Jenna Starborn (22 page)

Mr. Taff shrugged. “He asked me to fetch you and said he had business elsewhere. Perhaps he already has heard your news.”

“Did Mrs. Farraday seek him out, then?”

“I did not see her, but she may have encountered him in the hall. Come! I think you'll enjoy this.”

I allowed him to lead me from the room. “You seem to have enjoyed it, at any rate,” I observed.

“Oh, it was great fun! And I received the best news! I can hardly wait now for my future to unfold.”

It seemed pointless to warn him that this future might well be manufactured, so I was silent while we climbed the steps to the study. Mr. Taff entered with me to explain the mechanism. I was astonished to find that the room, normally quite pleasant and cheerful, had been altered to suit the mysterious circumstances of the event. Only a few lights were on, and these were turned very low, so that the brightest source of illumination came from the terminal in the middle of the room. This was not an ordinary screen, but a great crystal ball, bigger than my head, sitting on a base that appeared to be onyx but which was, no doubt, its electronic connection. It had been set up on a table, over which hung yards of dark velvet, so that it appeared to be situated inside a small curtained tent. The back of the room was in utter darkness. I was surprised to find my skin starting to prickle; I was usually not so susceptible to a staged mood.

“I take it I am to sit here,” I said, seating myself in a straight-backed chair pulled up to the table. I took a moment to glance over the crystal ball. I could detect no mechanisms for collecting or relaying data, but I was sure such devices had been installed in the base. Nor was there a keyboard, nor any way that I could determine to control any of the proceedings.

In the depths of the round glass, there appeared only a slowly turning image of a constellation on a blue-black sky. “And this is whom I am to speak to?” I asked with a note of derision in my voice. “I am not sure I can take a star cluster very seriously.”

“The psychic's face will appear once the program is activated,” he assured me. “It's stylized, of course, but not at all repulsive.”

“How do I activate the program?”

“You speak your name aloud and say you want your reading. There will be a short delay, and then the session will begin.”

“And how do I know when the program is ended?”

“She will tell you so, and the screen will revert to this.”

“It sounds simple enough. If you see Mr. Ravenbeck—”

“I know. I will tell him you need to speak with him. Enjoy yourself, Miss Starborn! I think you will find this an amazing venture.”

I waited until the door had shut behind him before I opened my mouth again. Then, reminding myself that I believed in none of this, I stared at the celestial image and spoke in a firm voice. “My name is Jenna Starborn, and I have come to have my fortune told.”

There was a moment's complete silence while the constellation continued to rotate on its field. Then suddenly the globe went absolutely blank, and the air thrummed with a faint background music. Just as suddenly, the interior lights of the ball flashed again, and resolved themselves into the image of a woman's face. It was a virtual woman, with flowing dark hair, snapping eyes, and so many necklaces and amulets wound around her throat that I could not begin to count them. She looked to be an amalgam of every gypsy and tarot reader produced in the last ten centuries.

“Well, Miss Starborn,” she said in a pleasing, husky voice. “What is it you would like to know about yourself?”

I smiled. “I already know everything I need to know about myself, though I am curious to know how much of that you may have discovered.”

“Ah! A skeptic. Have you come to seek a reading against your will?”

“Not unwillingly, but with very low expectations that you will be able to tell me much of the truth—or the future.”

“I know your past well enough, though, even you will agree,” she said in that gravelly voice. “Your name
Starborn
suits you very well, though you might almost have been called Jenna
Unborn.
For you were not delivered as an ordinary child might be, but generated by science and harvested through technology. You were raised, though not loved, by the Rentley family on Baldus, until you left for an education on Lora. Where you stayed fourteen years until taking your position here as technician. Do you agree that I know the details of your history?”

“They would not be hard to discover with a database and a little research,” I said calmly enough, though I admit to being somewhat shaken. My existence at Lora was a documented thing and I had, after all, sent my resume through the StellarNet, but I had told only Mrs. Farraday of my conception. I would not have expected her to repeat the tale, certainly not to a conjured mystic. Still, the records were there for anyone who had the time and leisure to track them down.

“True enough, and research is a valuable tool for someone in my profession,” she said—which I considered a very odd admission for someone labeling herself as a sensitive. “Let me go on to say that your strange origins have engendered in you a passionate belief in the equality of all persons, regardless of race, gender, status, or ability, and that—more than most people who hold such beliefs—you try to live by them.”

“I am a PanEquist. I suppose you could have gotten that information from any member of this household,” I said. I still found it difficult to believe that Mrs. Farraday—or Janet Ayerson or Ameletta—would have gossiped about such things to such a listener, which rather confirmed some of my earlier suspicions. The master of the house had had a hand in supplying background information to the medium about all his guests, the better to provide her with a chance of reading their fortunes aright.

“Further,” she said, as though I had not spoken, “this belief in your equality creates a great well of tension in your soul, as you struggle with the disparity between what you want and what you realize you can have.”

“I would presume that is a common dilemma for many in my situation,” I said. “But I do not agonize over that disparity, as you suggest. I see it, I acknowledge it, I go on.”

“The disparity need not exist,” she said in a low, whispering voice.

“What?”

“The gulf you perceive, between what you want and what you are entitled to—that gulf can be crossed with the frailest bridge that you yourself can construct.”

“I have no idea what you're talking about,” I said calmly, though I could feel my pulse begin to quicken.

“Do you not? What image that you are afraid to gaze on in broad day is imprinted in secret on your heart? What name do you practice in silence that you would not dare to speak aloud? What future do you envision, knowing it will not be realized? I tell you, gaze on that face. Speak that name. Imagine that future-and it will be yours.”

Now my heart was beating so radically that I was afraid to make the smallest movement for fear my violent shaking would be betrayed. She whispered of hopes so impossible I had not even dared articulate them to myself. “I have no need to build bridges,” I said, making my voice steady by sheer force of will. “I am content where I am.”

“Are you? In that cold, sterile environment where there is sufficient but there is not plenty?”

“Coming as I do from the life you have already described, you must realize that for me, sufficient is a blessing. It is so much better than nothing at all. I would rather sip from the glass half full than have the empty glass shattered on the floor before me.”

“You would rather be ill-fed than starving.”

“Exactly.”

“You would rather read by a few faint bulbs than sit, alone and impoverished, in the dark.”

“Yes, of course.”

“You would rather have friendship than lose that friendship by trying to convert it to love.”

I was silent.

“Ah! So there are some things for which your desires may overcome your fears.”

“It is not fear that keeps me from running through the darkness, seeking a blazing fire instead of my few flickering lamps,” I said, roused to something like anger; she was baiting me, and I could not understand why, nor could I let all her innuendo pass without protest. “It is gratitude that I have got so much. I have sat, many a night, in full darkness, with no distraction and no solace to hurry the hours along. I have been given a source of light, and a great text to read by it. Why should I complain? Why should I jeopardize that by complaining that it is not enough?”

“Exactly! The reluctance to damage the future by tampering with the present is the precise definition of fear.”

“You speak in riddles,” I said coldly.

“And you walk through your days, quaking with unspoken dread,” she replied. “You are afraid that the little you have will be taken away from you, and you know there is nothing you can to do prevent that.”

“So that is the fortune you predict for me? That I shall lose my job here, and my friends here, and be sent off into the universe alone?”

“Is that what you fear most?”

“You are the one who claims to have all the answers.”

“I think there are other things you fear even more, but that leaving Thorrastone Park would in any event be a grave blow to you. And you see it as a possibility before you—you know that there is talk of your employer marrying, and the household being broken up. And you think you are powerless to reach out a hand and alter the course of events or stay the cataclysm.”

“If Mr. Ravenbeck chooses to marry and close down Thorrastone Park, I do not see that any gesture of mine will be able to stop him,” I said with a composure that seemed to me remarkable. “He is a capable and intelligent man. No advice of mine might sway him.”

“Advice—perhaps not. But entreaty? Supplication? He might be moved by those.”

“So that is your counsel to me? To beg my employer to cancel his nuptials so that I might have a place to live and work? I believe in the equality of the classes, madam, but I do not believe in such a level field as that.”

“You misunderstand,” she said—or at least, I thought those were her words. Her image in the globe had started to crumble and distort, and her voice had started to climb to a higher range. “You should not implore him as employee to employer but as—”

And here the sound degraded altogether into a squeaky incomprehensible whine. “As a what?” I asked, leaning closer to the crystal ball, now filled with an array of random color dots. “In what role should I approach him?”

The next sound to issue from the speaker was completely different and altogether familiar. “Lord of the seven hells!” it said in the voice of the master of the house. “What's happened to the damned transmission ?”

I scooted my chair back and glanced around the darkened room. “Mr. Ravenbeck? Are you in here?”

“No—yes—I'm next door, or actually, in the hall closet. The damned connection's been broken, or something. I don't suppose you'd want to come in here and fix it?”

His voice was still issuing from the speakers, and I assumed the microphone was still carrying mine to him. I returned my chair to its place before the table. “I don't see the point,” I said. “Now that you are discovered, you may as well talk to me as yourself and dispense with this ridiculous disguise.”

The glass fizzled and cleared, and in an instant it showed me Mr. Ravenbeck's grinning face. He did not look at all abashed at being caught out in a deception-and such an ignoble deception!—but rather looked as though he had been enjoying himself mightily for the past few hours. “Well, Jenna?” he demanded. “How do you rate my performance ? Were you even a little thrilled or discomposed? Don't you think my comments were very close to the mark?”

“I think it was very bad of you to have played such a trick on me and your other guests,” I said severely. “Who knows what secrets they may have told you, thinking you were a stranger? Who knows what terrible truths you may have uncovered?”

“Well, I learned nothing from you, that's for certain,” he said, unimpressed. “Not that I expected to—but I did hope to rattle you more than I seem to have. You are so impassive! Why would you not reveal a bit more of yourself to my inviting creation?”

“Why should I be tempted to do so?” I retorted. “And I did not find her so inviting. She was judgmental and autocratic and would not let me say two words without contradicting me—much like you, sir, now that I think about it.”

He gave that sharp grunt of irritation that greeted so many of my speeches and looked a little less pleased with himself. “The others were not all so reticent, I assure you.”

“And did you play the gypsy with each of them as you did with me? I thought you had subscribed to a service. Were you in fact the psychic for all your guests?”

“No, only for half of you,” he said. “I let the program read what fortune it would for Mrs. Ingersoll and Ameletta and Melanie and Mr. Luxton. It was only for you, Miss Ayerson, Bianca, and Mr. Taff that I intervened.”

“And why the four of us? Why were we singled out?”

“I have more of an interest in your fortunes.”

“More in mine than in Ameletta's? More in Mr.
Taff's?”

“It is not easily explained.”

“No, I would not think it could be explained at all!” I exclaimed. “I hope you did not, in this illegal manner, obtain any information that would embarrass any of the others. I was on my guard against you, but the other three might have come with more open hearts and told you things they should not have revealed.”