Xenopath (5 page)

She pulled her
blanket from her backpack and arranged it on the bench, then lay down
and stared up into the amazingly complex arrangement of a tree's
branches high overhead.

She had seen
someone murdered. One second they had been alive, and the next
someone had killed him. Then the killer must have seen her jump down
and run, and maybe the killer thought that she'd seen him, and
decided that she must die too.

But the white
light that had hit her in the face?

She fingered her
snub nose and high cheekbones and her forehead under her fringe. They
felt fine, no burns or cuts or anything.

She had a
headache, but that might have been from all the excitement of the
past hour.

She snuggled
down into the blanket and closed her eyes. She thought about Abdul,
and wished he was still with her.

Minutes later
she heard a voice in her head.

Pham,
it
said,
do not be frightened. I can help you.

THE CUT

Vaughan awoke to
dazzling sunlight and sat up, hospital linen cool to his touch. The
last time he'd come awake to the warmth of the rising sun... It'd
been two years ago, again in hospital, just after Osborne had tried
to kill him and Sukara had saved his life.

Only then did he
open his eyes fully and make out Sukara, sitting beside the bed, her
outline dark against the sun's glare. She was gripping his hand.

"Su,"
he whispered.

"How do you
feel?"

"Great.
Tired." He'd had the operation, then? To say he'd undergone
intrusive brain surgery, he felt well. Not even a headache. He
reached up, felt around the base of his skull. He could feel the
bulge of the implant beneath his skin.

He was
implanted. He was telepathic again. But the world was mind-silent.

Sukara leaned
forward and kissed him.

He lost
consciousness and slept.

The next time he
woke, a doctor or technician was tinkering with his handset,
presumably repro-gramming it in order to control the function of his
occipital implant.

He closed his
eyes and dozed.

Then Kapinsky
was in the room with him. This time, the tiredness had gone; he felt
bright, alert. He sat up.

"How
long—?"

"You had
the cut yesterday," Kapinsky said. "Everything went well. I
had techs check the implant—it's doing fine. Your handset's
been boosted." She laid a pin in a case on his bedside table.
"This'll fill you in on your handset's new functions."

He raised a hand
to his head and felt stubble, then recalled that he'd been shaved
before the cut.

Kapinsky was
standing beside the window, looking out over a sloping greensward.
She turned and said, "You're going home today. I'll be in
contact in the morning, fill you in on the cases we'll be working
on."

He nodded.
"Great."

She smiled.
"It's good to have you on board, Jeff."

"Thanks."
He tried to work out how he felt about the new life that awaited him.
He concentrated on how Su's life would be changed for the better, and
tried to disregard the thought of mind-reading again.

Later that
afternoon, Su waddled in, holding her bump and smiling. He was up and
dressed and ready to leave.

"Guess
what, Jeff?" Her eyes were dancing with the delight of good
news.

"Surprise
me."

"I've been
doing some apartment hunting while you've been recovering. I've been
given tours of some real palaces. You wouldn't believe it."

"Found
anything?" He packed his bag, watching her. She was dressed in
baggy maternity trousers and one of his old shirts.

She beamed. "Two
places lined up. Both west side, with sea views. One on Level Three,
in Song Mah. Four rooms, five kay a month."

"Expensive."
He whistled. "But exclusive."

"The
other's on Level Two, Chittapuram."

"Which do
you like better?"

She rocked her
head, lips pursed. "Maybe the Level Two. It's cheaper, just four
kay a month. Three big rooms like you wouldn't believe. I mean, the
kitchen alone is bigger than our old place."

"Lead the
way," he said.

They left the
hospital and dropped to Level Two, then took a short walk through
wide, airy corridors towards Chittapuram. Sukara's delightful
excitement at their relocation dispelled his apprehension. She
gripped his hand and chattered like a child.

Five minutes
later they reached the apartment.

She proudly
swiped the lock and swung open the door, almost dragging him inside.
"Well, what do you think, Jeff?"

The first thing
that struck him was the cascade of sunlight that slanted in through
the west-facing wall-to-ceiling viewscreen. He gazed around the
lounge, open-mouthed. It was vast, perhaps ten metres long by five,
plush cream carpet, sunken sofas, a holo-unit in the corner. The
sheer view over the sea increased the apparent area of the room to
agoraphobic-inducing proportions.

She took his
hand and tugged him into a bedroom perhaps half the size, and then a
small bedroom. Both had en suite bathrooms. "This one is for
Li," Sukara pronounced.

Finally she
showed him the kitchen. "I'll be able to create feasts here,
Jeff. Just look at all the space!"

They returned to
the lounge. "What do you think?"

"This is
the one. I don't even want to see the other." He held her. "Well
done."

She lodged her
hands on the jut of her belly. "We'll be happy here, won't we?"
she said, tears in her eyes.

He kissed her
forehead, where the scar began. "We'll be ecstatic," he
said.

For the next
hour Su was on her handset, arranging the lease of the apartment and
hiring a company to move their possessions from Level Ten. She had
packed their few belongings yesterday, and they would be delivered
first thing in the morning.

Vaughan sat in a
sunken sofa, staring out through the viewscreen. They were not far
from the 'port here—and close to Kapinsky's office, too—and
he found the sight of the voidships, coming and going like so many
bees at a hive, reassuring. Below, a variety of boats from lowly
fishing dhows to oceangoing hydrofoils cut feathered wakes across the
blue expanse of the sea.

While Sukara was
still busy on her handset, he slipped a penknife from the pocket of
his jacket, laid the jacket over his knees, and sliced at the lapel.

He withdrew the
silver oval of the mind-shield, turning it in his palm.

Sukara finished
and joined him.

"What's
that?"

"A present,
from me to you." He handed her the shield.

"Great.
It's what I've always wanted. But what is it?"

He told her.

She stuck out
her bottom lip and nodded, staring at the silver oval in her hand.

After due
consideration, she passed it back to him. "I don't need it,
Jeff. I've got no secrets from you. When I married you, I told you
everything. The good and the bad. Everything. If you read my mind,
then that's fine by me."

He smiled at
her, wondering if she were offended.

He had never
read Sukara, even when he had tele-ability two years ago. He'd picked
up, when not scanning, the background miasma of her thoughts, and he
knew from these that she was a good person.

But the notion
of invading her private thoughts now disturbed him. For all she said
that she had no secrets, what she could not apprehend was that
everyone, often unbeknown to themselves, harboured subconscious
desires and longings, prejudices and petty jealousies, that no one
should pry upon, not even loving husbands.

His relationship
with Sukara was damned near perfect. He feared reading things deep in
her mind that might spoil that.

He passed the
shield back to her. "Su, the chances are that I'll never read
you—I can switch the implant off—but other telepaths
might. For security reasons, you'd better keep it. If I told you
about a case, and a rival telepath scanned you... See what I mean?"

She nodded, then
slipped the shield into her shirt pocket and looked around the lounge
like a child on Christmas day.

As the sun set
over distant India in a blazing panoply of saffron banners, Sukara
said she'd treat him to a takeaway. She'd scouted out a couple of
interesting Rajastani restaurants in the area. She left the apartment
promising to return with a feast.

Vaughan sat in
the silence of the lounge, watching the sun go down, then stood and
approached the viewscreen.

A narrow balcony
ran the length of the apartment, which he had failed to notice
earlier. It was accessible from the kitchen. He slid aside the glass
partition and stepped out.

The breeze was
warm, spice laden. He stood and gripped the rail, listening to the
muted roar of the arriving voidliners, the distant drift of sitar
music.

He examined his
handset, then looked along the length of the balcony. He was perhaps
ten metres from the neighbouring apartments—sufficiently
distant not to pick up the thoughts of their inhabitants, if he were
to activate his implant.

He wondered what
the background mind-noise might be like, when the implant was in
operation.

Tentatively,
fearing the consequences but knowing that he would have to take the
plunge sooner or later, he entered the start-up code.

A familiar
warmth surged through his head, followed by the even more familiar
medley of a million minds. Familiar, he realised, but different,
muted.

Whereas his old
implant would have amplified the emanations of surrounding minds to a
clamouring white noise, this rig kept the noise at a manageable
level, a background hum that he could tolerate.

He experimented,
probed. Two years ago, he had needed a drug called chora to make this
mind-noise manageable at all times; now, even in scan mode, he could
live with it.

He concentrated,
and it was as if the miasma of anonymous feelings and emotions that
swirled around him was a piece of music, a symphony in which various
individual thoughts were the instruments, each one different, unique,
some blaring, a surge of anger here, jealousy there; some
understated, a strand of contentment from someone strolling in the
park overhead, a feeling of love emanating from the corridor.

Then someone,
obviously in the neighbouring apartment, came within scan range, and
their thoughts cried out at him.

They were
clearer than he had ever before experienced: crystal sharp. He read,
first, a swirling undercurrent of emotion, almost like some
expressionist daub of colour on a canvas—a wave of elation, of
triumph. Then he read specific thoughts: >>
D
o
ne it!
Yes...
(Non-specific feelings of victory, of having bested a
business rival.)
>>That will show the extortionist—!

Vaughan fumbled
with his handset and killed the program, and instantly the balm of
mind-silence replaced the noise in his head. He felt obscurely guilty
for eavesdropping on his neighbour's thoughts, but more than that a
familiar, painful reminder of other people's shallow hopes
anddesires, preferences and prejudices. Life with Sukara had made him
even less materialistic than of old, and the reminder that for so
many citizens what mattered was the pursuit of wealth and possessions
he found dispiriting.

He smiled as he
stepped from the balcony and shut the sliding glass door behind him.
He'd just accepted an extravagantly paid job and taken the lease on a
luxurious new apartment. He wondered if he was as shallow as those
around him.

He found the
answer later that evening, when he and Sukara had eaten a sublime
dhal and aloo masala. They were sitting at the table before the
viewscreen, moonlight catching the cusps and curlicues of the distant
waves. Sukara was telling him about what the midwife had said at her
last appointment a couple of days ago, and Vaughan realised that the
only thing that mattered in his life, now, was the happiness of this
blithe and innocent woman, who loved him.

The following
morning, as they had breakfast at the bar in the kitchen, his handset
chimed.

It was Kapinsky.

"Change of
schedule, Jeff. We're dropping all the cases on file and
concentrating on a laser killing that happened late last night. Meet
you outside the gates of Himachal Park at ten, okay?"

And without
waiting for his response, she signed off.

After breakfast,
which he finished in silence, he hugged Sukara to him and set off for
the park, managing to hide his apprehension for as long as it took
him to quit the apartment.

He hurried
through the crowded corridors, then took an upchute to Level One,
arriving at the park fifteen minutes later.

Kapinsky was
waiting for him in the passenger seat of an over-engineered Russian
air-taxi. She signalled him and he slipped into the rear of the
vehicle as it lunged into the air with a whine of labouring turbos.

She passed him a
holstered weapon. "Keep this on you. You don't know when you
might need it."

He took the
pistol and strapped the holster under his jacket.

"What's
happening?" he asked, as the taxi inserted itself into the flow
of air traffic following colour-coded lanes high above the Station.

"Big
commission," she said over her shoulder. "Biggest I've
handled to date. Homicide is stretched as it is, and then this comes
in. Guy got himself sliced up in the derelict amusement park in
Kandalay. The commissioner got a Scene of Crime team in before
realising they didn't have enough detectives for the follow-up
investigation." She grunted. "Lucky us. It means all the
groundwork will've been done by the time we get there. We just take
the SoC's collated information and do the footwork."