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. Protection . . . 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 followed 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 storage 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 needing 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 between 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 satisfaction running through my hands. Reality was no one’s dream in Oldcity. Suddenly I knew why 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.