But then she was remembering Siebeling. She’d really believed he was the one— A sob caught in her throat. (Because it was all true.…)
“Jule, what are you ashamed of?”
“I drive everyone away! I tried to drown myself—I couldn’t even live with myself.”
“It ain’t true.” I shook her gently. “There’s nothing weak about you. Humans … shouldn’t have to live inside everyone else, too; they have to have protection. But when you’re born a freak, you don’t have it, and nobody else knows how to give it to you.… I mean, it was never your fault. You can’t blame yourself for the way you were born.”
She frowned.
“I know what I’m saying, Jule,” I said, knowing I wasn’t saying it right. “Listen to me. You’re no fool for trying to love him, or wanting his love. And anybody who’d ever let you go is the real fool.”
She sighed, a long, shaky sigh.
“Siebeling doesn’t blame you for suffering, for hurting. He helped you learn to stop having to feel everything and be hurt by it. He knows how hard it was.” If he was even half of what she thought of him, he did; but right then I had a hard time pretending to believe he was even human.
She almost smiled, but then her face twisted like she still didn’t know what to feel.
“He didn’t mean it, Jule. He’s half out of his mind over what’s happening here; he ain’t thinking straight, he’s too full of guilt and too confused. Ain’t that what you kept trying to show me? He didn’t even know what he was saying.” And I didn’t think about what I was saying, didn’t choke on the words, only wanting to say whatever I had to, to make her stop feeling that way. “He’s scared and angry, because he’s in love with you, and he’s afraid to admit it because he’s afraid of losing you like he lost his wife.”
She stood up. “Is it true—?” She shivered.
“It’s all true.” I just let it come, not sure where it was coming from, not even sure who I was talking about anymore, because—“Because he ain’t the only one who feels that way.” I only knew what I’d said after the words were out—and it was only after I heard them that I knew they were true. (I love you. I love you.)
She reached out across the table and took my hands. She kissed me once—my mind filled up with her emotions, with the only tenderness I’d ever known. She whispered, “Thank you, Cat … you’re the best, the only real friend I’ve ever had.” She looked up at me again, with her storm-cloud eyes.
But her lover would always be Siebeling. And as I understood that, something snapped inside me, like a broken-off piece of her pain. Suddenly I was five years old, hurting so much I wanted to cry. Why him? Why did it have to be him, why couldn’t it be me? I’d never had anything!
But love was blind, they said, love was crazy—love didn’t have any heart, and so it ripped out your own. Jule had taught me how to care; I knew I’d never be able to stop caring about her now. I moved around the table and held her again, just for a minute, pretending she was mine. And then finally I said, “It’s gonna be all right. Everything’s gonna be all right. I promise you.”
I left her apartment, and went out into the night.
FIFTEEN
I TURNED ON the light.
“How the hell did you get in here?” Siebeling leaped up out of the chair where he’d been sitting like a stone in the darkness of his room. The look on his face was worth the effort.
“Slip’s secret.” I twitched my mouth. “And what the hell do I want—since you’re gonna ask that next. I’m here because you got only two people you can count on in this snakepit, and you left both of them bleeding. I came to make you listen to some true things, you piece of—”
“Get out.”
“Uh-uh.” I shook my head, moving toward him, feeling the grief and rage caught inside me build again at the sight of him. “I ain’t getting out of here until I make you understand.” I reached out and caught him by the front of his thick sweater, and shoved him up hard against the wall. He started to struggle, but he hadn’t learned to fight on the streets. I pinched a nerve; he yelped and stopped struggling. “Yeah, that’s right, Doc. I can be everything you think I am, if you make me. Don’t make me do it—because it ain’t what I want.” I let go of him and backed off. “I just want you to listen.”
He straightened away from the wall, his eyes dark with confusion and sudden fear. He rubbed his neck. “All right. Say what you came to say.” He moved back to the deep-cushioned chair and sat down in it again. He didn’t relax any.
I stayed where I was. “First, I’m gonna tell you once more, I’m on your side!” I didn’t try to make him believe it, didn’t even touch his mind, because he was so sure I was going to use my psi against him. “I know you don’t want to believe it, because you know better than anybody why I ought to cut your strings. And you don’t figure I could give a fuck about anybody but me—why should I, right? You sure as hell don’t. It’s your kind that made me believe it, all my life. But everybody ain’t like you. Jule ain’t. And Dere—wasn’t. And Rubiy—” I took a deep breath. “You don’t understand what he really is, you don’t know! I know. He’s an iceman, a psycho; anything you ever thought about him ain’t close to sick enough! He murdered Dere and he enjoyed it, and I want to make him pay. I’d cut off my own hand before I’d work for him, can’t you understand that? I’ll do anything I have to do to bring him down—and to make sure he never hurts Jule. Anything! Even if it means saving you.” I glanced down. “And maybe I even owe you that much.” I looked up again. “I never want to owe you nothin’.”
He settled deeper in his chair, glaring at me. But he was listening.
“You think everything’s lost, don’t you, now that—now that they killed Dere. You got us all into this, and now you think we’re as good as dead and it’s all your fault.” I felt the surge of his guilt and knew I was right. Welcome to the club. “So you’re just gonna give it all up, cut everything and everybody loose and just sit here in the dark waiting till it’s over—just like you did with your whole life after your wife and your kid were gone. I’ll bet they’d be real proud to see what you’re made of, and what they did to you.…”
His fingers sank into the soft arms of the chair like it was flesh.
“Well, I got another answer for you, since you’re not looking anymore—and this one won’t risk anybody but me. Rubiy’s sending me back to the mines, because he trusts me. He thinks I’ll make a joining with him and show him the way in. But instead I’m gonna screw his plans, tell them the truth when I get there. Then they’ll come and save you, and everything’s gonna be fine. You got nothing to worry about.”
He stared at me. “God! If I could only believe you.…”
“You only have to try.” I moved away from the wall and started pacing in the small space of floor in front of him. “But why should you believe me—you don’t even believe Jule. You don’t give a damn about her, or what you did to her—making her fall in love with you, and then telling her she’s nothing. You think I’m selfish, you crippled son of a bitch! You ought to look in a mirror.” I turned back to him. “I’d let Rubiy have you in a second, if Jule didn’t care for you so much that it would kill her. You bastard, you don’t deserve her, you don’t deserve to live—”
I never finished it. Because his mind cried, (I know, I know …), and I knew suddenly that everything Jule had told me about him, that I’d told back to her, was true: some part of me had always seen it, there inside him. The one he really hated was himself. He’d never understood why his family had been destroyed while he went on living—and so he’d stopped living too, even though his body still went through the motions. He was suffering as much as the psions he treated, but there was no one he could turn to for help, no one who understood what he’d lost. He’d tried to do something good with the Sakaffe psionics research, something to help him feel like he had a right to be alive. But all that had done was cause a good man’s death, and trap him in a hopeless situation—him and Jule.… Hi
s face collapsed.
He cared about her, all right. If I’d been blind and deaf, I’d still have been sure of it—the feeling was that strong. He’d hurt her because he was afraid—afraid of losing her, afraid to face her death, and his own. And I saw how much he wanted her, and wanted to make it all right; how much he wanted to stop hurting himself and everyone else. He’d been so wrong about everything. But it had been such an old—habit, to break free of, being so wrong. And now he’d thought there was no hope left.…
He didn’t say anything, either; as if there was nothing he could say, to her.
And I still wanted to hate him, but somehow I couldn’t. Because I’d seen into his mind—but more than that, because I understood what I saw. I wasn’t the same burned-out shadow walker who’d been dumped in his office the day I met Jule, any more than I was still the psionic deaf-mute I’d been when I met the Hydrans. I’d changed. More than just my Gift had come back to life inside me; and like it or not, I couldn’t twist the knife in his wounds, any more than I could stop loving Jule.… I let all my angry words out in a sigh between my teeth. “She’ll know, Doc. She always knows. But go and tell her anyhow.” I started for the door.
“Cat, wait—” he called after me.
“Go to hell.” I opened the door and went out.
* * *
I went back out into the nameless street again, moving like a shadow walker, not wanting anybody’s mind or even their eyes to touch me. Moving because I couldn’t rest—not alone with my memory in my dead, empty room. The rain had ended and the sky was clearing; quicksilver puddles shimmered everywhere. The street stopped beyond the spaceport but I went on up into the hills, the only place I’d ever felt free for even an afternoon; the last place that I’d seen Dere smile.
I went farther than I ever had. The light of the sky was enough to let my eyes find a way. I only stopped when even the memories had to let my body rest; dropping down on the hillside in the spongy grass. The sighing of the trees and the hiss of venting steam was all around me, with the faint rustling music of tiny wild things in the darkness. No human sound, no human eyes, no human mind to ruin the perfect peace.
A cool wind moved through my hair. I looked up for the first time, and I thought that if the days were beautiful, there wasn’t even a word for this. The Crab Nebula lay across the clearing sky like golden fishnet in a black sea rippling with aurora. I lay looking up at it for a long time, opening all my senses, letting my mind escape into the universal darkness. Wanting to stay there forever and let the beauty of it fill me, because I was so hungry.…
A tendril of alien thought curled into the pattern of my own. My mind tumbled in blind panic, trying to protect itself—until I heard the voice that wasn’t a single voice but a choir of thought calling me. Not human … Hydran. I stood up, searching the darkness, and suddenly they were all around me, maybe a dozen of them, as silently as ghosts.
(What … what are you doing here?) I looked from face to face, knowing that their eyes saw me just as clearly in the darkness, and that their minds could see clear through me. A couple of them were albino-white, but I wasn’t really sure if any of them were the ones I’d seen before. It was hard to focus on their faces when my mind’s eye couldn’t even separate them.
They asked me, (Why I was surprised to find them here, when this was their place, created by their ancestors? Their ancestors were not born to live in the dark heart of this world. They longed for the sky and the world of living things as much as the outsiders who had stolen those things away from them.)
I looked down.
They showed me that they came here often, in secret, (to gather what they needed to feed and clothe their bodies … and to feed their spirit.)
I nodded, and let my mind loosen again, reaching out to become a part of their whole. But I kept control this time, I didn’t lose myself as I sank into the image. I joined with them, needing to share in the filling of their spirit, needing it more than I could know.
But as I joined, I couldn’t stop the memories of tonight that welled up like blood from a wound. The memories bled into the sea of their shared mind, and yet they didn’t break away. Deep waters swallowed my grief, purified it, held it suspended as they shared their strength with me.
But I felt their stunned surprise, the deeper fear beneath it, as they absorbed the truth about the human psions who had promised them deliverance.… (Murder—the human psions had murdered one of their own and forced the Promised One)—me, they meant me—(to be a witness. They were psions, how could they do such a terrible thing and survive?)
(They’re human,) I thought. (They’re good at surviving.)
And they were asking themselves, (How could they not have seen—?) But sharing their question, I saw that there was no way they could have known—because even though they were the best telepaths I’d ever met, their own minds were so open, so freely shared, that they had no defenses; they didn’t even know what a lie was. Without the lie itself, they had no way of telling a lie from the truth. Rubiy must have known that and used it against them, used them like he used everyone else.
But then they were asking me for an answer, (Because there was a strangeness that was more than alien in some of the human minds.… There was an unrightness, perhaps a)—the image blurred until it was almost lost—(deceit.) They could learn. They weren’t the fools Rubiy figured they were, after all, and I was glad.
But now I had to try to make them understand the truth behind the lies, the way they’d been betrayed, the hope they’d lost—(This is hard … but you’re right. They weren’t telling you the truth, they’re—deceiving you. We call it “lying.” Humans do it all the time, because most of them can’t read minds.…) And I told them, not hiding what I felt about Rubiy, or how good it felt to show them the truth. (… So they lied to you, to keep you out of their way while they took over the mines. They tangled up their thoughts with a false image because you couldn’t understand the difference—they thought you couldn’t, anyway. Does that make any kind of sense to you?) I let them sink deeper into my mind, as they tried to get hold of something that kept slipping away, and then the word/feeling came back.
(They understood, now.… But it was not clear why these new outsiders wanted the unholy place, if it was not because they came to fulfill the promise.)
(Well, they want power, I suppose.) I tried to show them what the blue crystals meant to humans. (So controlling the mines means they’d have the FTA—the ones who control the Human Federation—by the throat.)
It was like dropping a stone into water and getting no ripples: (Not clear … there was no need … no purpose.…) As if they didn’t have any idea why anyone would even want power. I tried to remember what I knew about power to let them see why. And I guess they did, because I felt something sharp and sudden form that hurt my head. I didn’t know exactly what I’d been thinking of, myself, until the thought came, (It was the suffering of those weaker than themselves that they wanted.) I caught images they must have picked up from my own mind, about the mines, and the Labor Crows … and Oldcity.
(Yeah, I guess that’s about right. But power can be used for good—) Right then I couldn’t think of an example.
A feeling that was almost disbelief patterned in my head; they were whispering, (What ugly, twisted mindpaths these aliens had chosen.) And I remembered what Dere had said, about humans being defective Hydrans.
I felt their hope curdling. (They understood at last that these human psions had used their gift falsely, only meaning to do further harm. But if they succeeded, what would become of the outsiders who held the unholy place?)
The question surprised me. (I don’t know.) I figured Rubiy would have to keep the ones who ran the mines alive to get what he wanted. But then I thought about the bondies—nobody would help them, whoever won.
(They saw that there was no good that would come out of this, for anyone.)
I looked up at the ring of dim faces again, seeing that there was nothing left for t
hem now; the thing that gave them life and meaning was being destroyed because of something they didn’t even understand. There was no way they could stop it, now. Their last hope of someone to save them, of a new beginning, was gone. And I was sorry I had to be the one who’d told them; I was sorry for everything.
(But they knew it was better to know the truth, good to know that in some ways at least they had been wise.…) The circle of their thoughts drew closer around me. Even if I wasn’t the answer they’d been promised by their ancestors, I was still the one who had shown them the truth.
I looked down at my hands. And then, because there wasn’t anything to lose by trying, I showed them how Siebeling and Jule were working against Rubiy, trying to stop him.
They listened. And then they asked me, (Why would I help the ones who tried to save the place where I was a slave?)
My mind tried to shut them out—
(Because there was someone who mattered.) They answered their own question, and I saw then that they already knew about Jule and the others, and everything that had happened between us.
(Yeah. Someone who matters.) For a minute I felt the old, human resentment rise against their understanding too much. But only for a minute. (So you see, we could use any help.…)
There was a silence inside my head. Finally they answered; but it was only to tell me, (They had to consider these things further.)
I nodded. (I don’t blame you. You don’t owe us anything.) Except revenge—but I knew they couldn’t take that. I felt hopeless and empty. My legs were getting shaky; I wondered how long we’d been standing there. I realized that they were telling me there was nothing left to say or share except loss, (And that was not appropriate to this place.) Their solid reality flickered. I felt them begin to loosen the ties that bound their minds to mine, knew that they were about to disappear again, and go back into their hidden world.