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, swallowed, “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.
“Sometimes I’ve felt you let go, for a second; sometimes you almost—”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“You can’t keep it buried. You’ve got to start facing up to the fact that you are a telepath—’’
“Not any more.”
“—and you work with me, with us, helping others like us. You’re making yourself a martyr to problems we’re all trying to face. I want to help you, but you aren’t doing a damn thing to cooperate!” The anger and frustration startled me; I couldn’t feel them.
“It’s not the same!” My own frustration fed on hers. “The rest of them live in a hell made by somebody else, just because the deadheads hate our guts. Nobody else made my hell.”
Jule’s eyes dropped. “I’m sorry. It’s just that I can’t help feeling—responsible for the way things are for you now. It’s just that when I remember what you had—”
“You think I don’t remember?” A silence apart from the music and the room settled on us. I remembered times we’d sat like this in the past, when I was a thief, and she was afraid; before we’d learned to trust each other more than any two human beings had the right to. Before I’d saved her life and Siebeling’s by ending someone else’s—and lost it all. The music and the awareness of unreal distances around us came back to me slowly, as the glissen numbed my memory. “What do you do in this place, anyhow?”
Jule lifted her head, tension still in the half-smiling corners of her mouth. “I don’t know. Meditate?”
I glanced down at the data bracelet covering the old scar on my right wrist. My credit balance had dropped a hundred points. I looked at it again. “Whew. It better be more than sitting on clouds.”
Jule glanced down at her own bracelet; her fist pressed the center of her chest. There must have been a time when a hundred credits didn’t mean anything to her. But that was somewhere in another life, and now whenever she thought of money she thought of the Center first. “I guess you don’t do anything in Oldcity without considering the consequences,” rueful.
I nodded. “That’s your first lesson. The second one is that most of the time you don’t get the chance to think about it.” She started to get up, and I thought about going out into the street again. “Wait—till we know if there’s anything else. We’re paying for it.”
She didn’t object. She settled back into her seat; we began to talk, but not about what had just happened. The glissen began to make our words slur and our minds wander. After a while the murmuring choir music faded. In the blue distance ahead of me a dark opening appeared like a wormhole from another universe. A figure came through it, walking softly on air to a place in the center of the cloudsitters. “We welcome you to the Haven.” The figure bowed, wrapped in dark folds glittering with stars; I couldn’t tell whether it was male or female, even from the voice. “We hope your time here has been one of tranquility and peace. To further deepen your experience we give you the Dreamweaver, who will open to you the secret places of your soul.”
I glanced at Jule, rolling my eyes; but she sat half turned away, watching the act as though it mattered. The figure raised its arms and folded in on itself, disappearing. The crowd gasped. I jerked, wondering whether we’d seen a teleport. But Jule turned back and said, “Just a projection.”
I shrugged. All done with mirrors. As I sat watching, a light began to fall from above us, a captive star drawn down out of the night. It settled where the projection had been, and as the light faded there was total silence in the room. I waited for more cheap tricks, wondering how they ever got enough of the audience back to this place twice to make it pay.
As the light faded I began to make out another form inside it, a human body. I kept blinking, trying to clear the dazzle out of my eyes. It was a child ... it was a tiny, fragile woman, lost in a shining silver robe. Her arms were bare, hung with bands and bracelets showing colored fire; her skin was no color I’d ever seen before, burnished brass. But her arms were as thin as sticks, and the bones stood out like a scream along their length; her face was a shadowed skull.