But the picture rippled and changed. The peasants drove purring machines now. machines that pulled plows with six plowshares each. They were well dressed in blue garments of stout cloth, unpatched: the feet on the pedals of the machines wore hardy brogans. Their faces were ruddy with health.
The land and machines belong to the State, the kind lady said, but the people are well fed, well clothed, and healthy.
It is a lie! Finister cried, though she knew it was not. In feeble protest, she added. They have few luxuries!
They have books available, and they all can read, the lady explained. In their free hours they make their own decorations, cultivate their own gardens, and play music. Do they need more?
Finister thought of her own early willingness to live without pleasures for the good of the Cause and her disillusionment in seeing the fripperies her superiors had collected. Yes, they need morel Everyone wants more!
Like this? the kind lady asked, and the picture rippled again to show people in brightly colored clothing pushing machines over lawns in front of houses that stood all in a row, well apart, along a tree-shaded street. In front of each house sat a strange-looking machine; others passed on the street with people inside, so Finny knew they were carriages. Each house was painted in different colors. Children played with balls on patches of pavements and rode wheeled contrivances. Some of them glided along the pavement with wheeled boots strapped to their feet; others drew on those pavements with colored chalk.
Finister's mind whirled with the richness of it. Too much! Far too much! No one needs so much! Then the fault-finding that she had learned so early and so well came to her rescue. They have so little land!
True, but they own it themselves, the kind lady said, though many have borrowed heavily to buy it and must pay those loans back all their lives. They are the citizens of a democracy. There are many who are far more poor than these, but there are some who are even more rich.
They are enslaved by money, Finister grumbled, but she lacked conviction.
The lady was silent, showing her kindness, for which Finister was grateful. She did not need to have it said out loud that Mama and Papa had lied to her, that SPITE had lied— or at least that they had told her only partial truths and kept her from learning any facts that contradicted the ideas they wanted her to believe.
But if she did not have Mama and Papa, she had nothing at all.
She looked up and found she was still in the schoolroom, though she was much older now, and Mama was telling them that winning was very important, because they all had to try to win against the King and Queen, and that was very hard, because the King and Queen were very rich and had very, very many soldiers.
Winning is not the only goal in life, the kind lady countered.
What else is there, then? Finister asked in surprise. All life is struggle! Put two people in a room and you have a contest for dominance! If you do not win, you submit!
Competition is only one of the ways in which people interact, the kind lady contradicted. There is also cooperation. There are times to compete, surely, but there are times to help one another, too.
Finister was silent, considering the idea—but in the classroom of memory, Mama was still lecturing, telling them that the King and Queen even had mind readers like Finny and her foster brothers and sisters helping them. Finny hated those other mind readers; they should have all been on the same side. Mama taught her a nice word for those Crown's espers: "traitors."
Thus they sundered you from your fellows, the kind lady told her. They were not espers themselves, but needed psis to counter those who had accepted the Crown y s offer of sanctuary — so they reared you to be weapons.
Stung, Finister retorted, Do not the king and queen rear the royal mind readers thus?
We do not rear them at all, the kind lady said. We do not take them at birth, but invite them to join when they are grown, or nearly grown.
Finister noted the "we" with alarm—but listened intently nonetheless.
The royal witchfolk recruit grown espers who wish to be among their own kind and are already loyal to the Crown, the kind lady explained. Often we must rescue those recruits from the anger and jealousy of their neighbors, or welcome lonely ones who, shunned by the villagers, have gone to seek hermitage in the woods or mountains. These we may try to persuade, and some choose to join us — but we do not take babies and indoctrinate them as they grow.
Finister was silent, watching the tableau before her, trying to think of an objection. Finally she said, Then you do not give refuge to foundlings?
The Crown has many homes for foundlings, the kind lady protested, but none take only esper babies. It is not good for them to grow up completely isolated from their neighbors, after all, and there are not so many in any one parish.
There were always enough to fill Mama and Papa's house!
Did you truly think they discovered so many foundlings on their doorstep? the kind lady asked in surprise.
Chapter 22
Why. . . why, of course, Finister said, taken aback. Two a year? Surely that is not so many!
And that is what they told you, the kind lady said with a sigh. There was little truth in it, I assure you. Those babes were brought from all over Gramarye and smuggled to that farmhouse, and most of them were neither orphans nor castaways.
Finister went rigid. What is this you tell me? she demanded with terrible intensity.
That you are probably neither an orphan nor a foundling, the kind lady said with relentless pity. Oh, some few were, I am sure — but I have looked into the minds of the anarchists who brought the babes, into the minds of the man and woman who reared you, and found that most of the babes were kidnapped from loving homes when they showed the first signs of psi powers.
A scream of anger and anguish tore the world apart. It went crazy for a few minutes, becoming a swirl of colors that blinked in and out of darkness. Finally it steadied and Finister, exhausted and panting, realized that the scream had been her own. Gasping for breath, she demanded, Proof! I must have proof!
There it was, the world from Mama's eyes, taking a baby from the arms of a man whose breath steamed—winter, then—and who was saying, "Her parents will never miss her. They have a dozen brats already. The youngest is still nursing and this one was trying to push the other away from the breast with her mind."
The surroundings swam, and Finny saw a little cottage, modest but well kept. In a sunlit garden, a mother was picking beans while her baby slumbered in a cradle. The mother looked up at a sudden sound, then went quickly back into the house, leaving the baby alone.
The cradle came closer as the man ran up to it. Two hardened hands lifted the baby out and tucked it in the nook of his elbow. Then the cradle swam away and the road came closer again. The man who was carrying the baby swerved onto the road and ran along it until trees shadowed him on all sides. Then he slowed to a walk as a scream sounded behind him in the distance.
Another night, another baby, another admission of kidnapping—and another and another.
The anger boiled up again, but Finister was too furious to scream. She stared, breast heaving, and in the silence, the vision changed to the street of the village near Mama and Papa's farm, with the boys out to taunt.
"Nyah-nyah! Little foundlings!"
Finny turned to stare at the four richly dressed boys who were thumbing their noses at the girls. Orma stood her straightest and turned Finny's head frontward. "Don't look, Finny. Don't pay them any attention at all!"
"Didn't have a father," two of the boys chanted in derisive singsong. "Never knew your mother!"
Then it was not true? Finister cried. We need never have suffered that humiliation, none of us?