Psion (9 page)

“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 terminal. It was just a plain bright screen with a couple of control buttons 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 seen
all those letters before.”

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 a Citicorpse, that he was wearing the insignia of some combine government. “Jule, you got a record?”

She didn’t answer. Siebeling came over to us, leaving the Corpse waiting in the doorway. Jule usually started to glow all over 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 ain’t bein’ 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 . . . even though I couldn’t see what she saw in him,
myself
. “They sent a Corpse to tell her? Whose colors is he wearing?”

“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. “Don’t worry. I ain’t planning to mug her.” 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 squash it. His mind showed me an ignorant criminal, a green-eyed Oldcity hoodlum 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 started 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 hood 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.

“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, reached out with our bodies and minds; making our control surer and more fluid, training ourselves to respond without losing focus or dropping 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 stinking- 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 started to pick 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 ripples of the 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.

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 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.