“Centauri Transport. It’s a shipping combine; the biggest and one of the oldest.” And the taMing family controlled its holdings. Her family … the thought was lying on the surface of his mind, bright with his own surprise.
“You mean she’s rich?”
“Does she look rich?” He bit off the words.
I shrugged. “Not from here.” She was talking to the Corpse, still hugging herself, still broadcasting resentment. I turned back to the screen, annoyed, and started trying to copy my name.
“What are you doing?” Siebeling said it like he’d caught me defacing property.
“Doin’ what she told me to do.” C … A … T. My hand shook; I was holding the stylus like it would jump out of my fist, and the letters looked like pieces of string. I made myself relax. C-A-T. C-A-T. CAT. CAT. CAT. The picture of my name. It got easier and easier. A feeling I’d never known before took hold of me. Maybe it was pride.
“A waste.” Siebeling let the words slip out and crush it. His mind showed me an ignorant criminal, a green-eyed Oldcity street punk who was wasting everybody’s time.
I looked up, smarting with anger, ready to do something we were both going to regret. But a burst of fresh feeling from Jule cut between us—a kind of startled triumph, and then echoes of the same feeling that had begun inside me. She was walking toward us again; the Corpse was gone from the doorway. She didn’t seem to notice our tension, for once. Her own mind was clenched around the irony that her family only interfered in her life when it was going right. But her gray eyes were shining and alive as she said, “I’m staying.”
Siebeling’s tight face relaxed into a sudden smile, his relief was almost as loud as hers was. But he said, “Are you sure that—?”
“Yes.” She nodded, ending it. She started to look back at me.
Siebeling caught her hand, trying to pull her away; but she broke free. “Wait.” Siebeling shot me a dark glance past her. I didn’t say anything. Jule looked at what I’d done on the screen. She grinned at me for a second like we’d both had a triumph, and pride filled me again. Siebeling put an arm around her then, the first time he’d ever done that in front of me, and this time she went with him.
I went back to the comm console and switched it on, and went through the sequence she’d been trying to teach me. I did it a few more times, perfectly, and then I went back and wrote my name some more. I thought about asking Jule to show me some other words tomorrow: maybe I could get an instruction tape, or something.…
But after that there wasn’t any more equipment I had to learn, and somehow Siebeling always seemed to have something better for Jule to do than waste her time on me. Without her pulling me, I went back to watching the threedy like the ignorant punk I was, and just forgot about learning anything else.
But that didn’t change how I felt about being at the Institute. Being a psion, working with the other psions, was still like nothing I’d ever known. Even if some of them called me “the mental pickpocket” in the back of their minds, when we worked together there was still a bond between us. Because then we were all the same, and nothing else counted. If the psi talent made me angry, I knew that most of them knew how it felt. Only they’d lived with it, and maybe hated it, a lot longer than I had. I knew I’d been lucky in burying it all my life, and that made living with it now easier for me.
I guess it was making it easier for all of us, sharing the changes. I thought some of them even began to like me a little—Dere Cortelyou, for one. And Jule. Back in Oldcity the closest I’d ever come to having a friend was sleeping in the same room with somebody. I’d never even run with a gang. This was the first time I’d ever belonged to anything; I never figured it would feel so right. I finally had something to lose. Sometimes I was afraid I’d pinch myself once too often, and wake up for good.
FOUR
“HERE!”
(Behind you—)
“Got it!” (Thanks.)
“Keep it moving. Again!”
“All right, all right.…”
“Here!”
“No, there!” Laughter.
We were working together, caught up in what Siebeling called “juggling.” Each of us used our psi talents any way we could, to take the others by surprise or warn each other, in a free-flowing, shapeless game. We tossed things and moved things and moved ourselves, reaching out with our bodies and minds; making our control surer and more fluid, training ourselves to respond without losing focus or dropping our guard—“Damn!” Or dropping a block, or a bowl.
(Gotcha!) “Gotcha!” More laughter.
“Twenty-three! Time?”
“Catch!”
“Over and under—”
(Cat, warning.)
Jule’s sending lit my mind a second too late, as the stool that had been sitting clear across the room materialized right behind me. I stepped back into it before I could stop myself; my feet tangled and I landed on the hard ripple-rings of the tile floor. Siebeling had done it to me again. He was good, real good. Too good. I lay on the floor and thought things at him that I didn’t have the breath to say out loud, but his mind was woven solid and he didn’t feel a thing. Didn’t feel anything, the bastard—Jule did; I saw her wincing, at my anger or at my pain. Guilt pinched me, and I tried to get control of my feelings, for her sake.
The others stood shifting from foot to foot. I shut my own mind against their muttering thoughts.
“Come on,” Siebeling said, and you couldn’t tell from his voice how much he must be enjoying it. “Get up, you’re breaking the rhythm.”
“You’re breaking my neck! Why is it always me?”
“Because you’re the least experienced,” he said quietly.
“No—because you’re always on my back, that’s why!” I picked myself up, piece by piece.
“If I give you more attention, it’s because you need it. You obviously need it or you wouldn’t have fallen. Stop making excuses.”
I got up, rubbing my bruises, and kicked the stool toward him. He watched me with that look I’d gotten to know too well, one dark with something I couldn’t ever reach; as if maybe even he didn’t know why he hated the sight of me. Then suddenly he looked away from me toward Jule, and the thread of tension snapped. He looked down. He shrugged and said, “That’s enough for today. We’ll work on this again tomorrow.” He gestured toward the doorway at the far end of the hall, making a point of not looking at me now. As he turned, I heard Cortelyou mutter to him, “Quit picking on the kid, Ardan. It’s not what he needs from you. You just make him expect to fail.…” I moved away from them, straight for the door; wondering if seeing me fail wasn’t just what Siebeling wanted.
When I was almost to the doorway, I had a sudden dizzy flash, my mind’s eye saw me, like a mirror picking up the image from some other psion’s mind. But the image came from outside the room, not through the eyes of anyone here … not from the mind of anyone I knew. I stopped, touching my head. We were being watched; someone was waiting in the hall. But when I got outside, no stranger whose mind burned with cold fire was waiting for me. The hall was empty. I went on to the lifts; I got into the first one that came and sent it up before anyone else could follow me.
When it couldn’t go any higher, it let me out into the quiet lounge at the top of one of the Institute’s peaks. There were a handful of lounges spread through the building’s ice-sculpture sprawl; this lounge was one not many people bothered with, because you couldn’t see the ocean. Today the sky was weeping, lidded with clouds, wrapping the towers of Quarro in dirty gauze; no one else at all was up here. That suited me fine. I settled down into the formless pile of seat in the center of the room, letting it ease my stiffness as I took out another camph. I leaned back, watching the billowing rain slide down the transparent dome. I’d never seen rain before I came here, except once, in Godshouse Circle. It was warm and brown. I’d felt like Quarro was pissing on me, and I didn’t like it. I remembered how for a long time I hadn’t even known what the sky was.
r /> I’d thought I’d come up here to be angry, but somehow now I didn’t have the strength for it. I just felt tired. My mind lay open, gray and empty like the sky. I closed my eyes, listening to the patter and drip of water; but the space behind my eyes filled up with images of Oldcity, like tears, and I blinked them open again. “Damn!” pinching myself one more time, just to be sure.
“Cat. Come in out of the rain.”
It was Jule: I knew her voice; I knew the quick, shy whisper of her mind. I hadn’t heard the lift come up; but she didn’t need the lift. I turned on the couch and she was standing there half smiling in her dark, shroud-soft clothes, with her black hair in a heavy braid hanging to her waist. The room seemed warmer and lighter suddenly, now that I was sharing it with her. “You still here?”
She shrugged, glancing down at herself. “The world’s a prison, and we are all our own jailers.… I was still here the last time I looked.” Jule was a poet—poetry was like psi, she said, like thought, a thing that compressed images to essence. Sometimes she talked like a poet; she made a little joke of it, so that you wouldn’t mind. I didn’t mind, anyway. She came over and sat down beside me, not too close. She was like a shadow, somehow too insubstantial to be an intruder. She always seemed to know what was happening inside of me—sometimes better than I did myself—and whether she should stay or go away again.
I’d asked her once, early on, what it was like to be able to teleport. She said, “It’s good when you want to get away from it all,” not looking at me. The image that slipped out of her mind then was such a surprise that I didn’t believe it. But I knew it had to be true, so after a while I’d asked the only question I could: “Jule, what made you come here?” And knowing she’d already shown me half the answer, she said, “One night I tried to drown myself.” She told me about it like she was telling a story about someone else; how a Corpse who was a telepath had pulled her out of the lake in the park. He’d spent hours talking to her about why she hated her life, and in the end he’d told her about this research program, how they were looking for psions who needed help. He’d made her promise to look into it, so that she’d have something to hold onto again. She kept the promise.
I’d told her then why I was here—my side of it. Everyone already knew Corporate Security’s side. And it was being able to tell that mattered, letting it out; what we were telling didn’t make any difference, as if there was an understanding that no judgments would be made. But she never told me why she’d wanted to drown. She only said, “It happens when you’ve forgotten all your excuses for not doing it. I’ve remembered some of them again, now.”
Now she sat beside me looking out at the rain. I looked at the smooth profile of her face and wondered again about questions without answers. But I didn’t go after the answers in her mind. Not because I was afraid she’d catch me, but because I knew how she felt about intruders. I knew how I’d feel. Even now she was so shy that she barely spoke to any of the others, except for Siebeling. I didn’t know why she still liked to share space with me, but somehow I was glad she did. I didn’t want to do anything to make it end.
“Your mind was all gray,” she said. “Where was it taking you?” She still watched the rain. It was hard for her to look at anyone for long, she’d said: the eyes were a window to our minds.
“Oldcity.” I shrugged, working my twisted thumb, watching the rain.
“Oldcity…” She murmured the word, closing her eyes. “Here in Quarro they call it the Tank. Why is that; do you know?”
“No.” I glanced back. “Maybe because once you’re tossed down there, you can’t ever get out.”
“Fish tank,” she sighed. “Feeder tank.” She looked at her own hands; her nails were bitten down to nothing. “When I was a little girl, my father took me to a pet shop. There were hundreds of creatures there, all crying, yearning at me with their hearts; I couldn’t choose. Then I saw the fish—two walls full of them, beautiful living jewels, and another tank, half hidden away. The sides of that one were green with slime, and the fish were gasping on the surface for air, or lying stunned and still in the water, waiting for death. I asked why, and they told me that was the feeder tank, it didn’t matter how they lived. I could feel them suffering, and no one cared! I started to cry and hold my head. ‘Let me have them, Daddy, they’re sad, they hurt.…’ All the animals and all the people in the store began to moan and cry, because I projected it. My father was mortified.” Her voice roughened. She folded her fingers under; one hand hugged the other. “His changeling daughter had humiliated the family in public again. He took me away without buying me anything, and never let me have another pet.” She looked back at me, finally. “That’s what I know about tanks.… I’ve always thought, If they could only feel what I felt, if they could only know, they’d never—” She broke off, and her eyes were looking somewhere else, desperately.
I sank further into the couch, hunching my shoulders, and didn’t say anything. The spicy end of the camph smarted on my tongue.
We both jerked upright at the chime of the lift arriving, and turned to watch as the door slid open. A man stepped out—tall, middle-aged, rich. He had dark hair, an expensive hairstyle to go with the expensive hand-cast gold at his throat. He wore a summer suit draped with watercolor silk; his clothes were so simple, and fit so perfectly, that they had to have been made for him alone. He was almost as thin as I was, but his face was handsome, in a way that looked like it would last all his life.
And he was dead. I heard Jule suck in her breath beside me, feeling the same thing with her mind: nothing. No … not dead. He was Death.
“I hope I’m not intruding.” He spoke, and even smiled as he came toward us. “My name is Rubiy.” He bowed to Jule and made a series of gestures with his hands—hand talk that would’ve fitted two people meeting in a palace. He didn’t even glance at me; I was glad.
“You’re a psion,” Jule said faintly, more to herself than to him. Her own hands were motionless in her lap.
He nodded. “Yes, I am. Something we have in common.” Suddenly the deadness in my mind made perfect sense: He didn’t let anything out. But what he had wasn’t like my own blind defense; his was the kind of talent that Siebeling had told us about, the level that none of us could ever hope to reach.
“Are you joining the research?” Jule asked, with a kind of awe.
“No.” He smiled politely, but it was just something he did with his mouth. He controlled his body as perfectly as he controlled his mind. I’d seen men with that kind of arrogance in Oldcity. I knew enough to keep out of their way.
“What do you want from us?” I said, finally because somebody like him didn’t do things like this for no reason.
“Direct and to the point.” He was still smiling. He sat down on the cushioned window ledge, keeping his distance. “I heard about what Dr. Siebeling was doing here, and came to see it for myself. And to offer you a job. I’ve been more fortunate than most psions, obviously.…” He gestured with a ring-covered hand. There was something strange about the way he spoke: not an accent, but just the opposite. The words were all too perfectly shaped, like he was afraid of making a mistake. “My psionic ability has given me everything I could want. But I’ve never forgotten the suffering that psions endure in this society. And so I’ve come to offer you the chance to work for me—with me—in a project that could give you all the wealth, all the independence, all the power you ever dreamed of.”
I swallowed a laugh. “You’re not too sure of yourself, are you? What do you do with your psi, rob vaults long-distance? Heart attacks for hire?” I thought about the rumors and horror stories I’d heard, all the reasons why people should hate psions.
“Telekinesis has its uses.” His ice-green eyes narrowed. Suddenly I was afraid—afraid I might be right, afraid of him. “But neither of those possibilities falls particularly close to the mark. My venture is on an entirely different scale.”
I glanced at Jule, my skin prickling. Her look said that she wa
s there way ahead of me. I drowned the realization in mind-static before it could form into conscious thought: that this was what we’d been waiting for. The messenger from Quicksilver, the psion who could make the whole Federation afraid of his shadow. I tried to make all my sudden jangling excitement feel like it belonged to what Rubiy had just said; not sure if he was trying to read us, or even whether we’d know it if he did.
“Isn’t this happening too fast?” Jule sat forward, surprising me. “You don’t even know us.”
“On the contrary.” He shook his head. “I’ve been observing you all, privately, for days—studying your talents and your resources, making inquires … deciding who would fit in, and who would simply be a liability. I’ve already narrowed my choices.”
I wondered how much more he would have narrowed it if he’d dropped in on us a few weeks earlier, and overheard one of the “special sessions” we’d been put through.… I pushed it out of my thoughts again as fast as I could. I was realizing suddenly what it would mean to try to spy on a whole gang of psions. The thought made me sweat. But if Rubiy hadn’t seen the truth in my mind or somebody’s by now, it couldn’t be that simple, even for someone like him. The false images that we’d had put into our memories must be working; and besides, it wasn’t that easy to walk into another psion’s mind. I ought to know that, if anybody did. I began to relax, just a little.
“You have both telepathy and telekinesis?” Jule was saying.
Rubiy nodded. “As well as teleportation. I am something of a genetic freak, even among ‘freaks.’…”
I’d thought no human could do all that. Rubiy went on asking Jule questions, answering her own. Her voice was so small that it was hard to hear. I wondered why he’d choose somebody like her, someone so fragile that he could hardly count on her under pressure.…