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.She denied that she had seen thewarrior-poet.At first I did not believe her.I wasted precious moments while she stood with her handson her hips and shrilly informed me that the strictly celibate, death-seeking warrior-poets were asdifferent from astriers as night from day; if she had seen the warrior-poet, she said, she would havepulled the hoods over her children's eyes, to shield them from evil.I moved closer to her, the better toread her face, and she stuck her chin out, as if to warn me away.I drank in the thick, womanly muskemanating from her woolens; I listened to the subtle tremolo of her voice.I heard fear in the tensenessof her vowels, the quick, stuttering sounds of nervousness and doubt.Faintly I smelled her fear.All atonce - and I did not know how I had come by this skill - I realized it was not a fear of thewarrior-poet, or at least, it was not a fear of warrior-poets in particular.It was a more general fear thatI detected, in a way, a fear of all things or anything that might harm her children.She, who had nodoubt left the hundreds of her youngest children safely in the care of her husbands on Goodrest, wasquietly, if subliminally, afraid of every person on the glissade.If she had seen a warrior-poet, her fearwould have built to a roar and screamed from her eyes.Perhaps she would have clenched her handsand sweated a profuse, acrid sweat as her bio-programs prepared her to flee or fight.With excitementI realized that fear has many colors, shades and tones.I would have to be careful to distinguish thecool blue of wariness from blind, crimson panic, if I hoped to find the warrior-poet.I apologized for disturbing her, and I pushed off down the glissade.I saw an autist who was clearlyafraid of something.I began to ask the ragged, filthy, barefooted man if he had seen "Death sailing byon silver skates." (One had to translate words into the autists' peculiar idiom or they would pretendnot to understand the simplest things.) Then, once again, I found myself spontaneously practicing theskills of a cetic.I found I could read the autist's fear program.I saw that his was not a fear of pain ordeath at the hands of a warrior-poet.Indeed, he did not fear his suffering, and he scarcely feareddeath.As all of us do, he feared losing what was dearest to him.I was surprised to see that autists - ifthis rotting, miserable, stinking wretch of a human being was a typical specimen - live solely forpleasure.I could see this in his smiling, constantly moving lips as plainly as I could see the vacantsmiles of the ice sculptures lining the street.But the pleasure he sought was not the fullness of gutafter a fine meal or of sexual ecstasy; it was not even the toalache aficionado's euphoria or thenumber-storm of those many pilots who love their mathematics too well.What pleased the autist wasto exist wholly within a world of his own creation.His was the pleasure of fantasy and delusion; tohim his thoughtscapes were as beautiful and as real as the ice castles of Urradeth appear to a child.And the thing he feared above all else was the intrusion of external reality - what the autists wouldcall the lesser-real - and the ruin of that perfect thoughtscape he sought, the realreal.(It is an irritatingfact that the autists claim spiritual kinship with pilots.What is the manifold, they will ask, if not acreation of the ship's computer and the mind of a pilot in fugue? It does no good, of course, to explain that a pilot's mathematics is a vision of the deepest structures of the universe.They will just stare intoyour eyes and babble, "Brother Pilot, the realreal is one of the manifold beauties inside the godheadwhen the good god is inside the real head.") An autist will suffer every sort of bodily degradationrather than lose sight of his precious realreal.I examined the autist's slack facial, and I saw that for him death was merely an abstract thought tobe filed at some arbitrary address of his awareness; death was the never-real.Since he did not believethat he really existed, he could not fear losing himself to death.There was no fear of death in hismilky, diseased eyes.There was only a hint of quiet regret and sadness that the beauty of histhoughtscapes would dissolve into nothingness when his mind ceased to be.And of that final tragedyhe had little fear because he would not be in-the-real to witness it.Then, too, it is the faith of autistseverywhere that: "In the realm of the real, the almost-real becomes sometimes-real according to therealness of the real head.The sometimes-real is a realness to be reborn into the realreal.In the realmof the realreal, there are many layers of reals; the realreal can be created but not destroyed."All of this, I should emphasize, I saw in an instant.I think I was reading most of his programs;possibly I was reading his mind.I never talked to him (if one can really talk to an autist), nor did Idally to appreciate the subtleties of my new powers.I skated down the glissade trying to distinguishthe different tones of fear on the hundreds of faces.Warrior-poets notwithstanding, we all fearsomething, and in some part of our being, we fear it every moment of our lives.I quickly becameadept at reading people's fear programs.I passed a merchant-prince afraid of losing his jewels andsilks.A hibakusha, a wizened, little brown-skinned woman dressed in patched woolens, approachedhim begging for the means to pay for the expensive procedure which might restore her to health.Butthe merchant could not see the desperation (and fear) in the beggar's eyes because he would not lookin her eyes.He would not look at her pained face, at the bald head where only a few wispy filamentsof hair hung above her high collar
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