Psion (22 page)

“I think someone saw that you did.”
(Rubiy.)
The name was as plain as if he’d spoken it.

My fingers hugged the plastic tag on my wrist again.
“Yeah.
It fits . . . it makes sense. He’s got the contacts to do that?” I looked up at Siebeling again, but he wasn’t listening.

His voice was so quiet when he spoke that I had to strain to hear the words. “The first thing you did when you saw me was try to tell Galiess who I really was. You just had another chance-why didn’t you use it?”

I winced, glancing at Jule. She was biting a nail. “I-I didn’t know what I was doing, before. I was sick then.” My own voice was hardly louder than his.

“You ought to be dead-“

Blood sang in my ears, but all I said was, “Sorry to disappoint you.”

His face went white, and I realized that I’d read him wrong. Jule leaned forward, her anger and frustration suddenly back again. “You would have died, if it hadn’t been for him, Cat! No one else here understood what was wrong with you, or how to treat it. You owe him your life.”

“Maybe he owed something to me.” I stuck out my bony wrist with its red band.

Neither of them answered that; and what lay in their minds wasn’t an answer, either.

Finally Siebeling said, with an effort, “I only meant that because you’re half-Hydran, you have a higher-than-human resistance to the radiation. And you heal more efficiently.”

“I know. . . .” I let my arm drop; it felt like lead. “You know what they say about cats-we all got nine lives.” I thought about how they would’ve been safe if he’d let me die. He’d known that, too. “Maybe that is one
of
 
‘em
I owe to you.”

Jule smiled, easing a little, but Siebeling still held himself rigid. I felt his thoughts shift focus.

“And I ain’t spending the rest of ‘em working for Contract Labor!” I answered him before he could say it. “I ain’t going back to the mines. You might as well forget that right now. You heard Galiess-the psions need me, Rubiy wants me. There’s nothin’ you can do about it. You’re stuck with me.”

“We’re stuck with you?” Siebeling said, his voice rising a little. “Are you trying to tell me you still want to work with us?
After what you tried to do?”
I couldn’t tell whether he sounded sarcastic or amazed.

“You mean, after what you did to me.” I pushed forward, wrapping my arms around my knees to keep myself there. Suddenly I was really hearing his question, and wondering what the hell it meant to me.

Did I still want to work with them? Was I crazy? I thought about the times, down in the mines, when I’d imagined how good it would feel to wring Siebeling’s neck.

But then I looked at Jule again: sitting at the foot of the bed like a mediator, aching for an end to the anger and misunderstanding between Siebeling and me. And I saw the ways she’d helped me, trusted me,
believed
in me. And I thought about Dere Cortelyou tossing me a camph, telling me more than I ever wanted to know about telepathy or half a hundred other things, trying to make me understand why he even cared. . . .
About working with the psions at the Sakaffe Institute; about feeling like a part of something for the first time in my life.

And the truth twisted like a knife inside me. I’d let myself get tied to these people, let my life get tangled up in theirs. It was just like it had always been-getting involved was hanging a stone around your neck when you were already drowning. But if fate wanted you to drown, there was nothing you could do. . . . I thought about Galiess and Rubiy, and tried to tell myself that I’d be crazy to trust either of them. But that didn’t change how much I could gain by working for them. And it didn’t change how much I could lose, working against them, for somebody who hated my guts.

I realized that the silence had gone on way too long while I thought it through. Finally I said, “Yeah, I still want to work with you.”
I been
a loser all my life. Why change now? I stopped just short of finishing it out loud.

Jule’s belief reached me like a smile. But Siebeling’s eyes didn’t change, and neither did his mind. He didn’t believe me; he’d never trusted me and he never would. “You’re a bad liar, for someone with your experience.” He moved away from me toward the window.

“You got a lousy bedside manner.” I sagged back against the wall again, my hands clenched white-knuckled on the bedding. “Listen, I don’t give a damn what you think,” putting all the strength I had left into it. “You’re stuck in this, and you know it’s not gonna solve itself. I can help
you,
if you let me-you ain’t gonna survive with Rubiy if you don’t.”

Siebeling turned; his disgust caught me behind the eyes. “You’re going to protect us from Rubiy?”

“I’m a better telepath now. Better than Galiess. You want to know how I got rid of her so
fast?
I just let her know that.”

A frown pinched his forehead again. He glanced at Jule; she looked at me, surprised but not really surprised. He said, “If that’s true, then you were a fool to let her know it.”

“Uh-uh.” I shook my head, even though I wasn’t sure he was wrong. I reached out for the cup of water on the table beside the bed. (And you can believe it. I can make you believe it; I can make you believe anything if I want to.) I looked him straight in the eye as I tore apart his shield and sent the thought into his unguarded mind. He jerked physically; the recoil of his thoughts hit me so hard the cup fell out of my hand.

Jule moved to pick it up from the wet floorboards. She filled it again before she said, very quietly, to Siebeling, “I tried to tell you.” There was no sharpness in it, but there could have been.

He kept frowning, flexing his long-fingered hands, searching for words; still searching his mind for the tendrils of my own probe.

But I’d already let him go again. I was bluffing him, and I couldn’t afford to let him find out. I didn’t have the strength in me yet to hold out against him for long-even to go on talking much longer. But I had his attention now; I had to use it while I could.

“How?” he asked, finally.

“The aliens, the . . . Hydrans.”
I lifted a hand to my forehead. “They went into my mind; they changed it. Healed it, somehow . . . all of them together, in a joining. That’s how they live-with all their minds bound together. And for a little while they made me a part of it. It was . . . it was . . .”

(Like coming home,) Jule thought.

I glanced at her, with the image moving like a bright bird through my mind. I looked at Siebeling again, at the blank wall of his resentment. “How’d they get involved with Rubiy? And why?”

“By accident.
They had nothing to do with any of this, originally.” His voice darkened. “But they discovered the presence of human psions here, and Rubiy’s sucked them into it as deeply as he can, using them, letting them
think
he’s here to help them by overthrowing the mines.”

“Their ancestors promised them. . . .” I said. “What are Hydrans doing here at all? How’d they get this way? Are all Hydrans like this?”

Siebeling broke my gaze. “I don’t know,” lying. Old memories stirred in his mind, in a mass of tangled feeling.

“Come on, damn it. This’s important to me. I know you know-you said you were married to one.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.” His mind warned me away.

“What the hell’s wrong? I ain’t asking for your lousy life story-“

(Yes, you are,) Jule said silently, only to me. (You can’t help it.)

(What-?) I slid into direct contact, so much easier with her than words. I saw Siebeling’s face change as he realized what we were doing.
(How?
Why does he hate me, Jule?)

(He doesn’t-)

(He does! He’s hated me from the first time he laid eyes on me. Anything I try to do, he takes it wrong. I never did
nothing
to him!)

(It’s not you that he hates. It’s-)

I finished it for her. (What I am?
A half-breed, a cheap gutter thief?)

She shook her head without moving.
(No!
Not in the way you think. Her mind telling me at the same time that I wasn’t a cheap gutter thief, that she wouldn’t feel me believing that. But he lost everything, Cat. His wife and son-)

(What’s that got to do with me?)

(Everything!
It’s not you he hates; it’s himself.) And in less time than it would have taken to ask again, she showed me her answer: she showed me Siebeling as he’d been when he was young, barely out of med training, so in love with his proud, gentle wife and their green-eyed son that he wanted everybody to know it. (He loved them,) I thought, (he really loved them-?) But his wife had dedicated her life to improving the way Hydrans were treated by the Federation. She’d gone back to her home-world during a combine’s relocation sweep, trying to help save her people from being deported. Siebeling had tried to stop her from going, afraid of what might happen to her. But he’d only made her angrier; in the end she’d gone anyway, taking their young son with her. And she’d died-
murdered,
he was sure, even though he couldn’t prove it. Nobody knew whether the boy had died along with her or been transported with the rest of her people, who’d been scattered over half the worlds of the Federation like dust thrown into the wind. Siebeling saw his wife’s body; but he never found out what had happened to their son. No Hydran he found knew what had become of the boy, or else they wouldn’t tell him; and the combines involved didn’t even care. Siebeling never found his son. (He blames himself, he thinks that he failed them because he wasn’t with them, and because he’s . . . human. Remember the crystal ball you stole?) I laughed, silently; she glanced away. (It belonged to his wife and their son. It was a Hydran thing, tuned to a Hydran mind. Only someone very much like them could make it change, the way you did. Seeing you
reminds
him of what happened, you make him overreact without meaning to, because you remind him of-)

“-Of my son?”
Siebeling said out loud, shattering the clear wall of silence between us.

Jule froze; her face paled and then turned red as she realized what she’d done.

“God damn it, Jule-
“ Siebeling
began. The rawness in his voice was like a wound; pain, not anger. Whatever he’d been going to say to her, he didn’t finish it. But something unspoken moved between them, and this time I was the one who was left out of it. The rigid, clenched way he held himself eased, almost against his will. When he looked back at me again, finally, I sank down into the corner, wishing I could disappear. I didn’t want to know, didn’t want to hear what he was going to tell me, the excuses, the reasons why I-

He said, “When I finally realized that my son was gone forever, I just wanted to forget . . . what had happened, everything I no longer believed. I stopped living, for a long time.” He looked at me like he was really seeing me for once. I felt his own stolen memories stir inside me; the moment when he’d heard about his wife, the long years of hiding inside himself. . . . “Until the FTA offered me a chance to do real psionics research, to actually help psions in a way no one had been able to before. And then I met an Oldcity thief with telepathic amnesia, who always seemed to say the wrong thing and do the wrong thing, until finally I sent him away without really understanding why. . . . Maybe it was because I blamed you, for always making me remember things I wanted to leave alone.
Because there is a resemblance.
You have the eyes, and your age is about right. . . .”

I remembered the strange conversation we’d had once, back in his office at the Institute. “No. You’re wrong. I never had any kin; none that wanted me, anyway.”

“But you’re not sure. You said you don’t remember-“

“I remember. I remember always b-being alone.” My eyes were shut against him. I felt him pushing me back toward the cliff edge of darkness at the end of my own memories, where something ugly waited to drag me down.
(Don’t.
Don’t.)

“Show me proof.” The words rang in my head like heavy bells.

I had to make him leave me alone, and words would never be enough. So I showed him the only proof I could-jagged pieces of my life that would leave his crazy belief torn and bleeding: (I’ve never been a part of your memories!) I showed them both what it meant to stay alive in Oldcity, enough truth so there wouldn’t ever be any more questions; and I showed them the fire and the ashes and the screaming. . . .

My eyes were open and I was staring at Siebeling again. He muttered: “I was wrong. I’m sorry,” while his sickened mind shrank away from what it had seen.

But I realized that what I’d shown him hadn’t really proved anything. Suddenly I hated myself, for letting him see even that
much,
and I looked down. I couldn’t face Jule at all.

“I’m sorry.” Siebeling said it again, too quickly. Relief filled his mind now. He wanted to believe it; he was glad I wasn’t his son. It was all he could think about, glad his own son didn’t have to live like that; he didn’t care whether it had happened to me. . . .

“You bastard, I’d rather be dead than
be
your son!”

I pushed myself up again. “So you still don’t know about the kid, do you? If he didn’t have to live like garbage-if he ain’t a slave digging ore someplace right now because somebody didn’t like his face? Well, maybe I hope you never find out!”