Joan D. Vinge - Cat 01 by Psion

Author:Psion [Psion]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2011-12-14T22:27:16+00:00

I remember one last night,

the darkness gathering around me,

quietly knowing

every stone and the tyranny

of grief

and all the vows that are made… .

Or do I only know

the blinding silence of the billion stars

burning and burning;

the glory of Orion striding up the sky-

Lost inside my own memories as she read, suddenly I saw her through the images, the filter of her feelings and my own: shivering alone on a balcony, her hands on a vine-covered railing, her eyes open to the night, transfixed by stars. Double vision stunned me as I knew it for a memory of my own (but not my own, fusion, confusion) swelling out of the dark underworld where I’d been lost these past weeks.

Jule stopped reading, watching the changes on my face, feeling the shift of my attention. “What is it?”

I didn’t answer her at first. And then I only said, “It means a lot to me.” Afraid to tell her why-not only because of the memories that had answered it already, but because somehow in one of them I’d shared the moment that poem was born inside her. I hadn’t been meant to know that secret moment, and I figured she’d only resent it.

But she smiled, content. I asked her to read the poem again and again, until I knew it by heart. And I wished that I had something to give her in return, a poem, anything; but anything I could think of seemed cheap and ugly next to what she’d given me.

After she left me again, I lay looking at her memory caught there in my mind, as much a part of me as my own were. Other scenes that had never been a part of my life began to surface, then-some that I knew or guessed belonged to her, some that I couldn’t put any tag on. It scared me, not knowing what had been done to me while I was sick-until I saw suddenly that I was the one who’d done it to myself.

And then, finally, I began to understand everything-that what had happened after the Hydrans had been inside my head had gone on happening, as though they’d found something caged and set it free. In sickness my mind had wandered out of itself; it had found open doors and gone through them, into the deepest parts of other human minds; pain drawn to pain, hunger to hunger. And from what I could tell no one had known it but me.

And now, whenever I was with Jule, it was easy to reach what lay on the surface of her thoughts-I could read her without trying, like I’d been doing it forever, like breathing.

I was a real telepath at last. And I wondered whether the Hydrans really knew what they’d done. I thought about them sometimes, what they’d done to me and for me; and when I did I felt a kind of longing.

But in the long hours, when I was alone, I began to work at controlling what they’d left me with; trying to stretch my waking mind to match what my unconscious had done.

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