To Ride Pegasus

“Markings on the liner?” a gentle but insistent voice whispered from the intercom.

Lajos shook his head, blinking furiously in an attempt to hold the fading sight. “It’s awash with flame. I think I see an eight, a four, a three-or is it another eight? It’s a Reynarder. It must be. They’re the only ones who use that class.”

“Which class?” the inexorable whisper wanted to know. Suddenly Lajos sagged, panting with shock, cold sweat breaking out on his forehead. He lay back exhausted. “It’s gone,” he moaned. “It’s gone.” “You had a second one,” Ruth said. “What was that about?”

Lajos’s brows drew together in a half frown as he brushed his straight black hair out of his face. He kept it overlong to hide the depilated circles where the electrodes fit. His lips curved in a half-sided smile. “Something good?” he asked hopefully.

Ruth suppressed her sigh. Lajos rarely detailed the felicitous ones.

“Incident validated, a strong reading, Lajos,” the intercom voice said. “Report in as soon as you’re able.”

“They’ll check it out, won’t they?” Lajos asked needlessly.

“Action already initiated.”

Lajos lay so still that Ruth knew it was not passive quiescence but rigid strain. Another thorn in the Talented’s side was the harsh realization that their warnings were often disregarded and they were forced to see their predictions come horribly true. Ruth wiped the sweat from Lajos’s forehead and began to massage his neck and shoulders. After a moment he grinned weakly up at her. “What a way to start the day, huh?” “At least you ended on a happy note.

Maybe that means they’ll prevent?”

“If they can correlate enough data, in enough time,” he said gloomily. “And Reynarder bothers to listen!” He flopped onto his stomach, pounding the mattress with impotent fists.

Ruth transferred her attention to his muscular back. She loved the line of him, the broad double plateau of his shoulder blades with the small mounds of hard muscle, the graceful curve that swept down to the narrow waist, the hollow of his spine, the Grecian beauty of his buttocks. She quickly suppressed a flare of desire. This was not the time to intrude sex on his personal anguish. And she knew that her intense sexual hunger for him stemmed from a yearning for the child of his seed. A daughter, tall and fair, with Lajos’s dimples in her cheek. A son, strong-backed and arrogant, with thick black straight hair.

This hunger for his child was so primal, it paralyzed the sophistication overlaid by education and social reflexes. Nowadays a woman was expected to assume more than the ancient duties required of her. Nowadays, and Ruth smiled to herself, the sophists called those womanly talents, Maintenance, Repair and

Replacement, instead of housekeeping, cooking, nursing and having babies, but the titles didn’t alter the duties nor curb the resurgent desires. And, when you got down to it, men still explored new ground, even if it were alien lands, and defended their homes and families. You could call Lajos’s precog a kind of an early-warning defense system. Well, then, she’d added the chore of being Cerebral-Recording Secretary to Maintenance and Repair but they’d better let her Replace soon or…

She concentrated on more soothing thoughts, using her latent empathy to ease his remorse. When he began to take deep long breaths, she knew he was conquering the aftermath of the Incident, dispelling its destructive despondency. He had done everything he could. He could not change the course of every fated life. Some events had to come to their dire conclusions, for out of present tragedy so often rose future triumph; the result of sorrowful recriminations was often the catalyst of progress. A specious rationale in the Silver-lined Cloud Approach but true enough to save the sanity of the Talented.

It was a bitter thing, Ruth understood, to be Talented: bitter and wonderful.

But it was worse to have evidence of Talent and never know what it was.

Nonsense, she told herself sternly, discarding these reflections, you can’t be what you can’t be.

“Ahh, you’ve got the right spot,” Lajos said gratefully and she doubled her efforts across the heavy shoulder muscles.

And yet, when she anticipated his desires and needs, sometimes the words from his mouth, she wondered just how she had tapped that need; just what might awaken the occluded Talent within her.

The Center believed that psionic abilities were latent human characteristics: their absence due to malfunction of the necessary brain synapses or, even more basically, underdevelopment due to a protein lack in the gene. When chromosomes in the twenty-first pair were damaged or blurred, no Talent was detected. There was no aberration in Ruth’s chromosomes, and although she tested as Talented, her ability was unidentifiable. She had never been able to stimulate an Incident involving any of the known abilities. She’d met Lajos during her testing: they’d been approached by the Eastern American Center after finishing their secondary schooling and had qualified for the six-months’ training designed to stimulate latent Talent. Their genetic history had been taped back to the fourth generation. They had endured hours of cerebral recording on the Goosegg under a variety of stimuli. Ruth was finally labeled “indeterminate”; Lajos showed strong precog tendencies.