Psion (23 page)

He slapped me. Jule stood frozen, staring at us like we must be out of our minds. Siebeling said, “I was right all along about what you were.” And his mind was pushing it all down again. . . . He turned and left the room. Jule stood a second more looking at me; but the pain was too strong inside her, she disappeared without a thought.

(I hope you never find out!) I flung it after Siebeling, before I collapsed again in the tangled bedding. I lay still for a long time with a crushing ache in my chest.

I was halfway up the hillside when my knees gave out. I almost managed to make it look like I’d meant to sit down. The view wasn’t bad, except that you could still see the town, and I didn’t want to think about it now-not the blank-walled room where I’d memorized every crack in the plaster from flat on my back; not the miners in the happy house down below it just waiting to spot my bond tag, or the psions waiting to spot a lie, or the spaceport, or anything else human. . . . I was free from all that, even if it was only for an hour, and all I really wanted was to reach the top of the hill. But in one and a half gravities I still felt like crawling, and I’d never have gotten this far without a stick in my hand and Dere Cortelyou walking beside me. He came up here whenever he could, “to get away from my mind,” he’d said.

“Next time,” Dere said, following my eyes and reading my thought.

“Yeah, sure.”
I answered him out loud, because like most human psions he wasn’t used to not talking, or to having his questions answered before they were asked. There was a reason why humans didn’t make more joinings. I wiped my forehead on the sleeve of my parka, feeling the cold spring air chill my flushed skin.
If there is a next time.
I didn’t let him hear that; hadn’t let him know what I already knew-that Rubiy had come back during the night. I was trying not to think about it myself, right now. It was too good just to be with somebody who felt sane and calm and didn’t want anything from me.

Dere sat down beside me. I leaned back on my elbows; the soft thick moss grass was like velvet under my hands. The air smelled heavy with new life; rustling tendrils of bark spilled down the trunks of the trees. Beyond the golden green of young leaves the sky went on forever. Just thinking about how deep it was, how endless, made me giddy. All my senses felt more alive in this one moment than they’d ever been in my whole life-because in my whole life I’d never had a moment like this, in a place like this; and because with Rubiy back I knew more clearly than I ever had that I had to take it while I could. I wished that Jule could be with us, or that she could be sharing what was in my mind right now; that I could feel a poem take root in it, to crystallize the feeling and make it last forever.

But Jule’s mind didn’t lie open to my feelings or to my need the way it had before: before I was well, she told herself; before I’d said what I had to Siebeling.
And knowing that, I kept away from her thoughts and shielded my own.
“Where did all this come from?” I said, to keep myself from
thinking,
and Dere from wondering. I lifted a hand across the view of green. “Did it just happen?”

He laughed, folding a piece of bark between his fingers. “No. Life is rarely that simple.” His mind shrank tight around the irony; for a second his mind screamed tension, out here where he could, before he got it back under control. Even he wasn’t really sane and calm, playing spy in a nest of mind readers-especially not him. He’d been right before, back on Ardattee, when he’d told me that he wasn’t much of a telepath. I knew it a lot better than he did now, with my new clearer mindsight; knew how hard he struggled to keep his thoughts to himself, and how afraid he was that he wouldn’t be able to. But he was still the same Dere, and he couldn’t leave a question unanswered. “Every species of living thing you see here was transported to Cinder from somewhere else, originally.” He spat out the end of a camph and fished another one out of his jacket.

“By humans?”
I said, starting to get interested. I watched his hands. “Gimme one of those,” reaching out.

He shook his head.
“Doctor’s orders.
You’re still sick.”

“I could be dead, tomorrow. All of us could.” I wagged my fingers. “C’mon.”

His cold-reddened face went a little gray; but he reached into his pocket and brought out another camph.

I stuck it into my mouth, and laughed once. “Funny.”

“What?”

“How worried Siebeling is about my health now. He didn’t give a damn what happened to me with Contract Labor.”

He glanced at my bond tag. “Maybe he thought you’d be better off with them than you were in Oldcity.” Always ready to excuse and forgive. “Contract Labor builds worlds. And it can give someone with no skills a chance to learn one. I’ve seen it work on Hadder’s World-I’ve seen combine contract laborers who went on to good solid company jobs. The FTA colonized Sephtat with government contract labor, and now it’s independent, one of the biggest exporters-“

I swore, and drove it into his brain with the rush of ugly memories that filled me up.
“’Builds worlds,’ hell!
It mangles them, and it uses warm bodies because they’re cheaper than machines!”

He put his hands up to his head; brought them down again, slowly. When I saw his face, I was sorry, but I didn’t let it show. I let him tell me he was sorry, instead; that he hadn’t known what I’d been through, that I was right and he was wrong.
Because I needed to hear it from somebody, even if it was only him.
He said, “I know. . . . Ardan’s a bitter man, hard on everyone-especially himself.” The same thing Jule always said. “Not an easy man to understand, or love.”

“Jule don’t seem to have
no
trouble.” I looked away, drowning my thoughts in the endless sighing green of the mountains.

“Jule has a gift most of us don’t have.” He didn’t mean just her psi. “And she has the problems to go with it.”

I chewed on the camph, watching the sky, the ribbons and veils of color against the deepening blue; until suddenly I heard what lay between the words. I looked back at him. “You’re the one, ain’t you?
The one who-who stopped her from drowning; who told her about Siebeling and the Institute and the research?”

He nodded, glancing down, his smooth brows twitching. “It was dark. She doesn’t remember, or recognize, me.” He meant that he thought it was better that way.

“
You done
a good thing, anyway.”

He sighed, plucking at wisps of moss grass. “To answer your question: no, the humans didn’t bring life to Cinder. It was all here waiting for us when we arrived . . . along with the ones who brought it all here before us.”

“You mean the Hydrans?” I sat up again, locking my hands across the ankles of my boots. “What the hell were they doing here?”

He shrugged. “I’m not sure. I’m not that familiar with Colonial history. Siebeling could probably tell you-
“ He
broke off, seeing my expression. “Well, you can always . . .” He stopped again. “I can look it up for you.” His job here was taking care of the tape library.

“Yeah, I know. . . .” I grinned a little. “If I ever get out of this, I guess I oughta take up reading.” He laughed. “You know anything about the Hydrans? The ones here, they-they live inside that thing you told me about, a joining, all the time. Are they all like that?”

“Not that I’ve ever heard.” He shook his head. “But they probably all have the potential, in a way humans don’t-because they have every other psi talent anyone’s ever discovered. They got the name Hydran because we encountered them first in the Beta Hydrae system-but it took on a double edge when we learned what they could do with their minds. Beta Hydrae is a star in the constellation they call Hydra on Earth; in human mythology the Hydra was a many-headed monster.”

I made a face.

“But no one can really deny that they’re more like we are than we want to admit. There have been xenobiologists who’ve claimed that Earth is a world of defective Hydrans-psionic deaf-mutes, mental cripples.”

Something turned inside me; suddenly I was listening to him talk about humans like they were strangers, almost aliens. . . . “What happened, then? If the Hydrans could kill a human just by thinking about it, how come the Federation took over all their worlds?” Because I knew that was true; knew the Hydrans lived among humans like something less, the ones who were still alive.

His round face got soft with guilt. “They can’t defend themselves.” He opened his mind and showed me: just because they could kill with a thought, Hydran minds had developed in a way that kept them from ever doing it. If a Hydran killed another being, the act destroyed built-in mental guards; the telepathic shock of the death would recoil and kill the killer. They couldn’t commit any violent act without sharing in the consequences. I realized then why the Hydrans here had never been able to drive out the human miners. And that it was why they’d been easy prey whenever the Human Federation decided it wanted something they had.

He showed me how once they’d had an interstellar civilization more highly developed than even our own-one that had been so different it almost seemed like magic to humans, because it was built on psi. It had passed its peak by the time we found them, and we hurried it on into collapse-taking what we could use and calling the rest worthless, like the frightened barbarians we were. . . . (I saw it all happening in Dere’s mind, wrapped in his words.) We’d pulled down their cultures, ruined their worlds, destroyed millions of lives, and all they’d been able to bring against it was pleas and protests. That hadn’t been enough to save them. I thought about Siebeling’s wife. And now the last of their people were living like strangers on their own worlds, or relocated on worlds the humans used as dumping grounds, among the people who’d destroyed them and who despised them, because they couldn’t kill the way humans could. . . .

And I thought about my mother, or my father; whichever one had been Hydran. And I thought about the one who must have been human. . . . I sat, chin on my knees, looking down the green slope at the far, glittering snowfields, and I didn’t say anything for a while, because of the lump in my throat.

Finally Cortelyou said, “You don’t know what happened to them?”

My parents.
I tangled my thoughts, angry at letting myself slip that far. “I know; it’s in here someplace.” I touched my head. “I just can’t remember.”

“Siebeling-“

“I don’t want to talk about Siebeling.” I cut him off before he could even finish the thought. I thought about the Hydrans instead-who shared everything, and knew everything about each other, even about me.

“Cat, what happened to you when you were with the aliens? Something did, I don’t need Siebeling’s pointing it out to know you’re a hundred times the telepath you were.”

I shrugged. “They did it. I dunno how. They made me join with them, and something
just.
. . came loose.”

“You made a real joining? What was it like?” His voice was hushed, almost embarrassed. His mind filled with sudden, hopeless longing, with envy for what I’d shared . . . with a need and a bitter loneliness I’d never thought I’d see inside anybody else, especially him. But maybe it was there all along, inside every human being, that voice crying and never being answered. And maybe for a telepath, living like a one-eyed man in the land of the blind, the loneliness was worst of all.

“I . . . uh, well . . .” I looked at the ground, wishing I could show him somehow. Because I wasn’t good at words; because words were too solid, too clumsy and heavy, never really meant to show what I felt anyway. . . . “It was-like all the highs I ever had, and all the burnouts.
Confused and bright.
A thousand voices singing all at once. . . . Like an ocean, like a whirlpool. . . . Like drowning. . . .” I moved my hands. (I don’t know how to tell you.)

He half smiled. “I know.” His own stubby hands clung together. “How did it make you feel?”

“Scared” was all that came out of my mouth. But I couldn’t tell him that what made me feel that way
was knowing
it could fill my every need.

He was disappointed. I felt him force his mind away from it. “How good is your telepathy now?”

I looked up at him again. “Better than anybody
I seen
here.”

He raised his eyebrows.
“Better than Rubiy?
That’s what Siebeling claims you told him.”

I pressed my mouth together. “Did he tell you to find out?”

“No.”

“Then I’ll tell you the truth. I dunno how good I am, compared to him. I never felt a mind like his. It’s like a wall.”

“Your mind is a wall to me now, when you want to keep me out. And it’s as clear as the sky when you want to communicate.”

“Yeah?”
I stretched my arms, letting the stiffness out. But he was watching me too close, and I felt the stray thread of a thought tickle my own . . . relief, that I still didn’t know his secret. . . .
His secret?
I eased further into his mind, following the strand back, not bothering to hide what I was doing. He tried to tangle his thoughts, to turn me away with confusions and distractions and half-truths leading nowhere. But I followed the true thought on and on, seeing the paths he tried to make me ignore and choosing them each time, feeling his panic grow. . . .