I nodded, keeping my head down—wishing I could leave, and wondering why everything I said just made me sound stupider, and made him angrier.
“Then let’s talk about what’s bothering you. Goba said you’d experienced some shock early in life that was so painful you totally rejected your ability to read minds.”
“I know. But he wouldn’t tell me what it was.”
“Apparently he can’t. Even under hypnoprobing you never say anything about it. The human mind is full of unknowns; you can take a memory and throw it down a pit somewhere and never see it in your conscious mind again. But it’s still there, somewhere, festering. The mind never really forgets anything—it only forgets how to reach that thing, sometimes.” He looked down at the glass ball. He covered it with his hands, and closed his eyes for a second. When he took his hands away again, the picture had changed. I stopped listening and just stared; wonder caught in my chest. “You don’t remember anything at all about what might have happened? Can you even remember a time when you knew what people were thinking?”
I blinked, and looked back at him. I shook my head.
“Has anything strange begun happening since you’ve been involved here? Have any peculiar memories surfaced—anything at all? Dreams?”
I nodded. “Dreams. I have a lot of bad dreams.…”
“What are they about?” He leaned forward across the desk.
“I don’t remember.”
He sat back again. “Something. There must be something—a setting, a feeling?”
“Oldcity. They’re always in Oldcity.” He raised his eyebrows. I shrugged. “Where else would they be?”
“Anything else, then? Close your eyes, remember how you feel just as you’re waking.”
I shut my eyes, trying to bring it back … “Afraid,” I whispered. I wiped my hands on the knees of my pants. “Somebody’s s-screaming.…”
“What?”
“S-screams!” I opened my eyes, glaring at him.
“Whose? Your own?”
“Yes. N-no!” I pushed up out of my chair. “I d-don’t want to do this.”
“Sit down,” he said, almost gently. I sat down again. “Do you stutter much?”
“I don’t stutter!” I remembered what I’d just heard come out of my mouth.
“All right.” He nodded, looking up through the skylight. “Let’s try something else. How old are you?”
I took a deep breath. “Your guess is as good as mine.”
“You must have some idea—sixteen, seventeen?”
“I guess so.”
“Have you ever lived anywhere besides Oldcity?”
“No.”
“Are you sure? You could have come to Ardattee when you were too young to remember. Did your family—”
“What family?” My mouth twisted.
“You’re an orphan, then.” He looked like he was apologizing for it, but there was something almost eager in the words that made me uneasy.
“I guess so.” I made a sound that wasn’t really a laugh. “And I remember living in Oldcity way back. I wish I could forget it, but I remember.”
“Before you were, say … four years old?” The question wasn’t quite casual. His hands closed over the picture ball; the picture changed again. He looked up, watching me watch it.
“Yeah,” I said, remembering to answer him. “I got a good memory.”
“How did you survive, if you were that young, and alone?”
“I lived off other people’s garbage and junk.” I felt him pushing me, a pressure I could almost see growing in my head. I twisted the hem of my smock between my hands, not understanding why it was happening. “I was a slip, and a beggar, and sometimes I was even—” I broke off. “What do you want from me!”
His face caught somewhere between disgust and pain. “Just—the answers to a few questions.” It was a lie. He kept his voice even, but one question was burning inside him, stronger and deeper than any professional curiosity. I couldn’t read him enough to tell what it was, but I couldn’t stop feeling it, either. “What happened to your parents?” That wasn’t the one.
“They’re dead.” I hoped they were; because if they weren’t I wished they were, for what they’d done to me.
“Do you know which one was Hydran?”
“What?” I frowned. “What do you mean?”
“Your eyes and the bone structure of your face look Hydran. Your psionic ability makes it even more likely.… Do you know about the Hydrans?” he asked finally, when I just kept staring at him.
“They’re the aliens.” The word was hard to get out. “They come from Beta Hydrae system. I know some jokes.… Are you trying to make a joke outa me? It’s bad enough being a freak. I’m human, not some kind of monster!” I stood up again.
He stood up too, and leaned across the desktop, upsetting the picture ball. It rolled toward me. “You don’t understand. My wife was Hydran. I had a son—”
“I don’t care if your mother was an alien, you deeve! I ain’t, I ain’t Hydran! And I ain’t answering any more questions.”
He pulled back, straightening away from me. I saw his face harden over with anger, felt his anger sink into my bones. He turned his back on me, as if the sight of me was more than he could stand.
I looked down from the back of his head at the picture ball lying on the desk in front of me. I picked it up with shaky hands, and put it into my pocket. And then I got out of that room fast.
He didn’t try to question me again. That was the last time he interviewed me, and Goba complained louder than ever when they got me back.
* * *
But a few days later Goba came into the lab with a stranger: someone who looked like he’d probably come sealed in plastic—everything about him was so neat, so ordinary, so mass-produced. The stranger looked me over and said, “You’re the shadow walker who beat up three Contract Labor recruiters?” I stood and glared at him. He smiled at me; it made his face look human.
—(Think you can take me too, telepath?) I heard it, but this time he hadn’t opened his mouth: the words formed inside my head—his thought, not mine, and I wasn’t even trying to read his mind. He was a telepath.
“You shit.” I held my head, looking back at Goba. Goba just smiled like a sadist and left us alone.
I put a table between the stranger and me, and wove my thoughts into a shield. No human had ever been inside my mind like this before—it was like a tumor of thought growing in my brain. The feeling made my stomach turn over. “Stay out of my mind, freak, or I’ll show you what I can do.” I made a fist.
“Hey, take it easy.” He spoke the words normally, this time. He looked nervous, which made me feel better. “Pull in your claws, Cat. I’m not here to—”
“I’m not an animal, damn it!” I brought my fist down on the table. “I’m human, even if they don’t treat me like it around here.”
His face changed. “My apologies.” He nodded, glancing down. He looked soft, like somebody who didn’t get any exercise. His dark hair was pulled back and fastened at the base of his neck, the way half a million other people wore it. It was like he’d done everything he could to make himself ordinary. His eyebrows were dark and smooth, like feathers; his eyes were a gold-flecked green when he looked up again. “I didn’t mean to patronize you, and I guess I did. I’m sure they’ve made your life more unpleasant than you had any right to expect when you came here. Just between us, it was meant to be that way. It’s all a part of the … uh, research. It helps to know those things; it puts it all in perspective. Doesn’t it?”
I stared at him, trying to figure out what he’d just told me, and what the hell he was doing here. “Who are you?”
“My name is Derezady Cortelyou. I work for Seleusid Interstellar as a corporate telepath. I’m also a volunteer in psionic research, like you. I’m here to help you work on your own telepathy.”
I sat down at the table and rested my head in my hands. It hurt, as usual. “Jeezu. That’s all I need
.”
He sat down across from me, picked up the stack of cards with symbols on them that I was always having to “see,” and shuffled through them. But he didn’t start playing head games; he didn’t even talk about telepathy. He talked about the weather—about everything but psi. I didn’t say anything. Finally, as if he’d run out of ideas, he pulled out a pack of camphs and put one of them into his mouth. I felt my own mouth start to water. My fingers twitched.
He glanced at me, but he didn’t offer me one. He just sighed, and I could feel how good it felt.…
“Gimme one of those?” I tried to make it sound casual.
He smiled and flipped one across the table.
I stuck it into my mouth and bit down on the end of it. The bitterness numbed my tongue. I swallowed, letting it deaden my throat, knowing that soon enough it would ease the tension all through my body. I sighed, like he had.
“Been a while since you’ve had one?” His voice prodded me, but only a little.
I nodded. “Seems like forever.” Knowing there was no way I could get out of it, I finally began to relax and let the conversation happen. He held his mind loose and unprotected all the while—I could have walked right into it and read everything he was thinking if I’d wanted to. I didn’t want to. I kept my own mind as tight as a fist, but he didn’t try to reach me that way again. It was a laying down of weapons, and even I could understand that much. Which maybe was why I let myself answer his questions, and after a while even talk about psionics.
He knew more than I ever wanted to know about telepathy, and when he found out that I didn’t know anything, he made me sit through it all. The only thing that kept me listening was the camph slowly dissolving in my mouth, and more where that one came from. But by the time the lights of Quarro were a net of stars in nebula outside the window, I knew all about the different degrees of telepathic ability. I had what should be the greatest, the most flexible: “wide spectrum,” the ability to read everything from conscious thoughts lying on the surface of another person’s mind to buried memory fragments and even pure emotion.
I’d learned that the brain was mostly a net of nerve fibers like strange noodles soaking in chemical soup, waiting for sparks of bioelectric energy to make ideas and images start cooking. That crazy stew reacting to every sensation and image, every thought and feeling was what let human beings interact with life. In most humans the input and reactions were woven into a snarl that even biofeedback training could barely begin to unravel. Psions were born with something more—a set of self-controls that let them weave the snarl into patterns by tapping into a kind of energy normal humans were blind to. Psions really did have a sixth sense—and their minds were both more open to it and more protected against it.
Some of them had two or more talents at the same time, different ways of manipulating the chaotic energy fields of subatomic particles; something as universal as life-force, and as much of a mystery to most people. Not all psions had the same level of control over their talents, the way not all artists had the same amount of skill. There were psions who were born with multiple talents like a crown of semiprecious stones, and ones born with a single talent like a perfect diamond.…
“A ‘diamond in the rough.’” I repeated the words, finally understanding them. “That’s what Goba called me.” A flawed stone that needed cutting, he’d said, but that resisted every tool except the hardest.…
“He’s right,” Cortelyou said. “You have a level of control that would make anyone who wanted to be a psion green-eyed with envy.” He laughed like that was a joke, but I didn’t get it. “Except you’ve twisted it back on itself. You’ve used it to weave the fibers of your mind into a barrier, a wall of defense. They’ve been doing their best to fracture it—”
“‘And they don’t much care if I break clean or shatter.’” I finished Goba’s speech for him.
His mouth quirked. “I can imagine. I know the type.” He sounded tired, suddenly.
I wondered again about what he was, and did. This time I asked. “What’s a corporate telepath do, anyhow?”
“I screen clients for Seleusid executives, and sometimes do security checks at their headquarters.”
“You mean you’re a croach.”
“A what?”
“A backstabber. A paid snitch.” I shrugged.
His mouth thinned, but if he was angry or insulted, he didn’t let it show. “Some people have said that, yes.” The words sounded used, like he’d said them too often before. But then he told me that he was also a precog—that he made predictions about the economic and political future of the combine’s holdings. I asked if he’d do it for me, but he only said that you couldn’t predict when you’d get a prediction, and that they weren’t always accurate, anyway. “Besides, we’re here to work on telepathy, not precognition.”
That was only the first time he came to work with me, and it wasn’t long before a part of me looked forward to seeing him. He was a new face, and he didn’t treat me like I was a pain in the ass—another change from Goba and the rest. But besides that he was more interesting than he looked. He told me that he had total recall, he remembered anything he saw or heard perfectly; that it was a skill any psion could develop, even me, if I wanted to work at it. I told him I had enough problems. But he must have accessed nearly everything on the Net, and almost anything I asked about he’d explain: stardrives or computer memories or just what my pants were made of …
“… and telhassium is the thing that ties them all together. It makes the data processing detailed enough and the transportation economical enough so that it’s worth someone’s while to make cheap denim clothing on Earth and ship it all the way to Ardattee.”
“Yeah?” I rubbed the knee of my jeans. “These really came all the way from Earth? Hell, they’ve seen more of the galaxy than I have.” I laughed.
“They have a longer history, too. The original denim cloth…” And he was off again. Half the time what he told me was so technical I didn’t know what he was talking about, but I tried not to let it show. Sometimes I wondered whether he really understood what he said himself.
But he seemed to enjoy having an audience. Not the way a performer did, or not exactly—it wasn’t just that he liked to show off. But sometimes I caught flashes of a need that ran strong and deep inside him, felt him aching for acceptance. I was a challenge to him, and from the minute I’d taken that first camph and started answering him, I’d been feeding a little bit of that need. Knowing that, I used his need, because that was what life was all about—using and being used. I knew how to fake interest; and sometimes I didn’t even have to fake it when I was listening to him. That just made it easier. “What’s—telhassium, that runs worlds?”
He smiled, blissed on the pure pleasure of knowledge. His eyes looked toward something beyond the pastel green laboratory walls. “Telhassium is element one-seventy. Its pure form is a blue-silver crystal used for information storage in computers. They lock data into the electron shells, and they can run a whole planet’s information web off a crystal as big as your fist. Telhassium makes starship travel easy, giving navigators the number-crunching computers that can set up a long jump in hours instead of weeks.
“Before they had telhassium, starships cost a fortune, and they couldn’t even…” He went on into a wilderness of words, all of them longer than my arm. “And now even a fast ship like a patrol cruiser carries less than a cubic meter of telhassium crystals on board for its computations. The big cargo ships only carry a little more telhassium than an entire planet uses; and only in case of emergency, because they use the computers of mainline ports like Quarro to do their navigation. A major spaceport can compute a jump to any important system in the Federation, except in the Crab Colonies, in less than an hour.”
“Whew.” I rubbed my forehead. My mind was still stumbling in the undergrowth of words somewhere back along the trail. “I feel like I swallowed my brain.”
“Then maybe we’d better get down to wor
k.” He glanced at the databand on his wrist, looking at the time.
“Hey, not yet. I have more questions.…” I never had enough questions, because once he’d answered all I could come up with, we had to work on my telepathy.
“You must lie awake nights thinking them up.” His voice began to show an edge.
“I always work best after midnight.” But it wasn’t by choice anymore. My eyes burned from the lack of sleep. I leaned back in my seat, waiting for him to start talking again. “Gimme another camph, will you?” I put a hand out on the cool white tabletop, palm up.
He didn’t move, sitting across from me. (You’ll have to work for it this time.)
I jerked and swore, unbalancing my chair. “Don’t do that to me!”
(Why not? That’s why we’re here.)
“No!” I flinched as I heard it come out. “I mean, I know that. But I need more time. I ain’t ready.” I was pulling my thoughts in tighter and tighter, weaving defenses to keep him from getting at me again.
“When are you planning to be ‘ready’? Tomorrow? Next week? A month from now, a year? You don’t have that long, Cat!” Suddenly he was angry. “If you want to stay in this research program, you’ve got to show results. You have to be able to control your talent, not just ‘feel’ it—control it under pressure, in ways you never expected to. You have to learn when not to use it, and how to keep other psions from using it against you—” He broke off.
“Why?” I frowned, matching his own.
“Because those are the rules; and if you want to get along, you learn to obey the rules.”
“Not where I come from.” I pushed up out of my chair and moved away from him.
“You’re not in Oldcity now. But you’ll be back there in a hurry, Cityboy, if you can’t learn to cooperate.”
“What’s biting your ass?” I turned to stare at him. He’d never called me that before, or threatened me.
“Maybe that you don’t even bother to hide how little you care about all this, about what you’re doing here, or what I’m trying to do to help you.” He got up, following me but keeping out of my reach.