TWENTY-ONE
I WAS BACK on the job the next day, because Elnear was back on the job. “Losing Philipa is like losing a part of my own brain,” she said to me, as we walked through the halls of the FTA plex to her office. “I’m not sure how I’m going to get through my work.”
“Is she that augmented?” I asked, surprised because I’d been sure she wasn’t. She didn’t have anything like the neural taps that Elnear did:
“No.” Elnear shook her head, a little embarrassed. “But she is formidably organized. She has everything in its place, all those little details that keep one from making a fool of oneself in public, and she can access faster than I can think, sometimes.…”
“Why can’t you just plug into all of it yourself? You’re wired. Why do you even need someone else to do it for you?”
She shrugged. “I’m really very lazy. I don’t want to spend all my time accessing, the way Natan Isplanasky does. I like to have time to step back and look the day in the eye … paint a picture, visit a new place. Philipa gave—gives me the time to do that.” The rueful smile faded, as memories piled up until her mind began to sink under them: Philipa, loss, fear, defeat, death.…
I made myself pull back before I went too far. The topalase was working, almost too well. It gave my mind x-ray eyes. It was so easy to start, too easy, with someone I knew. I could just pick up a strand of thought without even thinking, and follow it back through the maze. I could be inside someone else’s head before they knew it, without their ever knowing it … deep inside, where it got too private. Every human had things they didn’t want to share, things they didn’t want to admit … even me.
Knowing it was so easy now made me feel the way I’d felt that night at the taMings’ party: realizing that I could steal them blind … knowing that to do it was wrong. Dere Cortelyou had taught me before he died that there was a reason the deadheads were afraid of us. He’d gone too far, tried too hard to convince them that he wouldn’t hurt them. He’d worked as a corporate telepath, and they’d treated him like dirt. Rubiy had gone too far the other way, crazy with power, using everyone else like his personal property. They were both dead. Somewhere in between there had to be a survivor’s path, some way to balance on the tightrope without taking a fall that would kill me.…
We walked on in silence, neither one of us smiling.
I accessed Jardan’s datafiles when we reached the office, sucking up the next few calendar days and trying to make sense of it all—appointments, decisions to be made, data to be sent or collected. A thousand briefing details: this combine vip’s hair phobia; dietary restrictions to be careful of with that Assembly rep … somebody’s grandmother’s illness to be asked after the next time she was on some other planet. Information coming in from across half the Federation that she needed to know or wanted to know every day; changing every day. Now I understood what Elnear meant: just sorting it all out would leave her with no real time to analyze or make sense of it. Maybe I’d never like Jardan any better than she liked me. But now I respected her, at least; respected what she could do, with only a human brain.
Wearing Jardan’s data in my memory, I went with Elnear through her restless perpetual motion: walking the halls, paying personal calls where a vid would have done, as she spoke to one Assembly member after another about the upcoming drug vote. “Because when you come in person, people remember you,” she said, her eyes bright with her need to believe. I fed her names, gave her the relevant details, reading them right out of the stranger’s head if they weren’t in my own, and slipping them to her so gently she almost believed she was remembering them herself. But she knew she wasn’t. At first she gave me that Look every time it happened. But not for long.
Sometimes the people she wanted to talk to made me wait in the hall when they saw my face; usually the ones who had the most to hide. I waited outside, but it didn’t do them any good. More and more, Elnear’s eyes searched my face as she came out of a meeting, looking for clues. It took nearly a dozen calls before she finally got the nerve to ask: “Am I making any progress? Getting anywhere at all?”
I shrugged, glancing away. “Some, maybe.…”
“You don’t have to lie to me,” she said, her face settling into folds as the hope went out of it. “The answer is no.”
I nodded.
“That’s what I suspected. While I’m talking to them, I actually begin to believe that they are human beings; but they’re simply access ports. I might even convince the human being; but the human being is not what really votes, in the end.” She rubbed her neck, because she wanted to reach out and shake somebody. “Why did I even ask—?” Her head jerked with her sudden anger. Behind it was the knowledge that yesterday, in spite of everything that had happened, the special committee had finished its study of the drug deregulation—and had set it free. It would be up for the general Assembly vote in a matter of days. And she knew now that that vote wouldn’t go her way, no matter what she did.
“Why is this so important to you, anyway?” I said, trying not to let myself go ahead and find out without asking. “It’s not just the principle of the thing, and it’s not just the Council slot.…”
She gave me a sidelong glance, afraid I was about to do just what I was trying not to. When I didn’t answer my own question, she looked away again, her footsteps slowing. “My parents…” she murmured, as if she was drifting off into a reminiscence, “developed the pentatryptophine family.”
I half frowned. “Your parents? I thought pentryptine had been around for a couple of centuries.”
“About a century and a half,” she said, nodding. “Just about as long as my parents lived. They had a very long career. They synthesized or developed many of ChemEnGen’s most profitable biochemicals.…”
“And you think they wouldn’t want to see pentryptine used like this?”
Her eyes went bleak and pale. “They wouldn’t have cared … perhaps they would have been glad, because it was good for the company.” She frowned, looking down at her feet. Her mother and her father had developed all those chems and virals; but wondering how they would be used, for what, by who, had never given either one of them a moment of doubt or a bad night’s rest. And she had never been able to understand that, or to forgive them for it.
“What happened?” I asked. “To make you see it different from the way they did?”
She shook her head. “Nothing, that I know of. I’ve simply always believed that to live a life without some sense of responsibility to humanity, or for one’s actions, is—immoral, wrong.” She sighed, brushed a strand of graying hair back from her face. “I suppose I was just born that way.”
“Kind of a freak,” I said gently, and felt my mouth twitch.
She looked at me. “Yes,” she said, “I suppose so.” We started moving again. After a few steps I realized we weren’t going to pay another call; we were going back to her office.
“There’s got to be some better way,” I said. “You’ll find it.”
She didn’t answer.
I got through my office work as fast as I could, and went out for a walk. I used the first public phone I came to to call up Mikah, wanting the privacy of its security screen. His face filled in on the vid; it was the slightly washed-out image of a bandphone receiver. “Cat,” he said, with half a nod. “Make it fast.”
“You got anything for me?”
“Maybe. Tonight—?”
“Purgatory, before the show.”
“Yeah.” His image blanked out. I shut off the screen and started back through the halls, moving more slowly this time. Letting my mind drift, spreading out like fog, touching the surfaces of a hundred different minds and moving on. I didn’t even realize I’d been searching for something until I found it: Something about Stryger … and Daric. Passersby bumped into me, murmured and moved on, as I stopped, focusing in. Daric was leaving his office on the next level down, going to meet with Stryger to discuss matters of mutual interest. Yesterday’s vote, yesterday�
��s news. Daric was always a clenched fist; but the way his mind felt right now made the way he usually read seem like meditation. I sank a silent tracer into his brain, and took the first lift that came, following him through the plex. Mutual interest.… Anything they had in common had to be something I needed to know. Because it had to involve deregulation, and Elnear.
Stryger was waiting for him in a whiteroom, maximum privacy inside maximum security. But I’d planted the perfect bug, undetectable, already riding inside Daric’s brain. The room wasn’t far from the display hall where the tourists came to gape. I found a quiet corner where I could wait without looking obvious. On the wall across from me was the mosaic mural, the portrait of the people of the Human Federation—male and female, young and old, brown and yellow and black and white. Their faces stared back at me like silent judges. But I was the only one who could really decide if what I was doing was wrong or right, justified or only thieving. Deadheads. I looked up at them again, their faces, their eyes. And then I shut my stranger’s eyes, concentrating.
I opened up my senses, weaving them through the boundaryless territory of Daric’s mind like tributary streams, letting his thoughts begin to bleed into my own. It wasn’t easy, invading the mind of another psion; especially one whose brain was this sick, full of paranoid quicksand and dead-end mazes of augmentation. But needing all my skill, and being able to use it, feeling it work again with the perfect control I’d had once, made it almost a pleasure.
But I didn’t find anything I didn’t know or suspect already. Daric was Centauri’s contact with Stryger, giving Stryger instructions, suggestions, orders from the board. He was only one of too many data-feeders; most of the others were from combines with large, expensive populations. Stryger nodded and smiled and praised God for sending him such friends and counselors.
And all the while he was only half listening. Once I was inside Daric’s mind it was easy to get inside Stryger’s. I only had to step across the short empty space between them to pick up his responses. He was already one step beyond, imagining how it was going to be once they’d given him the thrust he needed to reach the Security Council, and he made the slot his own.…
And all the while Daric was talking—his voice calm, his face calculating and cool, everything about him stinking of arrogance—his own mind was twisting around and through itself like a snake, his body was twitching, sweating.… He knew as well as I did how much Stryger hated psions. It fascinated him, the way a gun lying on a table would fascinate somebody who was thinking about murder, or suicide.…
I figured I’d seen enough. I wasn’t going to learn anything new from this, anything that would help Elnear. I was wasting my time picking through garbage. I began to withdraw, slowly, carefully, not letting my disgust get in the way of my control long enough to give me away. Daric wasn’t a telepath, but his mind still had more sensitive burglar alarms than a normal human’s did.
Daric froze suddenly, as something went off like a flare inside his mind. I froze too, until I realized it was something Stryger had asked him, and not some slip I’d made, that had set off the response.
“Have you found me another?” That was the question. I reached for him again, going deeper, listening, sifting; curious about what could trigger that kind of panic reflex in Daric’s brain. What Stryger could want that he’d ask for that way—
I watched/felt Daric’s response take form, like an image rising up out of the black depths of a pool, suddenly there on its surface like a face in a mirror. “No, not yet … having a little—trouble, with my access to the supply…” And something in his mind was thrashing like a trapped animal, struggling to get free, to cry out, Take mine. Use mine. But he couldn’t say it, couldn’t, couldn’t ever …
I thought it had to be drugs. But it wasn’t drugs. Below the spoken words there were random images of the Deep End, dark streets and darker deals, but not for drugs; not this time. Tension and terror tightened like chains around an emotion they’d crushed so completely that I couldn’t even recognize it.
Flesh and blood. A body to use. Stryger wanted Daric to hire him a victim. But not just any victim. He wanted Daric to find him a psion. The way he’d done before.
Images were pouring out of Daric now: memories of red weals on pale flesh, swollen purple bruises slowly turning a face unrecognizable, screams driving pain into his own head like a nail.… Terror … Thirst …
I let them come; but I didn’t need his memories. I had my own.
It took all my control to keep from screaming inside Daric’s head—I know everything, you bastard—screaming it until his eyes bled. I broke contact; heard my voice gasp out a curse like somebody talking in his sleep. The eyes of the mural across the hall watched me, somber, curious, happy, sad.
I shut them out; stepped across the empty space and into Stryger’s mind again. Because now that I knew what he really was, there were questions I had to have answered; answers that would make all the difference, to Elnear … to my own sanity. I drove into his thoughts with one hard thrust, knowing how a knife felt when it sank into somebody’s flesh. But he never felt a thing. Deadhead. I ransacked his mind, keeping my focus tight, sealed like an antiseptic barrier. There were only two things I wanted from him. I didn’t want anything else; didn’t want him to infect me.… But I had to be sure.
He wasn’t the one. Not the one who was trying to kill Elnear. He wanted that Council slot, but he thought he already had it. God was on his side, God wouldn’t let him fail, God would make it happen. He didn’t have to help God along.…
He wasn’t the one. He wasn’t the same one who’d taken me up to that hired room back in Oldcity and beaten me up. But he’d done it to enough other freaks. And he needed to do it now, needed it bad, because of what had happened to him yesterday: caught in a lie, humiliated by a psion, by me, in front of so many watching eyes. And Daric, sweating like he had a fever, was ready to help him do it again.
I cut contact. He wasn’t the same one. Then how many were there, just like him? Just like the one who’d done it to me. Thousands? Millions? I looked at the faces of Humanity watching, waiting, one last time. “Go to hell,” I said, as I started out of the room.
TWENTY-TWO
“I GOTTA TALK to you,” I said, standing in the doorway of Argentyne’s dressing room.
She turned in her seat, away from the mirror above a cluttered table. The startled look on her face faded into something like distraction. “Oh, it’s you. Can’t it wait? I’ve got a show to do.” She was half in and half out of the Argentyne the public saw, in a coat bristling with glowing fiberoptic quills.
“No.”
She’d started to turn back to the mirror; she stopped, looked up at me again instead, in surprise. “All right,” she said. “Talk to me.” She picked up a wand and began to run it over her hair; the silver threads rose up like worshippers following the sun, and stayed that way.
I pushed clothes off of a chair and straddled it, resting my chin on its hard plastic spine. “About Daric.”
She studied herself in the mirror; she didn’t move her head, but the reflection changed and changed again, showing her different angles. “Laddie love,” she said patiently, “are you trying to save me from myself?” Warning me off.
I frowned. “I’m trying to tell you the truth.”
She shrugged, reaching up to hook an ear cuff dangling heavy rhinestones over her ear.
“Daric’s a psion.”
The earring clattered onto the table, lay there. I had her attention now. “Bullshit,” she said. She picked up the earring, not looking at me; twisted it, watching it gleam in the hard light. “Are you sure?” she asked finally.
I nodded. “It takes one to know one. He’s a teek—telekinetic. That’s how he stopped Cusp. I was there, I felt him do it.”
She looked up at my reflection behind her in the mirror. “But he said.… He’s never.… I didn’t—”
“Nobody knows it, except him—and me. He never told anybody.”
“Why not?” She honestly couldn’t imagine.
I laughed. “Why do you think? He’d lose everything if his family found out he was a freak. Look what they did to his sister.”
She turned in her seat again, slowly facing me, her face slowly changing. Her image in the mirror stayed frozen the way she’d left it, waiting. “Why are you telling me this?” she said. “You want to know if it makes a difference to me? If it matters that he didn’t trust me … or that he’s a psion?”
“Maybe.” I looked down.
“Did you really think that was going to change how I felt?” The anger behind her eyes was getting hotter. “So he didn’t trust me with a secret that could ruin his life … so he’s a freak. So what?” Her silver-nailed hand jerked at me. “At least he’s not a goddamned peeping tom!” Like me.
I shook my head. “A ‘mental pickpocket,’” I said.
“What?”
“A mental pickpocket—that’s what the other psions called me, back at the Institute in Quarro.…” I raised my head, meeting her stare. “Yeah, I picked his brains. And that’s not all I got. You know about Sojourner Stryger?”
She hesitated. “He’s the big godlover who wants to save everybody; the one who wants the drug dereg to go through? Daric’s talked about him, sometimes.…”
I nodded. “Stryger wants the same Security Council slot that Lady Elnear wants. Centauri is one of the combines backing him.… Did Daric ever tell you Stryger’s a freakhater?”
She shook her head.
“Daric is Centauri’s liaison with Stryger. He gives him his instructions—” I hesitated; pushed on, feeling my anger like a fire smoldering in my gut. “And he gets him whatever he asks for.”
Her frown came back again. “What do you mean?” she asked, impatience elbowing out her curiosity. “You mean Stryger does drugs?”
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