"Joan D. Vinge - Psiren" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vinge Joan D)

PSIREN
By Joan D. Vinge
Scanned & Proofed By MadMaxAU

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I don’t know why she came that evening. Maybe it was for the reasons she gave me,
maybe not. If I’d known her mind the way I used to, when I was really a telepath,
maybe everything would have come out differently.

But I might as well have been a blind man, falling over furniture in silent
rooms, with just glimmers of gray to show me there was still a world outside my
own head. And so I didn’t even know she was there until I heard her voice, “Knock
knock.” Jule never used the stairs, so I never heard her coming. She didn’t need to.
She’d just be there, like some nightwisp who’d come to grant you a few wishes. I
didn’t mind that she came in first and knocked afterwards; we’d shared too much
for that.

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. Protec-tion . . . 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.