The Mind's Eye, page 33
He shook his head. “We have no choice, but to do a terrible thing,” he concluded. “The Founding Fathers would spit on us.”
Epilogue
One year after the establishment of Bester Towns – the name has, alas, stuck – we can safely say that matters have cooled down in the Lower 48. There has been a marked reduction in the number of telepathic crimes, although it is believed that a small number of rogue telepaths have escaped detection and remain active. While Alaska may mourn the arrival of so many telepaths – and civil liberties campaigners may attack legislation specifically focused on telepaths – it appears that the Bester Towns have succeeded in their aim – limiting contact between telepaths and non-telepaths.
-AP News Report, 2016
“Congratulations, Director,” Art said.
“Thank you,” Alice said. She winked at him. “And congratulations, Mr Operations Director.”
Art smiled, ruefully. After Leo and his team of rogues had been hunted down, the Telepath Corps had been reorganised. Alice had been appointed Director, which made her the youngest Director in Washington. She’d commented, in a moment of droll reflection, that she’d probably only got the job because no one actually wanted it. Art himself had been appointed Operations Director, which made him the Field Team Leader. He’d been told that he should remain behind at the office and allow someone younger and more expendable to take the lead, but he had no intention of listening to that. He wasn’t an old man yet.
He shook his head. It seemed absurd to think of the Telepath Corps without wondering if they were doing the right thing. Isolating telepaths from the remainder of the general population – for some telepaths, it would help keep them sane, but for the others? He couldn’t see how it could fail to breed resentment among telepaths, any more than it had failed to breed resentment among any other targeted population.
Time, he decided, would tell.
***
“I wish I knew what you were thinking,” Elizabeth said, sadly. “I wish I could tell you what happened to your wonderful dream.”
Professor Zeller didn’t move, but then he hadn’t moved since the day of the attack on the Zeller Institute. He lay on a bed, surrounded by medical instruments that were monitoring his brain patterns – or lack of them. The coma had swallowed him up and nothing anyone, even a pair of mind healers, had done had been able to free him. His breathing – light, regular patterns – filled the room, yet there was no mind inside the body. Professor Zeller was, to all intents and purposes, dead.
Elizabeth shook her head sadly. Most of the active American telepaths lived in the Bester Towns, the telepathic communities established in Alaska, an isolated region of the Nevada Desert or an island out on the coast. There were even a handful of non-telepaths, the parents of telepathic children who had chosen to follow their children to Alaska, rather than let them be drugged or put into the care of foster parents. It wasn’t as if the Telepathic Corps was poor – the Corps hired out telepaths to military and business interests and used the money to fund the Bester Towns – yet there was something depressing about the accommodation. Perhaps it was the fact that, no matter what the President had said, they were prisons. The alternative was being drugged and, it was clear, the drugs sometimes had dangerous side effects.
And she was the greatest prisoner of all.
In the chaos that followed Leo’s death, she had half-hoped that she would slip through the net and find a quiet life somewhere away from the rest of the world. Whatever had happened to her powers to invert them had proven impossible to fix, leaving her the only leper among the other telepaths. Elizabeth had no privacy, even among non-telepaths, and had chosen to live away from the Bester Towns. She still wasn’t sure if the tolerance granted to her was a reward for turning against Leo or one final twist of the knife. The Telepath Corps regarded her as an embarrassment. The mundane population, had they known who she was, would have wanted her tried for terrorism.
“I wish I’d never met you,” she told the silent Zeller. “I wish I’d never even heard about your program, even if it meant a lifetime spent flipping burgers at a fast-food chain. I wish…”
But there was no point in wishing. It never changed the world.
The Bester Towns had defused most of the anti-telepath violence in the remainder of the United States, but even Elizabeth could sense the dull resentment flickering through the telepathic community. In a town where everyone knew what everyone else was feeling – if not thinking – there was little point in trying to hide anything. The telepaths resented what had been done to them in the name of public safety, even though the President had had little choice. His successor, the one who inherited his position, would have to come up with a better solution. And yet, Elizabeth knew that there was no better solution, none that would please everyone. How could there be when there was no trust?
She took one last look at Zeller and walked away, knowing that the handful of nurses in the building would sense her depression when they saw her. By now, she was used to it, even though it felt too much like walking through town naked. It left her caught between two worlds; understanding the hatred and fear of non-telepaths, while resenting the treatment of telepaths to make non-telepaths feel safer. She was the only one of her kind.
Behind her, the machines continued their silent vigil.
The End
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