Psion (7 page)

“Do you know what a ‘joining’ is?”

I shook my head.

“It’s a meeting of minds, between a telepath and another psion, so complete and unguarded that their minds become one-each open to the other totally, with nothing held back. Their psi powers are heightened, each one’s by the
other’s
; they do things they could never do alone. It’s the ultimate form of giving, of belonging. It’s like nothing else you can experience, and it can change the ones who join forever. . . .” His eyes were alive with longing.

“You ever do that?” I asked, because he expected something.

“Once.”
His clenched fists opened; I heard more joy and loss than I’d ever heard filling one word before. “A pure joining is very rare. It’s almost impossible for more than two human psions. It’s a combination of the highest ability and the deepest need. . . .” He looked up at me again, and his look told me I’d never experience it, unless somehow I could make my brain stop chasing its own tail.

“I can’t imagine ever wanting to get that close to nobody.” I leaned back, away from him.

He leaned back too, and sighed. “Well, a journey of a thousand miles starts with the first step.”

After that the steps got longer. Now that I could actually make contact with him, he began trying to teach me all the things he’d said I had to learn about controlling my talent. I didn’t see what was so important about most of what we did. But then, I didn’t understand most of what was happening to me here, anyway. I hardly even knew when I was confused, half the time.

He told me I’d had it easy working with technicians who weren’t psions themselves; their concentration and control was so poor that any telepath could keep them at bay. Working against another psion was going to be something else. He explained to me how trained telepaths could sort out the strands of image that patterned someone else’s thoughts; how they could locate one particular pattern, follow it along all its branching ways to their scattered ends and back again. He also told me how another telepath could protect that pattern by weaving a shield-burying it behind and between tangles of other images and information-or by sensing the probe and sidetracking it, braiding the intruder’s mind into a false strand, a lie. Most psions were better at protecting themselves from a mindread than normal humans, even if they weren’t telepaths, just because they were more in control of their own minds.

I was supposed to be a stronger telepath than he was. It should have been easy to keep him out of my mind. But I hadn’t been feeling my mind, exercising my talent-and he had. He told me that if one telepath knew the tricks of thought-tracking and the other one didn’t, the greenhorn couldn’t hide his deepest secret, no matter how much raw confusion he put up to save himself. Then to prove it, he’d make me nervous or angry. I’d forget what I was doing, and he’d walk right into my mind. He didn’t usually go very deep, but he didn’t need to. Using my telepathy never got any easier, and feeling him pry into me like that still drove me crazy. And then he’d jump on me anyway for letting him do it. For someone who looked so soft, he was as tough as steel when he was doing his job.

And no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t trick him, and that just made it worse.

But in spite of everything, working with Cortelyou I finally began to act like a real telepath. Or I thought I did, even if nobody else did. But Goba didn’t have any time left to be fussy, he said, when he finally sent me to meet the rest of Siebeling’s psions.

The psions were sitting in a circle of chairs, maybe a dozen of them, in a pearly-walled room with a floor of patterned tile. One wall looked out on the sky here, too; farther up in the building, and higher in the air, than I’d ever been before. Siebeling was at the head of the circle when I stopped in the doorway. He frowned at me like I was late and said, “This is
Cat.
He’s a telepath.”

They stopped talking. I spotted the red-haired woman from the day I’d first come here, staring at me. I didn’t want to go into that room, and know what they were thinking, and be laughed at. What the hell were they staring at, anyhow-? But then I saw the woman with empty eyes who’d given me the scarf. She was watching me too, but her eyes weren’t empty this time; and suddenly I saw myself from the outside, clean and neat in a fresh smock and pants, looking like anyone else. I wasn’t dirty and dye-smeared now; they were all strangers here, too.
A calmness
came over me somehow, and suddenly everything was all right. She half smiled at
me,
and her eyes dropped. I went and sat down, at the end of the circle where all the seats were empty. I pulled a pack of camphs out of my pocket and stuck one into my mouth. Then I finally noticed Cortelyou sitting with the rest of them. He nodded at me.

Siebeling began to talk about how most psions felt afraid or ashamed because they didn’t understand their abilities, and society didn’t understand psions. Once they learned to control their minds the way they controlled their bodies, they’d see that they weren’t freaks; that being a psion could be a good, valuable thing. He called psionic talent the Gift, and he said that it didn’t have to hurt
them,
it was something to be proud of. Learning how to control the Gift was what we were doing here at the Institute. He was smiling all the while he spoke; pride and encouragement filled the words. I’d never seen him like that-it made him look like a different man. I watched other faces around the circle while he spoke, and some of them looked like they’d never smiled much at all, but they smiled now with him.

Afterward we started in on new exercises. Siebeling put a candle on the table behind him and said we were going to use our Gift to help us light it. He held a lighter up in the air and let it go; but it didn’t drop. He was controlling it with his mind, by telekinesis. It drifted, past him through the air, and lit the candle. He blew the candle out again and tossed the lighter to the woman who’d smiled at me.
“Jule?”
I don’t know why it surprised me to learn Siebeling was a psion too. A lot of things suddenly made more sense about him. I tried not to stare.

Jule stood up, and then she was standing next to the candle, and then she was back in her seat, before I’d even blinked-she could teleport. The candle was
burning,
the lighter was on the table. Siebeling nodded; she looked down.

Someone else made the lighter float again, telekinesis, a little shaky; and then Siebeling was throwing it to me.

“What am I supposed to do with it? I ain’t a teek.” But he didn’t say anything. I sat there feeling stupid and angry, and then suddenly words filled my mind.
(Fellow telepath.
Ask me to light it.) I looked around the circle until I saw somebody grin at me. It was Cortelyou. I asked with my face but he shook his head.

(Ask me.)

His mind was open to mine. I thought, (Will-you-light-the-candle?) gritting my teeth.

He blinked. (Don’t shout. I’ll be glad to.)

I threw him the lighter. He reached over and lit the candle. Siebeling nodded, and tossed the lighter out again. It went on around the circle, and I started to feel like maybe this wouldn’t be so bad after all.

And when the lighter came to the red-haired woman, she just got up and walked over to the candle to light it, as if she couldn’t find any other way to do it. That made me smile, but she didn’t look embarrassed. Siebeling saw me grinning. He said, to everyone, “Dana’s talent is precognition-predicting the future. Psionic skills vary, just as artistic skills do. Sometimes your skill will be the only one that can solve a problem; sometimes it’s the only one that won’t. Don’t feel self-conscious if you have to do something the hard way-like the rest of humanity.” Everyone else laughed.

Later, when I couldn’t move a
chair,
and neither could Cortelyou, Cortelyou shrugged and thought. (
There’s always the cards
. We’re the only ones who can cheat.) I laughed out loud then, so that everyone looked at me, and the woman named Jule smiled again. And I guess I’d learned more than a couple of psi tricks that afternoon.

But then Siebeling said something while I was thinking about that, and everyone got up to leave. I looked across at Cortelyou and thought, (What?)

(It’s time for What to Do until Corporate Security Comes.)

I wondered what the hell that was supposed to mean, but I got up and followed everyone else.

It turned out to be another laboratory I’d never seen before. I sat down in a chair in front of a terminal and touchboard like everyone else, and someone at the end of the room began to talk to us about communications. He might as well have been talking backward for all the good it did me. I couldn’t understand anything: I sat and felt bored, rolling a camph between my fingers, until he began saying, “Touch the segment labeled ON. Now spread your fingers across the area marked with . . .”

I stared down at the board in front of me, and put out my hand, and pulled it back. My skin started to itch. I can’t . . . Cortelyou wasn’t anywhere near me; I couldn’t ask him for help. But Jule was sitting next to
me,
she looked like she knew what she was doing. I tried to reach into her mind. She gasped and her hand went up to her face; her mind drove me out with a bright flash of terror. Then her gray eyes were full of shadow and surprise, staring back at me. She was as afraid of intruders as I was.

I turned away, back to the terminal, my hands clenching. But it was already too late; Siebeling had seen it. He came up behind me, and I felt him look past me at Jule, and then down at the dark screen, before he said, “What’s the matter?” I didn’t say anything.

“Touch ON.”
Like he was trying to be patient.

I just sat there, feeling him get angry. “I can’t.”

“What?”

“He probably can’t read, Ardan,” the red-haired precog said, loud enough so that everyone in the room could hear it.

“Oh? Is that true?”

I nodded, barely moving my head, feeling like my neck would snap.

“Then I’m afraid you’re not qualified to-“

I stood up. “Why do I have to do this? This’s nothin’ to do with being a telepath! The hell with-“ I felt a touch, like a soft hand somewhere in mind, and then all of a sudden I shut up and sat down in my seat again, wondering. A voice said, “It isn’t a crime. I’ll help him, Ardan. Come on, Cat, it’s easy, watch me. . . .”

And I watched Jule touch a corner of the grid, because I was too ashamed to look anywhere else. The screen brightened. She turned it off, and then I tried it. After a minute Siebeling said, “If you can learn to do it, I’ll tell you why you have to,” and he left us alone.

“You can do it,” she said, not looking at me.

“What do you care if I can? Why should you help me?”

Her face changed; she looked up at me with those empty eyes and said, “I don’t know.” She shrugged. And she didn’t know.

I felt stupid and confused again, I was going to tell her to mind her own, but I just said, “I’m sorry, about . . .” and I touched my head. She nodded. I didn’t say anything more to her, but I let her help me.

Siebeling came back to watch me work after the others had gone for the day. He almost seemed disappointed to find me doing things right. “If you’re going to have this much trouble with everything, I can’t ask Jule . . .”

“But I don’t mind, Ardan. He wants to stay; I’ll help him.” She got up. “I have nothing else but time.”

“We could use another telepath,” somebody said. “He did all right today.”

I looked past Siebeling. I’d thought everyone else was 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 somethin’ against it?”

“Quicksilver gives all psions a bad name,” Cortelyou said, and Siebeling nodded.

“He’s a
renegade,
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.”