Xenopath (17 page)

"But you
scared her away from the park, right? So she won't go back there."

He tapped his
head. "Let's hope she's as quick up here as she is at running
away."

Sukara grinned
and dug him in the ribs. "You're getting old, Jeff! You can't
even catch a seven-year-old kid!"

"You should
have seen her move!"

"Strange,
isn't it? The other day I saw a girl. She reminded me of Tiger. Now
you tell me about this kid. I can't get Tiger out of my mind."

Jeff smiled at
her and stroked her hair. "I thought of Tiger earlier. Pham does
look a lot like her."

Sukara was
thoughtful. At last Jeff said, "What is it?"

"What?"

"Su, you're
dwelling on something. What is it?"

"I was
thinking... When all this is over. When the killer is caught and the
case is closed. Maybe we could find Pham, help her out. You said
she's a street-kid, right? An orphan?"

"Her
parents were killed in a dropchute accident a few years ago. She had
a decent job till she decided to see the world."

Sukara smiled.
"She must be brave, Jeff. To give up a job, and a place to live,
and just take off like that."

"Brave,
foolish. Perhaps they're the same thing."

"Anyway,
I'd like to help her. Maybe find her a job up here, give her some
money."

Jeff hugged her.
"We've got to find her first."

She looked up at
him. "You'll try, won't you? You and Kapinsky?"

"Of course
we'll try. The kid's vital to the case. Hell, I don't want the killer
to get her."

She smiled and
sipped her wine. Until she'd met Jeff, she'd never tasted wine, only
beer. He'd introduced her to red wine, a good vintage from India, as
well as many other things.

She looked up at
him. "Jeff?"

"Mmm?"

"Are you
okay? I mean, reading minds again? You told me what it was like, back
then."

"That was
different, Su. Then I couldn't turn the damned thing off. The
mind-noise was always there, even when I was dosed up on chora. And
the drug wasn't good for me."

When Sukara
first met Jeff, over two years ago, he had looked pretty awful, thin
and haunted, with an addict's frantic look in his eyes. He'd been a
different person, then—depressed and cynical and without hope.

Then Osborne
ripped Jeff's implant from his head, intending to kill him—and
it had been the best thing that had ever happened to Jeff Vaughan.
Far from killing him, it had renewed his life, given him mind-silence
and allowed him to concentrate on small, day-to-day concerns... Like
personal relationships. Sukara had sought him out, detecting
something good behind the haunted eyes, and decided that he was the
man for her.

And now he was
reading again, all because of her, and Sukara felt more than a little
apprehensive.

"So it's
different, now that you can turn it off. But... but you're still
reading minds, aren't you? All those evil, cynical minds you said
drove you mad back then?"

He turned to her
and stroked her cheek. "You know something? I can bear that, now
that I know you. Back then I had no one. I knew Tiger, knew how good
she was, but I wasn't this close to her."

"But you
read her mind?"

"Su..."

"You knew
her better than you know me?"

Jeff sighed.
"Su, that's not true. 1 never read her. I just picked up her
mind-noise, and I knew she was good. I didn't know her better than I
know you. My God, we've been together two years now—that
intimacy is how I know you're a good person."

She was quiet,
choosing her words. "But you don't want to read me?"

He hung back his
head and stared at the stars. "Su, Su... How to explain?"

"You said
that I should use the mind-shield so that no other telepaths might
read what you tell me." She paused, then went on, "But I
think you just don't want to read my mind, my secrets."
Something awful occurred to her. She stared at him, to observe his
reaction. "You don't want to read me because you might find out
that I'm not as good as my sister, right?"

He returned her
stare, shaking his head. "That isn't the reason at all, Su."

"But you
don't want to read something in here, do you? Is it my past? What I
did in Bangkok? Is that it?"

He took her
cheek in his hand, cupping it. "Su, what you did back then is
what made you who you are today. It's not that I don't want to read
it, it's just that... Look, some things should remain your own."
He stopped and closed his eyes. She watched him. She'd seen him do
this before, in apparent frustration at being unable to find the
words to explain something to her. He opened her eyes and said,
"Okay, so we have telepathy. Thanks to some neuroscientist
working twenty years ago, some of us can have an operation to enable
us to read the minds of others—"

"I don't
see..." she began.

"What I'm
trying to say is that it isn't natural. It wasn't meant to be. If
everyone could read each other's minds, the world would be chaotic,
it wouldn't function. You see, all of us have stray-thoughts,
desires, that are more fantasy than reality—it's the animal in
us, playing something out on a primitive level. And it's these that
shouldn't be read, especially by people who are close, who have
something special." He shook his head. "I'm not explaining
it very well, but all that matters to me, Su, is you, and your
happiness—" he lay a hand on her stomach, "and little
Li in there."

She said
quietly, "So you don't want to read my mind because you don't
want to find my secrets, my fantasies?"

"Something
like that," he said.

She shook her
head. "I have no secrets, Jeff. And my fantasies are all about
you."

Gently, he
kissed the top of her head.

"One day,
Jeff, one day will you read me?"

After a short
silence he nodded and said, "Okay, one day. Su, I promise I'll
read you, if that'll make you happy."

She beamed.
"More than anything," she said.

They finished
the wine, and Jeff stood suddenly and scooped her up and carried her
into the bedroom, and Sukara wondered whether anyone in the world was
any happier than she was now.

Later, in the
early hours, she lay awake and stared out at the gibbous moon and
wondered about what she had told Jeff about her secret thoughts and
fantasies. She was convinced she had no secrets from her husband, but
perhaps Jeff wanted to save himself from reading all her petty
irrationalities—her jealousy when they were in the company of
other women, her hatred of smooth-talking men in business suits, her
grief at what had happened to Tiger... She turned and hugged Jeff to
her, and fell asleep thinking that perhaps he was right in not
wanting to read her mind, after all.

She awoke in
pain around six, and tried not to wake Jeff. She sat up, agony like
stabbing daggers in her right calf. Jeff awoke, alarmed, and then
relieved. "Thought you were in labour, Su," he said,
digging his thumbs into her muscle, easing the cramp.

He was called
away at eight by Kapinsky, just as Sukara was looking forward to a
leisurely breakfast talking to him about nothing at all. She had
breakfast alone, ate a grapefruit, and drank a glass of Vitamilk
until it was time to go for her fortnightly appointment with her
midwife. Later she was meeting Lara for coffee. She hadn't seen her
friend from the Thai restaurant for a while, and she had so much to
tell her.

The midwife
enclosed Sukara's stomach in a scanner and she watched the image of
her daughter appear on the screen, in full colour and astounding
detail. Her baby had grown a lot since the last scan, three months
ago. She could tell already that, six months on, their daughter had
Jeff's long face and strong jaw—not Sukara's round Thai face.
She stared at the curled, pink little girl in her womb and could not
stop her tears of joy.

The midwife
downloaded the images and Sukara copied them to her handset. She
would show them to Jeff after dinner tonight, a special surprise.

She was well,
and the baby was thriving, and Sukara left the clinic in a buoyant
mood.

She made her way
to the Himachal Park cafe to meet Lara, riding a crowded upchute from
Level Three and then strolling through the relatively uncrowded lawns
of the park.

It was as she
passed a particularly beautiful flowerbed—a blaze of red
azalea—that she was struck by a sudden wave of... she could
only describe it as despair. She found a park bench and sat down
quickly. It was more than despair, a feeling more definite. Almost a
premonition. She was so happy now; life was going so well, that she
knew, with a terrible certainty, that things could only get worse.
She thought for a second that she was going to lose Jeff, but somehow
knew that that was not the cause of her despair. It was something to
do with her... or the baby. No, not the baby,
her.
She was
convinced, then, that she was going to die.

She was so
happy, and most people in the world were so sad, and she was going to
pay for her happiness with an early death.

Then, suddenly
and inexplicably, the feeling passed. She told herself that she was
fine. She was fit and healthy and still only twenty-three; she had
all her life ahead of her. Years with Jeff, watching their daughter
grow...

It was her
hormones, she knew: she was taking on the burden of the world's
despair, feeling guilty for her own good fortune.

She stood up,
suddenly optimistic again, and hurried through the park to the coffee
shop.

THE END JUSTIFIES THE MEANS

"So, where
do we stand?"

Kapinsky leaned
against the floor-to-ceiling viewscreen, staring out over the ocean
with her back to Vaughan.

He sprawled in a
comfortable lounger and gave her a detailed account of everything
he'd found out the day before: his infiltration into the
Scheering-Lassiter HQ, and the fact that its employees were shielded
to a person. He told her about his finding Pham on the surveillance
cam, and his investigations which had led to the pix of the Thai
assassin.

He voiced his
concern over the assassin's motives in trying to locate Pham. "What
I don't get," he said, "is why he's after her."

She turned and
stared at him. "Vaughan, she saw the fucking shooting, for
Chrissake."

He held her
stare. "So?"

"So—she's
a witness. He's an assassin. Therefore: he wants her dead. It looks
pretty fucking simple to me."

"Well, it
doesn't look all that damned clear-cut to me, Kapinsky. Listen. Okay,
so she saw the killing. Saw Kormier sliced. But there was no way she
could've seen the killer. He was twenty metres away. It was a dark
night."

"So, the
killer was taking no chances. He read her in the vicinity, and
decided to eliminate her. I don't see your problem."

"Dammit, my
problem is that he had no
reason
to kill her. He's a
telepath—he knew she didn't see him."

"So, he's
taking no chances. Listen, we aren't dealing with your regular
Station citizen here. This guy kills for fun. 'So a street-kid might
have seen my handiwork? Great, let's butcher her while I'm at it."'

Vaughan was
silent for a time. "I think it's more than that. I think it was
something he read in her mind."

"Yeah, like
she might've seen him."

"No,
something else."

"Like
what?"

"I don't
know."

"You don't
know? What kind of investigator are you, Vaughan?"

"Ease up,
for Chrissake." He stared at her, then said, "So okay,
what've you been doing?"

"Looking
into the Mulraney killing. I've come up with something. She was
lasered in a park on Level Two. i trawled through the surveillance
cams around rhe place, came up with this."

She crossed to
her desk and turned the com-screen to face him. She tapped the keypad
and a second later the full-body image of a tall, dark-suited guy
filled the screen. It was a distance shot, and indistinct. "'Gimme
that pix of the guy you brought in."

He took it from
the lounger next to him and carried it across the room, sitting in a
swivel chair and staring at the pix on the com.

Kapinsky held up
the pix next to the screen, comparing.

The two images
were similar—both guys were of the same height, the same build.

Kapinsky looked
at him. "But you said there was something not quite right about
this guy? Like, he-was built like a Westerner but had Thai features?"

He thought she
was going to get into another critical riff—say that there were
such people as Eurasians who combined characteristics of both races.
He got in first. "Not only his features. There was something
wrong about... well, all of him. He didn't act right. Lie was a
Westerner trying to act like a Thai." As he said it, he knew how
dumb it sounded.

"But he had
a Thai face?" Kapinsky said. Surprisingly, there was no sneer in
her tone. "So," she went on, "look at this." She
tapped the keys again.

The image
bloomed, homed in on the guy's face.

Vaughan stared.
"He isn't Thai."

The guy was
Indian.

Vaughan looked
at Kapinsky. "So Mulraney's killer wasn't the guy who killed
Kormier and Tra-vers?"

"What do
you think?" she said. "Same height, build, but different
faces—gotta be two guys, right?"

"Seems that
way."

Kapinsky smiled
for the first time that morning. "You ever heard of chus?"

He stared at
her. "Shoes?"

"C-H-Us.
Capillary-holo-units."

She opened a
drawer of the desk and pulled out a small, flat case. She opened the
lid, hinged it back and turned it to show Vaughan.

The thing
inside, nestling in red velvet, resembled a silver face-stocking,
connected to what might have been a control box.