Psion (6 page)

I wondered again about what he was, and did. This time I asked, “What’s a corporate telepath do, anyhow?”

“I screen clients for Seleusid executives, and sometimes do security checks at their headquarters.”

“You mean you’re a croach.”

“A what?”

“A backstabber.
A paid snitch.”
I shrugged.

His mouth thinned, but if he was angry or insulted, he didn’t let it show. “Some people have said that, yes.” The words sounded used, like he’d said them too often before. But then he told me that he was also a precog-that he made predictions about the economic and political future of the combine’s holdings. I asked if he’d do it for me, but he only said that you couldn’t predict when you’d get a prediction, and that they weren’t always accurate, anyway. “Besides, we’re here to work on telepathy, not precognition.”

That was only the first time he came to work with me, and it wasn’t long before a part of me looked forward to seeing him. He was a new face, and he didn’t treat me like I was a pain in the ass-another change from Goba and the rest. But besides that he was more interesting than he looked. He told me that he had total recall, he remembered anything he saw or heard perfectly; that it was a skill any psion could develop, even me, if I wanted to work at it. I told him I had enough problems. But he must have read nearly everything ever written, and almost anything I asked about he’d explain: stardrives or computer memories or just what my pants were made of. . . .

“. . . and telhassium is the thing that ties them all together. It makes the data processing detailed enough and the transportation economical enough so that it’s worth someone’s while to make cheap denim clothing on Earth and ship it all the way to Ardattee.”

“Yeah?”
I rubbed the knee of my jeans. “These really came all the way from Earth? Hell, they’ve seen more of the galaxy than I have.” I laughed.

“They have a longer history, too. The original denim cloth . . .” And he was off again. Half the time what he told me was so technical I didn’t know what he was talking about, but I tried not to let it show. Sometimes I wondered whether he really understood what he said himself.

But he seemed to enjoy having an audience. Not the way a performer did, or not exactly-it wasn’t just that he liked to show off. But sometimes I caught flashes of a need that ran strong and deep inside him, felt him aching for acceptance. I was a challenge to him, and from the minute I’d taken that first camph and started answering him, I’d been feeding a little bit of that need. Knowing that, I used his need, because that was what life was all about-using and being used. I knew how to fake interest; and sometimes I didn’t even have to fake it when I was listening to him. That just made it easier. “What’s-telhassium, that makes things go?”

He smiled, blissed on the pure pleasure of knowledge. His eyes looked toward something beyond the pastel green laboratory walls. “Telhassium is element one-seventy. Its pure form is a blue-silver crystal used for information storage in computers. They lock data into the electron shells, and they can run a whole planet’s information system on a crystal as big as your thumb. Telhassium makes starship travel easy, giving navigators the number-crunching computers that can set up a long jump in hours instead of weeks.”

“Before they had telhassium, starships cost a fortune, and they couldn’t even . . .” He went on into a wilderness of words, all of them longer than my arm. “And now even a fast ship like a patrol cruiser carries less than a cubic meter of telhassium crystals on board for its computations. The big cargo ships only carry a little more telhassium than an entire planet uses; and only in case of emergency, because they use the computers of mainline ports like Quarro to do their navigation. A major spaceport can compute a jump to any important system in the Federation, except in the Crab Colonies, in less than an hour.”

“Whew.” I rubbed my forehead. My mind was still stumbling in the undergrowth of words somewhere back along the trail. “I feel like I swallowed my brain.”

“Then maybe we’d better get down to work.” He glanced at his data bracelet, looking at the time.

“Hey, not yet.
I got more questions. . . .” I never had enough questions, because once he’d answered all I could come up with, we had to work on my telepathy.

“You must lie
awake
nights thinking them up.” His voice began to show an edge.

“I always work best after midnight.” But it wasn’t by choice anymore. My eyes burned from the lack of sleep. I leaned back in my seat, waiting for him to start talking again. “Gimme another camph, will you?” I put a hand out on the cool white tabletop, palm up.

He didn’t move, sitting across from me. (You’ll have to work for it this time.)

I jerked and swore, unbalancing my chair. “Don’t do that to me!”

(Why not?
That’s why we’re here.)

“No!” I flinched as I heard it come out. “I mean, I know that. But I need more time.
I just ain’t-ready.”
I was pulling my thoughts in tighter and tighter, weaving defenses to keep him from getting at me again.

“When are you planning to be ‘ready’?
Tomorrow?
Next week?
A month from now, a year?
You don’t have that long, Cat!” Suddenly he was angry. “If you want to stay in this research program, you’ve got to show results. You have to be able to control your talent, not just ‘feel’ it-control it under pressure, in ways you never expected to. You have to learn when not to use it, and how to keep other psions from using it against you-
“ He
broke off.

“Why?” I frowned, matching
his own
.

“Because those are the rules; and if you want to get along, you learn to obey the rules.”

“Not where I come from.” I pushed up out of my chair and moved away from him.

“You’re not in Oldcity now. But you’ll be back there in a hurry, Cityboy, if you can’t learn to cooperate.”

“What’s eating you?” I turned to stare at him. He sounded like a Corpse. He’d never called me that before, or threatened me.

“Maybe that you don’t even bother to hide how little you care about all this, about what you’re doing here, or what I’m trying to do to help you.” He got up, following me but keeping out of my reach.

“What do you mean?” Knowing what he meant, that he’d seen it in my thoughts. “I didn’t-“

(The hell you didn’t!) His anger and frustration caught me from an unguarded angle, and hit me behind the eyes. (All right, shadow walker, you’ve been using my patience like a wall to hide behind; but you’ve finally used it up. No more camphs, no more questions, no more games until you show me some return.)

“Lemme alone, you vermy bastard!”

(No more being left alone! You’ll never be alone again unless you make me leave your mind-)

“Get out, get out!” I pressed my hands against my ears, like that would do any good. He was through my defenses and on the inside, and I didn’t know what to do about it to get him out again.

(Make me.) His words echoed through the circuits of my brain.

“Damn you, damn you-
“ I
was half crazy with the fear that he really meant it, that he’d never get out of my head again. I groped for a weapon-not on the counter beside me, because my body couldn’t get at him; but somewhere in my mind, where I could.
(Damn you! damn you!)
Feeling the thought leap like a spark across the gap between my mind and his.
Suddenly making the connection, holding onto it, I completed the link of thought, (You slad, you son of a bitch, get out of my mind before I burn you out!), with a jolt of white-hot rage. (Break, break!)

He broke contact: in the same second my mind was suddenly all my own again, my eyes saw him sway and clutch at a chair for support.

I swayed too, reaching out for the counter edge behind me. I swore softly.

“Congratulations.” His own voice was barely more than a whisper.
“Psion.”

“God.”
I gulped, and wiped my hand across my mouth. A few more words slipped out, more curses, as I stumbled back to the table and sat down.

Cortelyou sat down across from me again. This time he tossed me the whole pack of camphs. “Here.”

I pushed one between my lips with shaking hands. Disconnected filaments pulsed behind my eyes-signposts, beacons, patterns that had
lain
waiting for me to turn my own eyes inward and see them. . . . We sat there for a long time, not saying anything; while I tried to make myself believe what had happened, while the camph calmed me down.

“How do you feel?” he said, finally. He was all solicitude, now.

“You should know.” I glared at him.

He shook his head. “I’m not reading you now; you know that.”

“Then how do you think I feel?” I looked away, wishing this room had a window.

“Proud . . . excited . . . like you’ve made a breakthrough?”

“No. Dirty, lousy-like a freak! That’s how you’re supposed to feel, ain’t it?”

“Did Goba tell you that?” His smile disappeared.

“He didn’t have to. Every time I get close to his mind, or any of them, I can smell it.” My hands tightened into fists on my knees.

Cortelyou grimaced. “Damn them, why can’t they-“

“Why shouldn’t they hate me? Who wants to have somebody else know everything you’re thinking? I seen people get killed for less than that!”

“And that’s why you’re fighting this every step of the way.” Half question, half answer.

I shrugged, letting him think he understood everything, when he only understood half of it.

“I’m sorry I was so hard on you.” He bent his head. “I should have known . . .”

“Why should you be any different?” I wished he didn’t apologize so much; it got on my nerves.

“Because we are different.
We have to be-not just because of what we can do, but because of the responsibility it puts on us. We do things with our minds that most humans could never do, and that makes them afraid of us. ‘In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is stoned to death.’ We have to live by a stricter code than the rest of humanity, to prove to them that they have nothing to fear from us. . . .” He leaned forward. “Do you want to know how I feel about my telepathy?”

No. But I didn’t say it. I shifted in my seat, hung onto its hard, curving edges to keep from bolting as I felt him reach into my thoughts again. I held my mind loose, let the sparking strands link with his in the invisible space where our senses met. I was shaking with the effort, and I felt his mind cringe with the fear I couldn’t damp out.

But he didn’t push me away. Instead the weave of his thoughts only loosened, like the first time, as he dropped all his defenses and drew me in. The impressions he wanted me to find shimmered on the surface of his awareness where I couldn’t help seeing them: he was proud, glad,
grateful
for the Gift that he’d been born with. . . . Psionics could lead to a new future for humanity, filled with understanding and free of the fear that fed blind hatred. . . . He would never abuse his Gift, never do anything to make the blind ones think of his talent as a threat. . . . He would do anything to gain their trust, to make them understand.

But behind the images he held like banners for me to see, I felt the brand of a fresh wound laid on him by some psi-hating corporate lackey-heard the murmur of a thousand other ghosts and shadows. Fury raged in some deep part of his mind, held prisoner by his will. And I realized what it cost him to be a corporate telepath, a missionary in a world of hate-filled deadheads who didn’t want to be saved. . . .

I broke contact. “How can you live with that?”

“What?” He looked totally confused.

“They spit on you, they don’t give a damn about what you’re trying to prove. It’s eating your guts out; why don’t you quit whoring for those bastards?”

His mouth fell open. “Where did you . . . ?” His face straightened out again. “I’ve lived with it for years. I’m barely aware of it anymore.” It sounded like something he used to put himself to sleep at night. “I believe in what I’m trying to do. It isn’t an easy thing, but it isn’t impossible.” One hand clung to the other. “Haven’t you ever endured something unpleasant for something you believed in?” It was almost a challenge.

“Yeah.
Staying alive-so I could stay alive.” The words slid out, just another smart remark. But then my own mind showed me things I’d done, and let be done to me, that would probably make him say everything I’d just said to him. “I guess you get used to anything, if you have to.” I looked down.
“So long as you don’t think about it too much.”
I thought about all his facts and figures, filling up his mind until there was no room for anything else to get in the way of his belief. And I understood suddenly why this research was important to him, why I was too, why he’d had to make that breakthrough today and force me to prove he was right. I thought about my being a telepath in spite of everything-seeing the lines of psi energy shining with life force. I thought about being born to use them: the Third Eye, the Sixth Sense,
the
Extra Ear . . . about a screaming thing locked in a cell somewhere in the pit of my mind . . . about thinking too much. I took out another camph.