Sometimes, I think it's a real pity I didn't get omniscience when I ended up with mobility.
Actually, perhaps it's a relief that we're not omniscient. Given the flashes we can see of other's lives, if it were compounded for everyone's life at all times, it'd likely be more of a burden than any of us could want to bear.
Suffice it to say that we have advantages. All of our advantages impose a price, too, so, for every one of our strengths, we've a weakness.
Now we don't often have brand-new members of our select-- all right, we don't know who does the selection, we sure have no influence, much less control-- group, though our numbers have grown with the population of the earth.
One thing that falls upon us "elders" is the job of properly orientating new members to this way of life. These new members are seldom, if ever, happy to join us.
And, no, Buddhists are not happier than any of the others.
At the same time, finding a newbie in order to orient them to their new life is not the quickest, either, and might take several jumps on their part for us to find them.
These situations are seldom pleasant.
Realize that not all of us retain sanity, you know. There are some of us that have snapped so badly that the rest of have little choice but to find a way to keep them alive as long as possible in a controlled environment, minimizing the additional lives they may piss away in an effort to escape this imprisonment.
If such madness worked to speed our escape into a permanent escape by death we'd've all chosen to go mad.
The biggest problem is that it has been very seldom that one of our kind turns mortal... but that also brings us a newbie at the same time. Such exchanges are seldom fun.
Well, seldom fun for the newbie.
We've also learned that the one least capable of coping with having a soul jump to a new body are the ones who have been far more religious than is good for them. When they find themselves in another's body, these least stable of souls tend to seek escape, again and again, too stupid to bother to learn the new rules. Such souls have to be cared for and well protected from themselves, all so that we've enough warning before they jump again and can then keep each new body they arrive in as far out of harm's way as we can.
Such souls are a real pain, all because they are unwilling to allow themselves the flexibility to think for themselves. If only we could be relieved of such burdensome souls, that they would eventually find surcease, but, it seems, they have been sentenced to live and live again until they come to their senses and accept what is. There are some who never do and so become nihilists, often taking down as many other people with them as they can.
I sometimes have wondered whether the extinction of the human race would release us all or whether something awful would be done to us.
You don't know how many times, before psychiatric units that could preserve a body for a long time were finally available and common, where we just dragged the suicidal bodies into an active war zone and "let 'em loose". Sadly, having them bouncing back and forth across the lines several times a day, only works for less than 1 in five.
And, believe me, those of us bringing fodder to a war zone also were subject to being ping-pong souls if our bodies got killed. This has never been completely without pain.
Well, you can't get something for nothing.
Sometimes, just by explaining the situation to a newbie, we can get them to accept their fate. Discovering how long the oldest have been "stuck" with this role seems to give mixed results, though, and, fortunately, very few end up wailing about what they're going through.
The good news is that newbies can't talk about who they were before with anyone else but another of us jumpers until they have lived a couple of lifetimes. We don't know who, how or why, but it drives some of the newbies crazy until we can get to them.
And, sometimes, when we get to them, they're on their last nerve.
I'd gotten a call from a younger jumper in the South-East US, letting me know that he'd sniffed out a newbie... but it was going to be up to me to get to him. In my current life I had accumulated all of the necessary paperwork as a psychiatrist so I had the ability to look in on newbies.
And, no, I was never Freud, but I have met him. Gawd, that man was a neurotic, even more obsessed with sex than many teen-agers, but, hey, most of the geniuses we've gotten to rub shoulders with tend to be sexually obsessed. Some of 'em did manage to do a better job of hiding it than others, you know, but these "great thinkers" got around to a lot more beds than historians could usually cope with.
Anyway, three of "us" in Florida found the newbie for me but couldn't get to her. She'd flipped through several bodies already within that psych unit as her cleverness in finding ways to die got around their restrictions. I imagine the facility itself was appalled by the odd statistics implied by this spate of suicides of different people. When I got there, while my family was vacationing on the beach, I was able to claim that I wondered about this statistical anomaly and was interested in looking more closely.
Now walking a psych unit, even in it's new name of a "behavioral facility", isn't easy for mere mortals. I could see and feel the stress in the people who worked here, which was hard enough for me to feel and carry. It is the flashes of past and future gleaned from the patients that is a very mixed bag, increasing my pain, so I tend, in my mortal role, to try to act incurious, just to protect my comfort.
At the same time as I walked down this hallway, I was, in effect, sniffing for the newbie.
I use the word sniffing because there's no way to describe the sense of another jumper nearby other than through smell. It's not perfectly accurate but it sure beats looking at each person and trying to get a "flash" of their past or future, and, to top it all off, a newbie "smells" different.
And, no, this sense of proximity doesn't provide a "bad" smell...
All right, I lied. Over the last three hundred years I have learned how to recognize, from the "smell", whether a newbie will be one of those who will adapt... or not. There's a slight, well, I can't describe it. I suspect that it takes both experience and exposure to pick up on the difference in "scent", and, between specializing in studying mortals and having been floating around for thirty two some-odd hundred years, I have the most experience... and, in the last three hundred years, closer exposure. When sniffing someone who is not going to learn any time soon, I've subconsciously attached a "badness" to the perceived scent.
This one I was hunting for was going to be one of the ones who will learn, and, within a hundred feet of her, I could breathe a sigh of relief, at least inwardly.
I finally found her, in the isolation and observation room where there was no way out. This was going to be, for me, a bit tough, but we jumpers have other tricks, if we think about it ahead of time. This trick would allow me to turn people away from paying attention to people around me.
E.E. "Doc" Smith would have called it a "zone of compulsion" but Douglas Adams named it better: the "Somebody Else's Problem" field. We somehow can take advantage of people's desire to not see or hear something outlandish. I also have enough leverage to ensure that the recorders were turned off. The ability to sense truth, like when someone tells me they turned off all recording equipment, comes in handy to a psychiatrist.
The newbie was in a woman's body, a thirty-something woman, not unattractive except for the slack expression one gets when you've gotten more than just the MDA of vitamin "T".
Even so, I could talk to her, and her to me. The thorazine would impair the body and fog the mind, but, the soul inside wouldn't be as impaired as the rest.
"Hello, Joe. Look at me. See who I am."
The woman looked at me... and I saw the eyes widen. I could tell she'd just experienced a "flash" giving her the life history of my soul.
"You... you... what are you? Who are you?"
I sighed in relief. This was a good sign. "I'm here to get you oriented in your new life and get you to stop trying to escape. You saw how old I am? You saw what the world was like in my first real life?"
She nodded. "Yes. I don't understand, though... why did this have to happen to me?"
This was a good question which none of us has ever found a useful answer to. Calling it "God's Will" doesn't make for anything we can work with, either. Those of us who've spoken to Moses, Jesus and even Mohammed had never gotten a straight answer though we have gotten smirked at. Going further east, Confucious had been confused and the Buddhists just shrugged. Lacking an answer to this meant that I couldn't provide any kind of comfort, so I told the truth: "We don't know. We don't know why or how any of us was selected to be like this. All we know is that we are. And the best hints as to why we are like this? Well, we may provide continuity, history... and we also seem to be the ones pushing for peace, too."
She stared at me. "So... who am I?"
"You are wearing the body of a woman named Doris. Now close your eyes and try to feel for her inside your head..."
It really doesn't take much for us to assimilate the memories of the body we take on. I watched the play of emotions on the female face in front of me as recall and integration of psyches played itself out to this newbie. When her eyes opened again I could see some sadness.
This was a key point in a newbie: would the new Doris pop out of the coccoon or would Joe refuse to accomodate the new identity?
"So, Doris, how do you feel?"
She looked up to me. I could see tears in her eyes. "She's been hurt. By a man just like I was. And she killed him, just like my wife killed me."
I nodded. "Can you cope with this?"
She nodded. "I have to deal with the consequences of the crime she committed, don't I? I go to prison, right?"
Again, I nodded. "Been there, done that. Prisons were a lot less pleasant three hundred years ago, you know, and I have been killed by hanging at least once. And being guillotined or burned at the stake is not much of an improvement, either. The good news is that we can distance ourselves from the pain."
The new Doris sighed. "All right, I can live this out. But when can I be a man again?"
I laughed. "When can I be a woman again? We don't get to choose... but we've found correlations for newbies, like you are now. It has to do with empathy for those around you, as you live."
Doris nodded. "All right. So it's not up to me, it's not up to you, it's up to, well, God, I suppose."
"Yup," I agreed, "that's as close as we've been able to come to an answer, which doesn't help us make plans. There are some of us who have related weird memories of some kind of interview between their first body and the next. It's not common, but, hey, we each learn something new with each body we get tossed into. There are things you will have to learn to cope with, though, like the flash. If you are even slightly curious enough when looking at someone, you can get a flash of who they are, their history... and often their future. Let me warn you right now that this is not something you want to do often, because, as part of the flash, you will feel some of what they've felt, which is often painful. All right?"
She nodded. She was already, with the integration of soul and body, burning through the thorazine faster than usual.
"All right. Be a good girl in here and they'll eventually let you out of isolation. I'll make sure that you'll have my contact information and I'll try to look in on you from time to time. Additionally, there are others in the region who will be contacting you. Will that be all right?"
She nodded, then looked down at her body. "It's weird, you know, being a woman?"
I smiled back. "Imagine being a woman over three thousand years ago, kid. It wasn't fun... and dying in childbirth or shortly afterward definitely sucked. So life is a little bit easier for women, in general, unless you married a real neanderthal."
Doris smiled back, joking with me, "I resemble that remark!" then sighed. "I guess... this is irony, isn't it?"
Hah! She nailed it! "Yes, we've learned that irony seems to be woven into the very structure of the Universe. Things have a tendency to balance out, given enough time. You now have a lot of time and will need to work out how you want to live... and decide what you want to do with your future lives."
She nodded. "OK, I think I can deal." She looked down at her body again, taking in the burn marks and scars on her arms and legs where Doris' husband had beaten and abused her body. "Well, payback is a bitch, isn't it? And I'm getting paid back for what I've done, aren't I?"
I nodded. "Been there, done that. Look, I can't lie to you about this new lease on life... it is not a reward, but I can tell you that it isn't really a punishment , either. It's just a chance to live and learn... and love. You'll eventually understand it better, and, who knows? You have a whole new set of opportunities to be different people."
Doris sighed, "All right. I think I can manage this, now. But... just make sure that someone touches base with me, all right?"
"Hon," I answered, "none of us likes being alone. You won't be."
We know there is more evidence that God has a sense of humor, over and above the fact that humans have one, too.
Of course, we know that it tends to have a major twist of irony to it, as well.
Doris was sentenced to ten years in a woman's prison. She got emotional support from our community of jumpers. On top of that she met Joe's widow and was able to make friends with her.
Like a true jumper, Doris chose to make positive moves in her new life, taking various correspondence courses and, on being released, was able, with our help, to go to college.
Along the way, Doris chose to have children.
Of course, by the time Doris got out, I was starting over in a new life, attending college, going pre-med.
For me, the long climb had re-started.
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Author: Jack C Lipton Title: Recursive Descent Part: Universe: Shadows Summary: Souls still carry baggage Keywords: Revision: $Revision: 1.2 $ Archive: http://www.asstr-mirror.org/files/Authors/CupaSoup/www/ Mailing List: FAQ: RCS: $Id: recursiveDescent.x,v 1.2 2006/09/30 19:59:58 jcl Exp $