A Different Light (21 page)

"I could have kept you from doing that."

"How could you know what I would do with it? Ysao, you see, has scruples. He could not ask you back. So I did it." In that magnificent, mellifluous mental voice, Goryn added,
That would have been against his prin-ci-ples. Ysao does not make use of his friends.

Russell was trembling where he stood. He stared at Jimson's face. "You're going to do it," he said.

Jimson nodded. He was thinking of a poem. He had written it the day after he saw a collection of paintings by a Terran artist named Vincent Van Gogh.

True, he was mad when he died.

No one sane can see in a cloudy sky

That pulsating glare, that beaten copper sun.

No one, surely, can see in trees

The great green and gold shaking giants he saw.

The earth humped like sea under his feet.

Look, it is peaceful here.

Farms seem the same as in the next county.

No wind demons the cornstalks.

Yet we see, walking through his town of Aries,

How heat bums the brown earth red.

The green trees blue,

And how the sun shudders.

Our eyes are not our own.

Surely it has changed, since then.

Jimson thought, that was what I wanted all my life. I wanted my art to survive. No one can draw my pictures for me. But if I do this thing, a generation of telepaths will see light through
my
eyes.

Goryn was delighted.
Ysao, he understands. Perfect!

"When do you want to start?" Jimson asked.

"Tomorrow," she said.

Tears were running down Russell's face, in the furrows that anguish was scoring there. He sat down on the edge of the bed and bowed his head into his hands, crying silently, body shaking.

"How long will it take?" Jimson asked.

"Till there is nothing left," Goryn said quietly.

I will do it, Jimson thought. He was almost content. He stroked Russell's hair.

Ysao spoke for him. "Goryn, he is ready for you now."

Chapter 18

"Hi. My name is Daffyd."

"Hi. My name is Tom."

"Hi. My name is Leonice."

"Hi. My name is Theo."

Behind his head Jimson heard a rustling noise. Mahil was playing with the I.V. tubing. Lately it had become easier to listen than to look. But this was a new person.
Alleca, be polite.
Jimson dragged his eyelids across his eyes. It hurt. The drugs they were giving him dried him out. He was a stick-figure man, a child's drawing, two dimensional on the sheet. He moved his fingers in welcome and said what he always said. "Hi. I'm better on faces than on names."

His voice was a croak. This face—he'd seen this face before. Thin face, lumpy muscular body, red-gold hair standing out from his head like a burning bush.... Bright orange shirt. "Theo," he repeated. A chain of names bound him to his death. He tried to remember them—Daffyd, Tom, Leonice, others before them he couldn't recall. It was hard to remember when they kept taking away pieces of his brain.

Momentarily he wished for Russell's hand to be there, holding his, holding him into the world. But Goryn had forbidden Russell the room after the first few days.

"You make it harder for him," she said. "You hurt him by calling him back."

Russell had turned to Jimson with a flame of desperation in his eyes. "Jim?"

Jimson had had to say, "She is right."

Russell's face hardened. Jimson had been frightened for him, feeling how close he was to collapse. But Russell didn't break. He touched his fingers to Jimson's chapped dry lips and then turned away. "You will call me when it happens," he said to Goryn.

Mahil was giving his customary lecture. "The drugs are personality-suppressants. Disregard the tendrils of thought and emotion concealing the pattern you wish to take. It's normal for them to be there, but
they
are not the pattern. Focus on the vision, on the imagination-structure. Take it from the mind as you have learned to take the language-structure from someone's brain."

The young telepath's face was intent above his own. It starts
now
, Jimson thought, and it started. The drugs poured into him. Despite himself, knowing it did no good, he braced, his fingers closing on the sheet.

Theo, with unusual gentleness, reached out and held his hand.

Thank you, Jimson thought. He felt his muscles relax as the drug took him, forcing him into lethargy. He felt his frame take on the lineaments of dissolution. His eyelids slacked and closed. It seemed to him, then, as it always did, that he was outside himself, bending over the bed, over this sick stranger with grey skin and eyes that sank back like stones into the face. Going into the mind, pushing memory aside, pushing hope and regret and love aside, going for the pattern, going for the heart.... He felt the electrodes on his temples and felt the shock at the sudden invasion: again, he thought, oh no, it happens again. Again.

Please don't fight me,
said the young clear voice in his mind.

DON'T. GO AWAY.

Please.

The interface between them was very thin.

Suddenly it hurt. It had never hurt before, and he cried a protest: DON'T. GO AWAY. IT HURTS.

Somewhere else Mahil was calling "Theo! Theo!"

It was too late, and he knew it was too late. He opened his eyes in the inward darkness. The shadow of the Rider, huge and inescapable, lay across his road. The dark eyes gleamed. TOO LATE. Jimson's heart pounded, writhed, broke and fibrillated, trembling without surcease, without cease, it hurt, and he fought it. In his pain he heard the Rider call him.
Time. It's time.

He stopped fighting then. He looked for the road, forgetting the young life still linked to his.

He could not see the road. His vision narrowed, and he saw what looked like a lawn; cool, green, soft, a space to breathe. He had never seen it in the painting before. His body, lying on the bed, would not obey him, and so he left it behind, and went.

It was not a place he had ever been before, but it received him.

"Theo!" Mahil roused the young telepath with difficulty. "Are you all right?" Theo opened his eyes. Mahil glared at his machinery with ludicrous disfavor. "Theo," he said, "I'm sorry. I had no warning. If I had, I would have told you to pull out. I hope it wasn't too bad for you. He's gone now. Theo?"

Theo whispered, "Russell."

"Oh, damn. Of course. You stay put. You don't look like you can move, anyway. I'll get him."

Russell came. He stood beside a body still warm, and still palisaded with bottles and tubes. Mahil had not had the thought, and Theo had not had the strength, to pull the electrodes away.

Russell said nothing. He didn't cry, not even later, alone in the room they had given him to live in. But every telepath in the X-team center, with the exception of Theo Moukis, had a deviling, tormenting, furious headache.

* * *

Theo Moukis stood in front of the mirror, talking to himself. Look in the mirror. See? There is no dark ghost looking out at you. There's only you.

Fair skin, blond thick hair, a scar on one shoulder from a childhood fall.... VERY DISTINGUISHED, THEO, said the voice. It was cool and calm, pleasant, and not at all like his own. WHAT IS IT LIKE FOR YOU?

Automatically Theo answered.
Like having a second set of memories inside my head. Like sharing the space of my mind with another mind.

IT'S THE LUCK. Rubbing his temples, Theo turned from the mirror. THINK OF YOURSELF AS A HAUNTED HOUSE.

"That's easy for you to say!" Theo exclaimed aloud. But of course, no one answered him. There was no one else in the room. He ran his fingers through his hair. Damn, he thought, what do I do now?

THE LIBRARY...?

He went to the library. The whole complex was subdued; there was almost no one in the hall. The other students were out gathering wood for the pyre. Theo had been excused from that.

"Newer students or inexperienced examiners occasionally encounter minor cases of personality impress," the computer told him.

He watched the words pile up on the screen.

"Such effects, while frightening, are invariably temporary, with the original personality characteristics of the student ultimately, usually within two weeks, subordinating and eliminating the impressed template."

Theo checked the bibliography and reference selections at the end of the chapter.

"See Smyth, Smith, and McGonegal—
"for more of the same.

Obviously, before now nobody had ever experienced the impression of one personality upon another at the moment of the impress-personality's death.

YOU COULD BE A CASE STUDY.

Thank you, but I don't want to be a case study!

It was disconcerting to Theo to find himself responding to the Jimson Alleca-template as if it were really another person sharing the space in his skull. The effects are temporary, he told himself. You have been momentarily impressed with someone else's emotion, experience, and memory. But it isn't a consciousness. It only needs time to be integrated, subsumed, and subordinated. Watch it disappear!

YOUR CERTAINTY, said the Jimson-piece, IS APPALLING.

For a moment, Theo considered telling Goryn what had happened. But he hesitated. She would insist that he be examined. She would fuck around with his head. I'VE HAD ENOUGH OF THAT. A vision of a silvery, celestial face with Goryn's features floated into Theo's imagination. Hard not to agree with that. Definitely, Goryn delighted in behaving like a minor divinity.

I AM GLAD YOU AGREE, said the Jimson-piece. ARE WE FINISHED HERE? I WOULD LIKE TO ATTEND MY FUNERAL.

* * *

It was cold. They stood in a circle around the pyre, twelve students, four teachers, and Russell. A strong cedar-like scent concealed that other smell of a body burning. Sparks whipped up from drying bones. The wood shuddered and fell inward, thrust at by the gusting wind. The pyre guttered sparks. Flickered. Went out. Russell knelt, and laid his palm down on the edge of the dark circle, where the ash had cooled. Then he pushed himself up and turned away from them.

RUSS—

Theo took a step forward but checked himself. He did not want to call attention to himself. PRIVATE, he said to the rest of the world. And turned inward.
Are you all right?
he asked. He tried to reach inward, but came up against a wall. Part of his mind was literally closed to him. But the closure was not complete; he could sense, in the same way that he could sometimes sense his dreams as he was dreaming them, a deep and lonely mourning. He tried to reach in again—

DON'T. GO. AWAY.

Theo could appreciate the surrealism of being present at one's own funeral. It would be comic, he thought, if it weren't for this—this pain. He felt it. He could not help feeling it. He felt as if he was a stone whirling at the end of a string; whirling and whirling in helplessness, till the person holding the string chose to let go.... He staggered a little.

"Theo, are you all right?" He had not been aware of Mahil watching him. "I told you to rest. You shouldn't be here."

"I felt I had to come." He searched for the right words. He thought of asking Mahil's help—but no, he'd been over that. He would be able to handle the whole thing if his teachers would leave him alone. "I just can't get my balance."

Mahil said, "It could be the drugs."

"I'll be all right."

"You're sure?'

"I'm sure."

THANK YOU. The words emerged, without his conscious control.

Listen
, he said,
listen, you can't just live in my head
.

He waited for an answer. If there was an entity in his head, it had withdrawn into a space he didn't know. He couldn't get at it. On the other hand, it could get at him. The thought disturbed him.

THEO. LET ME STAY HERE. I WON'T HURT YOU.

Do I have a choice?

DID I HAVE A CHOICE?

But it's my head!
Theo said.

He—it—Jimson—did not answer him.

* * *

Two weeks passed. Theo relaxed. In his head, the entity, if it was there, if it was an entity, rested quiescent. Theo got drunk. He went to two parties, and allowed himself to be happily seduced into three beds. In training they were learning about starships: hyperspace mechanics, computer training and terminology, navigation codes. They learned to fly a bubble. This section of Psi Center owned and maintained a grounded starship. It was called the
Missing Link,
and all that it was missing—a pretty big all—was the drives. They slept in it, ate in it, and exercised on the monkey bars, simulating Jumps. "You aren't crew," they were told, "but you need to know enough to be useful and not to make nuisances of yourselves." It was a different kind of training than what, as telepaths, they were used to, and it made a nice change before the mounting pressure of the final exam. And Theo was aware that Goryn, Mahil, Nior and Ysao had started to watch the twelve pattern-impressees with anxiety. They referred to the whole event as The Experiment.