“Leave me alone.” I kept my face turned away until she left the room. And then, because it was easier than facing the truth, I slid down again into deeper blackness.
* * *
Siebeling was in the room with Jule when I woke up again; I sensed him before I ever opened my eyes. I left them shut and pretended to go on sleeping. If the monitors gave me away, he didn’t notice. I lay still, listening to them talk.
Siebeling sighed. “Are people like us born with faulty circuitry, or are we what human beings should be? And how used to living with the Gift can any of us ever become, in a society where it isn’t universal? The best we can ever hope for is to learn control, to ‘fit in.’ And there’s never been a place psions can go for real help. It’s what I wanted to do at the Institute—”
“If only everyone could be empathic, or telepathic. Then maybe we’d really learn to understand each other; we wouldn’t have to see everything distorted by our own fears. But if we were given a choice, we wouldn’t be.…” I felt the rueful smile in Jule’s mind.
Siebeling laughed once, bitterly. “If there was any justice in this universe, there never would have been a stardrive. We weren’t ready for a galaxy. Humanity is an infestation, not a civilization. We never learn. Never.…”
I found him with my mind: he was thinking about his wife. And then he was thinking about me, and the tension inside him was a pain. I opened my eyes just enough to watch him through my lashes.
“Damn it, sometimes I wish I’d never heard of the Sakaffe Institute!” He moved away from the window; sunlight made me squint. “It was a fraud, an exploitation … an insane risk.”
Jule got up from where she’d been sitting at the foot of the bed. “It helped us all more than you can know, Ardan.… It saved my life.” Her voice was calm and even, but her thoughts were too full.
“And what did it get you, or any of us? It got us here, trapped inside a conspiracy with time running out—waiting for him to find the strength to betray us all.” He meant me. “And the ‘lucky’ volunteers are simply back where they started, barely surviving in their own lives. I was wrong to think I could do anything to make a difference, anything that would last. I was a fool, letting myself believe it. We’re not professional spies; we never could be. Corporate Security must have known it was impossible—just like they knew we were expendable. I should have known it.… God, I’m sorry I got you involved in this.” He put his hands gently on her shoulders.
“You didn’t. It was my choice. And I’m not sorry.” She met his gaze, held it, her own eyes shining too brightly.
He looked down, shaking his head. “I’m not, either … I am and I’m not. Because simply by being here you help me to remember that there are human beings who aren’t—like I am, in the galaxy. And then I believe that stopping Rubiy could still make a difference. But I cherish you, Jule. You’re the only one, since … You mean too much to me, it makes me afraid. If anything happened to you…” He pulled her to him; her own arms closed around him. I felt their need, and the sharp edge of fear that sweetened every moment they held each other. Their kiss seemed to go on forever, burning itself into my brain, until I felt my body begin to answer it.… But then my own need curdled into envy, and I broke contact.
Jule broke away from Siebeling, murmuring, “It won’t. Not now. I don’t know what brought me to this place, but it was right.”
Siebeling reached for her again, but a high-pitched beeping broke the silence of the room. Siebeling swore; his hands covered his databand. “I’ve got to get back to the hospital.”
She touched his cheek.
He nodded as if she’d spoken, and kissed her hand. Then he turned to check the monitor, and I shut my eyes again, forcing myself to relax. If he saw anything that surprised him, he didn’t let on about it. “He’s going to be all right.” His voice hardened. “It’s just a matter of time.” He went out of the room. Jule stayed behind, but somehow I couldn’t make myself say anything to her. I pretended to go on sleeping, and after a while she disappeared, with a soft inrush of air.
* * *
The next time I saw her, strain showed on her face, and I felt a stab of sudden doubt touch her mind as she looked at me. For a second I couldn’t understand it. But then I remembered what Siebeling had said about me, just waiting to betray them. “Jule, you don’t have to be afraid of me.”
She started, but then her face relaxed and she began to smile. “I know,” she said. And now she was sure. She sat down beside me, twining her fingers together, glancing at my face. “I missed you, Cat; I missed you a lot. After … after you were gone, I’m glad to see you again.” Her mind touched me and let me know how glad she was. That made me smile; I guess she knew why.
From then on I saw her alone; I never saw Siebeling. She spent as much time as she could with me, when she could get away from the job she’d been assigned to. She fed me soup and wiped my skin with a cool cloth, always as gentle and patient as I’d remembered her; forcing me to admit I was going to live, whether I liked it or not. The first few days I didn’t even ask questions, because I wasn’t ready to face the answers. She seemed to understand that, or else for her own reasons she didn’t try to tell me more than I wanted to know.
When I could sit up, after a couple of days, there was a view of the mountains out the single window. But there were heavy curtains at the window, closed half the time because Cinder’s day and night were too short, nothing close to a standard day. Most humans were built to sleep and wake up on Earth, and their bodies didn’t change just because they lived on a new homeworld. I couldn’t even get to the window to open the curtains on my own; but Jule brought flowers into the room, and gentled me with promises of walking outside when I could get on my feet again.
And one evening she read me some poems she’d written, from a little notebook she had. As she read to me I felt doubt straining inside her, and I understood that she was sharing something very personal, not knowing whether I wanted it or could even understand it. But as she began to read, the images shimmered and burst open, letting me into them. She’d told me once that poetry was like psi for her, distilling word and thought to their purest form; and as she read to me, the distance between her voice and the touch of her mind closed, word and thought flowed together into one bright song and then another. A lot of the poems were full of pain, but that only made them easier to understand. I don’t suppose they meant the same things to her that they meant to me, in the end; but maybe that doesn’t matter, anyway.
I remember one last night,
the darkness gathering around me,
quietly knowing
every stone and the tyranny
of grief
and all the vows that are made.…
Or do I only know
the blinding silence of the billion stars
burning and burning;
the glory of Orion striding up the sky—
Lost inside my own memories as she read, suddenly I saw her through the images, the filter of her feelings and my own: shivering alone on a balcony, her hands on a vine-covered railing, her eyes open to the night, transfixed by stars. Double vision stunned me as I knew it for a memory of my own (but not my own, fusion, confusion) rising out of the dark underworld where I’d been lost these past weeks.
Jule stopped reading, watching the changes on my face, feeling the shift of my attention. “What is it?”
I didn’t answer her at first. And then I only said, “It means a lot to me.” Afraid to tell her why—not only because of the memories that had answered it already, but because somehow in one of them I’d shared the moment that poem was born inside her. I hadn’t been meant to know that secret moment, and I figured she’d only resent it.
But she smiled, content. I asked her to read the poem again and again, until I knew it by heart. And I wished that I had something to give her in return, a poem, anything; but anything I could think of seemed cheap and ugly next to what she’d given me.
After
she left me again, I lay looking at her memory caught there in my mind, as much a part of me as my own were. Other scenes that had never been a part of my life began to surface, then—some that I knew or guessed belonged to her, some that I couldn’t put any tag on. It scared me, not knowing what had been done to me while I was sick—until I saw suddenly that I was the one who’d done it to myself.
And then, finally, I began to understand everything—that what had happened after the Hydrans had been inside my head had gone on happening, as though they’d found something caged and set it free. In sickness my mind had wandered out of itself; it had found open doors and gone through them, into the deepest parts of other human minds; pain drawn to pain, hunger to hunger. And from what I could tell no one had known it but me.
And now, whenever I was with Jule, it was easy to reach what lay on the surface of her thoughts—I could read her without trying, like I’d been doing it forever, like breathing. I was a real telepath at last. And I wondered whether the Hydrans really knew what they’d done. I thought about them sometimes, what they’d done to me and for me; and when I did I felt a kind of longing.
But in the long hours when I was alone, I began to work at controlling what they’d left me with; trying to stretch my waking mind to match what my unconscious had done. Because I’d been given a gift whether I wanted it or not; and whatever happened to me now, I figured I was going to need it. At first it was hard to handle; I didn’t know how to control it. I was still weak and it was so strong—like the tail wagging the Cat. But day by day it got easier.
Jule had told me why I heard music: that this hidden room where I lay was somewhere in the starport town, over a bar that was about the only entertainment on Cinder. I couldn’t reach very far with my mind, I didn’t have the energy yet; so I spent a lot of my time watching the ones down below with my mind’s eye: feeling them bored, frustrated, homesick, afraid. Feeling the emotions get loud or fade or blur, feeling them shift and the images run like a ruined painting as they drowned their sorrows in alcohol and drugs. Sometimes I followed them down to oblivion, because that was as close to pleasure as I’d been in a long time.
By now it was simple to tell a psion from a deadhead. Normal human minds were an unfocused snarl, and my own was light and sharp enough now that I could wander into them like a thief, taking anything I wanted, and no one even knew I’d been there to steal their thoughts. If they’d had anything worth stealing.
Most of the deadheads were from the mines—guards, technicians, officials, who never knew they were sharing a table with a psion who’d come to Cinder to steal their world out from under them. Because most of the townspeople were psions by now. Jule had told me Rubiy had been replacing as many of them as he could with the psions he’d recruited. She and Siebeling had come here together—he worked at the port hospital and she had a job at the spaceport—after “disappearing” for a while out in the Crab Colonies. Her memories of that time turned private and warm, but edged with bright fear, as if she was almost afraid to think about what their time together had meant to her. I caught a wisp of image of a world I’d seen in false memory before, but not her memory.… Siebeling’s homeworld. Seeing it again, in her mind, I felt alone and angry.
Dere Cortelyou had come in on the next ship. The turnover of workers on Cinder was high to start with because of the radiation levels—even with an energy shield projected around the planet to keep most of the pulsar’s radiation out, the background levels on Cinder itself were still too high—and because of the boredom and isolation. Rubiy’s people had been raising the turnover even more by spooking the deadheads with psionic suggestion, playing on the negatives that were already lying in their minds.
I watched them do it, looking into their own minds—some of them tight-woven and always shielded, so that I had to use everything I’d learned and more to measure their skill; some of them almost as tangled and sprawling as any deadhead. Most of the psions weren’t criminals, not the types you’d expect to find plotting to take over a world. But most of them were hungry, and angry, and all of them were ready to take any chance to get what they thought the Federation owed them.
And none of them had ever known anything to match what I’d felt when my mind had been joined with the Hydrans. I began to understand that no joining of human psions ever did. None of the psions I probed matched what I could do, either. No one even tried to; I never felt anyone test my own shield, and by now I was sure I’d know it if they did. Rubiy himself was the only one I wasn’t sure about; I remembered how afraid I’d felt the last time I’d seen him. Jule said that he’d disappeared right after they’d found me; he’d gone offworld, and she didn’t know when he’d be back. She was glad he was gone; so was I.
I could find Jule anywhere in town, any time; a part of her mind was always open, listening for me, in case I needed her. It made me rest easier to realize she was always there, even when I didn’t see her: someone quiet and kind watching out for me, who wasn’t just waiting like death to catch me when I couldn’t fight back. I touched her thoughts a lot through the days, without letting her know it. Making contact with her wasn’t like reaching a stranger, it was more like finding another part of myself. But I never went deeper than the surface of her thoughts, or tried to take anything that wasn’t my right. Just touching her with my mind was enough.
After a while my strength began to come back, and I finally began to face up to life again. And lying alone in a room with four blank pale walls, staring out the single window at the same view you can’t ever reach, gets old. Jule was the only thing I had to look forward to; I couldn’t help it if I began to wait for the sight of her, the sound of her voice, her touch, the soft sigh of air as she materialized at my bedside. And now that I was really a telepath, I couldn’t help it if I began to wonder how it would feel to make love to someone while I was sharing her thoughts—sharing every desire, every pleasure, every secret hidden in our souls.…
TEN
(CAT?)
I turned around on the table where I was sitting, beside the wood-framed window, to see Jule appear in her usual spot—by the bed I was still supposed to be lying in.
“Here.” The dim sunlight coming through the streaked panes barely warmed the back of my head.
The scattershot confusion of her thoughts collected into relief as she saw me. “What are you doing there?”
“Looking out.” I shrugged like it was the simplest thing in the world. It had taken me five minutes just to get from the bed to the window, and the hospital tunic I was wearing was soaked with sweat.
Objections surfaced in her mind, half angry, half reluctant. She didn’t bother to say any of it out loud; she didn’t need to.
I got up, feeling my legs tremble under me. They carried me a whole couple of steps before they gave out. Jule caught me and helped me back to the bed. I held on to her a little harder than I needed to.
“You’re sick,” she said, like I needed reminding. She pushed me down; her hands were gentle and strong. I noticed that she wasn’t biting her nails anymore.
“I’m sick of lying here like a corpse.” My heartbeat was so loud in my ears that I could hardly hear myself talk.
Her mouth tightened a little at the image. “There are worse things.”
I glanced at the bond tag on my wrist. “Yeah.” I covered it with my hand, remembering when a week in bed had seemed like all I could ask of heaven.
“I brought you lunch.” She bent her head at the two plates on the bedside table, one for her and one for me.
I looked at it, but suddenly I wasn’t hungry. “Jule…”
She raised her eyebrows, sitting down at the foot of the bed.
“What’s gonna happen to me?” Asking it at last.
“I don’t know.” Her voice got faint. She pulled her shawl closer around her. “I don’t know what’s going to happen to any of us now. But Rubiy wants you back; that’s why they’re sheltering you. He’s been searching for a way to get hold of you ever sinc
e you arrived on Cinder.”
“Me?… The mines. It’s what I know about the mines?”
She nodded. “It must be. His people have been on Cinder for nearly a standard year, some of them, but they’ve never been able to get into the mines compound. They’re beginning to get desperate. Whoever is backing them is losing patience, and the psions who’ve been here the longest can’t stay much longer without suspicion. Our only hope has been that Rubiy would fail because of time—we’ve been watched all along, and we haven’t been able to do anything to stop him, or even to get a warning out. But now that he has you, everything’s changed again.” (For the worse.) But she didn’t say it.
“When Rubiy gets back…” She didn’t hide the disgust she felt when she thought about seeing him again. She remembered his dead man’s eyes searching every centimeter of her body, peeling away even her skin, probing for her soul.… Humiliating her—not because he thought she was a spy, but just because her name was taMing. He knew that she’d been born into all the wealth and luxury anyone could claim; but she’d still been born a psion—and there wasn’t enough money or power to make that stain on the taMing honor disappear. He hated everything she stood for and was heir to; he enjoyed the pain her Gift had caused her family. And he’d let her know that he’d brought her here because of all that, as a pawn in his private game with the Federation’s mortal gods. But he wouldn’t show her what the game was.…
I grimaced and looked down. But I only said, “Where’s Rubiy now?”
She shook her mind out. “We think he’s gone to meet with his backers again. There are combines involved in this, but we don’t know which ones. A woman named Galiess is in charge … she’s his lover. She doesn’t tell us anything, and Derezady can’t read her.”
“How come Dere ain’t been to see me?” He hadn’t even been into my head to say, (Hello). I wondered if he didn’t trust me now, either.
“Ardan won’t let him. He won’t let anyone see you until you’re stronger.”