He held up his hand. I stopped. “We’ll see.” Some of the faces began to look worried; but not his. The combine man kneaded his hands together. A door was opening in the next room. Two men were shaking the slug awake, hauling him off his couch. The woman called Hedo went to Ineh, helped her to stand, leading her out after the others were gone. The corporate telepath stared at me as if he’d just noticed I was there; glanced at his boss, who frowned. He looked back at me, confused, and I tried to make him react somehow. He looked down again at the remote in his lap, his shoulders hunching. Kinba’s bodyguards led me out of the room.
We went back up in the lift, back into the main part of the house; into a room looking out on the night and the long ruddy slope of the hill. Ineh was already there. She sat gulping something from a cup, her robe soaked and stained, her movements jerky. And yet she was more beautiful, almost shining; not because of what had happened, but somehow in spite of it. I shook my head again, not understanding what I was seeing. She looked up then and saw me, froze as she saw what I looked like.
“Ineh,” the woman said, “see who came for your performance.”
Ineh still sat frozen. She didn’t answer. Her mouth quivered.
“I’m okay,” I said. “I’ve come to take you back with me. The Corpses know everything. If anything happens to me or you, they know who to blame.”
“Ineh, is he telling the truth?” Kinba strolled past me to where she sat, ran his maggot fingers through her hair, massaged her neck.
I felt her touch me with her mind: a hard clumsy blow that tore the tight-woven defenses I couldn’t control apart. I tried not to resist, holding out trust, hope, reassurance, not even bothering to hide my lie. Trusting her—
“He told no one.” Her voice was flat. “He is here alone, no one knows what he’s done.”
Kinba’s hands dropped to her shoulders, patted her lightly; all the hidden tension had gone out of them. His laughter was loose and easy. I was just exactly as stupid as he’d figured I was. “You see, good people, there was nothing to worry about,” heavy on the nothing.
I looked down at the floor, twisting my hands against the hard edges of the binder.
“Ineh, I’m disappointed.” His hands squeezed her shoulders. “Is this quixotic idiot really your idea of someone who’s going to change your life?” She grimaced, but didn’t answer. “Well, here he is. You did well enough for us just now. But you seem to detest it, you resist it so. That impairs your usefulness. I always said our relationship was one of mutual need, not slavery. You could leave any time you chose. Would you like to go away with him?” She looked up, her face caught in the middle of half a dozen different emotions. “You’ve given us years of loyal service. Shall I repay you now … let you go away with him? Of course if you do, you’ll be losing the—privileges of our partnership. Are you ready to lose all that? Or do you want to stay on, safe and protected, and … let us get rid of him?”
I couldn’t believe that she was really listening to what he said, any more than I believed for a second that he was offering her a real choice. But she stared up at him like she was seeing God. Then she looked at me for a long minute, without letting me through into her mind. She looked out the window at the empty night, and the minute stretched into two, into eternity. My mind ached, waiting for her to choose, even while I knew it was no choice and at least one of us was going to die.
I looked after her out the windowed wall at the sky … just in time to see the windows dissolve like a film of ice in the sun, the sun bursting in on me, my sight going redgoldwhiteblack before I could shut my eyes. Then all hell broke loose—shouting and curses and noises I didn’t recognize, bodies slamming into me, knocking me down. By the time I blinked my eyes clear, there was a Corporate Security cruiser hanging beyond the slagged windows and the room was filling up with Corpses.
And Ineh was on her knees beside me, pulling at my arm. Her voice was high and broken, I could barely make out what she said. “Cat, Cat … they come to arrest us, to take us away!”
I sat back, trying to get my feet under me. “Get out of here, Ineh! Now, while you can—” A Corpse had spotted us, was starting toward us through the forest of shifting bodies.
“Where, where can I go? I’m afraid—”
“Somewhere they won’t be looking! Anywhere. Go on!”
“You—?”
“I’ll be all right. Go on!”
She disappeared; I felt the soft inrush of air that followed. Neat gray legs stopped short beside me. I heard the Corpse swear, and looking up I saw Polhemas. I started to get up. He reached down and caught the front of my jacket, hauling me onto my feet.
“Where did she go?”
“Who?”
“Don’t play brain-damaged with me.” The polite official front was gone. “You’re in enough trouble as it is.”
“Me?” I jerked at my cuffed hands. “Come on, Polhemas, you think I did this to myself? You know I didn’t have anything to do with them—” I bent my head at the rest of the room.
His hand was still clenched on my jacket front. “I knew you were lying when you told me you didn’t know anything, back at the Center. That’s why I had a tracer put on you. And it led us right to the answer.”
“You think I didn’t know you were following me? It would’ve been damn stupid to walk into this all by myself if I wasn’t involved; that’s what you figure, isn’t it?” I tried to stare him down. I hoped he couldn’t see my ears burning. “I’m not stupid,” just crazy, “and I wasn’t lying to you. But I was smart enough to see a few things you overlooked, while you were spending all your time trying to blame this on the Center. Face it, Polhemas, I’m the hero here. You can’t turn it inside out.”
His face turned redder than my ears, and his hand on my jacket jerked me forward. But then he grunted and let me go. He was going to be hero enough himself to keep him from making a case of proving I was wrong. I let my breath out in a sigh. He looked me over again, looking hard at my bruised face. Then he turned me around and released the binder on my wrists. “Why didn’t you just tell us what you learned? If you wanted to be a hero that would’ve been enough. Why risk being a dead one?”
I pulled my hands forward and rubbed them. “Why should I do you any favors? What have you done for the Center for Psionic Research lately?”
He ignored that. “It was the Dreamweaver, wasn’t it? Where did you send her—where is she?”
“I don’t know. Somewhere you won’t find her. You can drug me all you want but I can’t tell you more than that.”
“We’ll find her.” It was a threat.
I caught his arm. “Why don’t you leave her alone? They made her do it, she didn’t want to. That’s why she came to me, for help. She’s suffered more than that mindfucker ever did—” pointing at her “guest” standing sullen and confused while two Corpses questioned him. “He’s the one you ought to send up. If you saw the inside of his head you’d kill him on the spot.”
Polhemas looked at the slug and back at me without saying anything. His eyes were still cold and empty.
“Look, you’ve got what you want. Leave us alone.… Maybe it never occurred to you, but we’re just trying to live like everybody else. Give us a goddamn break! We gave you what you want; we’ve earned it.”
He didn’t answer.
I let go of his arm and turned away. The corporate telepath was looking at me from across the room, where his boss’s voice was getting louder and louder. His face was full of fear and despair; I could see it, but I couldn’t feel it. I started to walk away.
“Nobody said you could go anywhere,” Polhemas said.
“Try and stop me.”
He did.
* * *
It was hours later before I was free again, walking back through the streets to the Center, feeling the steel and stone of all Oldcity weighing down my heart. Polhemas had asked me a thousand questions about everything I’d seen, heard, overheard, thought or guessed. I’d told him ever
ything I could, because it didn’t matter any more and I only wanted to get out of there. It was only after I’d left the detention center that I let myself realize he hadn’t tried to force anything more out of me about where Ineh had gone. It surprised me, because it meant that he must have listened to something I’d said before. But either way it didn’t really matter; because Ineh was gone, and I didn’t know where. How the hell would I find her; what would she do—what would I do?
The Center had long since closed for the night when I reached it. But there was still a light on somewhere inside, so I went in the front entrance instead of taking the back way up to my room. Jule and Siebeling stood waiting for me in the empty hall; I almost walked past them without seeing them.
“Cat?”
I stopped, shaking my head. They came toward me when I didn’t move. Siebeling lifted his hand, and across the room the lights brightened. Their faces showed pools and lines of shadow, their tired eyes looked me up and down. Siebeling caught my jaw with his hand, gently, turning my face right and left.
“Did Corporate Security do that to you?”
“No.”
“What happened?” Jule asked. The question didn’t stop with my face.
“I fell down.” I tried to pull away, but Jule held my arm.
“Wait, Cat.” She stood in front of me. “You’ve been trying to pretend that you’re the only one who’s involved with the Dreamweaver’s problems; but you’re not. You’re not alone in this. You’re not alone in the world—for better or worse.”
“You weren’t exactly killing yourself to help me out.”
“That’s hardly fair,” Siebeling said. “You didn’t give us any information. You didn’t tell us the kind of problems that were really involved, the kind of people, the danger. You went off on a suicidal crusade against Evil, and you damn near got just what you were asking for! Didn’t it ever occur to you that—that—” he broke off, “that we can’t read your mind, Cat.”
“I never thought about anything else. That’s the trouble.” I looked down, my arms hanging heavy at my sides. “I’m sorry. Maybe I’ll start appreciating what I’ve got left, now.” Now that it doesn’t matter any more, now that it’s too late. “How’d you know what happened? Were the Corpses here?”
“No.” Siebeling leaned against a seat-back. “They haven’t been here.”
“They haven’t? Not at all?”
He shook his head.
I laughed, a choked sort of sound. It meant there might be something decent in Polhemas after all, and I wasn’t ready to believe it. “Then how did you know?”
“Ineh told us,” Jule said.
Ineh? The word wouldn’t form in my mouth. “Where—where is she?”
“Up in your room. I had to give her a sedative to help her keep control; she’s sleeping now.” He touched his head. “You know she’s an addict, Cat—?”
I flinched. “I know. What’s she on, Doc?”
“Trihannobin.”
“Nightmare.” I felt the blood drain out of my face. “They call it nightmare.”
He nodded. “And it takes you for a hard ride. It’s a kind of nerve poison. Most people don’t use it for long; they generally stop when it kills them.” His face was as empty as my own.
“I went for a ride once.” The memories came without my wanting them to. “I thought I was in heaven. I didn’t eat or sleep for three days. And then it wore off.” I kept my eyes open, kept looking at their faces: proving that I was here in the present, that I’d really come through it. Nightmare … that’s why they call it nightmare. I could still see the hospital ward through their faces, the nutrient bath shining on my skin like sweat, the straps.… They hadn’t cared enough to make it easier. “Give her something to make it easier—”
He shook his head, looking down.
“Why not?”
“She’s Hydran, Cat … I can’t predict how it would affect her. She doesn’t react to the drug the way a human does, or she’d be dead by now. If I tried to counteract it without doing an analysis, I could make it worse for her.…” He sounded helpless; I wasn’t used to hearing him sound that way.
“I guess I want to see her now.”
He nodded, and the three of us went upstairs.
I was the first one into the room. Ineh sat waiting, watching, from my bed platform. Her arms were locked around her knees, her fists were clenched tight. Her face was clenched too; I couldn’t tell what she was thinking.
“We may need restraints,” Siebeling murmured to Jule.
“No.” I looked back. “If she needs it I’ll do it; I’ll hold her.” I realized as I said it that I was going to do more—that I was going to do everything. Not because I wouldn’t share it with them, this time, but because I couldn’t. Ineh would lose control again, and when she lost it completely I’d be the only one left who could stand to be near her. “You’d better get out of range while you can.”
They looked at each other, and at me. This time they didn’t argue. They left the room.
“Hello, Ineh,” I said softly. She didn’t answer. I moved across to the bed platform, climbed up and sat beside her, trying to keep my face calm and easy. “Thank God you came here,” I said, thinking that she had more sense than I did, to trust Jule and Doc when I hadn’t. “I just about went crazy wondering how I’d find you.” I reached out to touch her arm. Her body jerked away; I didn’t know whether she’d meant it to or not. “Sorry.” I looked down at my hands, up again. A hard knot was forming in my throat. “I know, it’s already starting. Don’t be afraid.”
Her eyes fixed on me, wild and glassy, as though she was listening to a lunatic. She licked her lips. “I need my dream tonic. Help me.”
I shook my head. “Not that way. I’ve been through this, Ineh, and I came out the other side. I’ll help you. Trust me. Let me in, let me share the—”
Something blinding hit me behind the eyes, fed back along the nerve-paths to the ends of my senses—all her power, focused on me and driven home by fear. I cried out, holding my head. And I saw her clearly, at last: not the Ineh I thought I knew, but the Ineh I’d seen in ghost glimpses when her concentration slipped, when she couldn’t make me see her the way she wanted the world to see her, and I’d fallen through it into the way she was. The nightmare Ineh, brittle bones, sunken eyes, wasted flesh. The nightmare. The nightmare already beginning— Disgust and hatred filled me up like the urge to vomit: Ineh’s loathing for the thing she’d become in her mind, was becoming with her body; a filthy, crawling, drug-infected ruin, born to pain, deserving pain, terrified of pain but trapped inside it with no escape, trapped—
Trapped. I’d be trapped with her in this nightmare journey of pain and more pain, pain until you wailed, howled, beat yourself senseless against walls to get away from it. Your hands ripped your own flesh, your legs wouldn’t hold you up, your body betrayed and humiliated you in ways you never dreamed of and you didn’t even care.… When I could sit up again in the hospital there was a corpse in the mirror, I saw a corpse and I screamed and I can’t go through it all over again I can’t—!
I threw myself down from the platform, away from the sight of her. I almost shouted for the others, almost started for the door; almost ran—out of the room, away from her and the power of her pain and myself.
But instead I turned back, and looked at her. She hunched forward, burying her face in the stained whiteness of her robe, dragging isolation over herself like a shroud. There was no reaching from mind to mind now; I’d shut her out of myself, and she wasn’t trying to get back in.
And I was going to leave her that way. I was going to leave her alone and prove to her that there was nobody on this world who wouldn’t betray her; that there was no one she could count on; that no matter what she tried to do, because of what she was it would turn against her.… That if she reached the other end of this road through hell she’d only find that it hadn’t been worth the trip. I was the only one who could share the journey, who knew the road
marks, who could make her believe there was a reason to survive it. But I was going to leave her here alone and run from her problems; just like I’d done to myself.…
I climbed back onto the platform. I kneeled beside Ineh, put my arms around her huddled body, feeling her muscles knot and quiver. “I’m here, I won’t leave you. You can count on me—” my voice broke.
A wall of blind hatred slammed into me, locking me out. Hopeless pain was all that was left, all that was real to her now, eating her alive from the inside. She wanted to die; and she would. I had to break through to her again, somehow, before everything imploded.
And there was only one thing still working her mind. If I could turn the rage that was holding me out into a tool to let me in.… “All right!” I shouted it into her face. “You hate me, you want to blame it all on me. But you dragged me into this, you set me up to do what you didn’t have the guts to do yourself. Then you lost your nerve, and I got the shit beat out of me. If I was going to stop believing in you, that should’ve done it. But I didn’t; I didn’t give up on you. I kept on until you were free. You’re free.
“If you have to hate, remember where you were before you came here tonight! Remember who did it to you, who turned your gift into something sick and dirty. If you want to shut somebody out of your life, shut them out. If you want something enough to die for it, make it your freedom. If you want to hate somebody let it be Kinba!” I shook her. “Don’t let them win. We don’t have to let the goddamn scum of this universe destroy us. Let it out, the hate … the pain will go with it. Let me in—” (Let me share your pain,) I pushed myself aside, trying to loosen my mind, to forget any other thought, and just once let the emptiness go unguarded.
Ineh jerked upright, tears streaming down her face. She opened her mouth. And screamed. The scream went on and on, pouring out of her like blood.
My mind burst open as the images smashed into me, losing all control as she lost all control. Not even my own mind any more, but a stage in darkness for the Dreamweaver’s nightmares: Agony from a million neurons like live wires snapping … the taste of gall, the stench of putrefying flesh, my ears screaming, knives of light slashing my eyes, agony that filled all time and went on and on and on.… Cancer flowers spreading, the face of the torturer with a thousand faces, petals opening endlessly changing out of control controlling body, soul … Kinba, white yielding inevitable cajoling soothing strangling striking tearing destroying/*flash shatter hot blades broken glass*/Hedo, oblivion’s water food of gods of dreams hands of ice edge of knives/*screaming blackness eyes torn from sockets*/ Body of a slug mind full of worms bursting like a boil, endless floods of diseased image that went on and on, no escape from filthy minds, stupid, greedy, blind, empty empty minds—mutilating her gift denying her self, suffocating her soul in their soul-darkness until she was only a thing used by things.…