Psion (10 page)

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; I 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 a neat dark beard, 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-something 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 kind 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 someone like him didn’t do things like this for no reason.

“Direct and to the point.”
He was still smiling. He settled smoothly 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 was 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 inquiries . . . deciding who would fit in, and who would simply be a liability. I’ve already narrowed my list.”

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 nervous that he could hardly count on her under pressure. . . .

“. . . And you are, of course, one of the illustrious taMings,” he was saying. It wasn’t a question. “Your family controls Centauri Transport. It’s rare to find a psion of such distinguished lineage.”

Jule frowned. “Most of them are strangled at birth.” The bitter sarcasm of it startled a laugh out of Rubiy. I looked at Jule, not really believing those words had come out of her mouth. Her hands twisted the worn black cloth of her shirt. “I’m only a country cousin.”

But doors shut in her mind; even I knew she was lying. Rubiy had to know it, too; just like he had to know that whatever she’d been once, she was nothing and nobody now.

But he said, “Nonetheless, for what we’ll be doing, it’s an excellent qualification.”

She didn’t ask why. I did.

Rubiy only smiled at me, gently.

“Okay, then.” I pulled my feet up under me.
“Why me?
If you’ve really been watching what we do, you know I ain’t worth spitting on as a ‘path. I might as well be dead for all the good I’d be to you.” I wasn’t sure if I was just asking, or trying to talk him out of something.

“You may want to think you’re the psionic idiot of this group, but believe
me,
your potential is greater than anything you’ll ever see here.” Suddenly his eyes were like spotlights, and my own were like window glass.

No. I looked down and away, shaking my head. “That ain’t-that ain’t what Siebeling thinks.”

“What Dr. Siebeling thinks, and what he really understands, are two different things.”

Jule stiffened beside me; a tiny line formed between her brows. I said, “You ought to tell him that.”

“I intend to. Because he is a doctor-and for other skills-he is also one of my ‘chosen.’” Rubiy nodded, dark humor twisting his face. His foot tapped a silent tattoo on the carpet.

“What makes you sure I’m so good?”

“The obvious: Your shield ability.
Your eyes.
That clumsy trauma-barrier you’ve built can be broken down. These incompetents have hardly breached it. And then your mind will shine like a star.”

My eyes. . . . I rubbed the scar above my left eye, feeling my body tense again.

His face changed, and so did the subject. “You’re currently on probation of sorts, from Corporate Security: you didn’t welcome the attention of Contract Labor’s recruiters. Would it really have been so bad, compared to Oldcity? They say ‘Contract Labor builds worlds.’ That it teaches you skills, and gives you a stake. That it’s a chance to escape from a place like Oldcity, a choice-“

“They say you’re better off dead than living in Oldcity, too. But that don’t mean I want to find out the hard way. At least in Oldcity I knew what to expect.”

“I see.” He-understood, somehow I knew it. I could feel it. “And what did you do there?”

“Steal things, mostly; I was a slip. But now I’m just the mental pickpocket around here.” My mouth twitched.

And then for the first time I felt his mind make contact-not to intrude on me, not to take anything, but only to give: pictures slipped loose somewhere in his memory and he showed me why he understood. . . . I caught images of a ragged, hungry kid with psi burning inside his head like fire, cursed by the Gift, like too many other psions in too many slums, in too many cities on too many worlds. But not like all the rest-not a loser, not a weakling; selling what he could do with his psi to anyone who’d pay, for anything they wanted.
Anything.
And they always paid, plenty, or they were sorry they didn’t. Until before long he was out of the slum and rich, he didn’t need to sell his talent anymore. But he still hired out, on his own terms, if the offer was right; because he was the best and he enjoyed proving it.

And he was sitting there across from me, with his arrogance licking at us like a colorless flame, the sky weeping behind his back: Quicksilver. This was Quicksilver himself-suddenly I knew it couldn’t be anyone else. He’d come here to choose us personally, not even hiding his face or name, making fools of Corporate Security without even realizing it. He was that sure of himself.

His cold green eyes held me, and I wondered what he could see in my face; but I didn’t feel him touch my mind again. “Are you interested in what I have to offer?”

“Yeah.”
My voice hardly carried to my own ears, but I let him read it in my thoughts. Jule nodded too, but she was only answering the question he’d spoken out loud.

“Good.” Rubiy stood up. The audience was over, and somehow it was more like he was dismissing us than leaving. “I’ll be in touch with you again.” And then he disappeared. A sigh of air rushed in to fill the space where he’d been.

We sat looking at the emptiness and at each other for a long time before either of us said anything. Finally I said, “Quicksilver. That was him, Jule.
Right here.”

“Quicksilver himself?
You mean he-
“ Jule
broke off, glancing from side to side, groping with her mind.

“You might as well finish it, even if he’s listening. If he’s gonna find out what we’re really doing here, it’s better if he finds out now,” almost wishing that he would.
“Before it’s too late-for us.”
I pulled a finger across my throat.

She grimaced. “He . . . he could kill without a thought, couldn’t he?”

I nodded.
Or with one.
But the memory of what I’d seen in his mind made the words stick in my throat. He was an iceman; he could do anything to anybody and never feel a twinge. Maybe he’d had feelings once-too many feelings: I’d seen his kind snap under Oldcity’s weight and turn into something that wasn’t even human. Alike . . . were we really so alike?