"No. No." Lunging to my booted feet, I grabbed the pitted rock from Rachel Summerstars hands as she staggered up, with it held over her head, to bash in the brains of the mutant who wept at my feet. Sticking a pointing finger in her face, I gave her a look, and she subsided.
"Sit down." I ordered, and then carefully did not look at her until she plonked herself down on a rock fifteen feet away. The mutant then began to kiss my foot, and rub its flap of a nose against my ankle until I stepped back not one, but two needful paces. He quivered, wanting to further abase itself, but that creeped me out, not its pocked and corrupted body.
Besides, I saw the fellow glance at the sleeping tiger a few feet off next to the ruin of the lounge car which the slaves had abandoned. He essayed waking the mankiller with his mental domination, and failed due to my stronger command, and the tiger‘s physical need for sleep. The mutant was not even sincere in his protestations of loyalty and love. He wanted to wake his pet tiger, and unleash the monster on me.
I walked over past the lounge car with its twin poles, and leaned against the half-built pyramid formed of chunks of igneous rock which must be the large structure I had seen on the overview map I had in my pocket. Downhill past them both a village of slate roofed huts squatted behind the wooden palisade wall stretching across my path.
In the streets, I saw the occasional healthy slave, and a wide variety of mutants with many different body plans. Although all of them were variants on humanity.
"Whats your name?" I called out.
"Gregnak Tigermaster, your worshipfulness." He began to babble more profuse compliments, hoping that I would spare his life after he had tried to enslave me.
"Do you have any such named ‘Gregnak’?" I asked Rachel still sitting quietly on her rock. She shook her head ‘no’, and curled her lip at the mutant. There was a thought trickling around in the back of my head, but it would not come out, so I let it roam free in the canyons of my mind for a while. But it had something to do with Gregnak, and the oddity of his name.
I cajoled, and commanded Gregnak to show us his town. By his word, we were let through the gate, although I realized getting out was probably not going to be as easy. Other mutants kept us in their sight, and it would only take seconds for them to rush us.
A female, I believe, with three legs, and one eye stood in our path. I began to walk around her, but she scuttled sideways.
"Your cowardice will avail you nothing. Come within ten feet, and my telekinesis will rip you to shreds. I am Mighty Mordashnu."
I blinked, and decided that this one had the look of a gunslinger. Each culture has its own methods of dealing with trouble. Many would simply have refused me entrance at the gate, and some would have mobbed me after I got to some hard to defend spot.
Here, they evidently sent out champions such as this telekinetic. What with her poor depth perception, and general air of not quite sure what to do, I probably could rush her in a second. But, often cultures have certain attack methods considered taboo.
Instead of breaking their probably taboos, I reached out and touched her mind. Her surface thoughts were almost completely open with only the most rudimentary of shields between her and me. She wanted me to advance, desperately, so that once I was in the ten feet range of telekinesis, she’d be able to pound me. This notion of TK being limited in range to ten feet went against how I understood such things worked.
Digging deeper into her brain, I saw the mental pattern she used to create the telekinetic force. It had some weak spots, and was inexpertly assembled with key junctions almost flickering out of existence as the seconds piled on, and she held her pitiful concentration together. But, primarily, it had artificial limits on its power. There was no need for her to be limited to ten feet except she believed it to be true.
I reached out with my TK, and gently pushed on her carotid artery until she passed out. Then I, and my two ‘advisors’ went onward up the street toward the central temple building.
At the corner of the next ‘street’, another mutant. This one with four eyes. Two in the traditional locations, one in the ‘third eye’ and the fourth on his chin. The last looked red, sore, and weeping with yellowing pus dripping from both corners of it. It looked exquisitely painful, and I was moved with pity for him even as he challenged me to a duel.
“I am The Terrible Eye. I shall find your secrets, and make them mine, and you shall obey me…” He seemed to want to go on, but I had things to do so I repeated my last attack even as his feeble attempt at searching my memories lost its way in the mental defense entitled by the Ynvatani Sensitives, The Castle with Moving Walls. He collapsed, and I took a moment to use my psionic healing, and tend to his eye. After that, he seemed to relax, even in his sleep.
Two more mutants tried to stop me with roughly equal success. One did succeed in launching a plate at me, but I snatched it out of the air with a quick hand, and then I TK pushed the assailant back on his bottom before tapping him out with a carotid squeeze.
One thing I noted was that no one seemed that good at their psionic skills. When I inquired as to why, Gregnak seemed horrified.
"Train? But these are gifts of the radioactivity?"
"Radioactivity?" I questioned him, a bit startled.
He nodded and led us away from the temple to the right until we came to a large granite rock. A quick check of my geiger counter, and I stopped a good thirty feet away from it even as to my sickened shock, I saw people sunbathing on top of the two story chunk which must have been tossed here after being near point zero of one of the nukes.
"The Rock of Power."
"Figures. Mutants worship a rock. We at Haven worship the Green Tree." Rachel Summerstars said with a snort.
"Yeah, but you both take slaves, so you’re not off the hook either." I retorted and she shut up, hoping I’d forget about her.
"It gives us power. Both bane and benefit."
I understood as he explained it. The locals had been mistreated by the others in the wake of the Nuclear War, and so they had been forced to settle in the more radioactive regions. But, from their books they read, and from the theories they had been passed down to them by their parents, they knew that radioactivity, especially in large amounts gives people the ability to have psi powers.
I wanted to curse Charles Darwin, and the makers of some horrible movies which had led these folk astray. Now I knew where Gregnak came from. The name came from Hollywood. Art imitates life, and then life imitates art.
"So you meditate day and night on the Rock until you develop your power, right? Has it occurred to you that this meditation might be the key to developing new esper powers, and that the radioactivity does nothing but cause genetic damage?”
“No, your worshipfulness, no.” He cried out, and then cringed to the ground as a trio of mutants walked around the Rock of Power. They carried themselves with assurance. They knew they were the rulers, and that they were bad to the bone.
“Why have you come here to spread lies?” They thundered in one voice. It was modestly impressive, but believe me, I’ve seen better floor shows. And after an archangel thunders at you, one gets a tad blasé about the whole intimidation thing.
“I assume you trio are the bosses?”
“We are the Unity. A single mind with three aspects. We are Power.” They backed up their announcement with a general Project Emotion. Behind me, I heard an ooooh, and an aaaahhh. It seemed the rest of the town was arriving. Which made sense to me since lo-tech villages can be short on entertainment. It of course, failed to even move my shields.
“Well Unity,” I projected my own voice with good old fashioned lung power. And believe me, even back in the day, I had a loud voice when I wanted it. “I was brought here to be a slave by a tiger. The tiger sleeps, and the mind controller begs for my mercy. So, if you want to blame anyone for my coming here, well, I‘d have to say blame your own self for the ruin you bring to your followers.”
Two could play at the unfair question game. They scoffed, and broke the Trial Lawyer’s First Rule. Never ask a question you don’t know the answer too. “Ruin? How? We are strong.” “Strong are you? Your village looks like its on the last brink before final disaster. I give you ten years before this whole place is burnt down. Your mutants are so weakened physically that you have to import slaves.” “We take slaves because we are strong.” I heard Rachel start in surprise. I bet that one had struck home. A lot of the arguments cultures use repeat themselves, with similar cultures re-inventing the same old arguments as someone else used before. And neighbor cultures are often very similar in certain surprising ways. “I’m going to be you just recently started because you found out that too many of your mutants did not have the strength to go out and take care of themselves.” I heard a gasp behind me of shock at my perceptiveness, but it was nothing really. I had not seen the casual brutality long-term slave taking brought, nor had I seen a slave market, or corrals for slaves. It was obvious that the mutants were new to this game. “Treason!” The Unity bellowed, and I looked with interest back on the crowd. The smaller bit was a parade of horror, several hundred mutant grotesqueries. Next to them stood nearly seven hundred hale and healthy men and women who were almost to a man studying their captors with speculative glances. After all, I had just revealed to the slaves how weak their masters were. “Seize him!” They commanded. “A moment.” I said as guards came forward. A ring of four rocks rose about me, and began to spin in a circle at waist height. “You use that word, but I don’t think you know what it means. For me to be a traitor, I must have first aligned myself to your cause. I have not.” “You have too. You have walked the path of challenge, and risen to Count of the Mutant Kingdom in battle royale.” I blinked. Stared, and then just burst out laughing. Whatever they expected, that was not it. Finally rubbing my hand in my beard, I controlled myself, and let the rocks down to the ground stiff under my feet. The guards stared perplexed until the Unity signed for them to back up. “You lot must have gotten your society from a movie.” At this Rachel pealed out her girlish laughter that chimed off stone roofs and hillsides in a display of healthy vigor that must have been bittersweet to the mutants lost in pain and degeneration. “Its true. Their guide is The Days of the Last Man.” She stood up. “And our oldest writings tell us that She Who Was the Goddess, but before she realized this, she ‘went on a date to see this awful movie, the Days of the Last Man’, a parade of all the most inept and stupid clichés that post-apocalyptic movies had been burdened with.” “Yes, we have heard this too. You think us ignorant. But we know of your writings of this so-called goddess. She goes on to lament the psionic powers which she decried as fake. But I/We have psionic power, as do my people. So tell me now, little Havener who worships a tree, who has the right of it? We have electricity even, and steam power. We have maintained the true heritage, and been given power as mutants.” My next question was predicated on just how much knowledge of science the mutants had retained. If they imagined as did Darwin that life at the sub-cellular level got simpler, instead of as it actually does which is get vastly more complex, then my point would be lost on them. If they thought you got one good mutation for one bad mutation then again, I would be shooting too high for them. “How many mutations would you say it takes to get a new power?” I asked. “Ah ha, he tests us. He seeks to find if we remember the ancient knowledge. In the old days, hundreds of millions of years of evolution with thousands upon thousands of tiny mutations were required to develop the new limb.” That was close enough for my purposes. Actually, it was far more complicated than that, but they didn’t need to know about the necessity of systems evolving together because what good is a strong muscle without a strong bone to hang it on? And again, I was vastly simplifying the difficulties. “But in the days after the Bomb, the Holy Bomb, fell, we had mucho radiation, and mutation spread. Many died, but of those who lived, they turned to find out how their powers worked. And it was so, as The Days of the Last Man told it to us. All hail Tarentino, the prophet.” I listened attentively although I felt like rolling my eyes when I discovered that Quentin Tarantino had been elevated to the status of a prophet by some radioactive mutants three hundred fifty years after his death. “Lets say, I took this stone.” I lifted a large one with my mind. “And flung it at a hut.” I slung it with telekinesis a distance of nearly a hundred yards which was far more than any of them thought they could. It knocked a few tiles off the roof of my targeted hut which I had already clairvoyantly checked as empty. “Lets say, I took ten thousand stones, and flung ten thousand stones at each hut, at the end, how many huts would be left standing?” They paused, and I made a gesture with my hand to push them to answer. “None.” The Unity responded. “Exactly right.” I nodded, and the Unity and its people breathed a sigh of relief like they had passed a test. And it was then I saw that they had a cultural inferiority complex as regards normal looking humans. It was not something they admitted. Indeed, they loudly proclaimed their superiority. But really, who given the chance wouldn’t trade a weak TK and chronic skin rashes, arthritis, and deformed bones for no TK and a healthy body? They knew they were on the bottom. “Now, since those village huts represent your bodies, which are far more complicated, and less forgiving of being brutally manipulated than rather simple huts, you can, of course, see where this is going?” They struggled, but they couldn’t. However, I acted like I knew they knew, and were just being polite. “Of course, you don’t want to be rude. So, let me say it. Ten thousand random changes to your genome, and you’d be dead. And not one of you believes that a castle would have arisen by accident from the thrown stones.” “But, but…they have powers.” Rachel blabbed out, and I could have given her a free pass on making the campfire for a week for that well-timed comment. “Yes. Your mutations have nothing to do with your powers. If they did, you wouldn’t have powers. Mutation, my fine young mutants is a degenerative force. Natural selection is a conservative force. Mutants tend to die out, I’m afraid. And that is just what you are doing.” “We have power.” The Unity objected as it rose into the air. “And so do I.” And I floated into the air before them as well. “Pschyic powers are a matter of training the mind. Your ancestors believed they could do things, probably with a great deal of fervor since they were in terrible conditions, and they found after focused effort that it was true. They learned how to use these god-given skills. But you have not taken them to the next level.” I reached out, and with my TK lifted the giant radioactive rock out of the ground, a perhaps thirty ton lift, and then sent it higher and higher until it crashed into a deep pit I had spotted a dozen miles away. There, it was as far away from groundwater, wildlife, and humanity as I could conveniently make the nasty thing. Later, I intended to go back, and bury it under some tons of stone. “With the proper training, many of you could learn to do just what I did. TK is not limited to ten feet and a hundred pounds of force just because this movie told you it was.” “But he was a prophet.” The Unity wailed holding their hands over their eyes. “Was he?” I asked gently as disabusing people of their cherished traditions, and false religions is a delicate task indeed. “Did he claim to be such? And let me tell you what my Holy Book had as a standard for prophets. One mistake, and you were a false prophet, and liable for stoning. I do not speak to you now of prophecy, but of truth and of wise judgment that will bring life and prosperity to your people.” Agony reflected on the Unity’s trio of faces, but also hope. “No, The Tarentino never claimed to be a prophet. We just needed him to be.”
