Marduk's Rebellion

by Jenn Lyons

reason you’re different, and you know that too.”

  “Yes.”

  “They’ll kill you for it eventually,” he says. “Someone told them that you can only see the minds of humans, and that’s not exactly true is it?”

  I blink. “You know about him?“

  “Yes. I trained him too. It’s harder to see Sarcodinay, you know. I understand. They’re all fuzzy with high walls, like a castle in the fog. But they will figure it out. They’re going to do something terrible to you or to someone you know one time too often and you’ll rip someone’s mind apart, and you’ll scare them. And no one reacts well to being scared.”

  “I don’t want to hurt anyone, anyway. They made me hurt people, and I didn’t want to, and I could feel them die. I can always feel them die.”

  “I know.” He kneels down and looks up at me. “Mallory, you have no reason to trust me, but I will let you look at me. Look at me up here.” He taps a finger against his temple. “Because I can show you how to shut it down. How to stop the voices. And there will be no more accidents, no more hurting people like that. You’ll still hear humans, but it will be much fainter, much easier for you ignore—and Sarcodinay, well, I doubt you’ll hear them at all.”

  “Never?”

  “Just while you’re in school. We’ll weave in triggers, so that when you’re older, you can pull down the blocks. When you’re older you can scare the Sarcodinay all you like.”

  “But why do I have to stay in this school? We could leave. We could leave right now!” I point to the hole in the roof, to the sunlight falling down like spear shafts.

  He shakes his head. “I know it’s hard to understand, but you are safest here. I know that seems impossible, but you are valuable to the people who put you here, and as long as they don’t panic—for instance, because they find out that you can affect them in exactly the way normal humans can’t—you should be more valuable alive to them than dead. And the security here is really very good. Even that hole isn’t the easy exit it looks like.”

  “But they’ll know,” I protest. “The woman who put me here is so strong. If she comes back and you take away what I do, I won’t be able to block her out anymore. And in any case, when they drug us and they fill our minds—if they think to ask I’ll tell them everything.” I see the look on his face. He is not surprised. I am not telling him anything that he doesn’t already know, hasn’t already thought through.

  “All very true, but...” He taps the side of his nose. “You won’t be able to tell them what you don’t remember. We’ll bury this deep, Mallory. Deep enough that it won’t come out until you are well rid of this place. And I promise you, while that’s true, Tirris Vahn won’t be able to touch your mind.”

  I look at him seriously. “I think I am going to have to see into your mind.”

  He nods. “Only fair.”

  Duncan tilts his head and smiles at me, and his brown eyes look mischievous. I put my hand against his forehead, little fingers lightly touching the teacher caste mark at the center. I’m not sure why I feel the need to touch him. I’ve never had to do that before. I don’t really need to do it this time either. I just want to.

  I touch his mind and know, instantly, that he is not human.

  I have never felt a mind like his before. It shines with the brightness of star fire, with the blinding glare of a sun. I cannot even look at it directly, but must peer at him obliquely, as if I were trying to shade my eyes. Which is silly of course because I’m not using my eyes and he’s not really throwing off such a bright light and I shouldn’t be squinting, but I am. And I know that he’s dimming that light for me, to make it easier. He’s lowering his defenses so I can get in without frying myself to a crisp, which I can tell is what would happen if I’d ever been foolish enough to try this without permission.

  His real name is not Duncan Goliard, which isn’t a surprise, not really. I catch a glimpse of all his lives, so many of them they seem to stretch out into infinity, and some of them have been human but so many more have been other races, so many more races besides Sarcodinay and human than I ever realized existed and all of them beautiful, horrible and so very different than the two arms, two legs, one head bipedal template I’ve grown up knowing. He is here, he is here now, because he likes humans best, because what the Sarcodinay have done with humanity fills him with revulsion, because someone has to shake things up a bit and he has always found the greatest pleasure in the teaching and training of rebels.

  “Kantari,” I whisper, and he smiles in response.

  “Another thing it’s best you don’t remember,” he tells me.

  He’s scared of me. I see that too. Except—no—he’s not scared of me, but for me. He is not scared of me, but of the reactions of others to me. He fears the reactions of those I will frighten, those I will terrify: some humans and most Sarcodinay and dimly, seen from far away, some other group so old and immense that I shy away from their memory the same way I’d pull my hand away from a fire.

  He puts his hands on my temples and I feel his mind pour into mine like sunlight through a window, and the world dissolves into beautiful white brightness.

  When I wake he is just a human, just one of my teachers, and I have never been able to read Sarcodinay minds.

  ggg

  “We’re here, Mallory,” Medusa said.

  I opened my eyes slowly. I was more tired than I’d thought. I rubbed my eyelids and yawned, leaned my head against the window and looked out once more at the antique old apartment building I remembered from childhood, and had chosen to reclaim again as home. The trip up would be quick this time. Walk in, pick up the film of Paul’s records, hop right back out again, board the Aegis for a trip to Keepers’ Island and a waiting Alexander Rhodes—but I couldn’t make myself move.

  “Do you think Shaniran was telling the truth?” I said after a long pause.

  “That Maia-Leia Shana was responsible for your creation?”

  I pressed my forehead harder against the glass. “Yes.”

  “I think he believed it was the truth. That does not, however, make it true.”

  “It would explain a lot.”

  “And raise as many questions. If Maia-Leia Shana created you as an experiment, why weren’t you raised on Keepers’ Island? Why were your parents, who presumably would have been appointed to raise you by Shana, arrested for illegal hyperspace research? Why were they arrested at all? And if Maia-Leia Shana did create a telepathic hybrid, in violation of the Tridates of the Keepers, why weren’t you trained to use your abilities? If she didn’t mean to create a telepath, why weren’t you killed when your abilities first manifested?”

  “The very question Lorvan had promised to answer.” I scratched a nail down the side of the smooth, cold windowpane. “What happened in Rio—”

  “What did happen in Rio? Most recently, I mean. Your vital signs were not within healthy limits.”

  “The blocks are falling away, Deuce, that’s what happened. I’m starting to remember, and the more I remember, the worse it grows. I’m not—” I closed my eyes. “I’m not Vela-class. Not even close. I didn’t even have to try out there, Medusa. His mind was so open. It would be so easy. I shouldn’t have that kind of power. No one should have that kind of power.” I shuddered. “How do the High Guard even stay sane, being able to do that to other people?”

  “I don’t believe that by human definitions Sarcodinay High Guard would be considered sane. They fall within fairly traditional definitions of sociopathy.”

  I laughed bitterly. “Yes. Yes, of course they do. Imagine the walls they must build up around themselves just to keep from...feeling. Feeling everything. What monster first thought it a good idea to take telepaths and make them assassins? So they could feel every death as though it was their own? Know their victims so completely, so intimately? Closer than any lover...”

  “Knowing is not the same as cherishing, Mallory. I have often wondered if that might indeed make it easier to feel contempt for those they would
kill.”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “I can only speak for myself. Even with my psychic abilities locked away as they were, killing people hurt. It’s a dull, rusty knife kind of pain, and there was a point in my life where I craved those self-inflicted wounds, but—” I shook my head. “I don’t know what I would have done if Duncan hadn’t locked it away. I really don’t. I think I would have gone insane back in Kaimer School. Gone mad. If Duncan—” I stopped. Duncan. Kantari.

  “Mallory?”

  I shook my head to clear the distraction of old teachers and their secrets. “Do you want to know what people are like? What they are really like?”

  “I will admit I have wondered at how you perceive them.”

  “They’re...” I searched to find the words. “They are just exactly like they are on the outside, Medusa. Everyone is.”

  “And by that you mean—?”

  “Stupid, hateful, superior, insecure, lazy, arrogant, close-minded, sweet, clever, loving, brilliant, kind, sincere, understanding, wonderful. Everyone is horrible and awful and beautiful and precious. And to know that someone is all that, to know the way that most people can only guess at any other person’s true nature, to have no doubts at all, and to just cut away their life regardless...”

  “Maybe the High Guard have taught themselves to only see the evil. Then it would be justice.”

  “Indeed. And every one of us deserving. No one