A Different Light (2 page)

In the morning he went first, naked, to the desk. He went through the sketchbook. He set the cartoon of Kas aside: he would redo it, and give it to the potter as a gift. The rest of the sheets—he gathered them up to stuff them in the disposal, but at the last moment changed his mind and piled them into a corner. They were not bad, just mediocre, BORING. There was not a line in them that he couldn't have drawn six months ago.

The sky through his window was a deep ultramarine. Through his windows he could see the vines with their many-hued flowers that gave Las Flores its name pouring over terraces and walls of houses. His hands twisted and rubbed together, a gesture he had carried with him from childhood when it had seemed to relieve the ache in his leg. Putting sketchbook and pens into his bag, he slung it onto his shoulder. There was nowhere in Las Flores he much wanted to go, but he could not wholly waste the brilliant light. He went out to look at it.

Chapter 2

When he walked through the clinic door three days later, the medic on morning duty pretended tactfully not to know him. "Alleca, isn't it?"

"Is Senior Ramoz here today? I need to talk to her."

The medic asked no questions. Raina's chime sounded over the call system. "Would you care to wait for her in a cubicle?"

Jimson paced impatiently in the pastel box, waiting for the door to slide back. The sharp edge of the visicube, still in his pocket, rubbed against his thigh.

Raina came in. "What is it, Jim?"

He paced, and talked. She sat at the desk, straightening the papers.

He finished, and waited for her response.

"You're sure?" she asked.

"I'm sure," Jimson said. "I'm scared shitless—but I need a drug disc to go offplanet, and if that's the only way to get one, that's how I'll have to do it."

"All right," she said. "As it happens, I think Ensel is not very busy this morning. Have you the time? If he's willing, it can all be over in a little while."

There was challenge in her voice.
Put up or shut up.
Fear tightened Jimson's throat.
Now? So soon?
But he managed a nod. Raina went out the door and came back very quickly. "Come with me."

Jimson followed her. She brought him to a door and held it for him. "Here?" At her nod, he went in. He saw a bed with high sides, almost like a crib. There was someone in it, and a chair beside it. Automatically he sat down. Supported on pillows within the crib was a spindly-limbed boy, too big to be a child, with a grotesquely big head on a skinny neck. His eyes were black and shiny and the skin around them was puffy.

Had Raina led him to the wrong room?

"I'm sorry," Jimson said gently, "I didn't mean to disturb you."

"You have not," said the boy, and he tilted his heavy head forward and up to look into Jimson's eyes.

Eyes, crib slats, walls whirled back, away. Vertigo possessed him. His senses disengaged; there was a terrifying mélange in his mind. He felt as if his arms and legs were stretching far away from his torso; he fragmented, he disconnected. There was an
otherness
within him, a steady, purposeful sentience not his own inside his skull, sliding through the boundaries of his mind like a drill through slippery sand. It was a violation so complete and alien that he could not even name it as pain.

When the other withdrew and he could again recognize himself, arms and legs and head, he discovered that he was slumped in the chair, unable to move. He was so nauseated that it took all his minute control to swallow and not be instantly sick. Through the slats, black eyes watched him coolly. Savagely he thought at them: "I'd love to puke in your bed!"

The telepath's lips curved in a smile.

Then there were people around him, and he felt a needle prick his arm. Nausea lessened, and then surged back as he was lifted onto a cart. Thankfully he noticed a basin beneath his chin and vomited. His insides were heaving as if they were trying to get out. "So go," he muttered. Another needle.

As if he were falling down a long dark tunnel, he collapsed.

When he woke up he wondered if his body had been eviscerated and then reconstructed. Stars! But at least he was no longer sick. He tried to sit up, but his muscles refused to respond. His arms barely moved an inch. Raina leaned over him, fingers around his wrist.

"How are you feeling?" she asked. "Not so sick, eh?"

"No," Jimson said. "Better." The words slurred.

"I thought I'd give you a chance to curse at me."

Jimson tried to shrug. "Tired."

"I know. I remember."

Jimson looked his question.

"I've been through it three times," said the Senior Medic. "Ensel and I are old friends now."

Three times!
Jimson forced himself to sustain speech. "You must have wanted something very badly," he said.

"I did. So did you." The medic held a disc close to Jimson's eyes. It was clear, with imprinted black characters. Deftly she snapped it into the bracelet link, and tossed the red disc into the disposal. "You'll be fine in about six hours," she said. "Until then you might try sleeping." She turned to leave. Jimson tried to beckon her back, forgetting that his hand wasn't working. She saw the abortive attempt and came to the bedside. "Something else?"

The words came so slowly: "Are they all like that?"

"No. One of the best telepaths I know of is an exquisitely beautiful nine year old girl. Ensel is good. Very fast. They can kill you if they stay in too long at that depth. Ensel admires you, by the way. He knows who you are; he's seen prints of your work. If you ever come back to New Terrain, you might stop by here and tell him about what you did and what you saw. All telepaths are compulsive voyeurs. He can't go himself."

"Why not?"

"He has so many things wrong with his body that increased gees would kill him," said Raina. "He could take the Hype—but he can't ride a fusion-drive shuttleship up to Epsilon Moon where the starship port is. He'll never leave New Terrain."

"Then he knows," Jimson said. "He's that kind of a freak, too." It made him feel triumphant. "But I think I'd rather be me," he added.

"So would Ensel," said Raina. And she left Jimson to reflect on that until he fell asleep.

Chapter 3

He was standing in a roomful of stars.

Absurd! No, he was suspended in space, and beneath his feet and over his head drifted the dust that made universes. He searched for familiar constellations: there were none, just darkness and more stars. They shone and shone. Somewhere among them swung Old Terra, Earth, his homeworld—though he had never been there. And Nexus Compcenter, in the center of the inhabited worlds, where the starship fleets were based. He recalled the names from the wall maps, but those were flat maps, and it was hard to transfer locations from those to the totality of a matrix map. He watched the stars blazing in a black so intense it hurt his eyes. When it faded to grey, and the grey dissolved into a square room with a bored official turning knobs, he looked at his hands as if he had never seen them before, and at the room as if it were only marginally there.

"Well, that's what it looks like," said the clerk, faking interest, not very well. He lifted the helmet from Jimson's head. "Innerestin', huh?"

The spectacle of the galaxy wreathed around his head preempted Jimson's visions. "How does it do that?"

"The helmet." He tapped it with his knuckles. "It cuts out sensory feedback, otherwise you'd hear your own breathing, heartbeat, and so on. Plugs into the brain."

Now, does he know what he's talking about? wondered Jimson. Or is that all he knows, that the helmet "plugs into the brain?" Don't be critical, he admonished himself.

He thanked the man and stepped out into the hall.
You're a stranger here, remember?
He thought back to the talk they all had heard before boarding the shuttleship from New Terrain to Epsilon Moon. The woman giving it had barely looked at the roomful of people. "Most of you," she had said, "have already booked passage through the Hype and won't stay at Epsilon Station more than a day. The rest of you have three days to decide if you want to go on through the Hype, or go back to New Terrain. While you are there, use common sense. If you're told by Station staff to do something, do it. Ask questions later. You haven't the experience to even recognize the emergencies that might occur. Don't go where signs say you shouldn't; same reasoning applies. Custom off New Terrain differs from what you're used to. Three things you ought to remember. First: Don't go where you're not wanted. Especially, stay out of the portions of cities where Hypers live. They don't like tourists. Second: Don't ask personal questions. You can ask about the Stations, the starships, the Hype, whatever you want to know, but don't be curious about the people you talk to. It's very bad manners in the Hype. Third: Offplanet, only Hypers wear jewelry. On stations, starships, and in cities where Hypers live, you should leave bracelets, earrings, all ornaments except very plain rings, behind."

When she had turned to leave them, Jimson had noticed the blue earrings sparkling in her ears. It had given him a start; she looked, maybe, twenty. They go young, when they go, he had thought. He'd examined the faces around him. There were no young faces, and he'd realized that most of these people, whether they were going through the Hype or not, would always be strangers to it—drugged passengers on the starships, gawking tourists on other worlds. He had climbed to the shuttleship observation deck on New Terrain to look at the bright ships—and suddenly he was sixteen again. Sixteen, in the first light of summer, watching Russell ride the movalong away from him, across the open field to the Gate. He'd wanted to follow, and had known he could not. But Russell had never wanted anything more than he wanted the stars. He had not even turned to look back.

Jimson reached out to touch the corridor wall, trying to detach himself from the sudden, painful rush of memory. They'd been friends for two years. Jimson had lost all memory of Russell's voice, but he recalled without difficulty Russell's walk, and his smile. He had a sexual drive like a firestorm, and a temper to match his hair. Jimson went to Las Flores. Russell said,
"
I'll be in touch."

"
You'll have to write to me. I won't know where you are.
"

"
I'll write.
"

But he hadn't. Jimson waited till he gave up waiting. He thought he'd given up waiting.

Then the visicube had arrived.

Fourteen years ago Russell had put on a matrix map helmet, stabbed a finger into the midst of the Living Worlds, and said,
There.

Jimson thought, I've followed him now. I'm on Epsilon Moon. The Hype is waiting for me. All I have to do is go.

Ahead of him a sign gleamed in the wall. "Sector One," it read, and then an arrow, and then "Port." He walked in the direction of the arrow. A ramp led into a tunnel. The tunnel sides closed around him like the gut of a giant worm. It was a short walk, but Jimson was glad when he saw the lights from Port Sector reflecting off the tunnel walls. He shifted his bag on his shoulder and lengthened his stride.

He was up and out of the tunnel. Below him lay a glittering city. Above him hung blue sky.

In blocks and towers like a child's fantasy, Port spread out below him. He stood on a balcony. Above, translucent silver-blue marked where the dome interposed between airless space and the working Station. He tipped his head back to marvel at it. Now it seemed cloudy, now clear, and it trembled and shivered with the insubstantiality of an atmosphere. How could engineers' artifices, beams and girders and rivets, do what he could almost never do with ink and paint? The illusion of depth was superb. It gave him mental shivers to think that this sky came to an end, arching down from overhead to find its anchorage in the rocky surface of an airless moon.

He looked around for the way down—and found it. It was a Gate, with a scanner, hedged by signs which read:
Authorised Entrance Only.
Above the Gate a cage mechanism hung, ready to drop and imprison anyone trying to go through the Gate with no I-disc, or with the wrong one. Jimson's disc, as far as he knew, would only pass him through the Gate at Sector One. He didn't want to risk the cage. Anger stirred in him. His sense of déjà vu poured through him like a wine rush. He was sixteen again, and left behind, outside.

He pulled himself out of it, firmly, and glanced around. This was not a bad spot to be. He could watch the people. A veritable parade was passing him, coming from the complex of tunnels that connected Port with the other Sectors: Garden Sector, Comp, Sector One, Research. There, for example, was a green person. Pale green skin, smooth and hairless, head hair like fine coiled gold wire, six feet tall: Jimson knew he was looking at a Verdian. She (she?) was wearing a long robe that shimmered and changed colors constantly, but appeared to be mostly green, and, on long pendant earlobes, longer ruby earrings swayed. Behind her (her?) came a woman in purple coveralls, with purple shadows drawn around her eyes like a mask. She wore a silver bracelet high on her bare right arm. He hunkered down on his heels and set his back to the railing. Bright, arrogant, the wild parade marched through the Gate. Jimson's fingers itched for paper and a pen but that, he guessed, might be rude. I wonder how long it will be before someone gets tired of this crazy stranger staring, and punches me one?