LEARNING FEAR

by B. A. Chepaitis

  Alex had been running interference for her since she'd been booted off of Planetoid One almost five years ago, so he knew how to deal with the governors in these matters. They were a cakewalk compared with dealing with her.

  Especially on days like today, when he wasn't sure how she'd take what he was about to say.

  "Jaguar," he said, "you've been asked to take on a special assignment."

  She stopped stirring and placed her spoon on the table between them. "Tell me about it."

  "It's part of an exchange program. We've got some University people coming up here to learn the system, and we're sending some of our people to the University to do some teaching."

  "Who's bright idea was that?"

  "Governors. Good for PR, and it gets some extra funding tossed our way. The University people here will be confined to interviews with exiting prisoners and reading open files, so that shouldn't be a problem. The Planetoid people on campus will teach courses in their areas of expertise."

  "And what's my part in it? Confining the researchers?"

  "Actually, you're being placed at the New York State University. Upstate campus. Cultural studies department."

  She sat with her cup of tea poised halfway between the table and her mouth.

  He continued. "It's a pretty light load. One undergrad survey-of-religions course, one honors seminar, three on-line graduate students. Research time."

  "I beg your pardon," she said. "Did you say a teaching job? As in, a classroom? Grade sheets and ordering books and taking attendance?"

  "I appreciate the irony."

  Jaguar had spent some time teaching when she was a graduate student, but she'd never intended to work in a classroom. She'd gotten a degree to satisfy the requirements for work on the Planetoids. She said it was about the same job description as classroom teaching—long hours, low pay, and hard work with groups of people who would rather be somewhere else.

  She sipped at her tea, a Cheshire cat smile visible over the rim of the cup.

  "Quite a cover," she said. "Who's the prisoner, and what's the assignment?"

  This, Alex thought, would be the difficulty. No way to say it except straight. "No prisoner. Just—research."

  She put down her teacup, sat back, and folded her hands in her lap. Waiting.

  Alex paced from the couch back to the window, and toward the couch again. Her apartment was, like her, clean and airy with a touch of the wild. Not too much furniture. Bentwood rocking chair which he knew had belonged to her grandmother. Shelves loaded with disks and books. Then, on the desk next to her telecom, a curved piece of wood intricately carved by busy insects, next to a clay pot filled with dried sage leaves. On the windowsill, a hawk's feather and two stones—one round and white, the other thin black obsidian. Fresh mint in pots, and dried mint tied in bunches that hung over the doorway to her bedroom.

  He picked up the pack of cigarettes that was on the end table next to the couch and brought it to Jaguar, held the cigarettes out in front of her.

  Jaguar stared at them, then took one out, lit it as he sat back down.

  "Where's my blindfold?" she asked, breathing out smoke. "And which wall should I stand against?"

  "It's not that bad," he said. "I just know how you feel about research jobs."

  "I don't feel any way about them," she said deliberately, "because I never do them. I work with prisoners. Criminals. I'm a Teacher." She pulled deeply on her cigarette, flicked ashes into the saucer of her teacup.

  "You'll be a teacher there, too," he said. "And the research isn't the usual. Just listen for a minute, okay?"

  She unsettled herself in her seat, resettled, and showed him the green of her suspicious eyes. He supposed that was listening, of sorts, and he continued.

  "The Board's been taking heat about psi work on the Planetoids. Apparently home planet opinion is moving to the right, and the media's decided we make juicy copy, so there's been more than the usual run of stories making us out to be freaks. The Board wants Planetoid people visible on the home planet as regular working folks. They want to shift some attitudes."

  Jaguar rolled her eyes at him. "They might have a better chance if they could make up their minds about their own."

  The Board was ambivalent about the use of the arts. They'd overturned the ruling that automatically discounted people with psi capacities from working on the Planetoids, but the codebook advised against use of the empathic arts. No specific punishment existed for using them, but Teachers could reasonably expect an absence of promotion if they were spotted as practicing. They knew use of the arts was extraordinarily helpful in the job, but they wouldn't support it as long as prejudice against it still existed on the home planet.

  Like all good bureaucrats, they wanted to sit on any fence they could find, no matter how many pickets it drove up their behinds.

  "Maybe a little learning on the home planet would help, too," he said.

  "Goon."

  "The campus you're going to is trying to set up courses in history of the empathic arts. Ultimately they'll add research courses."

  Jaguar raised her eyebrows. "And wonders never cease. Will they have courses for practitioners? A sort of voc-tech for incipient empaths?"

  "No, Jaguar. History only, for now. That's controversial enough."

  "No shit. Anybody dead yet?"

  "Not yet. The University president asked for someone from here who can spot trouble and let her know about it."

  "The president? Is she—you know—one of us?"

  "No. She just likes the color of the money she's getting from certain federal research organizations."

  "Such as?"

  "The usual. Military and Think Tank. That's part of the local controversy."

  "Interesting," she said. "Am I to express support for the Pentagon while I'm there?"

  "You're to discreetly track faculty feelings so the president can forestall any trouble. They're still trying to live down bad press over the disappearance of some sorority women a few years ago, and they want no more noise. But for the most part, you'll just be teaching your course and relaxing. I don't expect any trouble."

  "How nice for you," she said. "But you won't be there, so it doesn't matter what you expect. What about me? Should I expect trouble?"

  He folded his hands on his knees and studied them before answering tentatively. "I don't think so," he said.

  He felt the stab of subvocal communication from her.

  Not so sure, are you, Alex?

  She raised her sea eyes to his, and maintained contact. He held her stare, watching the gold flicker in the green like sun on water. The sharp, clear aroma of mint curled from her to him. He saw the brief image of Jaguar, young and small, crushing dried mint in her hand. Her grandfather bent over her, nodding. Mint. Mint to cover the smell of rotting death, of bloodied bodies lying too long in the streets. Her grandfather, giving her mint, and outside her window, a group of vigilantes clubbed a woman to death because she wore a sage-green dress.

  Color of empaths, color of healers. In popular lore, color of Satan. In fact, color of death for those who wore it, as the self-appointed Safety Squads ran the streets looking for anyone they could blame, anything they could do to control the terror of those times.

  She gave him all this as easily as she would blow a kiss to Paul Dinardo. Then, just as easily, it was gone and she turned a cool smile at him.

  "You're going to University campus in upstate New York," he said sharply, "not Manhattan during the Killing Times. This is not a big deal."

  "This is a crock of shit," Jaguar replied just as sharply. "Putting me on a campus in the middle of an antiempath movement to do some discreet spying? Sounds like the Board wants me to get myself discreetly killed."

  Alex frowned down into his teacup, swirling the leaves at the bottom. He knew an old woman who would have read the answer there, but he couldn't. Except that he knew Jaguar was right. It wasn't her job. Though they were both empaths, and though they both used the arts, A
lex had learned how to do so within the bounds of Planetoid policy. Jaguar recognized only the boundaries necessary to accomplish the job at hand. She would get the job done at any cost—which is why her success rate, at 98 percent, was the highest in the system—but she was definitely a high-maintenance worker. On her last job she'd saved a few million lives, and cost a few million dollars when she decomposed an entire VR site. With her bare hands. Once she'd blown up a Lear Shuttle, just to save his life.

  And that's why, Alex thought, she's going back to school.

  Board Governor Paul Dinardo said her doctorate made her most qualified, and what he euphemistically called her special talents made her best suited to spot trouble. Alex said draw trouble was more like it, and Paul said maybe, but wouldn't it be restful to have her off the Planetoid, just for a little while? Maybe she'd like the job so much she wouldn't come back.

  That's how all the governors felt about her, but they'd hand her the hardest assignments because they all knew that if Jaguar couldn't handle it, nobody could. Alex didn't know who to be angry with about that. Jaguar, or the conservative administrative body she tangled with. Sometimes, just for fun, he'd be angry at both simultaneously.

  "If you could exercise a little discretion here," he said testily, "this sort of thing wouldn't happen so frequently."

  "What? This is because I object to giving them tape? I will not have a bunch of tight-assed white men and blue-haired ladies setting the standards for my programs," she shot back at him.

  He picked up his teacup and drank the remainder, setting it down on the coffee table a little too hard. He drew in breath and let it out.

  "All right," he said. "The University president requested help in ferreting out faculty involvement in an antiempath movement, and the request seemed to mesh with the Board's desire to give you something dull and far away. It'll give them a break from your incendiary tendencies, and they can slap your wrists politely at the same time, hoping you'll come back properly subdued."

  "The Board," Jaguar said, eyeing him coldly, "hopes I'll come back as a clean-cut white man who buys the system. Preferably, an Adept."

  He shifted uncomfortably in his seat. The privilege of wearing a suit and tie, the privilege of a gut-level understanding of institutions were his. He was a white man, old enough to slap the backs of other white men, enough silver in the black of his hair that nobody commented much on the earring he wore, or the thin braid he could easily hide down the collar of his white shirt. And institutions tended to value the services of the Adept more than the kinds of arts Jaguar practiced.

  His art was seeing future possibilities and manipulating present events to reach the desired end. Hers was— what? Blowing up technology. Singing herself into visions and the wisdom of the spirit world. Getting through the barriers that surrounded a shadowed soul. Seeing the world of the prisoners she worked with so clearly she could breathe on it, then wipe it clean.

  Much of what she practiced didn't even have names yet. Chant-shaping, singing, walking in a world whose existence others didn't even acknowledge—they didn't fit into the dominant paradigm. His psi capacities were known quantities, and he used them quietly so the Board couldn't object.

  And he couldn't do a thing to change either himself, or her, or the Board.

  "Jaguar, give it up. You're not going to change the world today."

  She unfolded her legs from under her and put her teacup down on the table. She stared at the smoke that rose from the cigarette in her hand, and then tamped it out hard in her teacup.

  "A course runs fifteen weeks," Alex said placatingly. "The work is easy and interesting, and you get better pay. So why are you angry?"

  She lifted her chin a notch. "Maybe I'm just tired of being treated like a wayward child. I'm not, you know."

  "I know. What else?"

  She lowered her head and raised it again, a gesture Alex had come to regard with the same caution as he'd view a bull making the same moves. When she raised her face, she let her green-gold eyes focus fully on his, and it took no empathic touch to read what was written there.

  Infamy. Betrayal.

  She was angry at—him?

  "Why?" he asked, knowing he didn't have to say more. Not to her. "What did I do?"

  "It's not what you did, Alex. It's what you didn't do."

  "What didn't I do?"

  "Talk them out of sending me."

  She was right. He could have fought it harder. If he'd insisted, Paul would probably have backed down. He'd done that sort of thing for her in the past. Something stayed his hand this time, and she knew it. He wondered if she knew why, and wished that if she did, she'd let him know, since he didn't seem to have a clue. His confusion rippled into defensive anger.

  "I don't see any reason why you shouldn't go. Christ—most Teachers'd jump at the chance."

  "Since when am I most Teachers?"

  "What do you suppose I could have done to change their minds?"

  "How hard did you try?"

  He scowled at her, said nothing.

  She uncoiled herself and rose, stalked silently to the window, then back to the couch, looking somewhere over his left shoulder. She passed him, circled around to his back, and stood behind him. He sat still, feeling the hum of tension between them. Buzzing like lightbulbs in rain, he thought.

  Then he felt her fingernail press into the back of his neck. It lingered there a moment before she raked it across his shoulder, delicate and deliberate, like a razor plowing flesh. Had she ever touched him like that before? Not that he knew of.

  Her finger came to rest in the joint of his shoulder. He didn't move.

  "Perhaps you haven't betrayed me, then," she said quietly, holding him still with her fingertip. "Perhaps you've betrayed yourself."

  She stood silently behind him. Let the moment sink into him. Let time pass. She was so good at that.

  "What the hell are you getting at?" he asked at last.

  She answered, soft as silk brushing against his cheek, "Your fear."

  She spoke into him now, easy as water, smooth as the blade of her knife.

  Why are you sending me, Alex? What are you afraid of?

  He was tempted to turn and let his eyes rest in hers, see what strange and wild creatures swam there. That's what she wanted him to do.

  Give me your eyes.

  To pull him into that compelling, and disturbing, place. And what would it show that he didn't know already?

  Give me your eyes and let me see.

  Nothing. There was nothing to see. He knew who she was and accepted it. What he saw on the tape with her prisoner. What he knew of her wilderness. Her untamable soul.

  Then give me your eyes.

  No. There was nothing to see. Once, he'd kissed her, but that was work. Kiss of life, given in the line of duty. Empathic energy and nothing more. It meant nothing.

  Give me your eyes.

  Nothing but the feel of her hair twined around his fingers. A blip of feeling, here and gone. It had nothing to do with what was going on now. Nothing to do with fear or wanting her to leave or wanting her. Or wanting her. Or wanting her to leave.

  Then give me your eyes.

  He lifted a hand and made a fist, brought it down hard against the table.

  The teacups clattered. She didn't jump. Didn't say a word while he considered his fist, considered her touch on the back of his neck, considered his own reaction to her touch.

  He felt her finger leave his shoulder, felt her eyes stop boring into the back of his skull. He was aware of her moving away from him like thunder heading south. He twisted around and saw her staring out the window, away from him.

  "Right," she said. "What's next?"

  He let his breathing and heart rate settle, asked his anger to dissipate, then he answered.

  "Just the packing," he said. "The books are ordered and your syllabi were set by the department. I looked over the list. There's nothing on it you don't know."

  "They ordered my books? Set my syl
labi?"

  "Apparently," he said, "they aren't taking any chances."

  He did not say out loud that he couldn't really blame them.

  "So," Rachel said to Jaguar, "have a good time. I'll miss you."

  She'd come over to Jaguar's apartment on her way to work to say good-bye, see if there was anything else that needed doing in her absence. Rachel was a team member, working with Teachers on the programs they created, and working in the Supervisor's office with Alex when she wasn't on a prisoner assignment. She had once been Jaguar's assigned prisoner. Now she was her friend.

  Jaguar turned from her bags to Rachel's concerned face and smiled a little tightly. "I'll miss you, too, Rachel. Stuck down there with a bunch of rat-fuck pencil pushers. I'll even miss Gerry."

  Rachel bit her lip, trying not to laugh, a move she thought wouldn't be politic right now. "That's what I like about you, Jaguar. You keep that positive attitude working for you."

  Jaguar ran a hand through her hair, let it rest at the back of her neck. "I'm positive this is a crock of shit.

  "What'm I forgetting?" she asked. "You'll water the plants?"

  "Check on the imaginary cats. Walk the invisible dogs. Assassinate Board members. Whatever you say. Got your notebook?"

  She patted her shoulder bag, then her wrist. "Notebook here. Knife here."

  The tip of the red glass knife she carried up her sleeve made a brief appearance, then receded back under the sleeve of her red silk shirt.

  "You shouldn't need that," Rachel said.

  "Never know. Got a line you can't untangle—sometimes you need to cut it."

  Rachel shook her head and let it go. "Did you input all your codes? You'll need the office and my personal line codes. Alex said—"

  "The hell with Alex," she said. "I'll file my reports—shit. My report code. I don't know it."

  She let her shoulder bag drop, opened it, and pulled out her notebook, which would have all the files for codes under which to report back to the Planetoid while she was away.