I turned off of the Circle into another street, not saying anything; my face was stiff, my mind clenched, hardly aware of Jule beside me. The dark, decaying building fronts faded behind walls of illusion: Showers of gold that melted through your hands, blizzards of pleasure and sudden prickles of pain, fluorescent holo-flesh blossoming like the flowers of some alien jungle. The heart of the night burst open here in sound that took your sight away, hard and blistering, sensual and yielding, shimmering, pitiless. You could drown in your wildest fantasies right there in the street, and I heard Jule crying out in wonder, joy, disgust, not knowing her own emotions from everyone else’s.
But it was all a lie, and I’d lived it too many times, hungry and cold and broke; seen the ones who went through the images, through the doors where the fantasy turned real, and left me standing there—all beauty, all pleasure, all satisfaction running through my hands. Reality was no one’s dream in Oldcity. Suddenly I knew why I’d never made this trip, why I’d stayed like a monk in a monastery at the Center since I’d come back here … suddenly I was wondering why the hell I’d done it now.
A hand was on my arm, but Jule was drifting ahead beyond my reach. I turned, wanting to see a stranger; the past looked me straight in the face. The hand ran down my sleeve, a heavy hand with sharp heavy rings; the soft ugly mouth opened, showing me filed teeth. “Dear boy,” it said, “you look familiar.”
“I don’t know you.” Panic choked me.
“Boy…” wounded.
“Get away!” I jerked free, ran on through the phantoms of flesh until I collided with Jule.
She steadied me, staring at me and past me, frightened. (What’s wrong?)
“Nothin’. It’s nothing. I just—” I shook my head, swallowed, “Ghosts.”
Without another word she took my arm and pulled me through incense and pearls: The nearest door took our credit rating and fell open, letting us past into the reality. And suddenly there was no floor beneath us, no walls, no ceiling; just an infinity of deepening blue like the evening sky, shot with diamond chips of light tracking away toward an endless horizon. Our feet moved over a yielding surface that didn’t exist for my eyes, and with every step my body came closer to the dizzy brink where my mind swayed now. But we reached a low table, with seats like cloud; all around us other cloudsitters watched us walk on air. The sound of their voices, their laughter, was dim and distant. Patternless music flowed into the void, a choir of spirit voices weaving their conversation into its fabric.
As we settled at the table a slow mist rose, curling between us; I felt it tingling against the skin of my face, rising deeper into my head with every breath. The pungent cold of glissen was in it, along with a flavor I couldn’t name, that made my mouth water. You could get arrested for this out on the street. My hands were trembling on the transparent table surface; I watched the trembling ease as the glissen began to make me calm. “What is this place?” I took deeper breaths, letting it work.
“It’s called Haven.” Jule was still searching the room with her eyes. She sighed, as if her inner sight saw only peace and quiet. She looked back at me. “I thought you needed one.”
I smiled, half a grimace, pulling at a curl behind my ear. “I didn’t—didn’t know it would—come back at me like this. Like … I don’t know.” I looked up again. “I’ve never been in one of these places. Never.” My eyes traveled. “Maybe that’s the problem. Everything’s changed for me, Jule, but I don’t believe it. I could leave Oldcity—” My hand clenched.
She didn’t answer, only looked at me with her storm-colored eyes, until I almost thought I could feel her mind tendril into mine the way it used to. I felt it soothe me, felt her sharing without question.
“Cat, you heard me, outside.”
The way she said it made me say, “What?”
“When I asked you what was wrong, I didn’t speak it.”
“Yes, you did.”
She shook her head. “I never got it out of my mouth; you answered me first.”
“But I—” I looked away, back, dizzy with infinity rushing at me. “It—happened? I read your mind? And I didn’t even know?” I felt cheated.
She nodded. “That’s why it did: because you lost control.”
“The first time—” since I killed a man, “since we came back from the Colonies. More than a year.” Of living in solitary.… I let my mind reach, trying to feel it: the unfolding, the opening out—
She frowned, straining. “You’re cutting me off, Cat. Don’t—”
“I’m not trying to!” I hit the table edge; my voice made heads turn. I sank back into my seat. My mind was like a knot.
“Sometimes I’ve felt you let go, for a second; sometimes you almost—”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“You can’t keep it buried. You’ve got to start facing up to the fact that you are a telepath—”
“Not any more.”
“—and you work with me, with us, helping others like us. You’re making yourself a martyr to problems we’re all trying to face. I want to help you, but you aren’t doing a damn thing to cooperate!” The anger and frustration startled me; I couldn’t feel them.
“It’s not the same!” My own frustration fed on hers. “The rest of them live in a hell made by somebody else, just because the deadheads hate our guts. Nobody else made my hell.”
Jule’s eyes dropped. “I’m sorry. It’s just that I can’t help feeling—responsible for the way things are for you now. It’s just that when I remember what you had—”
“You think I don’t remember?” A silence apart from the music and the room settled on us. I remembered times we’d sat like this in the past, when I was a thief, and she was afraid; before we’d learned to trust each other more than any two human beings had the right to. Before I’d saved her life and Siebeling’s by ending someone else’s—and lost it all. The music and the awareness of unreal distances around us came back to me slowly, as the glissen numbed my memory. “What do you do in this place, anyhow?”
Jule lifted her head, tension still in the half-smiling corners of her mouth. “I don’t know. Meditate?”
I glanced down at the data bracelet covering the old scar on my right wrist. My credit balance had dropped a hundred points. I looked at it again. “Whew. It better be more than sitting on clouds.”
Jule glanced down at her own bracelet; her fist pressed the center of her chest. There must have been a time when a hundred credits didn’t mean anything to her. But that was somewhere in another life, and now whenever she thought of money she thought of the Center first. “I guess you don’t do anything in Oldcity without considering the consequences,” she said.
I nodded. “That’s your first lesson. The second one is that most of the time you don’t get the chance to think about it.” She started to get up, and I thought about going out into the street again. “Wait—till we know if there’s anything else. We’re paying for it.”
She didn’t object. She settled back into her seat; we began to talk, but not about what had just happened. The glissen began to make our words slur and our minds wander. After a while the murmuring choir music faded. In the blue distance ahead of me a dark opening appeared like a wormhole from another universe. A figure came through it, walking softly on air to a place in the center of the cloud-sitters. “We welcome you to the Haven.” The figure bowed, wrapped in dark folds glittering with stars; I couldn’t tell whether it was male or female, even from the voice. “We hope your time here has been one of tranquility and peace. To further deepen your experience we give you the Dreamweaver, who will open to you the secret places of your soul.”
I glanced at Jule, rolling my eyes; but she sat half turned away, watching the act as though it mattered. The figure raised its arms and folded in on itself, disappearing. The crowd gasped. I jerked, wondering whether we’d seen a teleport. But Jule turned back and said, “Just a projection.”
I shrugged. All done with mirrors. As I sat watchin
g, a light began to fall from above us, a captive star drawn down out of the night. It settled where the projection had been, and as the light faded there was total silence in the room. I waited for more cheap tricks, wondering how they ever got enough of the audience back to this place twice to make it pay.
As the light faded I began to make out another form inside it, a human body. I kept blinking, trying to clear the dazzle out of my eyes. It was a child … it was a tiny, fragile woman, lost in a shining silver robe. Her arms were bare, hung with bands and bracelets showing colored fire; her skin was no color I’d ever seen before, burnished brass. But her arms were as thin as sticks, and the bones stood out like a scream along their length; her face was a shadowed skull.
Her head twisted like a doll’s head until she was looking toward me, at me alone. The touch of those sunken eyes was a blow. I shut my own eyes, not knowing what I was seeing, afraid to see it. I kept them shut for a long minute.
It was the light—the light playing tricks on me. When I looked at her again there was no ugliness, no suffering in that face. But there was a strangeness—something alien about its flat planes, the coloring, about the way her body fit together. Alien. I leaned forward, trying to meet her eyes. She looked at me, and they were green, impossibly, translucently green. Our eyes locked; in my mind I saw her seeing the same eyes, like jewels trapped in the matrix of a face that was too human, my face.…
I read confusion, a silent cry in her look. She twisted her head away again, searching the crowd as if she needed a hiding place. But infinity was an illusion; the audience held her captive with its anticipation. I almost thought she shimmered, began to disappear … caught herself, in control again. Jule murmured something across from me, but I didn’t listen.
The Dreamweaver put her hands up to her face, but it was only a gesture, a sign of beginning. Something like a sigh moved through the crowd … something like a whisper formed in my mind. I shut my eyes again, trying to hear the image clearly: the soft, fragile-colored dream that echoed palely as a ghost in my mind’s darkness. I strained toward it, trying to make it clear, to share what made even the blind, deaf, and empty deadheads all around me gape and dream and squirm in their seats.
“Cat. Cat!”
I opened my eyes again, blinking; whispered, “Damn it, Jule—”
Her face twisted with pain. “I want to leave. I have to leave.”
I couldn’t focus on her; the echoes wouldn’t leave my mind alone, calling, promising—“I can feel her, I can almost—”
Jule put her hands to her head, and tears started in the corner of her eyes. “I can’t stand it, Cat. Please!”
Laughter rippled across us and through us: the cloud-sitters, lost in another world, one I wanted to share so much it hurt.
“It hurts!” Jule gasped.
“Block it, then,” trying to keep my voice down, trying to ignore hers.
And suddenly she was gone. Into the air. “Jule!” The one or two people nearest me jerked and swore. I stared at the empty seat across from me. She’d teleported, she’d left me behind; she’d wanted to get away that much. Why? Why would she run from this? But the whispers were smoky and seductive now, I couldn’t keep my mind on her, couldn’t keep it away from them.…
The Dreamweaver held the room inside a spell for what seemed like hours, but wasn’t. A part of my mind felt the passing of time, a dim clock marking seconds to the beating of my heart. My concentration and my need fell inward until I was as lost in seeking as the dreamers around me were lost inside themselves.
But dreams end, and the time came when the mindsong faded like dawn, growing fainter, paler, farther away … until all that was left to me was my own mind lying. The light in the room was brightening into sunrise; feeling it through my lids, I opened my eyes. The Dreamweaver was drowning in light until I couldn’t look at her, couldn’t see her, felt the light wash me with physical heat—And she was gone. The light imploded, left my eyes dancing with phosphenes. The other cloudsitters began to shake themselves out, murmuring and gesturing toward the empty center. There was no applause, no calling out for more. Dazed by glissen and drugged with wonder, they stood on air and began to drift toward the door.
Someone passed through my line of sight like a rainbow. I caught at his arm without thinking; felt the electric prickle of the charged cloth and let go of it again. He turned to look at me, seeing worn jeans and a leather worker’s jacket, the only kind of clothes I felt comfortable in; seeing the plain tight curls of my hair, the half-homely strangeness of my face. He couldn’t make me fit in.… I saw him figure me for some rich eccentric. I realized he was right, in a way, and I grinned. He smiled, a little uncertain.
“Is—uh, is the show always like that?”
He nodded. “But the dreams are always changing.”
“Is there anyone here besides us? I mean, who runs this place? Who owns it? Where are they?”
He shrugged. “I never see anyone. But I’ve no doubt they watch over us all from the other side of the sky.” He waved vaguely at infinity. His eyes were glassy.
“What about the Dreamweaver? Who is she? Where does she go? I want to … want to … thank her.”
He laughed. “She sees into our minds; no doubt she sees our gratitude there. Who knows where she goes, or who she is? It’s all a part of her mystery. Knowing too much would spoil it.” He leaned forward, sharing a secret. “Anyway, she’s not human, you know.”
I felt my face close. “Neither am I.”
He half frowned. “That’s not funny.”
“I know.” I looked back again at the emptiness where she’d been; feeling the empty place in my mind. He drifted away. The room was darkening around me, infinity reaching an end, walls closing in with almost a physical pressure. I followed the rest of them out into the street, not thinking about where I was this time, but only about tomorrow—about remembering this place, and coming back to it again, and again.
I walked back to the Center through Oldcity’s night without seeing any of it. I climbed the ancient circling stairs at the rear of the quiet building to my room. And as I opened the door I remembered Jule again, remembered her coming here and how our evening had started; how it had ended, when she left me at the Haven without a good-bye. Why? But I wasn’t ready yet to go to her and find out. Because it would mean sharing what had happened to me, and I wasn’t ready for that; not even with Jule.
I stretched out on my sleep platform, staring at the ceiling. My long-pupiled stranger’s eyes tracing every crack, even in the darkness. Alien. She was an alien, the Dreamweaver—and that was why she’d been able to reach into every mind in that room at once and start them all into fantasies. Why she’d even been able to crack the tomb I’d buried my own mind in. No one else I’d met since I’d lost my telepathy had even come close—because I was only half human. The other half was Hydran, like she was, and that half came with psionic ability that no one I knew could touch. All human psions had some Hydran blood, but in most of them it was generations thin—from the time before humans had decided to hate the only other intelligent race they’d ever encountered.
My mother had been Hydran; my mother was dead. My life after that had been living proof that nobody wanted a Hydran halfbreed—until I’d met Jule and Siebeling. But even they hadn’t been able to make me a telepath again.
And yet the Dreamweaver had looked at me and known, and even holding dozens of other minds, she had made a blind man see.
I rolled onto my stomach, pushing the heels of my hands into my eyes; seeing stars, God, oh God! feeling tears. I ground them out. After more than a year working with other psions crippled by human hate, proving to them just by existing that they could be worse off than they were … to have this happen! To feel alive again, to feel the presence of another mind reach into mine. The pain of returning life was the sweetest torture I’d ever known. The Dreamweaver … I had to find her; had to let her know … let her know … a heavy peace began to settle on me as I touched th
e memory again … find her.…
* * *
It was daylight when I opened my eyes again: another artificial day of Oldcity street-lighting. I blinked and squinted in the band of glare that lay across my face; sat up, feeling excitement hot and sudden in my chest as I remembered. I tried to remember how long it had been since I’d felt anything but a dim, tired ache, morning after morning. I pulled on a clean smock over my jeans and went downstairs.
I’d overslept. Jule was already there, passing out hot drinks to the day’s first handful of miserable-looking psions who’d come for their ration of human contact—something I should have been doing for her. She jerked as I came up beside her, catching her by surprise. I took the drinks out of her hands, keeping a mug of bitter-root for myself. “Sorry. Why didn’t you call me?”
She looked at me with an expression I couldn’t read. “I didn’t know you were here.”
“Jule, I want to take the day off.”
Her face pinched. “Cat, not today. It’s half crazy around here without Ardan. Mim and Hebrett can’t handle it without you.”
The hell they can’t. I opened my mouth to say it, changed my mind. I sighed, and shrugged. “If you need me.…”
She smiled. The smile stopped. “Yes, I want to talk about last night. Later.…”
I nodded and went back to work. The morning passed in a haze of going through the motions, setting up control exercises, watching them happen, listening to a new day’s complaints from the ’paths and ’ports and teeks who were trying to come to terms with the freak mind talents that were tearing up their lives.
And then I was alone with Jule in Siebeling’s broom-closet office, sitting on the corner of his perfectly organized desk and drinking soup. I watched Jule sipping at her own cup, sitting in his chair; watched the kinetic sculpture on his desk, afraid to let my mind focus. The sculpture was lifeless, nothing more than a tangle of metal without Siebeling here to make it dance with his mind the way he did. You could tell what sort of mood he was in by what it was doing.
“Last night…” Jule said finally.