The Seeker Read Online Free Page A

that looked half devoured. Yet there was a kind of wild joy about him that I could only envy, for I was far from free. If he had been human, I think he would have been a gypsy, and in fact he quite liked to visit the troupes that rovedabout. He told me they fed him scraps and sang rollicking songs and laughed more than other funaga.
    The bond between Maruman and myself had been the catalyst through which I had discovered the full extent of my telepathic powers. He said it had been destiny, but I doubted it.
    I had been seated right next to the statue of the founder when it happened. A scraggy-looking cat was stalking a bird. I would have ignored them both, except that I was so struck by the carelessness of the bird. I thought it almost deserved its fate. As I concentrated on the pursuit, I suddenly had the sensation of something moving in my head. It was the queerest feeling, and I gasped loudly.
    Startled, the bird flew off with an irritated chirp. I had saved the wretched creature’s life, and it was annoyed! It did not yet occur to me to wonder how I knew what the bird felt. Instead I noticed that the cat seemed to glare indignantly at me with its bright yellow eyes. I shrugged wryly, and it looked away and began to clean itself.
    I had the notion it was only pretending to ignore me. Then I laughed, thinking I must have sat too long in the sun. The cat turned to face me again, and for a moment I imagined a glint of amusement in its look. I wondered if maybe Jes was right and I was going mad.
    “Stupid funaga,” said a voice in my head. I somehow knew it was the cat and stared at it in shock. “All funaga are stupid.” Again I had heard what it was thinking.
    “They are not!” I answered without opening my mouth. Now it was the cat’s turn to stare.
    That first moment of mutual astonishment had given way to a curiosity about each other that had in time grown to an enduring friendship. Once we had overcome our initialdisbelief and began to pool our knowledge, Maruman revealed that all beasts were capable of mindspeaking together as we did, sensing emotions and images as well as brief messages, though typically not so deeply or intimately. He said animals had been able to do so in a limited way even before the holocaust, which, interestingly, he, too, called the Great White.
    I told him my one piece of knowledge about the link between animals and humans, gleaned from a Beforetime book my mother had read. It had claimed humans evolved from some hairy animals called apes, which no longer existed as far as I knew, but neither Maruman nor I could feel that was more than a fairy tale.
    I had heard many stories about the Great White from my parents as a child, which were different than the stories told by the Herders once I entered the orphan home system.
    I remembered little from my childhood, but Herder lessons about the Great White and Beforetime were driven into us during the daily rituals and prayers, exhorting us to seek purity of race and mind. The priest who dealt with such matters at Kinraide was old, with a sharp eye and a hard hand. His manner of preaching often reduced new orphans to screaming hysteria. He made the Beforetime sound like some terrifying concoction of heaven and hell, woven throughout with sloth, indulgence, and pride: the sins suffered by the Oldtimers. The holocaust itself was paraded as the wrath of Lud in all its terrible glory.
    This fearful picture was tempered by the stories one heard from other sources, gypsies and traveling jacks and potmenders, who presented the Oldtimers to us as men who flew through the air in golden machines and could live and breathe beneath the sea. Those stories left little doubt that theBeforetime people had possessed some remarkable abilities, however fantasized and exaggerated the details had become.
    Maruman had little to offer about the Beforetime. He had more to say about the Great White. Dismissing the Herder version, Maruman said the beastworld believed that