Psion Page 3

  He said, “Prisoner nine-double-oh-five-seven.” I nodded, even though it didn’t mean anything. He had what must have been the report from Corporate Security on the terminal, and he stared at it for a while before he looked up again. “This says you’ve got a record of petty thievery, and that now you’re charged with assault and battery against three recruiters for Contract Labor. That you attacked one man with a knife—”

  “Is that what he said? That croach. I didn’t need a knife.” He looked up at me with eyes like stones. “It was a bottle.”

  “Attacked one man with a knife, struck another, and kicked a pile of boxes down on a third. You ran away, and were arrested by Corporate Security after you broke your ankle in a fall. You were out on drugs at the time?” He sounded like he didn’t believe it.

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Why did you do it?”

  “Because I didn’t want to be shipped off to some sewer world where they can’t get nobody sane to go, and rot there for half my fucking life. Why do you think? The stinking Crows…”

  He looked bored. “There was kadge in your bloodstream when you were picked up. That was two days ago, and you’re not climbing the walls—you’re not addicted?”

  I shook my head. “I can’t afford it.”

  “None of them can afford it, but most of them aren’t that lucky. In fact, I’ve never heard of anyone who could take it or leave it.”

  Neither had I, when I thought about it, but I only said, “You have now.”

  He glanced down at the report again. “This says you’re also no mind reader. You tested wide-spectrum on telepathy but entirely dysfunctional. I’ve never heard of that before, either. You must have given the techs a real challenge: you show a ten-plus resistance to probe. I show an eight; that’s high. You have control like that and you’ve never used it?”

  I was remembering the test: the veil of tingling mesh they’d fastened over my face back at the Corporate Security station, how I’d felt when my mind began to unravel.…

  “Well? I asked you a question, Cityboy. Answer it.” His voice hit me like a slap.

  “I got a name, asshole! It’s Cat.” I was starting to believe in hate at first sight.

  His hands tightened on the desk edge. “Don’t you get smart with me. I’m sick and tired of you and all the rest. Why the hell can’t they send me something besides criminals and addicts?”

  “Okay, okay. I didn’t mean nothin’ by it.” I raised my hands. I hoped I looked as sorry as I felt—sorry for me. The last thing I wanted was to give him a reason to send me back out that door, back to the Corpse with the binders waiting in the hall. I tried to make my answer come out smooth and soft. “No. I didn’t know I was a mind reader till the Corpses told me so. I never felt—never even f-f—” Black lightning flickering at the core of my mind, someone screaming …

  Siebeling stared at me with a peculiar expression on his face. All his anger was gone. “What is it?”

  I shook my head, rubbed my eyes, feeling cold and confused. “Nothing … No. I don’t want to be a mind reader; who would?” The words spilled out before I could stop them. “All the psions I ever saw were crazy. They don’t call ’em freaks for nothin’.” I grimaced.

  “How much do you know about psionics?” His face was empty again. He pushed the glass ball away from him on the desktop.

  “Nothing. What do I care about a bunch of freaks?”

  “Psionics research”—he let it sink in—“is what you volunteered to participate in.”

  “Oh.” My ears burned.

  “That’s all. Thank you.” He stood up. The door was open. I knew then that the interview was over. And that I’d failed it.

  I went out the same way I’d gone in, wishing that I could make myself invisible. But I couldn’t. I walked past the rest of the freaks like I’d lost my Last Chance, and I saw their faces. I felt mine get hot again.

  “Wait a minute.”

  I stopped, and heard Siebeling asking if anyone there was a telepath.

  One by one, they shook their heads and said, “No.”

  I looked at him again, even though I was afraid of what showed on my face. He frowned, and then he gestured me back. Suddenly I wanted to walk out on him. I nearly stepped on him instead, getting through that door before he changed his mind.

  The first thing he said was: “Don’t think this makes anything different. You’re here because of your resistance level, but that’s the only reason. I’ll still drop you the minute you fall short anywhere. Contract Labor has requested you be turned back to them, if that means anything to you.”

  I laughed, but it wasn’t funny.

  He stood there like he was waiting for something. “Don’t you even want to know what you’ll be doing?”

  I shook my head, as much because he wanted me to nod as because I really didn’t care. “Why? Nobody’s gonna miss me.” Everything was lousy; at least this was a choice.

  But he said, “The experiments we’ll be doing involve psionics—‘mind over matter.’ Mainly it will be a group of people with undeveloped mental abilities working together to learn how to control those abilities. We’ll teach you how to be a mind reader without going crazy. That’s all you need to know for now.” I shrugged. He touched something on the terminal and a door stood open in a wall again. A different door; I uncrossed my fingers. “How long have you known the woman who came in here ahead of you?”

  “Why?” I frowned.

  “Curiosity. She suggested that I give you a chance. I wondered why.”

  “I never saw her before today.” I couldn’t think of anything else to say, so I just stood and waited until he pointed toward the door.

  “Through there. They’ll tell you what to do.”

  TWO

  I FOLLOWED ANOTHER hallway, one that didn’t try so hard to look like it wasn’t in a hospital. The tightness in my chest eased as I walked, and I took deep breaths. At the end of the hall was the doorway to a lab. Inside, a couple of people in pastel coats were sitting on the edge of an examining table, tossing out game pieces. I stopped. They looked at each other, then put the pieces back into a bowl. “Siebeling sent you?” the man with side-whiskers asked, like he thought maybe I’d taken a wrong turn somewhere.

  I nodded.

  “What are you?”

  I glanced down my body and up again. I put my hands on my hips. “Tired and hungry and sick of taking a lot of crap.”

  His face changed, first confused and then annoyed. “What’s your talent—are you a teek, or a ’path, or what?”

  “What?” I said, feeling like an echo.

  “Well, he’s not a mind reader, Goba.” The woman pushed at her hair.

  “Wrong,” I said.

  They traded looks again. The old man leaned over and put a readout onto the display screen in the tabletop beside him. He stared at it, a frown growing between his thick brows. “Take a look at that.”

  The woman peered past him. “Total dysfunction? We’re supposed to unravel that in reasonable time? God’s teeth, where do you start? What strands do you pull? How do you get through that wall?” She touched something on the screen with her finger.

  “Like the Gordian knot,” Goba said, “I think it requires the direct approach.” He chopped the air with his hand.

  The woman laughed. “Well, this one’s all yours, lucky son. If you can find a real telepath in that you can retire.” She looked up at me. “If you can even find a human being inside this pile of rags you’re doing better than I could.”

  He pulled at his mouth, starting to look too interested. I began to get uneasy again.

  I have good instincts.

  The first thing he did when she was gone was call in reinforcements. Together they stripped me and threw my clothes down the trash chute. Then they scrubbed me and disinfected me and gave me a medical that didn’t leave anything to their imaginations—all the time telling me they’d tape my mouth shut if I didn’t quit screaming for help. After it
was all over, they let me eat, in the hospital cafeteria. I ate until I got a stomach ache, and fell asleep in my chair.

  The tech named Goba and a shifting handful of others took over my life after that. They told me when to eat, sleep, and wash; they gave me the food I ate and the clothes I wore and even the bed I slept in. My life was jammed into a coffin, a soft suffocating prison where every waking hour they were beating on the doors of my mind, trying to get me to answer, to come out or let them in. Nothing like it had ever happened to me before: no one had ever had that kind of control over me. No one had ever told me when to breathe, or had even cared if I kept breathing at all.

  The techs didn’t really care, either. I was a psion, and they weren’t; they didn’t even like psions—nobody normal liked a freak. They didn’t like this job or anyone who made them work at it. But it was their job, and they weren’t going to fail because of me. Goba told me they were going to make me into a telepath if they had to crack open my skull to get what they wanted; after a while I started to believe him.

  A telepath was what I was supposed to be: a mind reader. Goba told me that the first day. He’d explained it all to me very slowly, like he was talking to a burn-out, while I stuffed myself full of cafeteria food. There were other psionic “talents,” too: teleportation meant that you could move your own body from one place to another instantly, just by thinking about it; telekinesis meant that you could move objects the same way; precognition, the wild-card power, showed you flashes of the future—or several futures—and left you to sort out the clues that led to the true one. Some psions could do more than one of those things. I only had one talent, telepathy. One too many.

  They used more strange drugs on me than I’d ever used back in Oldcity, to put my mental guards to sleep while they probed around in my brain with machines I never wanted to know about: finding areas of resistance in my mind and walling them up, drowning the fears, finding my telepathic sense and dragging it out into the open. I woke up after every session thinking everything was fine, because that was how they’d programmed me to wake up … but always I woke up soaked with sweat, raw-throated or red-eyed or with a headache the size of a sun. And then they’d throw me into a hundred different exercises that were supposed to loosen the tension that still held my mind shut, to force me to follow and control the strands of my thoughts, to feel the power move and reach out with it. I had to tell them things like what picture they were looking at when I couldn’t see it, or what they ate for breakfast, or whether they were telling me a lie.

  They always told me whether I was right or wrong, but I didn’t need it. I knew when something happened in my head that had never happened before; I felt the alien energy making static behind my eyes, a formless force stirring in buried rooms of my mind. But I couldn’t control it. I couldn’t shape it into anything like a thought message to project into someone else’s mind. I couldn’t even focus in on somebody’s sendings, no matter how much feedback they gave me.

  Because from the first time I felt the psi power wake and stretch inside me, I hated the feel of it; and no matter how often they put me to sleep and made me swear I didn’t, that never changed. It was like being forced to do something I was ashamed of in public, over and over, with all of them watching; being smeared with their disgust every time I brushed against their minds: psions were scum, psions were a threat to every decent human being, because they had the power to invade another person’s life. Psions were freaks, and they all knew I was one.…

  Whenever I got anything right, I figured they ought to be grateful, under the circumstances. But usually they only got sarcastic, telling me I could do that well by guessing, and that I wasn’t really trying. I told them I was trying, they didn’t give me any choice. “What the hell’s going wrong that I can’t just be a fucking telepath? Maybe you’re wrong about me,” I said once to Goba. Wanting them to be wrong, wanting to hear him tell me it was all a mistake, that I was as normal as he was; even while I was afraid he might really say it, and send me back to Contract Labor.

  But Goba caught my jaw with his hand, turning my face until I was looking at my reflection in the side of a metal storage cabinet. He said, “You look at that face, psion, and ask me again if I could be wrong about your mind.”

  I only shook my head, not understanding.

  He looked disgusted, which wasn’t unusual. “You are a psion; don’t try to kid yourself. You’ve got a lot of scar tissue in there,” pointing at my head, “figuratively speaking. That’s what’s gone wrong. Something fed you a tremendous telepathic shock once, so intense it burned out the circuits. Your mind could have repaired them itself, but whatever happened was so painful that it never did. So we’re trying to do it for you. But you’re still resisting.…” He sounded like he took it personally.

  “What kind of a shock?” I wondered how something that bad could have happened and left me without even a memory of it.

  He shrugged. “That doesn’t matter. It’s not our business to find out. We just repair the circuitry.”

  “I ain’t a machine; you can’t reprogram me. It ain’t that easy.” Bastard, wishing he could hear me think it.

  “Get back to your exercises.” He started to turn away.

  I stayed where I was and folded my arms. “I got a headache. I don’t think I want to work anymore.”

  He looked back at me. “Our job is to work around your problems, not to solve them. If you want to know why, see a psiopsychologist. Now get back to work.”

  And so I moved through the days like a robot, answering when Goba told me to, talking to myself if I wanted a real human conversation. The rest of the techs might as well have been robots too, for all they ever said to me. I never even knew the names of most of them. I was just one more experimental animal to them, and every night they locked me in my room. And night after night I had dreams so ugly that I started sleeping with the light on; nightmares I could never remember, that faded into the morning and left my head filled with the echoes of screaming. I never told Goba about it, or any of the others. They could all go to hell, I’d be glad to give them references, but I was damned if I’d ask them for help.

  Then one day I got my visit with a psiopsychologist, without even having to ask. Nobody bothered to tell me that was what I was getting. All I knew was that I was going to see Siebeling.

  He was more surprised than I was when the tech showed me into his office. He raised his eyebrows when she said, “Here’s Cat,” and actually looked past her out the doorway before he looked back at me. I felt the sharp stab of his surprise puncture my mind as he finally recognized me. I stopped dead, shaking the surprise loose from my thoughts, fighting my own disgust. I wasn’t used to picking up strays; for some reason his mind focused much more clearly than any of the techs’ did. There was an afterimage of confusion that cut off suddenly, leaving me alone again and off-balance inside my thoughts.

  “Sit down,” he said.

  I dropped down into the sling of the nearest chair; the metal frame creaked like old bones. Siebeling grimaced. I leaned back, swaying a little, glancing past him. This wasn’t the same room I’d seen him in before; this one was higher up and there was a slanting skylight instead of a glass wall. I tried to imagine what shape this building really was. The room was about like the other one except for the skylight, and Siebeling sat behind the desk like he was just visiting in this one, too. I wondered if people treated him the way they treated me around here. I stared at his clothes: probably not. He had the glass ball in front of him again; the picture inside it looked different from what I remembered.

  “I almost didn’t know you.”

  I think that was supposed to be a compliment, but somehow it didn’t feel like one. I shrugged.

  “How’s your ankle?”

  “They fixed it up all right.… What’s the matter, did they tell you I’m no good?” My hands tightened over the metal chair frame.

  “Who?” He looked blank.

  “Them—the techs. They keep t
elling me you’re gonna throw me out of here if I don’t work harder. I’m doin’ the best I can!” I leaned forward, the seat shifting under me.

  “I’m sure you are.” He sounded like he meant it; I sat back, easing a little. “They’ve told me that you aren’t making progress as fast as they’d hoped. They say you seem to have blocks they can’t break down. That’s what I want to talk to you about.”

  “Why?” I felt my neck getting stiff.

  “It’s part of the research. All the volunteers here are trying to come to grips with the problems their psionic ability has caused them. You’re not alone in having problems. I’m sorry I haven’t been able to talk with you about yours before this; but there are a lot of volunteers, and we’re only getting started.”

  “Well, what do you care about my problems? The techs already told me they don’t matter. You just like to get personal?”

  He looked at me like I’d just spit in his face. “You mean you still don’t understand what you’ve been doing here?”

  I looked down at the floor between my sandals. “How am I supposed to know anything? All I ever see are those damn techs. They’re all alike and they don’t tell me nothing, they don’t even speak to me. Jeezu! What am I supposed to know—that this is a prison? Where the hell are all these other psions they keep talking about? I never see any of ’em, and I’ve been here forever!”

  “You’ve barely been here two weeks. You’ll see them when you’re ready to work with them. And you are a prisoner—not ours, but Corporate Security’s. Until I’m sure you’ll work out for our research, you’ll go on being their prisoner, and go on being carefully watched.” He took a deep breath. “I am Dr. Ardan Siebeling. I am a medical researcher; I am also a psiopsychologist—I specialize in the treatment of emotional and behavioral problems relating to psionics. As a part of this research I’m trying to give all my volunteers—even you—what counseling I can. The whole point of this is to help you control your talents and learn to live with them. Does that answer your questions?”