Jaguar knew she was being asked to do something, but she wasn't sure what. "Do you want me to talk to them about it?"
"Actually," Emily said, "I thought maybe you could give an open lecture as part of the speaker series. About working on the Planetoids. It would make sense as part of the exchange program, and I know a lot of the faculty also want to know."
Jaguar thought of the last tape she had made for the Governors' Board. If she had thought ahead, she would have brought it along and shown it, then fielded questions afterward.
"Did I say something funny?" Emily asked, when she saw the grin on Jaguar's face.
"No. Not at all. I'm just flattered at your request. It's a shame there's certain confidentiality rules I couldn't possibly break. I don't think my office would allow it."
"Oh," Emily said, disappointed. "I see. But—are you sure?"
"I could check, but I'm reasonably sure."
"Well, if you find out different, let me know and I'll arrange something."
Arrange to make me a nonmoving target, Jaguar thought. She didn't know if Emily was actually involved with Private Sanction, or if she just spouted the bigotry of the general public when she talked about empaths, but she must know that giving a lecture about the Planetoids, as a Planetoid worker, would mark Jaguar for all eyes.
Emily said nothing for some time. Her mouth twitched and her glassy eyes peered over Jaguar's shoulder, out toward the distant mountains. Jaguar watched her, saw that her emotional ground was shifting, and something interesting was waiting to rise up from the epicenter.
At last she spoke. "About Ethan," she said, and then stopped, fidgeted with her bracelets. "I feel obligated to let you know that he's perfectly free to see whom he wishes," she said, and sighed deeply.
"I don't have any particular interest in any kind of— of relationship," Jaguar said.
"I know," Emily said, speaking more sharply. "That's what makes you so dangerous."
Jaguar pulled back in her seat and brought her chin up. "Dangerous?"
Emily leaned forward and pulled her gaze into focus, turning it on Jaguar. The force of it was astonishing. "When I first came here, I believed in the University. I thought it was a place where you could live your ideals. Teaching, learning, guiding young people, and following the call of enlightenment. I was wrong. It's a place of pettiness. Petty greed. A pretense of power to ward off fears of impotence. Petty men grappling for the biggest piece of a rotten potato. They think it means something. I thought it meant something. I was wrong."
There was enough fire in her eyes to burn the building down, and she reached over and put a hand that felt like a talon on Jaguar's arm.
"And you—you come here as if you can get away with living as you please. As if you don't have to get caught in the web of all the relationships, all the needs and feelings and grapplings and gropings. As if you're above all that. But you're not. You'll see. You can act like nothing will stick to you, but you'll come out as bloody as the rest of us."
She held up a hand like a claw. Held it high, laughed at it, then dropped it back into her lap and stared out the window, away from Jaguar, who waited to see what might happen next.
Emily stood, smoothed down her skirt. "Well, I won't keep you," she chirped. "But let's have lunch sometime. Shall we?" She gave Jaguar a hand to shake, and left the office.
"Well," Jaguar muttered to the door when it closed. "Wasn't that fun? And yes, let's do it again sometime, when one of us is a little more sane."
She picked up her student papers and riffled through them absentmindedly, thinking about Emily, about the message left on her computer, about the glassiness of Emily's eyes. As she ran her finger over the edge and listened to the paper make its small music, a printout of an Internet article floated out and down to the floor. She scooped it up midair, and held it in front of her face, reading.
"Shit," she said.
It was an article about the murder of two Wiccans. They were performing a ceremony for Samhain when someone bashed their heads in, pinned notes to their tongues. "Mind-fuckers," the notes said.
Jaguar put the article on her desk. Did it go with someone's paper? She sifted through, looking for Wicca. Discrimination. Samhain. Anything resembling this article.
Nothing.
Without thinking, she ran a hand over it to feel the last hand that had touched it. Such a natural gesture for her. Her hand stroked the paper, and she felt for signs of life. At first there was nothing. Then a sense of her students. None in particular. Just their faces, their eyes, passing by hers like lights past the window of a speeding car. Eyes, looking to her. Eyes, wanting something from her. All their eyes. Then, Steve. And Katia.
Katia, eyes deep and dark and frightened. Katia's eyes and her mouth forming words. Her eyes, a tunnel to fall into, and Jaguar fell to the feel of cool hands running her skin and pressure at the base of her neck.
A cool hand touching the back of hers. Pressure at the back of her neck. Something cool and firm and highly charged moving through her. In her.
Down into her belly and her groin.
Fast. Whoever was doing this was fast. She pulled away from it, getting nowhere, stuck in the hands that surrounded her held her down talked to her.
You want him. Want him. Call him. Not safe here alone.
She struggled against it. Breathing hard and rough. Want who? Want—
Alex.
Want him. Call him. No, she wouldn't. Breathing was a chore. She fought for breath, felt a strangling at her throat, brought her hand up to grab it, keep it away.
Call him. Not safe alone.
No, she thought. Not right. No breath in her. No breath and no way out of these hands jesus what was this her body moving without her volition and she couldn't pull out of it couldn't pull out close down get away too much.
She crushed the article and pitched it away from her.
Then she leaned forward, put her head down on her desk and listened to the humming of pain in her head as it passed from her.
When she was aware of herself and her surroundings again, the only thoughts in her brain were her own. Whatever she'd been caught in, she was out now.
No contact. No more contact. Stay closed. No messing around.
A hand at her shoulder brought her up sharp.
She lifted her head, and her arm followed to ward off whoever was there. Leonard caught her wrist and held it, regarding her in silence.
"Jesus," she said, "you scared me."
He loosened his hold and she pulled her arm away. Shook herself and ran a hand through her hair. Tried to gather herself back to normalcy.
He stared at her with his empath eyes. "You okay?"
"I'm—fine." She cast a glance at the door. "How'd you get in?"
"I knocked, and you didn't answer, but I heard you in here. So I went to the office and got the master key. Told them I locked myself out. You sure you're okay?"
She nodded, tried to smile lightly. "I guess I fell asleep. Ever doze over papers?"
He frowned, recognizing the lie. "All the time. But I don't talk in my sleep like you do."
"Bad habit," she said, and shifted in her seat. "Did I say anything interesting?"
"Nothing too bad," he said. "But I'd watch it if I was you. With your job, I don't think it's a good idea to keep a high profile."
"I'm here to teach a course," she said carefully. "There's nothing high profile about that."
"Is that why they sent you?" Leonard asked quietly.
She turned her face up to his, held his eyes with hers, asking her face to be a solid and blank page for him to read. "They? You mean the Board?" she asked.
"No," he said, "Not Supervisor Dzarny either."
"I'm here to teach," she said, clipped and angry. Too angry to think about how he knew her supervisor's name. "If you heard anything else, you heard wrong."
"Okay. I heard wrong." He smiled agreeably. "It happens."
She reined her temper in. "It does. Do you mind telling
me who you heard wrong from?"
"A few people, I suppose. Emily has some ideas, but you already know that, don't you?"
Jaguar frowned. His voice had emphasis. Carried warning. "I know. She was here earlier."
"Yeah?" he asked. "What's she got to say to you?"
"She says don't mind the dean. I guess that's her personal tenure search, right?"
Leonard grinned. "About right. And I don't think it's going too well."
His massive shoulders lifted and fell slowly, like boulders moving their way down a mountain. He had such a capacity for quiet one tended to forget he was a big man. He had a face that listened. She wondered how he managed on this campus.
"Are you looking for tenure here?" she asked.
"Not me," he said adamantly. "I'm a temporary appointment. Special visiting professor. Next year I'm back home on the res. Right now I'm doing Intertribal Unity work with the Mohawks at Kanatsiohareke. They're like One Bird's place—a traditional community, not on res land."
Jaguar knew. They'd done well, as had the reservations since the Killing Times. They'd escaped the trouble of the cities, as Leonard said, partly because they had warnings from men of vision like her grandfather. It was the only time the Natives made out better than the white man's world. A time during which she was in exactly the wrong place to have the rare advantage of her people.
"Y'know, Katia's a Mohawk," Leonard continued.
He was as bad as Alex, still trying to pull her in, she thought. "I didn't know," she said.
"She did an independent study with me on it. You get to talk with her much?" he asked.
"Just the usual. She stops by my office sometimes. She's pretty closed, and," she added deliberately, "I don't like to pry when a student isn't ready for it."
"Right," Leonard said, catching on. "Sure." He sighed, and moved himself toward the door.
When he got there, he turned around and looked at her. "Be careful around here, okay, Jaguar?" he said. "When you walk, walk soft."
Walk soft. In her language, that was a reference to the chant-shape. Walking in power, but inaccessible. Elusive. Silent and, if you wanted to be, invisible. What was he trying to tell her? She decided to ignore it. Pretend she didn't understand the implication.
"I'll be careful," she promised.
He opened the door and stepped out. "Good. I'll call you, and you can come over to my place. I'm right on campus, too. We'll talk about your research, and I'll cook you an injun dinner. How's that sound?"
"That sounds good, Leonard. That sounds very good. Right now I'd better—great Hecate's cloak. I'm late for class."
She fumbled with her book bag, grabbed her coat, and made a dash for it.
"Dinner," Leonard yelled after her, standing in the hall. "I'll call."
"Great," she shouted over her shoulder.
She avoided knocking anyone over on her way down the stairs and managed to find the right turn in the tunnels to her classroom building. When she arrived in her classroom, she found the students whispering among themselves.
She looked up at them.
"What? What's going on?"
"Nothing."
"Something," she said.
Glen pointed to the blackboard behind her.
She turned. Written in large white letters, the same words that were on her computer.
MIND FUCKER GO HOME.
So far, her day was going like hell.
She used a minute of studying it to keep her face away from her students. Then she put a hand on her hip. "I always thought 'mind-fucker' was a hyphenated word."
Some laughter from the back. Some shifting in seats. Discomfort. She picked up an eraser and started wiping it away.
"Is this going on a lot?" she asked as she erased.
"Yeah," Glen said morosely. "All over campus. It's the Private Sanction group."
"It's about the course, right? History of the Empathic Arts?"
"We shouldn't waste class time on this," Steve chimed in. Katia gave him a dark look.
"What should we waste class time with?" Jaguar asked. "A theoretical discussion of religious persecution?"
"This," Steve said, "has nothing to do with religious persecution. The empathic arts are not a religion."
She put down the eraser and went over to the table where her lectern stood perched and pointless. She never used it. She swung herself to sitting on the table and regarded the students.
"They are to the practitioner," she said. She let that settle in. "That message on the board—would Private Sanction mean that as a personal affront to me, or just a general directive to whoever happened to walk in?"
Shifting. Whispering. You say something. No, you say it. No, you.
Katia, finally, speaking up. "Dr. Addams, I think it's because you worked up there." She pointed toward the ceiling. Up there. With the bats in the belfry.
"Everyone thinks that if you work up there, you're— well, we hear all kinds of things about Planetoid Teachers," Jesse Goodman told her.
Jaguar ran a finger down her nose, let it tap thoughtfully against her lips. "What kinds of things?"
"Like you're here to investigate the Gone Girls," Selica said. "That some professor snuffed 'em, and you're gonna find out who did it."
"And," Taquana piped in, "that you're setting us up so we'll take the new course. At least, that's what Private Sanctions says."
Jaguar grinned. "Between teaching and papers and investigative work and mind-fucking, I'm pretty busy. How do I find the time?"
Murmuring. A little appreciative laughter. Katia nudging Steve, mouthing "I told you so" at him.
He pulled away from Katia and addressed the class, his voice high and loud. "Y'know, you guys' favorite religion is apathism. You're all apathists. You don't care and you don't think you have to. There's been a lot of trouble here. At least Private Sanction's trying to do something about it."
Jaguar turned her attention to him. Caught his eyes and held them. Felt Katia's dark stare move toward her with his. Remembered at the last minute to make no empathic moves here. Keep herself contained. Closed. And knowing this was necessary made her even angrier.
"So are the people who work on the Planetoids," she growled.
He tightened his lips and said nothing.
"The Planetoid prison system was created in response to the Killing Times—the Serials. Ten million people killed—that's a problem. How many people did you see killed, Steve?"
He kept his eyes, cold and belligerent, on hers. A band of pressure formed at the base of her neck and she twitched it away.
"I know. You weren't even born yet," she said. She shouldn't be doing this. It was very unteacherly of her to lose herself in anger. But the force of it was bigger than she was, tightening with the bands at the base of her neck, the pressure at the back of her eyes, hands reaching for her that she didn't want reaching for her. Dammit, she'd make it go away. Stop this shit.
She saw that the rest of the students were gaping at her. She was shocking them. They were used to her being easygoing. Tolerant. She included them in her speech.
"It's so much easier to find convenient targets for your fears than to face them, isn't it? Just get rid of the empaths, and all those dark and horrible years, the memories your parents carry that they insist on telling you about, the fears you carry—that'll all just go away. Except it won't."
She strode to the middle of the room and wrote on the board in large letters the word witches.
"Lots of these were killed in the Middle Ages, along with the cats people said were their consorts. Only thing is, with the cats almost extinct, the rat population grew. And then—guess what? The plague overran Europe, with not a healer in sight to do a thing about it."
She wrote in even larger letters the word jews. "Getting rid of them sure helped the Germans fix their economic problems, didn't it?" she said.
She wrote on the board again, gays. Indians.
BLACKS. WOMEN.
And finally, all in capita
ls, the one word she was afraid to write most. empaths.
"Somebody tell me what the hell the difference is?"
Steve's mouth clamped shut, and Katia put a hand on his shoulder. He shrugged it off.
Then she turned back to the class, quiet again, already ashamed of her outburst. Her anger settled in the room around them. She lowered her head and rubbed hard at the back of her neck. The pressure dissolved as quickly as it had risen.
Murmurs rose and died away. She dropped her hand and looked up.
"Look," Glen said, "not everyone here thinks those things. That attitude—it's just in the air."
"I know," she said more quietly. "But why do you have to stand downwind and breathe it? You're here to learn the difference between the smell of truth and the smell of—of shit."
She sighed. Facing the truth. Getting the dearly beloved illusions out of the way. Teaching. This wasn't rest leave. It was more of the same job, with the danger included.
Gone now, that pressure at the back of her head, in her eyes, but she didn't know when it would occur again. Didn't know its source or intent. Didn't know anything. Just knew danger when she smelled it. Like truth, it had its own scent.
"That don't mean we have to take your truth," Jesse pointed out.
"You're right," she agreed. "But how will you find your own?"
"It might be easier," Selica said, "if we knew what we were talking about."
"How's that?" Jaguar asked.
"I don't even know what the hell the empathic arts are, except like it's some gypsy shit about people who tell you your future and read your mind."
"We shouldn't be talking about this," Steve growled. "It's not right."
She turned to him. He stared at her, silently. No, she thought. I won't fight with him again. She turned back to the board and began writing.
"Empathic arts is a general term that includes a number of psi talents—scientifically identifiable states of consciousness," she said as she put terms down on the board. "They include empathic touch or the ability to directly experience or share someone's emotions, memories, and thoughts. Also telepathy, which is a subvocal reading or projection. Clear dreaming and clairvoyance— receiving knowledge through dreams or waking visions. The capacity to see events and objects that are distant. There's esper—long distance touch, and the art of the Adept, which is visions of future possibilities. Unfortunately it's rarely specific enough to give you the right horse."
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