“When you sent me images of prison, of being locked up, I thought it was just that. A metaphor. It was all true. Everything you showed me. Real. Happening.”
She looked up, her expression unguarded. “You could have killed me any time. The way you killed him. No one would ever have known. Why didn’t you?”
The door opened and the clothes she’d requested arrived. They were more battered than what I was wearing. She looked on in dismay. Then her expression changed. Before the officer could leave, she was on her feet, confronting him.
“I want a basin of hot water and towels. And fetch the package of clothes from my car. And if you have a physician, I want him brought here. Now.”
“He’s doing the autopsy on Clyde.”
“Clyde is dead. He isn’t going anywhere. He can wait. Go and fetch the doctor. But bring the towels, water and clothes first.”
He glared, muttered something like agreement and let himself out.
“Let’s get you cleaned up. The doctor will fix your hand even if I can’t.”
The smell of gripe water and baby food was back. I didn’t know what she had in mind. I let her do what she would. Water, towels and a new suit arrived long enough before the doctor so that she had time to scrub me and help me dress. She was the only one I’d worked with to bring me clothes. Her fingers lingered over sweet spots in an un-motherly way.
The doctor looked at my mangled hand. He had a small hammer for resetting noses that might do to break the bones without shattering them. He admitted he had no anesthetic and wasn’t good at setting bones.
“You do your part. Leave the rest to us.”
I suffered in stoic silence as the medic smashed the small bones of my hand anew. After the first blow she couldn’t watch. When he’d cleaned up the worst of the mess and left my hand lying on a towel on the tabletop, she let him out then sat across from me, lips pressed together against any outcry while I drove the healing as hard as it would go. When tears pricked my eyes she reached across and grabbed my good hand, willing me strength to continue. I couldn’t break down with her there. She made me brave. Or maybe just stupid.
When the last fold of skin slid into place and sealed the wound against infection, she let out a breath I hadn’t been aware she was holding to whisper; “Magnificent.”
“A lot of people would pay to have a talent like that.”
She colored and fixed her eyes on the table. I flexed my hand and pretended not to notice. I hadn’t been imagining it. The desire radiating off her was so palpable I could almost see it. Was it me, the clothes, the blood, or the pain that got her motor revving? I didn’t care. I wanted her, too. To reaffirm life after danger and cheating death. She was sitting on the bed. Much as I wanted to rip her clothes off and take her, that had nearly been my fate. I couldn’t do it. The next move was up to her.
“Killian, I…”
Whatever she’d been about to say was drowned out by a different kind of lust. I clutched my head. Not now!
“Is it him?” She was back on her knees, reaching out to me.
I knocked the chair over in my haste to get clear, put some space between us. With him in my head I couldn’t trust myself. And I couldn’t expose her to this sickness.
She pounded on the door. Moments later we were racing through the building. Cassandra phoning backup, managing the situation. Beautiful, strong, in control. How dare I aspire to that? I was still enough of myself to wonder; enough part murderer not to feel my terror of open spaces when I looked through the air car window.
The world that had no place for me was beautiful. Gothic spires and glistening skyscrapers, landscaped parks and manicured hills. Unafraid of the view for the first time, I became aware of how contrived it all was. Ecologically balanced. A regulated biosphere. Population controlled, environmentally friendly—at a price. Your ability to do what you wanted.
She may live in a luxury apartment, but Cassandra was a prisoner too. Only the deviants I hunted exercised true freedom. And what they chose to do with that freedom eventually cost them their lives. Was it worth it, that fleeting moment of complete abandon? Could freedom be achieved any other way?
I was so absorbed in this newfound philosophy I missed her question. Unthinking she laid a hand on my arm to ask,
“Which way?”
The maniac I was channeling ploughed into her unsuspecting empathy. She screamed and fell back, cowering in the foot-well while we careened crazily.
I wanted to comfort her but I dared not. Touching her would make it worse. And while I wanted to die, there were less painful ways to go than plummeting out of the air. Cassandra had no such wish and I had no right to choose death for her. The air car lurched toward a building.
I snatched the control column and stabbed in a holding pattern. The car straightened up, then hovered patiently waiting for the command voice to confirm codes. For the first time I saw my shortcomings. I couldn’t do a simple thing that would save our lives.
A clock began ticking down in the corner of the dashboard screen, warning a shutdown of all systems if correct codes weren’t entered before the timer reached zero. And Cass? Curled in a fetal ball, rocking, whispering to herself, unable to cope with what I endure every time they make me do this.
Thirty seconds. The exact current span of our lives. There was only one thing to do. No time for twisting together wires. I balled up my newly fixed hand and punched straight through the VDU. Electric shock froze me in my seat, singing my hair. I locked my teeth against a scream and interfaced directly with the machine. What else was a computer but another kind of mind?
But it was an alien mind, nonetheless. Sweat stung my eyes as I drove meat thoughts through wires and plastic, processors and diodes, programs and chip sets. I swam through hardware, down the information highway to the CPU. With a sense of my life slipping away I found a way to tell it what I wanted it to do, where I wanted it to go. It obeyed. I rerouted power from the screen and severed the connection, pulled clear and fell back into the seat. Beating my smoldering hair with my newly bloodied hand.
Poking the broken bones back into torn flesh and giving voice to the pain the only way I could, I found her staring at me. Awake. Aware. I clamped my mouth shut.
“We’re going to where he is?”
I nodded, my thoughts in turmoil.
“Why? You could have taken us anywhere.”
Before she could reply the radio cut in, demanding confirmation of the course change. She scrambled into her seat as law enforcement vehicles surrounded us.
“Killian?”
We watched Special Forces do their thing, rappelling down the walls, smashing into the building, saving the day. Cassandra turned the car away.
“Why? I have the real hero right here.”
She was silent all the way to her apartment. She tossed me a packed of wet-wipes and after what she’d just said I was vain enough to wash my face and try and do something with my burnt hair, as well as mopping up the blood. I missed our arrival. I was trying to disentangle myself from the killer’s thoughts as they tranq’d him for shipping to the penal army on the outer rim. Murderer’s redemption plan. More freedom through service. I had no idea who they were fighting. It’s the o
nly thing mankind’s really good at.
“Come on. This goes straight into the apartment. I can have my personal physician see to your arm, fit a new teleprinter.”
So that was her excuse. I followed her inside. Camera’s tracked my every move. She waved away security, moving us past checkpoints into the huge room upstairs. Without her influence it was nothing more than a bedroom with floor to ceiling windows that the night sky pressed against hungrily. I froze, unable to take another step. She did something that made the walls fill in, leaving us in comforting twilight. She tugged on my hand and this time I went.
The couch had been replaced by an enormous satin covered bed. I didn’t care if it was an illusion. She sat beside me, fingers tender as she stroked the raw skin of my wrist, then further. Hand on my fly, she dared to look up for my approval. It wasn’t me she saw, but if it meant she’d let me touch her, I’d happily be her proxy.
She peeled me out of the jacket then pushed me down, straddling me. For the first time she showed me her true face. I watched it age backwards to her twenties, when the man in her memories was the only one she dreamed of. I stepped into those images and made them mine, superimposed his face over my own.
“Am I moving too fast for you?”
“Then show me what you can really do. Or do you need soap for that?”
I don’t know if she realized what she was giving to me. Somewhere along the line, whether saving her from death or watching me have my bones broken, she’d decided to trust me. They always do. Her mind and her body both said yes.
My fingers brushed her breasts through the dress she wore. Her nipples jumped to attention. Good enough, but I needed skin. Thoughts sank into material. Cotton. Organic fiber, no different than flesh. A twitch destabilized the molecules. Her garments disintegrated to fine powder. The psi-wind I generated blew it away. Only the under-wires of her bra were immune to suggestion. Fascinated, she picked them up, examining them for a moment. Then she dropped them as desire gripped her.
I flipped her beneath me. On my knees, I stroked the curved underside of her breasts and drew my knuckles down the sides of her ribcage. I traced the soft skin on the inside of her thighs with the backs of my hands and inhaled as I rubbed my cheek against her mons. I stroked her collarbone, kissed a breast, rubbed her hard clit, setting up echoes that sped across her skin. My mind magnified sensations and fed them back to her until she writhed. She drew my hand to her lips. Licked every inch.
“Inside me,” she urged. Who was I to resist?
She was so wet that four fingers slipped in without effort. Lifting her hips onto my right leg, stroking her G spot, I eased my entire hand inside her. I looked down the length of her body, flexing my fingers, loving what I saw.
I worked my right hand in and up. Her clit jumped when I brushed it, standing to attention. I knew it was what she needed then, in exactly that way. Inside her head as well as inside her body.
Her muscles contracted round my wrist. I drew her right leg over my left shoulder to give me a better angle. Her inner walls clenched, sucking me further in, while I flicked her hard bud.
When she came I was with her. She never needed to lay a hand on me. The hand I’d broken to save her life gave her pleasure which in turn gave it back to me. And at that moment I felt a part of me separate; break off inside her, as it always did. Soon there would be more of us. They had taken away my ability to bare offspring but evolution is determined. It doesn’t matter how I take them, when it’s over they’re always carrying my child.
Her orgasm spat out my hand as her body arched, muscles contracting and relaxing in pleasure. Drenched to the elbow, I watched her slide off me, moaning into the pillow so her security wouldn’t come and beat me down.
I disengaged my mind from hers and slipped away to clean up.
It wouldn’t be long. They’d come. It never went beyond this moment. I’d learned to take what satisfaction I could quickly. The end was always someone else to work with, until they too succumbed.
I was sitting in the dark on the reception room sofa, fully dressed, when the doors burst inward. I offered up my wrists meekly. The Special Forces guy got a whiff of sex and dealt me a buffet to the head that put me on the floor. The Commander knocked his man down to join me.
“Not the head, fuck-wit! She’s worth more than our combined salary!” He snatched up my hands, noticing a missing fingertip and swore, knowing what it meant. He detailed off his squad. “Medic, check on the empath. Corp, get me Housekeeping. We need to relocate. STAT.”
From the moment they conceived, I never saw my conquests again. I was given to a new empath. One they hoped wouldn’t be swayed by my charms.
“How long did it take?”
“Three months, Sarge.”
With men killing one another, Mother Nature has to do something. The speed of my success could have as much to do with an attempt to keep the population going as evolution’s desire to change their behavior.
I’m not vain enough to assume I’m Gaia’s only chosen Adam to my empaths. But it’s significant that no men have been born with the talent. My children are virtually impossible to abort. As I’d suggested to Cassandra, nature knew the reception we’d get.
When they bound my hands I noticed that my fingertip was already starting to grow back. Enough DNA to do the job, no more. They were leading me away to a new life when the screaming started. She’d just found out what her consent had really meant. The unexpected result of her one-night stand and mercy fuck. I hoped she could forgive me. I’d genuinely liked her.
When she calmed down, she’d probably console herself with the thought that I’d manipulated her sympathy. Messed with her head. Mind games. Of course I had. I’m what you made me. I’m a telepath and that’s what we do.
*
TS: Very shortly, I will have been a civil servant for 20 years. You do less time for committing murder. Combine that premise with a love of science fiction, and “Mind Games” was born.
The Rocky Side of the Sky
By Melissa Scott
Once upon a time…. That’s how stories are supposed to start, or at least that’s how Mam’Sook started them when I was a little girl up in Coldwater. Except this story can’t start that way, because in this one, Once and Time don’t meet. Maybe I knew her, once, maybe then she knew me back, but time itself got fractured, broken apart and badly mended, when our ship wrecked and lost us, and in the process we lost ourselves. So…maybe sometime I loved a woman, and her name was Tisha Rho.
I have all the notes on my log, which I kept because my daddy, Prosper Sr., told me always to keep a journal in case you got lost in the sweet-not-yet; what the cosmologists call the adjacent possible, and the workhorses code in screaming fire-panic red. Daddy had sailed the sweet-not-yet himself, which is why I’m an only, and why I’m Prosper Larkin, Junior, even though I’m female. He’d earned the christening-right, taking the chances he did, and I’m proud to bear his name. He was time-lost just after my fifteenth birthday, came back chronophagic, a burning, wasting shell, died of old age at forty-one, and left me the bond that paid for my wires and my training, access to space and beyond.
Which was how I met Tisha Rho. I’m from Coldwater, up on the northern edge of the Reclamation; we’re farm folks and shipbreakers from forever. Tisha was from Charity-the-city, and all her family worked in water. She was the first one to get her wires, first one to go into space since the family came to New Corinth, and they didn’t know quite what to make of her. They did know exactly what they made of me, and they didn’t like it one bit. It’s a funny thing, because Charity has a reputation for looseness, and the Edge Townships are generally hard-shell observant, but it was her family that got queasy about her loving a woman, and mine that shrugged and said, well, so long as you’re happy… We met on the work lines at Jefferston Port, both of us worki
ng nights so we could go to school days for the coding skills we’d need to go into space. When we graduated, the sorters paired us up right away, and we went up to the rock belts that had been the moon called Charity.
New Corinth had three moons, Faith, Hope, and the greatest, Charity, and the plan at settlement was to bring them all down and use them to build the systems that would reclaim the planet. We were one of the last planets where terraforming was begun, and one of the ones where terraforming was banned before it was finished, so what’s left of Charity-the-moon spangles New Corinth’s skies, and Charity-the-city straddles the artificial channels that tame the Big River, and send water and fertilizer north as needed. But there’s still a lot of raw minerals left in the debris ring that fills Charity’s old orbit, and there are plenty of companies willing to stake you to a job in the ring. Of course, with jump-and-jostle, JSTL, just-slower-than-light, you flip in and out of the sweet-not-yet, and every time you run the risk of getting time-lost.
Mostly we were lucky, or so my log says. We had our minor dyschronias, like the chronorrhea that made your hair fall out and finger and toenails shed; once a brief, scary bout of chronal sclerosis, where the old words and memories choked the new, so I could remember everything except the thing I wanted, but even that had faded fairly quickly. We had a good workhorse, out of the Petesider lines, and regular clients in Glasstown and Jefferston and Comfort, so we were able to make a steady job of it. Not a bad life, really, or at least that’s how the log showed it. There were other entries, too, that didn’t say anything outright, but somehow sent ripples of emotion through me, echoes of passion, of love, of simple comfortable togetherness. That’s the kind of achronic I was: I’d lost access to a bunch of forebrain memories, mostly recent ones, but the emotions were still there, feelings without context, and I had my log to give me most of that.
Tisha Rho was the other kind. I don’t know why it hit her harder—maybe it was that I’d been tied into the horse when the jump went wrong—but she’d come out of the sweet-not-yet full-blown achronic, unable to form new memories or access old ones without the help of a prosthesis. And while I was in the hospital, trying to get my own brain back in order, her family came and spirited her away, and when I saw her again, she looked through me like she’d never seen me before. I asked around, bribed a nurse’s aide, and found out her family had written me out of the prosthesis’s programming. They could do it, too, because they held her proxy, something that made me stop a bit when I found out about it. If Tisha Rho hadn’t given me her proxy—and I hadn’t given her mine, come to that—then maybe this relationship wasn’t all I thought it was. But when I went back and read the log, the feelings were all there, rolling and strong as a river under the surface of the words, and I knew what I had to do.
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