The city of Athens bordered the Arcade. I had no idea why the Allieds called the place Athens; it was as ugly as its ancient namesake on Earth was reputed to be beautiful. They had laid it out in squares delineated by nervoplex streets and lit by boxy lampposts. As Rex and I walked along the darkening roads, hovercars hummed by, their cushions of air exciting the nervoplex into ripples that bounced back and forth between the curbs. It gave me a headache.
The police station was a one-story building chromed with the same blue and silver colors worn by the Arcade police. We entered a lobby with a counter on its far side. As we crossed the room, a holocam tracked our movements from its perch in a corner of the ceiling.
A woman with graying hair greeted us at the counter. "Boro na sas voetheso?" she said.
Translate, I thought.
Greek, my node responded. Translation: May I help you?
The woman looked from Rex to me, her gaze darting over our uniforms. She repeated her question, her voice higher this time. What did we want, coming in here dressed like thugs—
Block, I thought. The psicon flashed and I stopped feeling like a criminal. Translate 'We would like to make a report' into Greek. As my node provided the words, I spoke haltingly, copying the Greek as best as I could. It didn't sound much like the node's pronunciation, though.
"Ti?" the woman asked. My node translated it as, What?
I pushed my hand through my hair. "Skolian?"
She shook her head. "Okhi Skolian."
No Skolian, the node translated.
"English?" I asked.
"Okhi English," she said.
How do I say 'Interpreter?' in Greek? I thought.
Diermeneas, my node answered.
I regarded the woman. "Diermeneas? Skolian."
"Epanalabete?" she asked. The node gave that one as Say again?
I gave it another try. "Diermeneas."
"Ah." The lines in her forehead smoothed out, and she motioned for us to follow her. She took us to a small room with a table surrounded by nervoplex chairs. Three walls were blank, but the fourth had a large pane of opaque glass. I suspected the glass was transparent when viewed from the other side; the place looked like an interrogation room.
After the woman left, Rex scowled at the chairs.
I smiled. You don't like the decor?
He grimaced. It's hard enough muting people's reactions without having it multiplied by what we sit in.
I brushed my finger over the back of a chair. Although nervoplex could do no more than react to muscle tension, empaths tended to interact with it, stiffening when it tried to relax us and relaxing when it tensed up. It set up a feedback loop that intensified whatever we were feeling. So really it just multiplied our own emotions. But Jagernauts were like sponges; other people's feelings became ours. Even the most disciplined of us, soldiers who showed no response to most observers, experienced minute changes in posture and muscle tension when we picked up emotions.
The door opened and a young man entered. He walked over to Rex and smiled, extending his hand. "My pleasure at your company," he said in perfect Skolian. "I'm Tiller Smith."
Rex blinked at him, then looked at me.
I think you put your hand in his and move it up and down, I thought.
Rex grasped Tiller's hand and pumped it vigorously. "Gracias," he said, using one of the few Earth words he knew.
Tiller winced, and extricated his hand from Rex's clutches. "Mrs. Karpozilos said you wanted to report a crime."
Why is he talking to me? Rex thought. Can't he tell you outrank me?
Maybe he doesn't know our military protocol. Aloud, I said, "Not a crime. We're hoping to prevent one."
Tiller glanced at me, then at the arms of Rex's jacket, then at mine. Finally he said, "I'm sorry—I've never really worked as an interpreter. I'm just a handyman here. I—well, I'm not sure how to do this." He spread his hands. "I can't even read your identifications."
Identifications? I peered at my jacket. Its only markings were a line of silver studs and the gold band around each of my upper arms that denoted my rank. Rex's was identical except he had two narrower bands on each arm. Did Tiller mean our ranks?
"I'm Sauscony Valdoria, Primary." I motioned at Rex. "Rex Blackstone, Secondary."
Tiller gaped at me. "You're an Imperial Admiral?"
I didn't see why that was such a surprise. "Primary. It's not the same thing."
"Isn't Primary another word for Admiral?"
"The rank is similar," I said. "But it's not the same. Primaries are Jagernauts."
"Super-fighters." Excitement leapt in Tiller's voice. "Telepathic computers, yes? I studied your—ah!" He hit his head with his palm. "I'm sorry. You didn't come here to be grilled by me."
"That's all right," I said. It was rather nice to meet someone who didn't wish we would go away.
He motioned to the chairs. "Shall we sit?"
Rex and I looked at each other. Neither of us made any move to sit. After a moment Tiller said, "I have a better idea. Why don't you come to my office? I have some great armchairs there." He glanced at the nervoplex seats and added, "Mine have cloth upholstery."
Smart fellow, this Tiller. "Thanks," I said.
His "office" turned out to be a cubbyhole between a restroom and a closet. Shelves lined the walls, crammed with holobooks and old style texts with paper pages. A faint odor of oil hung in the air. Equipment lay scattered everywhere: optical tools, dismantled holoscreens, parts of mesh consoles, jacks for human/mesh interfaces, and pieces of soldering-lasers. The clutter covered every available surface and hung from anything that remotely resembled a hook. The promised armchairs were buried under boxes of hologram film.
"Here." Tiller cleared off three chairs, transferring the boxes to his already crowded desk.
I chose an armchair with a worn covering that crackled. Rex settled into a green armchair. When Tiller drew up his seat, we made a small circle. He pulled a rod out of his pocket and tapped it against his knee. With a hum, it unrolled into a flexible screen on his lap. Dark letters appeared, suspended above the screen, and a holocam icon glowed in one corner, which probably meant he was making a visual recording.
"Okay." Tiller glanced up at us. "Tell me what happened."
"A Trader Aristo is visiting the Arcade," I said.
Tiller's face paled. "And?"
I wondered at his reaction. "Do you know why we call the Eubians by the name Traders?"
He spoke with difficulty. "I know—knew—someone who was on a ship captured by a Eubian Huntercraft. His family has been trying to find him for six years. The authorities say he's probably been sold to an Aristo."
"I'm sorry." Their chances of rescuing his friend were nil. "We think that may be why this Aristo is here. To find providers."
As Tiller's hand tightened on the arm of his chair, my own knuckles started to ache. "You think he's planning to kidnap someone?"
Rex rubbed his hands, massaging the knuckles. "It's possible."
"Why would an Aristo come to Delos for that?" Tiller asked.
"Providers have to be empaths," Rex said. "And empaths are rare, particularly among the Traders. He might have thought he had a better chance of finding one here."
Tiller spoke carefully. "The official Allied position is that empath don't exist."
Rex stiffened. Being told you didn't exist wasn't the most endearing statement. He spoke coolly. "That's not our problem."
Tiller held up his hands. "I didn't say we all thought that. Just that the experts aren't officially convinced true empaths exist."
I wondered how an official conviction differed from an unofficial one. His reaction intrigued me. He wanted to know what we could tell him about empaths far more than he let on. Why?
"An entire range exists," I said. "From simple empaths all the way to those who can sometimes pick up the thoughts that go with the emotions."
A surge of excitement made my stomach feel like shimmerflies danced in it. In the same instant Tiller said, "You mean telepathy, yes? Are you—?" He stopped himself. "I don't mean to pry. I've just never met telepaths before. I mean, you have to be, right? If you're Jagernauts?"
I couldn't help but smile. I liked Tiller. Most people wanted to be as far from us as possible, fearing we would violate their privacy. I had heard fabulous talents attributed to Jagernauts, everything from altering coastlines to adjusting the future. In truth, the best we could do was catch unusually intense thoughts, and even that was difficult unless the sender was also an empath or telepath.
"A Jagernaut must be five or above on the scale," Rex said.
"Scale?" Tiller asked.
"The Kyle Empathic Reception and Expression Scale," I said. "It measures a psion's strength. Ninety-nine percent of all humans are between zero and two. The weakest empaths are three, or one in a thousand. What most people call telepaths are six. One in a million. Or above that."
Tiller looked from Rex to me. "You're both sixes?"
Neither Rex nor I answered. After a moment, Tiller said, "Is something wrong?"
"What would you do," I said, "if I asked you how many times you made love last night?"
He reddened, and suddenly I felt mortified, as if I had peeked into his bedroom. "I'm sorry," he said. "I didn't realize it was so private."
"It's all right," Rex said. "I rate as a ten."
What possessed him to reveal that? I knew the ratings for my squad: Taas was seven, Helda six. At ten, Rex was that one in ten-billion telepath. But knowing their ratings was part of my job as squad leader. I doubted Rex had told Taas, maybe not even Helda.
Tiller looked at me—and I caught it. Feedback. He was feeding my surprise back to me.
Are you getting it, too? Rex thought. I was trying to draw him out.
We could ask him, I thought.
Too personal.
I think he wants to know. To put it mildly. He was bursting with his curiosity. He seems more comfortable with you.
Rex turned to Tiller. "How long have you known you were an empath?"
I almost groaned. He could have tried a little more tact.
Tiller turned red. "I never claimed—"
"You're in a feedback loop with us," Rex said. "You're picking up our emotions and sending them back to us."
Tiller gaped at him. "You're kidding."
"Not at all," I said. "Didn't you know?"
"Of course not." He hesitated. "Well, I mean, I've always thought—but you don't say things like that. People laugh at you." A breathless feeling came over me, fear and hope together. At that exact moment Tiller said, "You really think I'm an empath?"
Rex smiled, the lines around his eyes crinkling. "Yes. You should get tested."
"I've thought of it. That's why I learned Skolian. But I can't afford it." He looked from me to Rex. "I'm probably fooling myself, anyway. I don't see any evidence I'm different."
"It's not something you see," Rex said. "It's in your brain."
"Something is wrong with my brain?"
"Not wrong," I said. Though I supposed that depended on your point of view. "It contains two extra organs."
Tiller laughed. "In my skull? There's no room."
"They're microscopic," I said. "The Kyle Afferent Body and the Kyle Efferent Body. Most people just say KAB and KEB, though."
"When you think, neurons fire in your brain," Rex said. "My KAB picks that up."
Tiller squinted at us. "How could your brain know that my, um, neurons fired?"
"The molecular configuration of your brain has a quantum probability distribution—" Rex stopped when Tiller winced. Then Rex said, "Imagine an invisible hill centered on your brain."
"Okay." Tiller looked relieved.
"That's the distribution," Rex said. "Its 'foothills' fan out in all directions. They get smaller so fast that they've dropped to almost nothing a few hundred meters away from you. When you think, it changes the shape of those hills. You and I are close enough to each other that the distributions of our brains is overlapping right now. So my KAB can pick up changes in your distribution."
Tiller blinked at him. "So why doesn't this overlap thing happen with everyone?"
"It does," Rex said. "But without a KAB, a person can't pick up anything. But I do. The more intense your feelings or thoughts, the more molecular sites they affect my KAB. The KAB sends messages to neural structures in my brain called paras. Only empaths have them. My paras interpret that input as your emotions."
"The KAB receives signals," I said. "The KEB sends them. It acts like an amplifier, increasing the range and intensity of the signal you send to other empaths."
Tiller laughed ruefully. "No wonder I'm so slow. If all that extra business is going on in my head, I must never have time for thinking."
Rex smiled. "Actually, you have more brain cells. In fact, it can make you smarter."
"Not me," Tiller said. "I'm not brilliant like my siblings."
"Don't underestimate yourself," Rex said. "The traits are hereditary."
"Shouldn't my parents be empaths, then? I don't think they are."
"The genes are recessive," I said. "Your parents could carry them unpaired, like brown-eyed parents with a blue-eyed child."
Tiller hesitated. "A lot more people have blue eyes than, well—are like me."
Rex and I exchanged a glance. We knew all too well the rarity of psions. I tried to make a joke out of it. "You could put us on an endangered species list." It didn't sound funny, though. It hit too close to the truth.
"If people know which genes do the trick," Tiller asked, "can't they engineer more of us?"
"It's been tried." My grandmother had been "born" that way. "But the Kyle genes are linked to lethal recessives. Even if an engineered fetus survives, its brain is often abnormal. The fetus also reacts strongly to its environment, so cloning is difficult." I smiled slightly. "The best method for making psions is the old-fashioned way, with a man and a woman."
"Ah." Tiller smiled slightly. Then his face turned thoughtful. "I had always thought empaths were a result of the Rhon Project."
"Not exactly," Rex said. "Doctor Rhon was trying to help empaths develop a high resistance to pain." Bitterly he added, "He created the Aristos instead."
Tiller sat up straighter. "The Skolian government created the Aristos?"
I spoke shortly. "No."
"Your government isn't called the Rhon?"
Soz? Rex thought. Do you want me to stop?
I tried to relax. No. Go ahead.
"We're governed by the Assembly," Rex said. "It's an elected council of leaders."
"Then what's Rhon?" Tiller asked.
"He was a geneticist," Rex said. "The word is also used for the descendents of a human dynasty that ruled the Ruby Empire five thousand years ago."
"Oh." Tiller looked embarrassed. "I'm afraid I don't know much Skolian history."
"It's your history too," I said. "We all come from the same place."
"I have to admit,' Tiller said, "I just never understood how that could be."
I spoke wryly. "Join the club." As in, the entire human race. "all we know, really, is that six thousand years ago, an alien race kidnapped humans from Earth, stranded them on some planet, and disappeared." My ancestors had never figured out the point of that bizarre exercise, seeing as their kidnappers never told them why.
The displaced humans had had nothing but the ruined starships left behind by their abductors. They eventually used the libraries in those vessels to develop star travel and establish the Ruby Empire, an interstellar civilization. The empire fell after only a few centuries, though, stranding its colonies. It took thousands of years for my ancestors to recover space flight, but they still managed it before Earth. In Earth's twenty-first century, when her people finally attained the stars, they got one hell of a jolt. We were already here, busily building empires. We and the Allieds had intermingled since then, until now, less than two centuries later, it was hard to believe we had been separated for millennia. But the differences were there, deep under the surface. It would be a long time before we trusted each other.
"Rhon worked with the descendants of the Ruby Dynasty, which had ruled the Ruby Empire." Rex said. "He was trying to bring back the Kyle traits that had made them empaths and telepaths. That's why people call members of the Ruby Dynasty 'the Rhon.' It refers to their Kyle rating. It's too high to quantify."
"I thought Rhon was their name," Tiller said.
"Their family name is Skolia." Rex spoke wryly. "That's why we're the Skolian Imperialate. They may only be titular rulers, but they're still our royal family."
Tiller rubbed his chin. "So Rhon selected for empathy and got Skolias, and he selected for pain resistance and got Aristos?"
"He didn't mean to create the Aristos," I said. "It's what you would call an unfortunate side-effect." Very unfortunate, as in one of the worst catastrophes in human history.
"I still don't get it," Tiller said. "What do the Traders want with empaths?"
I didn't want to answer. I didn't want to think about it. But he needed to know. "An Aristo's brain only picks up emotions caused by pain. To decrease their sensitivity to it, the brain sends the signals to its pleasure centers. It makes the Aristo feel good. More than good. It's ecstasy." I had to stop myself from gritting my teeth. "They're a bunch of sadists. They get off on torturing people."
Tiller's face paled. "But why empaths?"
I was having trouble breathing. A fan in the wall whirred, with a hiccup that grated on my nerves. "We send stronger signals. The stronger the empath, the—the more the Aristo—enjoys . . ." My fists clenched and my words balled into knots.
Tiller waited. But neither Rex nor I continued. Finally Tiller traced his finger through a winged icon above his screen. "I've sent a copy of your report to the Chief." He shifted in his seat. "But unless this man breaks a law, we can't do much."
"Just be careful where you go," I said. "Stay at home or here for the next few days."
"All right." He looked as uncomfortable as I felt.
After we left Tiller's office, we headed to the lobby. I stopped before we had gone far, though. "Rex, I'll meet you at the Inn."
"What's wrong?"
"Nothing. I just forgot to tell Tiller something."
He touched my cheek, his finger lingering. "Soz . . ."
His uncharacteristic touch startled me. "I'm all right."
"You're sure?"
"Sure. I'm great."
He brushed a curl of my hair out of my eyes. "I'll see you later, yes?"
Why was he looking at me with that strange, tender look? "Of course." It wasn't like I was going anywhere.
After we split up, I went back and found Tiller's door open. He was sitting on the edge of his desk reading a book.
"Tiller?" I said.
He looked up, his pleased surprise lightening my mood like a gust of cool air on a sweltering day. "Did you forget something?"
"No." I came over to him. "I thought you wanted me to come back."
He winced. "Am I that easy to read?"
I smiled. "Only to another empath."
"I was just thinking—" His voice gentled. "It took a lot for you to come here."
"All we did was talk."
"Something hurt you, and our talk stirred it up."
"I'm fine. Really."
"I wanted to say thanks, that's all." He pointed to the pen-sized computer on his armchair. "And for that. With a record of two high-ranking Imperial military officers saying I'm an empath, I might convince a grant committee at the university to sponsor my Kyle testing."
"Well. Good." I didn't know what else to say. I was used to people speeding in the other direction when I came around. Thanks wasn't a word I had much experience with.
"Here." Tiller handed me his book.
I held it awkwardly, wondering what do. The book was old style, bound in soft cloth the color of ivory, with parchment pages inside instead of a holoscreen. My translator gave the title as Verses on a Windowpane, written in English.
"It's beautiful," I said.
"Keep it. As a thank you gift."
A gift? This Allied citizen who didn't know me was giving me a gift simply for talking to him. For some reason my eyes were wet. Block, I thought. But the psicon didn't flash.
Night had folded its cooling darkness around the city by the time I headed back to the hotel. I took speedwalks that bordered the streets, avoiding the nervoplex. I didn't want to feel what it would tell me about myself. I already knew. I had lied to Rex and Tiller. I wasn't fine. My mind had started to replay that scene, the one I wanted to forget, the one that had lived in my nightmares for so many years.
Ten years ago, I had been walking along a dirt path on Tams, for all appearances a normal citizen going about my business. A flycar had hummed by me, then stopped and backed up. In slow motion, I saw it happen again and again; Kryx Tarque, the Aristo governor, leaning out to look at me, lifting his long finger while his lips formed words: That one. I want that one.
That one. Me. Sauscony Valdoria.
I had run. But even a Jagernaut couldn't outrun six armed soldiers plus an Aristo in a flycar. When they caught me, I faced a decision that haunted my memories: should I fight? I wanted to hurt them the way I knew Tarque planned to hurt me. But it would give away my military training. They would know they had someone far more interesting than a Tams citizen. They would investigate until they discovered my identity, not only my military rank but also the civilian title I carried. And then my life would become a nightmare.
Unless I waited until the odds were better, I would have no chance of escaping. So I fought like a frightened civilian instead of a Jagernaut. Tarque found it amusing. He took me to his estate in the hills and had me as his prisoner for three weeks. Late into one of those long Tams nights I finally managed to work free of the restraints he had used to tie my wrists to the bed.
Then I strangled him.
Rex had been trying for that entire three weeks to infiltrate the estate. He found me after I fled the house, when I was running across a field, my mind screaming from aftershocks of the pain. He caught me, held me tight, so tight, as if he feared I would vanish. His voice shook while he told me, again and again, that I would be all right.
But I wasn't all right. Tarque had been the antithesis of an empath, a being with a mental cavity where his capacity for compassion should have been. Sadist and empath, parasite and host: his mind had been the negative of mine. When he concentrated on me, I fell into his emptiness, filling it for him, connecting us in a bond he craved even more than orgasm. He spoke in soft, loving murmurs while I screamed and screamed and screamed . . .
Rex and I left Tams that night. I spent only a few days in the hospital; Tarque hadn't wanted his provider scarred, so my physical wounds were minor. But my doctors told me to see a heartbender. When I didn't go, my CO ordered it. So I went and told the heartbender what she wanted to hear; I am, after all, an empath. In her report she said I would be all right, that I just needed time to heal.
As for my true feelings about what happened—if they had haunted me for ten years, that was my business and mine alone.