Vinge, Joan D - SS - Psiren.pdf - Joan D Vinge - przemosta

PSIREN

By Joan D. Vinge

Scanned & Proofed By MadMaxAU

* * * *

I don’t know why she came that evening. Maybe it was for the reasons she gave me,

maybe not. If I’d known her mind the way I used to, when I was really a telepath,

maybe everything would have come out differently.

But I might as well have been a blind man, falling over furniture in silent

rooms, with just glimmers of gray to show me there was still a world outside my

own head. And so I didn’t even know she was there until I heard her voice, “Knock

knock.” Jule never used the stairs, so I never heard her coming. She didn’t need to.

She’d just be there, like some nightwisp who’d come to grant you a few wishes. I

didn’t mind that she came in first and knocked afterwards; we’d shared too much

for that.

I climbed down from the sleeping platform high up under a constellation of

ceiling cracks. “How’re you?” There was a time when I wouldn’t have needed to

ask.

“Lonely.” She smiled, that quirky, half-sad smile. I stared at her, my eyes

registering her for my mind because my mind couldn’t see her. Black hair falling to

her waist, gray eyes deeper than the night; the bird’s nest of shawls and soft

formless overshirts wrapping her long thin body. Protec-tion . . . like mind layers. At

least they were in bright colors now, pinks and purples and blues instead of the dead

black she’d worn when I first met her. She was pushing thirty standards, had more

than ten years on me, but she was still the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen.

Because I’d seen her from the inside. Nothing would ever change the feeling I had

for her—not the future, not the past, not the fact that she was married to another

man.

“Doc will be back in a couple of days.”

“I know, Cat.” Her forehead pinched; she was angry—at herself, for letting

need show.

“Somebody’s got to mind the mindreaders,” I said. “And you’re better at it

than he is.” She glanced at me, surprised and questioning. “I remember how your

mind works,” I shrugged. “So does Doc. You’ve got the empathy, he’s got

credentials. So he hustles the cause, you hold the fort.” And I sit up here pretending

to be one of his healers, instead of one of the cripples. “You’re lucky you miss him

. . . and so’s he.” I moved two steps to the window set in the thick slab of wall.

Looking out I saw the building straight across the alley staring back at me, black

ancient eyes of glass sunk deep in its sagging face. I listened to the groans and sighs

of the one we stood in; the real voice of buried Oldcity, not the distant music in the

streets. I refocused on my own reflection, a ghost trapped inside the grimy

pane—dark skin, pale curly hair, green eyes with pupils that were vertical slits; a face

that made people uneasy. I looked away from it.

“Sometimes it feels like the Center is becoming my whole life, consuming

me,” Jule was saying. “I need to break away for a while and let my mind uncoil. I

wondered if maybe you felt that way too.” She wondered: Jule, who was an empath,

who knew how everyone felt; who knew, who didn’t just guess. Everyone but me.

It wasn’t just the Center that was consuming me, even though I spent all my

time here watching over it. It was the rotting emptiness of my mind. “I don’t have

anything to uncoil.”

She looked at me as though she’d expected to hear that. But she only said,

“You have a body. You ought to let that out of here once in a while.”

“And do what?” I tried to make it sound interested.

“Go out into Oldcity, see the parts I’ve never seen . . . parts you know.”

My skin prickled. “You don’t want to do that.”

“Prove it.”

“Damn it, Jule, it ain’t— isn’t anything you want to see. Or anything I want to

see again.”

She nodded, folding her arms, drawing herself in. “All right. Then can you

take me somewhere I do want to see? Give me a fresh perspective for a few hours,

Cat.”

I dropped the print I’d been reading onto the windowsill. “Sure. Why not?”

She picked it up as I moved away, looked at the title. “CORPORATE

STRUCTURE AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE FEDERATION

TRANSPORT AUTHORITY.” She looked back at me, half smiling.

“Not bad for a former illiterate’?” I said. She blushed. She was the one who’d

taught me to read and write. I picked up my jacket from a corner of the floor. Only a

year ago. A lifetime. Forever. “You know something?”

She raised her eyebrows.

“Stupidity is easier.”

She laughed. We went down the creaking stairs, through the silent rooms of

the Center for Psionic Research, and out into the street.

The streets of Oldcity were bright and dark: the bars and gambling places and

whorehouses were lit up like lanterns; the heavy glass pavements were inlaid with

lights that fol-lowed you wherever you walked, down the narrow alleyways between

the walls of buildings almost as old as time. None of the light was real light, it was all

artificial. Only the darkness was real.

Oldcity was the core, the heart of the new city called Quarro, the largest city

on the world Ardattee. Every combine holding on Ardattee had grown fat when the

Crab Nebula opened up and made it the gateway to the Colonies. Then the

Federation Transport Authority moved its information stor-age here and picked

Quarro to set it down in, and Quarro became the largest cityport on the planet by a

hundred times. Earth atrophied, and Ardattee became the trade center of the Human

Federation, the economic center, the cultural center. And somewhere along the way

someone had decided that the old, tired colonial town was historic, and ought to be

preserved.

But Quarro was built on a thumb-shaped peninsula between a harbor and the

sea; there was only so much land, and the new city kept growing, feeding on open

space, always need-ing more—until it began to eat up the space above the old city,

burying it alive in a tomb of progress. The grumbling, dripping, tangled guts of

someone else’s palaces in the air shut Oldcity off from the sky, and no one lived

there any more who had any choice. Only the dregs, the losers and the users. It was

a place where the ones who wouldn’t be caught dead living there came to feed off

the ones who couldn’t escape.

I walked with Jule through the wormhole streets that tendriled in toward

Godshouse Circle, the one place in Oldcity where you could still see the sky. For

years I’d thought the sky was solid, like a lid, and at night they turned the sun off. I

didn’t mention it, as we pushed our way through the Circle’s evening crowds of

beggars and jugglers and staggering burnouts. But I looked up at the sky, a deep,

unreachable indigo; down again at the golden people slumming and the hungry

shadows drifting beside them, behind them, a hand quicker than the eye in and out of

a pocket, a pouch, a fold. I felt my own fingers flexing, and my heartbeat

quickening.

I pushed my hands into my jacket pockets, made fists of them. Once a

Cityboy, always a Cityboy…I felt Oldcity’s heavy rhythms stir my blood, make dark

magic in my head; my body filling with the hunger of it. Hot with life, cold as death,

raw like a wound, it left its scars on your flesh and its brand on your soul. A

hollow-eyed dealer was sliding be-tween us, selling the kind of dreams that don’t

come true in a voice like iron grating on cement. It still shows. They can smell me. I

shoved him away, remembering too many times when it had gone the other way.

I turned off of the Circle into another street, not saying anything; my face stiff,

my mind clenched, hardly aware of Jule beside me. The dark, decaying building

fronts faded behind walls of illusion: Showers of gold that melted through your

hands, blizzards of pleasure and sudden prickles of pain, fluorescent holo-flesh

blossoming like the flowers of some alien jungle. The heart of the night burst open

here in sound that took your sight away, hard and blistering, sensual and yielding,

shimmering, pitiless. You could drown in your wildest fantasies right there in the

street, and I heard Jule crying out in wonder, joy, disgust, not knowing her own

emotions from everyone else’s.

But it was all a lie, and I’d lived it too many times, hungry and cold and broke;

seen the ones who went through the images, through the doors where the fantasy

turned real, and left me standing there—all beauty, all pleasure, all satisfac-tion

running through my hands. Reality was no one’s dream in Oldcity. Suddenly I knew

wh y I’d never made this trip, why I’d stayed like a monk in a monastery at the

Center since I’d come back here…suddenly I was wondering why the hell I’d done

it now.

A hand was on my arm, but Jule was drifting ahead beyond my reach. I

turned, wanting to see a stranger; the past looked me straight in the face. The hand

ran down my sleeve, a heavy hand with sharp heavy rings; the soft ugly mouth

opened, showing me filed teeth. “Dear boy,” it said, “you look familiar.’’

“I don’t know you.” Panic choked me.

“Boy ...” wounded.

“Get away!” I jerked free, ran on through the phantoms of flesh until I collided

with Jule.

She steadied me, staring at me and past me, frightened. (What’s wrong?)

“Nothin”. It’s nothing. I just—” I shook my head, swal-lowed, “Ghosts.”

Without another word she took my arm and pulled me through incense and

pearls: The nearest door took our credit rating and fell open, letting us past into the

reality. And suddenly there was no floor beneath us, no walls, no ceiling; just an

infinity of deepening blue like the evening sky, shot with diamond chips of light

tracking away toward an endless horizon. Our feet moved over a yielding surface

that didn’t exist for my eyes, and with every step my body came closer to the dizzy

brink where my mind swayed now. But we reached a low table, with seats like cloud;

all around us other cloudsitters watched us walk on air. The sound of their voices,

their laughter, was dim and distant. Patternless music flowed into the void, a choir of

spirit voices weaving their conversation into its fabric.

As we settled at the table a slow mist rose, curling between us; I felt it tingling

against the skin of my face, rising deeper into my head with every breath. The

pungent cold of glissen was in it, along with a flavor I couldn’t name, that made my

mouth water. You could get arrested for this out on the street. My hands were

trembling on the transparent table surface; I watched the trembling ease as the glissen

began to make me calm. “What is this place?” I took deeper breaths, letting it work.

“It’s called Haven.” Jule was still searching the room with her eyes. She

sighed, as if her inner sight saw only peace and quiet. She looked back at me. “I

thought you needed one.”

I smiled, half a grimace, pulling at a curl behind my ear. “I didn’t—didn’t

know it would—come back at me like this. Like ... I don’t know.” I looked up again.

“I’ve never been in one of these places. Never.” My eyes traveled. “Maybe that’s

the problem. Everything’s changed for me, Jule, but I don’t believe it. I could leave

Oldcity—” My hand clenched.

She didn’t answer, only looked at me with her storm-colored eyes, until I

almost thought I could feel her mind tendril into mine the way it used to. I felt it

soothe me, felt her sharing without question.

“Cat, you heard me, outside.”

The way she said it made me say, “What?”

“When I asked you what was wrong, I didn’t speak it.”

“Yes, you did.”

She shook her head. “I never got it out of my mouth; you answered me first.”

“But I—” I looked away, back, dizzy with infinity rushing at me.

“It—happened? I read your mind? And I didn’t even know?” I felt cheated.

She nodded. “That’s why it did: because you lost control.”

“The first time—” since I killed a man, “since we came back from the

Colonies. More than a year.” Of living in solitary… I let my mind reach, trying to feel

it: the unfolding, the opening out—

She frowned, straining. “You’re cutting me off, Cat. Don’t—”

“I’m not trying to!” I hit the table edge; my voice made heads turn. I sank

back into my seat. My mind was like a knot.

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