maygar was his son, I guess I couldn't blame him for not wanting to tackle it alone. Anyway, we still had no way of knowing where Maygar's loyalties lay at this point––Chan’s opinions on the subject notwithstanding––so we had to treat it like an interrogation, at least to a degree.

I wanted to talk to Maygar too, of course, but whatever Maygar and I might have to say to one another could definitely wait. It certainly couldn't be as important as Revik trying to have his first real talk with his son.

For the same reason, I stayed in the security station while Revik went inside.

Maygar hadn't been cleared by security yet, so they still had him in holding.

It was a pretty low-security version, though, even compared to Varlan or Surli...much less Ditrini or any of the truly high-security-risk prisoners we currently held at the hotel. Even so, I knew Revik wanted to check out Maygar's light himself. He probably wanted to see what he could feel there on his own, before Balidor and the rest of his team took over and debriefed Maygar for real.

I knew part of this was that Revik felt responsible for Maygar's having been picked up by Shadow in the first place, but the decision had its practical side, too. Revik's past connections to the Dreng weighed on him, but they also made him one of the best people we had, in terms of finding any lingering resonances in any of Shadow's ex-captives.

Wreg was good too, but even he hadn't had as much exposure to the different methods of infiltration used by the Dreng as Revik had.

Maygar didn't look very good, truthfully.

We knew from the med techs that, unlike any of the others, he'd been tortured. We still didn't know for sure
why
he'd been singled out, but Revik and Balidor theorized that Shadow had been trying to learn about his light, likely because of who his father was.

Revik explained to me, as Balidor spoke, that torture was a crude but often effective way of testing a seer's aleimic reflexes. He said that part of the purpose of Menlim's treatment of him as a child had been to terrorize him into losing control over his light. It also would cause him to panic at different points as a kid, and thus flex his aleimi to try and defend himself. Revik told me torture would unlikely be sufficient to truly
activate
those structures, at least not without years of training woven into the abuse, as had been done with him, but it potentially could have given Shadow, whoever he was, a pretty clear map of what structures lived in Maygar's light.

None of this exactly eased our minds, vis a vis the whole 'Menlim is alive and Shadow' theory, but Revik was the first to point out that Salinse would have known this as well, and likely would have employed the same strategy.

When I said that at least Maygar likely wasn't telekinetic, given that Shadow would never have let him go if he'd had those unique structures in his aleimi, Revik only shook his head. He then told me and Balidor that he'd actually been thinking the opposite...that Shadow's strongest motivation to let Maygar go would be so that Revik could train him.

According to Revik, just being around the two of us would make it about a hundred times easier for Maygar to access that ability in himself, if he had it. Which again lent credence to the theory that Shadow knew exactly where we were and likely believed he could overcome us easily when and if he wanted...and take Maygar back from us, too, if he wanted.

And yeah, none of this was reassuring.

Revik and Balidor both assumed by now that Shadow and Salinse had given up their main efforts to convert Revik back into a member of the fold. With his bond to me, they'd essentially have to convert both of us. Revik, Balidor...and even Tarsi...thought that would be too difficult for them to have it as a Plan A, especially now that Revik's light had been mostly repaired from what Menlim had done to him as a child. It didn't mean we no longer considered Revik and me targets; if anything, we figured Shadow would probably just try to kill both of us.

Possibly the only reason he hadn't yet, was so that we could help Maygar or Cass access their own telekinesis. Or maybe Shadow wanted our DNA for himself, so he could clone more telekinetic seers. Either way, we had to assume that both Surli and Ditrini were right, and that we were only alive because Shadow wanted us alive.

We had no idea what Maygar knew about his own abilities, of course.

We didn't even know if anyone in Shadow's camp bothered to tell Maygar why he was being tortured. The interview with Revik would be the very first anyone on our side had attempted since we picked Maygar up in Argentina. Well, apart from Chandre spending time with him on the flight back...and the medical technicians who'd worked on him.