Deadly Relations: Bester Ascendant Read Online Free PDF Page B

in the front of our heads, bifocal, so we could triangulate, see depth-be able to actually catch that next branch when we jumped at it.
    “But that turned out to be a big change, after all. Our bifocal eyes needed all this new hardware to nun. As a result, primate brains got bigger. Sight got better, hand-to-eye coordination got better, and the other senses suffered, but so what? Because with those big brains came unexpected benefits.
    “For sixty million years or so, primate brains have been built around vision-vision and manipulation of our generalized, lizard hands. As a consequence, we learned to express ourselves with pictures first. Words came later.
    “Telepathy is a very new evolutionary step, and evolution always has to work with what it’s given. Birds didn’t just grow wings-their forelimbs were modified. Likewise, we do telepathy with those same old monkey brains, and the primary modality is still visual. So we “see“ the unseeable, picture the unpicturable.
    “Think about dreaming. Dreaming is caused by random surges in neuroelectricity. These jolts go through the brain and release images; our brains then try to organize these images, make sense of them, release or build more images to fill in the gaps. When we awaken, we try to assign linear, logical meaning to them. We don’t `see’ random surges of electricity jolting into our brains-we see ourselves, sitting in class in our underwear or running in slow notion from angry Grins.
    “When a rogue tries to fry your brain with a mind-blast, you won’t `see’ an inchoate, deadly force, or a pattern of electrochemical reactions triggered in your neural net. You’ll see a sword coming to cut your head in two, a car about to run you down, the sky falling. That’s fine, because that’s how we work, we fancy monkeys.
    “The trick is to not get confused, and that’s a big deal. We relate to things we don t know in terms of things we do know-by analogy. If you’ve never seen a snake, but you do know worms, you will see the snake and think, “Aha! It’s like a big worm“. But if you make the mistake of thinking that a cobra is an earthworm, you make a very foolish-and terminal-mistake. If you actually think that a mind-blast is a sword - well, I can take you to see some people who made that very mistake. You can take turns spoon - feeding them and changing their diapers.”
    He tried to keep that in mind, as he focused on the sphere that signified Simon’s psyche. As he watched, the translucent shells began opaquing. He was confident that his own blocks were in place. They were familiar friends. Still, general blocks were of only so much use in this test.
    “Proceed,” Teacher Roberts said.
    Simon came at him in a storm front, a roaring, crackling mass. Amused by the crudity of that approach, Al met him force for force, and they collided like twin hurricanes. Jagged blue-white bolts condensed into coruscating ball lightning’s, eddying, sputtering out, sometimes erupting into whirls of purple fire. Simon couldn’t beat him like this, and he must know it. What was he up to?
    A terrible fear gripped him. Then a sense of defeat. The best was already over. Somehow Simon had already found his hidden image, was about to tell Teacher Roberts what it was…
    No. Simon had been clever. The frontal assault was a feint; the real attack was this awful despondency, sneaking down the slow, tropical river of his limbic system. Emotion so basic and colorless he hadn’t recognized it wasn’t his own. But to project despair so well, Simon must own some of it.
    Al tightened the feelings, intensified them, and launched them back to their source, in a fluid bolt that dug quickly through the outer shells of Simon’s mind. It stopped short of the inner sphere, but like an oil strike in reverse, started pooling there, flooding and poisoning Simon’s outer blocks with gloom. As his own false sense of failure faded, Al caught a surge of panic from Simon.
    He worried fm