Read Online Psion by Joan D. Vinge - Free Book Online Page B

sometimes to be sure it was all real.
    I even liked to think about what I was supposed to be doing here: I’d seen a show on the threedy, Nebula Pioneers, about Colonists and miners out in the Crab Colonies making a home in the alien wilderness. Life was hard out on the frontier worlds, but it was exciting, and no one cared what you’d been before, only what you were trying to be now. It was a place where you were free to start again, and maybe make it all come out right this time. I thought maybe I’d like to try that; thought about using some of my money to go there when this was over. I was glad we were supposed to be helping them out.
    But more than anything else I liked working with the rest of the psions-even if it meant being one myself . It was hard work, and Siebeling always seemed to make it harder; but I never wanted to quit. I was getting to be pretty good, too. I think I’d have been good even if I hadn’t been trying to keep Siebeling off my back. I wanted to be good; I guess I wanted to prove something to somebody. Maybe to myself.
    But even so, I wouldn’t have been much good without Jule taMing. After that first day, whenever we had to work with any equipment she stayed around afterward, and went over everything we did with me until I knew it from memory. I’d half expected Cortelyou would take over teaching me, but he only laughed and said he knew where my attention was now-meaning on Jule-and I might as well follow it. I swore at him, blushing, and did.
    Jule taught me how to use one machine after another: she taught me letters and symbols that stood for the same thing on different boards; she worked with me until soon I could pick things up almost as fast as anyone else . . . .
    “. . . then that, and that- “ I touched the wrong square and the comm panel lit up with red. “Damn!” I pulled back from the touchboard, shaking out my hands.
    Jule leaned past me and cleared the panel for the tenth time, her dark hair brushing my shoulder. “Those two letters are almost the same; anyone could make that mistake. Try again,” she said, still as patient and calm as she’d been an hour before. Somehow she never made me feel stupid.
    But that doesn’t mean I didn’t feel stupid anyway. “Mother Earth, I ain’t never gonna get them straight! They don’t mean nothin’!”
    She looked down at me directly for once. “You’re tired. . . . Your body is screaming for sleep. Why do you stay awake all night, when you know you have to get up and work?” It wasn’t critical, just curious.
    I tensed; it still made me jumpy when she knew exactly what I was feeling. She was an empath besides being a ‘port: she knew what everybody felt, whether she wanted to or not. I frowned at my hands. “I’m used to it.” Back in Oldcity I’d stayed awake all night because that was when the crowds were out, and I lived off the crowds. Now I stayed awake because I was afraid to sleep.
    Her face told me that she knew there was more, but she looked away and didn’t push it. She had her own fears. She shut off the comm’s touchboard, murmuring. “They don’t mean anything. . . .”
    I followed her across the lab. Outside twilight was staining Quarro a deep violet-blue; lights were coming on. There was a roof garden a few stories down below us; trees moved in the cool air of dusk. Jule lit up another terminal and began to work with it. I stood beside her, looking out; close enough so that my hip brushed hers. And suddenly I couldn’t help thinking about how close she was, touching me, the way her hair moved. . . . I felt a rush of heat rise through me, and wondered what she’d-
    The thought that she knew everything I felt hit me like a bucket of cold water. I tied my mind into a knot, trapping the thought inside, and moved away from her.
    She looked up, startled-either because she’d felt what I felt, or just because her awareness of me had been stopped dead. I looked out the window, taking out a camph, rocking