“We could use another telepath,” somebody said. “He did all right today.”
I looked past Siebeling. I’d thought everyone else had gone, but Cortelyou was still standing across the room.
Siebeling frowned. “I just don’t think he—”
“I want to stay here. I’ll work.”
He glanced back at me, hesitated. “All right, then I suppose I … Jule? If you can wait, I’ll … see you out.” For just a second he looked like an embarrassed kid.
Jule had started fading away toward the door; she stopped and came back. I saw Cortelyou grin at nothing behind her, and then he followed her back to where I was sitting.
Siebeling looked annoyed, but he only said, “When I told you what you were getting into, I didn’t tell you everything, because I didn’t know how you’d work out. Everyone else here already knows the full truth about what they’re getting into. You should understand all of it too, before you make your final decision.
“We are psions working with our abilities; the FTA is ‘sponsoring’ it. Everything I told you about that part is true. But they hope it will be more than simply a research project. They’re investigating a matter of Federation security that involves psionics; they think we may attract the attention of the criminal behind it—someone they call Quicksilver.” The word seemed to burn his mouth. I saw Cortelyou’s mouth turn down; lines of tension formed on Jule’s face.
“Nice name,” I said, raising my eyebrows. “You all got something against it?”
“Quicksilver gives all psions a bad name,” Cortelyou said, and Siebeling nodded.
“He’s a terrorist, he uses his psionic talents to commit crimes all over the galaxy.”
“What kind of crimes?”
Siebeling started to frown again. Cortelyou answered the question: “Expensive ones. Impossible ones.”
“Ugly ones,” Jule said softly, and all of a sudden I didn’t want to hear the details.
Cortelyou nodded. “He’s rumored to have multiple psi talents, all of them perfectly controlled. Just take one, telekinesis, and let your mind play with the possibilities … Combines hire him and use him against rival governments. He’ll work for anyone who pays him enough. And he uses his psi to slip through Corporate Security nets like water. So far they haven’t been able to touch him. They don’t know his real identity—they don’t even know what he looks like. But they want him stopped. That’s why we’re here.”
“We’re bait, in other words,” Siebeling said, “and if Quicksilver takes the bait, we’ll be expected to act as undercover agents. Nothing at all may happen; but if we do become involved with this Quicksilver, we’ll be in considerable danger. Because of that I’ve arranged for everyone to be credited a substantial—”
“Everybody?” I said. He nodded, and told me how much; my arm slipped off the back of the chair. “Jeezu, you mean … I’d have a rating, a databand, the whole thing? Like a real human being?”
“I suppose so.” He glanced at the clock in the lower corner of my terminal screen. “Is that acceptable to you?”
“Are you kidding?”
“Jule…” He turned to go.
“Hey, you gonna tell me any more about it?” Suddenly the strange questions the Corpses had asked me before I came here, and all the things Cortelyou had been showing me without telling me why, began to fit together in my mind.
“I thought you weren’t interested in anything but avoiding Contract Labor.”
The others looked at Siebeling, surprised, and then at me.
“Well … maybe I changed my mind.”
“Do you know anything about the Crab Colonies?” That was Cortelyou, naturally.
“I heard the Crab Nebula is an exploded star. It’s … out there, someplace.” I waved at the window.
“It’s forty-five hundred light-years from here,” Cortelyou said. “But you’re on the right track.”
“What’s a light-year?”
Siebeling sighed and put down the infolder of data he was carrying. “If you really want to know about this, you’ll have to have more background than you do. I suppose we can give it to you.…” So the three of them told me about the Crab Colonies and the FTA and Earth, and what all that had to do with us being here at the Institute.
The Crab Nebula, Cortelyou said, was a cloud of gas and debris—what was left of a supernova, a star that had blown itself up before humans ever left home. To astronomers on Ardattee it looked like a smoke ring; and like a smoke ring it was expanding through space. A light-year was the distance light could travel in a year—moving at around three hundred thousand kilometers a second. But even at speeds like that it took thousands of years for the light to reach us here; the real Nebula was even larger than the nearly five-thousand-year-old image they saw from orbital observatories. Several star systems with habitable worlds were located near the Nebula in space; those were the Crab Colonies.
The Federation Transport Authority controlled the Colonies directly, and the rest of the Federation indirectly, because it regulated shipping. The FTA had grown out of something that had been set up long ago back on Earth, before the days of stardrives and space exploration. Its original purpose had been to oversee trade for the confederation of multinational corporations that finally took over earth’s old national governments. As the solar system was terraformed and settled, making shipping and trade a thousand times more complicated, the FTA became more important. And it grew even more by taking over the distribution of resources during a handful of intrasystem wars. Finally it began to build its own ships and even weapons and hired more security forces than a lot of corporations did.
Then faster-than-light stardrive was invented, and suddenly humans could reach the nearest stars in weeks instead of years. Suddenly Earth’s multinational corporate empires had the chance to become interstellar empires, and they started sharpening their knives to carve up the stars. The old toothless Worldgov mutated and survived; it set up guidelines for interstellar law, even though it didn’t have the power to back them up. And the new Human Federation began expanding like a bubble outward from Earth. Finally the FTA set up an expedition to prospect in the Crab Nebula for telhassium. Cortelyou had told me about telhassium—an element so rare that it was almost impossible to find outside the heart of a star. The Federation needed it by the kiloton to make its new faster-than-light stardrive cheap and simple.
The Transport Authority expedition found a piece of the exploded sun’s corpse there, still orbiting the tiny neutron star that was all that was left of its mass after the supernova explosion. They called the thing Cinder, and it was the nearest anyone had ever seen to a solid piece of telhassium ore. Once they began mining it, the citizens of the Human Federation were free to travel between settled worlds as easily as they’d traveled between continents on just one world.
But they hadn’t counted on one thing: The FTA took the telhassium for itself. Controlling the telhassium supply meant that the FTA no longer just oversaw the Federation’s transportation, it controlled it. No matter how big any combine was—and especially if it wanted to get any bigger—it had to toe the FTA’s line or it didn’t get the telhassium it needed to move its ships and process its data. The original shipping empires suffered the most, because the FTA took just about all their independent control away and made them its tools. The FTA wasn’t all that unreasonable in what it wanted—power and money—but it cut into the power and profits of everybody else. It also built up a big enough Special Forces arm to actually start enforcing some of the Federation’s laws. It kept the combines from the kind of throat-cutting competition they were used to, and they didn’t much like that. But they lived with it.
So an isolated Colony of the Federation grew up out around the Crab, controlled by the FTA and independent from everything else. And the rest of the Federation, even though it was still only a few hundred light-years across, wasn’t a bubble shape expanding evenly into space anymore. It started to stretch out toward the Colonies. Earth
lost its economic influence, and Quarro became an independent Federal Trade District, the new center of power and money and everything worth having.
All of that was why Quarro’s District Corporate Security, the FTA’s own soldiercops, had gotten involved in something going on way out in the Crab Colonies. The FTA had learned through its spies and informers that some sort of dirty business was taking shape out there, and they figured some combine or alliance of combines was backing it. But they couldn’t get any closer to the heart of it; all their leads just kept slipping through their fingers. They were sure Quicksilver was behind the plot, whatever it was. That made them real nervous, because the telhassium supply was out there in the Colonies. But eventually they learned that Quicksilver had contacts here in Quarro—and that he was looking for recruits.
So we were here to work undercover, to find the real source of the trouble and make sure it got stopped before it knocked the Federation on its ass. Siebeling made it sound like making history, like poor psions saving the galaxy. I thought about that, and about me as a big hero.…
Siebeling said, “Keep that smirk off your face. This isn’t a joke. If you can’t take it seriously, I’ll send you back—you aren’t being given the chance to slide out of anything here.”
I sighed. “I’m glad you ain’t a mind reader.”
Cortelyou laughed and shook his head. Siebeling just turned away, looking toward Jule.
I watched them leave together, all of them going home when I couldn’t. My head was crammed so full of information that I felt like moving would make everything overflow. I thought about psions plotting out in the Colonies, about going out there and stopping them, about being a hero and a part of history. I looked down at my hands, at my bare wrist that would be wearing a databand in a few more weeks … at the broken thumb that had healed crooked after I’d picked the wrong pocket once. And I realized suddenly that I was glad I wasn’t going home.
* * *
The next day Goba and his techs used their brainwashing on me again, giving me a screen of half-true memories that would protect the real truths I knew now from anything but a direct telepathic probe. And beginning the next day Dere Cortelyou worked me harder than ever, forcing me to learn the mind tricks I needed to handle a direct attack. It wasn’t any easier; but at least now I knew why I was doing it, so it was easier to keep trying.
And then I really was a part of the research program, playing psi games with the rest of the psions and waiting for something to happen. Before long I began to wish we’d be waiting there forever. Sometimes I think that was the happiest time of my life.
It surprised me how fast I’d gotten used to the Sakaffe Institute, because it was so different from—everything, from before. I had decent clothes that fit me. I could eat as much as I wanted to, anytime I felt like it. I even had my private room. They’d stopped locking me in at night, but by now it didn’t matter: the bed was soft, clean, and mine, and that was all I wanted. There were a dozen different projects going on at the Institute besides ours, too; and once they’d gotten used to seeing me, the lab workers let me hang around and watch. Or just sit and stare at the threedy in one of the lounges, if I felt like it. I didn’t even miss Oldcity’s kind of drugs; just looking out any window was like some kind of an alindith dream. I had to pinch myself sometimes to be sure it was all real, that I wasn’t just dreaming.
I even liked to think about what I was supposed to be doing here: I’d seen a vid on the threedy, Nebula Pioneers, about colonists and miners out in the Crab Colonies making a home in the alien wilderness. Life was hard out on the frontier worlds, but it was exciting, and no one cared what you’d been before, only what you were trying to be now. It was a place where you were free to start again, and maybe make it all come out right this time. I thought maybe I’d like to try that; thought about using some of my money to go out there when this was over. I was glad we were supposed to be helping them.
But more than anything else I liked working with the rest of the psions—even if it meant being one myself. It was hard work, and Siebeling always seemed to make it harder; but I never wanted to quit. I was even starting to be good at it. I think I’d have been good even if I hadn’t been trying to keep Siebeling off my back. I wanted to be good; I guess I wanted to prove something to somebody. Maybe to myself.
Even so, I wouldn’t have had a prayer without Jule taMing. After that first day, whenever we had to work with any equipment she stayed around afterward, and went over everything we did with me until I knew it from memory. I’d half expected Cortelyou would take over teaching me, but he only laughed and said he knew where my attention was now—meaning on Jule—and I might as well follow it. I swore at him, blushing, and did.
Jule taught me how to use one kind of equipment after another: she taught me letters and symbols that stood for the same thing on different boards; she worked with me until I could pick things up almost as fast as anyone else …
“… then that, and that—” I touched the wrong square and the comm display lit up with red. “Shit.” I pulled back from the touchboard, shaking out my hands.
Jule leaned past me and cleared the panel for the tenth time, her dark hair brushing my shoulder. “Those two letters are almost the same; anyone could make that mistake. Try again,” she said, still as patient and calm as she’d been an hour before. Somehow she never made me feel stupid.
But that didn’t stop me from feeling stupid anyway. “Jeezu, I ain’t never gonna get them straight! They don’t mean nothin’!”
She looked down at me directly for once. “You’re tired.… Your body is screaming for sleep. Why do you stay awake all night, when you know you have to get up and work?” It wasn’t critical, just curious.
I tensed; it still made me uncomfortable when she knew exactly what I was feeling. She was an empath besides being a ’port: she knew what everybody felt, whether she wanted to or not. I frowned at my hands. “I’m used to it.” Back in Oldcity I’d stayed awake all night because that was when the crowds were out, and I lived off the crowds. Now I stayed awake because I was afraid to sleep.
Her face told me that she knew there was more, but she looked away and didn’t push it. She had her own fears. She shut off the comm’s touchboard, murmuring, “They don’t mean anything.…”
I followed her across the lab. Outside twilight was staining Quarro a deep violet-blue; lights were coming on. There was a roof garden a few stories down below us; trees moved in the cool air of dusk. Jule lit up another display screen and began to work with it. I stood beside her, looking out; close enough so that my hip brushed hers. And suddenly I couldn’t help thinking about how close she was, touching me, the way her hair moved.… I felt a rush of heat rise through me, and wondered what she’d feel like, be like, if we—
The thought that she knew everything I felt hit me like a bucket of cold water. I tied my mind into a knot, trapping the thought inside, and moved away from her.
She looked up, startled—either because she’d felt what I felt, or just because her awareness of me had been stopped dead. I looked out the window, taking out a camph, rocking on my heels.
“Cat?” She called me back. I couldn’t tell what she was thinking, but for just a second the corners of her mouth turned up a little. She wasn’t looking at me as I stopped beside her, but she said, “You move like a dancer. You’re very quick and graceful.”
“Me?” I laughed, embarrassed. “Comes from walkin’ on eggs all the time.” I pushed my hands into my pockets. It was the first time I could ever remember anybody noticing something good about me. “What’s that?” I nodded at the display. It was just a plain bright screen with a couple of controls below it. There were three letters printed on the screen.
“That’s your name.”
I touched it with my hand. “My name?”
She nodded, tracing the symbols with a stylus, naming them, C-A-T spells Cat.
I said the sounds after her. “I’ve seen all those letters before.”<
br />
She nodded again.
But now they really mean something. I reached out, pulled back a little, finally took the stylus she was holding out to me. I touched its tip to the screen, leaving a bright smear.
Someone came into the room. I felt it before I saw them … Siebeling, and a Corpse with him. I jerked around, dropping the stylus, looking for another way out—
Jule’s hand caught my sleeve. “It’s all right. He’s not here for you. It’s me he wants to see.”
“You?” But already I saw that he wasn’t FTA, that he was wearing the insignia of some combine government. “Jule, are you in some kind of trouble?”
She didn’t answer. Siebeling came over to us, leaving the Corpse waiting in the doorway. Jule usually started to smile whenever she saw Siebeling, but this time her face was set and pale, and her mind was full of darkness.
“Jule, there’s someone here to see you,” Siebeling said.
She nodded, keeping her head down. “I know. I don’t want to talk to him, Ardan. Make him go away, please.…” She began to bite a fingernail.
“I think you should talk to him.” Siebeling’s voice was quiet, but it was almost an order. “Jule, you didn’t tell me that you—”
She picked the stylus up and put it into my hand. “Here,” she whispered. “Practice.” Then she moved away from us, toward the Corpse, her arms folded in front of her and her hands clutching her elbows. She was trying to hold in her tension, but I could feel it like electricity in the air.
“What’s he want? She’s not being arrested, is she?”
Siebeling glared at me like I’d insulted her. “Of course not. He brought a message from her family.”
“Her family?” There was something so solitary about Jule that I’d always thought she must be as alone as I was. Siebeling was the only other person she ever really talked to besides me. The two of them had had a thing going almost from the start; everybody knew it even though they pretended not to. It wasn’t easy to keep a secret from a bunch of psions; and Jule was only just learning how to keep her feelings hidden at all. She might as well have shouted it. If she wanted to get involved with Siebeling that was her business; but I couldn’t help wondering what she saw in him. “They sent a Corpse to tell her? Whose colors is he wearing?”