Sunburst

by Phyllis Gotlieb

  She looked down at her hands. “It gave me no pleasure. And I used to despise you too.”

  “You’re different.”

  “I hope so.” She looked out of the window at the barbed wire, the brick wall, the iron gates. “Why are you doing all this?”

  He sighed and blew ashes over the bedclothes. “Nothing stops you.”

  She stood up. “Maybe I don’t know enough about dealing with people. I’ll keep out of your way till I do.”

  “Sit down, you silly nut. I told you it’s hard for me to talk to anybody I can’t read.”

  She sat down unwillingly. He said, “Somebody’s coming, don’t get scared.”

  She waited. Jason ground out his cigarette and said, “Marsh.”

  “It’s me.” The old man came in. He had exchanged the orange and green sunsets for red tropical flowers with blue leaves. “I came to see how you were. I see you already have company.”

  “I’m ready for the next trip,” said Jason, with only the faintest hint of sarcasm. “Shandy, this is Dr. Jaroslav Marczinek.”

  “Oh,” said Shandy. “The Field. Now I know why you’re here.”

  Jason sighed again. “You’ll never get a simple good morning from this girl.”

  “Good morning, Dr. Marczinek,” said Shandy. “Why were you sitting in with Dr. Urquhart?”

  The old man ignored Jason’s snort, but sat down and began to fill his pipe before answering. “Because, since I find it impossible to grow outward in these confined circumstances, I have to do the best I can to grow inward.” He clamped the pipe in his teeth and calipered his skull with both forefingers.

  Shandy nodded and turned to Jason. “It’s nothing to be peeved at. Other people ask you questions when they come here.”

  “I know ways of shutting them up,” said Jason. “With you it’s different. And the people who ask you questions have a reasonable purpose.”

  “I am different. How do you know I haven’t a purpose? Just because I don’t know what it is doesn’t mean there may not be one hidden inside me… Dr. Marczinek, you seem to find me very amusing.”

  The old man finished out his laugh. “Oh, yes indeed, and very refreshing—though you may also turn out to be very dangerous.”

  “And you’re awfully truthful.”

  “You mean awesomely, I hope. I have to be—”

  “Now Marsh—” Jason began.

  “I can see why you have to be hypnotized,” said Shandy to Jason.

  “What? You’re way ahead of me—”

  “When you go in to check on the Dump. Urquhart sets up the blocks so they won’t know everything that’s going on.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Do they ever try to break the blocks?”

  “Not usually. They might make it if they tried hard, but it’s too much like work. Luckily most of them live on the surface.”

  “And the rest?”

  “I dunno…there’s one or two…never mind.” He touched his bruised head experimentally “If the toughest ones were really smart…and the smart ones really knew how to use their power and their brains…”

  Marczinek said, “Jason, before I forget, Grace wants to know if you’re feeling well enough to complete her lists of broken teeth and dislocated shoulders.”

  “Yeah. Tell her to come along. You met the doctor, didn’t you?” he asked Shandy.

  “Yes,” said Shandy. “How does she take care of the kids?”

  There was a bit of an edge to Jason’s voice. “She wheels herself in there and cleans them up, and they treat her very respectful and polite.”

  “How come?”

  Jason grinned. “I let them know Prothero told me he’d drop a bomb on the Dump if they so much as gave her a cross-eyed look.”

  “But he’s not gonna drop any bombs for you.”

  “Nope. You don’t have to mention anything about bombs to her, though. She’s a nice old doll without a mean thought in her head, and I don’t want her feelings hurt.”

  “He’s a man of true sensibility,” said Marczinek. He had been puffing at his pipe and watching Shandy with a curiosity as unabashed as her own. “Shandy, you were saying before that you felt different. Why?”

  “I don’t know why… I’ve just had the idea since I was very small. I’ve been trying to find out something about it ever since.”

  “You are Impervious, solitary, inconspicuous. Along with intelligence, I should think that would be enough. Everyone is different.”

  “Everyone is individual,” said Shandy firmly, “but nearly everyone is a lot like hundreds of other people. The kids in the Dump are a lot like each other—and like plenty of others who aren’t in the Dump—except that these are extremes, and they have psi.

  “But I’m not like most kids who get brought up any old way; that’s part of it. I haven’t had much love or attention spent on me for the past ten years, but I’ve never wanted to break out against everything or hate the world for my tough luck. I’m not unhappy.” She shrugged. “Sometimes I think I must have something missing, and sometimes I think I have something added on, and if I didn’t have it I would be unhappy—”

  “A kind of equilibrium,” Marczinek suggested.

  “I guess so. Something like that. But I see other people who I’m almost sure haven’t got it, and they seem to get along all right, even with their ups and downs…and sometimes I get frightened. Not the way I’d be if I had psi: if I had a tremendous power I couldn’t understand I’d get really scared. It doesn’t bother the Dumplings—they’ve got no imagination and all they can see is that they have something they could get even with, and it must drive them nearly crazy not to be free to use it. You’re lucky to have a use for it, Jason, even if you do get banged up.”

  “Why are you frightened?”

  “Because…once I read a story about a man who had the feeling there was something special about him…he was going to have some great and maybe terribly dangerous part in shaping the world. He loved a woman who wanted to marry him, but he was scared because he figured he was going to be called on any day to save the human race or lead the Charge of the Light Brigade, and he didn’t want to leave her widowed—”

  Jason exploded. “Jeez, what a jerk!”

  “Yeah, he was, because when his life was over and she had died he realized the only thing special about him was that feeling of being special, and he had missed everything that would have made his life valuable or happy. And that’s why I get scared.”

  Marczinek puffed in silence for a moment, and said, “I don’t imagine you’re the type to turn down a good thing when it’s offered to you, Shandy, or refuse to go after it once you see it clear.”

  “I hope not,” said Shandy. “Maybe I’m only being silly.”

  “No,” said Jason somberly. “I thought I was different once, too.”

  “But you had more to go on than I have. How did you find out?”

  “Like you read about in stories. I was about ten…out playing alleys with a couple of guys named Charley and Pink. I had a winning streak all of a sudden—I guess I must’ve been wishing extra hard because I didn’t have many alleys—and Charley knocked my best purey out of the ring and said: beat that, you jerk! And I said, ‘You’re damn right I will!’ and they both looked at me as if I was nuts. Charley says, ‘What did you go say that for? I never said nothing to you!’ And I started scratching my head…

  “It was funny, you know, because I could still hear the echo of my own voice in my ears, but nothing before that. I says, ‘Didn’t you say: beat that, you jerk?’ He turned white as a sheet—he’s Iroquois, and it took some doing—and said, ‘That’s what I was thinking!’

  “Jeez, was I scared! I shoved my alleys in the bag and ran for home, up the stairs and sat on the bed, just shaking. My mother was running the mixer down in the kitchen and hard
ly noticed I was there. I didn’t want to talk to anybody. I was grabbing that bag of alleys so hard my hand hurt, thinking: I start out with sixteen alleys, now I’ve got fifty-seven—and I’ve read a guy’s mind…like that stuff in stories, and maybe I really could do something with my mind. So I put the alley bag on the floor and loosened the string and said, ‘Git outa there! Git outa there!’ Nothing happened, and I didn’t know whether to be disappointed or glad. I thought, well, I’ll try once more. I willed them to come out and squeezed at them from my whole insides, and wow! there was a rumble in the bag and they started to pour out and rattle all over the floor.

  “Rattle! It was thunder! You’da thought the Imp bust outa the bottle. If I was scared before—it still hurts to think of it. They were shooting out so hard I had the idea they were going to bounce off the walls and ceiling and beat down on me like hail. I scrunched down in the bed and closed my eyes. My mother yelled up, ‘Jason, what’s all that racket!’ and I couldn’t say a word. When I got the nerve to open my eyes they were on the floor, just a few of them rolling around a bit. I grabbed them up and stuck them in the bag and that was it.”

  “And you didn’t play again for a while, I suppose,” Marczinek said.

  “Well, no, I didn’t have that much imagination. I was too scared to try anything else for a day or two, but I was working myself up to it. It was too important just to forget. But I didn’t see Charley and Pink around—I think they must have spread the word and everybody was leaving me alone—but I didn’t care much because I wanted to work it out. I mooched around like that for a couple of days…worried my mother because I wasn’t coming home crudded up with dirt from head to foot. And one night when I went to bed I swore I was going to try it out first thing in the morning…”

  * * * *

  Girls and boys, come out to play,

  The moon doth shine as bright as day;

  * * * *

  The moon was shining. Shandy Johnson, a sallow, thin child of five, slept in the narrow cot. Her sleep was silent and still and almost dreamless; she was not disturbed through the night, even though two or three of the Slippec girls were tossing and muttering in the big bed across the room.

  It was a quarter after eleven. Sorrel Park was a small city; there were not many people on the streets on an early September evening. The place was quiet, though there had been rumblings of uneasiness in the last few days. Several fruitstalls had been turned over; no-one saw who had done it. Three manhole covers had disappeared; neither they nor the thief had been found. A bottle had exploded in the hands of a drunk as he was raising it to his mouth; it took two interns three hours to pick the glass out of his face and hands—he had only just missed losing his eyes. The thimble-rigger at Muley’s Inn had lost his shirt and his self-confidence.

  Jason Hemmer had won too many marbles.

  There were ripening talents in the place, scattered, raw, and destructive. They belonged to children who gradually, over months and years, had singly awakened to an unchildish power and begun to use it in bursts of destruction. They were self-centered, out for the advantage. The only minds they were interested in reading were those of a fellow crapshooter or a beaten-down mother from whom they might bully an extra dollar.

  Twisting restlessly in sleep, flying and powerful in their dreams, they were unintegrated, waiting for a form: twenty-nine boys, five girls, sullen, discontented, hostile.

  One other ten-year-old boy besides Jason Hemmer was deeply disturbed. He was lying awake, furious because his father had whipped him for stealing a jet-scooter and staying out after dark to avoid punishment. His name was Colin Prothero; his father, the Major, was fifty-four years old, too old to remember what a boy was like. The boy had careered about the dark streets, swift and free, until he was caught by the Civil Police, an added indignity for the Military. He lay still in his bed, rigid with anger and resentment.

  His parents were asleep in the next room. They could sleep; it was nothing for them to shame him. He tightened his closed lids, squeezing furious red stars of hate against his retinas. And heard voices. A voice.

  Dammit, why should he turn out like? He’s had every. I always. When I was his. And it had to be the civvies. Why?

  His father was awake, then. So much the better. Let him suffer too. He waited for his mother’s answering murmur. The house was perfectly silent. He heard his father turning in bed. Silence. And again: In the morning, see about…and a mind sunk in sleep. A mind—not a voice drifting into the unconscious. A mind.

  A talent stirred. Almost unaware of what he was doing he began to probe—down into that goddam thick skull of his father’s, under the khaki-bristled hair, under the cortical laminations of sternness, resolution, duty—and stopped, repelled by a pain he could not understand.

  He retreated, frightened at the enormity of the sudden power, and twitched nervously on the bed. The pain of his welted back washed over him and woke the anger once more; he forgot everything else. When I grow up—when he grew up, what then? What could he show that unyielding man? He didn’t dare plan revenge, but he could catalogue the crimes of injustice and humiliation against him.

  Someone whispered in his ear: me too.

  Who?

  Me, me, me, me, me too.

  Thoughts flickered in and out of his mind like dust-motes in a sunbeam. The beam thickened and whitened: sleepers were stirring in their dreams, awakening thoughts caught in the pulsing flow. It grew in the mind, a white singing like blood in the compressed veins of the brain. Old men twisted in tangled nightclothes, caught dreaming in passions withered through seventy years; babies woke shrieking as though their brains had been seared in the lightning of mindforce.

  Touched off by Colin Prothero’s pain and resentment, thirty-four minds coalesced in a critical mass, and at last, a discovered form.

  * * * *

  Leave your supper, and leave your sleep,

  And come with your playfellows into the street.

  * * * *

  Curtis Quimper, who at eighteen had known something of his powers for several years, ran down the midnight street silently screaming into the minds of all wild things. He had stolen three manhole covers, and a few nights ago in the dark of an open field had sent them whirling in a planetary dance of hate around his head, clashing like cymbals, at last crashing together in a single welded mass and plunging down through the earth, atomizing moles in their burrows and melting streams of ore in the crevices of rocks below. I can do that with anything or anybody, anything or anybody, anything or anybody!

  If the form was a pack, Curtis Quimper was the leader.

  * * * *

  Scooter King, fourteen and six months out of Juvenile Detention, rose at the imperious call. He had been asleep on a pile of sacking in Koerner-the-Florist’s woodshed. His father was in jail, and his mother, with seven other children, had almost forgotten he existed. The rotted door shrieked off its binges and fell at his frantic push; he scrambled out and ran.

  * * * *

  La Vonne Hurley, a dwarf with a twisted compressed body and a mind equally ugly teleported herself into the street and scrambled on short thick legs. Her arm itched terribly because a sister had wrenched it the day before, but she was perfectly happy for the first time in her life.

  * * * *

  Frankie Slippec pulled himself out of bed from between his two sleeping brothers, jumped into his pants, and yanked an old jersey over his head. It was full of holes, and his skin shone through them like dull silver coins in the moonlight as he jumped off the windowsill, landed lightly two stories down, and ran with the rest.

  * * * *

  Come with a whoop, come with a call,

  Come with a good will or not at all.

  * * * *

  Donatus Riordan threshed and screamed in his bed. He was a hunchback with spina bifida and the children called him Doydoy because of his painful stutter. H
e had a comfortable bed in a clean room; he was well loved and cared for; his parents were perfectly decent people and there was nothing wrong with his moral sense—but either the Blowup or some other freak chance had done something terrible to the chromosome pattern that formed him and he could not help himself.

  When his parents ran into the room they found him hovering near the ceiling; he was yelling and flailing his arms; the sheets were twisted round his useless legs and trailing in a rope. He wrenched them away with the sweep of a powerful arm and disappeared before they could even think of reaching for him. There was a queer sucking noise as the air rushed in to fill in the space he had occupied.

  * * * *

  The force flared and streamed; the town was dreaming. Every ugly thought locked in the mind broke free and dragged with it the animal hates and terrors of childhood, the horrors of the Blowup, and all the small bestiaries accumulated by even the sanest mind living the calmest life.

  No-one else ran down into the street, though all felt for an instant the flash of the irrational urge. But none of them wanted to go to sleep again, once wakened. They sat on the edges of their beds, trembling, and lit cigarettes, or got up to turn on lights and put on coffee, with an ear tuned for the coming of thunder.

  Jason Hemmer stood on the sidewalk, rubbing his eyes. The telepathic surge had washed him out of his bed and into the street before he was half-awake. He had used a power he had not known he possessed. Behind him he heard his mother closing down the windows against the expected storm without knowing he was out of the house. He stepped into the middle of the road, dazed; the sky was clear with moonlight. Far down, far away, he heard the clamor of the Pack.

  They had passed with the sound of Djinns, and their unearthly echo rang in his brain. He could have joined them yet, but somehow he did not, and only stood there, with his arms limp at his sides, looking down the road.

  He heard his mother calling in sudden terror: “Jason! Jason!” and he turned back to the house, stumbling on bare feet. He had missed the express to Transylvania.

  * * * *

  Shandy slept.