Psion (5 page)

“Well, what do you care about my problems? The techs already told me they don’t matter. You just like to get personal?”

He looked at me like I’d just spit in his face. “You mean you still don’t understand what you’ve been doing here?”

I looked down at the floor between my sandals. “How am I supposed to know anything? All I ever see are those damn techs. They’re all alike and they don’t tell me nothing, they don’t even speak to me. Jeezu! What am I supposed to know-that this is a prison? Where the hell are all these other psions they keep talking about? I never see any of ‘
em,
and I’ve been here forever!”

“You’ve barely been here two weeks. You’ll see them when you’re ready to work with them. And you are a prisoner-not ours, but Corporate Security’s. Until I’m sure you’ll work out for our research, you’ll go on being their prisoner, and go on being carefully watched.” He took a deep breath. “I am Dr. Ardan Siebeling. I am a medical researcher; I am also a psiopsychologist-I specialize in the treatment of emotional and behavioral problems relating to psionics. As a part of this research I’m trying to give all my volunteers-even you-what counseling I can. The whole point of this is to help you control your talents and learn to live with them. Does that answer your questions?”

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 your 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 been 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, 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 bein’ a freak. I’m
human,
I ain’t 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 whole lousy family was alien, you devil! 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 even 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 then a couple of 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 plain, so mass-produced. The stranger looked me over and said, “So 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.

“God’s teeth!”
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. “You keep out of my mind, freak, or I’ll show you what I can do.” I held up a fist.

“Take it easy.” He spoke it normally, this time. He looked nervous, which made me feel better. “Pull in your claws, Cat. I’m not here to-“

“I ain’t an animal, you piece of meat!” I brought my fist down on the table. “I’m a 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 didn’t care. 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 talked 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 a 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 mind was a net of electric fire-nerve fibers reacting to every sensation and image, every thought and feeling that 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 and, more than that, to tap and use a kind of energy normal humans were blind to. Psions had 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 an energy as universal as life-force, and as much of a mystery. 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, ugly 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.