Crosstalk

by Connie Willis

  I could call you Conlan. He doesn’t know that’s your—

  “No, nothing even remotely Irish. We don’t want to give him any clues to what’s causing this.”

  I could call you Ishmael.

  “Too Jewish.”

  Highwayman?

  “No, too obviously code, just like Cinderella. It needs to be something that doesn’t stand out, that could just be an ordinary word, like—”

  Sky, she said.

  There was a silence on the line.

  You know, from Guys and Dolls. Sky Masterson.

  “Are you sure you want to do that, Sister Sarah? As you recall, she ended up in Havana with him.”

  I’ll take my chances, she answered, turning her head so the clerk couldn’t see her expression. She was, after all, supposed to be sobbing to a friend about being stranded. Smiling clearly wasn’t appropriate.

  “Great,” C.B. said. “You don’t happen to like dulce de leches, do you?”

  No alcohol, remember? she reminded him. The voices aside, I don’t want to accidentally let anything slip to Trent. Speaking of which, we need to tell Cindy she mustn’t talk to me. If Trent finds out she’s telepathic…

  “Don’t worry. I’ll tell her to go inside her castle and raise her drawbridge and close her zombie gates. And meanwhile, Sister Sarah, you go home and send your secretary an email moving your appointments to the afternoon so your morning’ll be free, and then try to keep from thinking thoughts you don’t want Trent to overhear.”

  “Is he awake?” Briddey asked nervously.

  “No, not yet, but from this point on, you’re going to behave as if he is, and as if he can hear anything you say or think. Which means we’d better maintain radio silence, too.” He hesitated. “I suppose it’s pointless to tell you to try and get some sleep.”

  Yes.

  “Okay, well then, memorize ‘Marian the Librarian.’ When you come to the lab I’ll teach you some other screening techniques. And when you’re not reading, think about what you’re going to have for breakfast or what you’re going to wear to work. Or how the castaways are going to get off Gilligan’s Island. Anything except Maeve, me, telepathy, or Ireland. I’ll check out Verrick’s history to make sure there are no paranormal skeletons in it—which I’m pretty sure there aren’t—and see if I can find out what celebrity client he went to see. It’s all going to be fine, I promise. Now say, ‘Thanks for giving me a ride. I’ll see you in a couple of minutes,’ and hang up so I can talk to Maeve.”

  “Thanks for giving me a ride,” she said. “I’ll see you in a couple of minutes.”

  “Good girl,” he said. “I’ll see you in the morning,” and hung up.

  And she should hang up too, particularly since the clerk had resumed leering at her from the counter. But instead she said, even though C.B. was no longer there, “I really appreciate your doing this for me. I was an idiot to have ever thought I was in love with him. I didn’t even know what love was.”

  The clerk gave a derisive snort.

  “I’ll be waiting outside,” she said to the dial tone. “I love you,” and hung up the phone.

  She hurried out of the store to a position on the curb where she could both look up the street and keep an eye on the clerk, and as soon as he turned his back, sprinted to her car and drove back home, wondering if she might be able to find Dr. Verrick on the radio so she could confirm he wasn’t working with Trent and find out why he was coming back. And why he’d told his nurse he was in Hong Kong when he was actually in Arizona.

  She tried as soon as she reached home, but the doctor was apparently asleep—or out of range. She couldn’t find his voice on any frequency.

  I’ll try again later, she thought, called up “The Highwayman” on her laptop, and spent the next hour committing the lines to memory—and wishing she’d chosen a cheerier poem, especially when she got to the part where the highwayman found out Bess was dead and came racing back for revenge, only to be shot down by the soldiers lying in wait.

  She had to force herself to learn the last stanza, where he lay drenched in blood on the highway, “with a bunch of lace at his throat.” I need something with a better ending, she thought, and ordered up “Adelaide’s Lament” from iTunes.

  She should have known by the title that it wouldn’t be upbeat either, but at least nobody got killed. And it had lots of verses. Good, she thought, it’ll take me till morning to memorize it, but when she looked at the clock afterward, it was barely five.

  I’ll just have to memorize the rest of Guys and Dolls. And The Music Man, she thought, downloaded their scores, and started in. C.B. was right, “Fugue for Tin Horns” did sound too much like the voices, and she didn’t think “The Sadder but Wiser Girl” was a good idea—the title was a little too close for comfort. But Professor Harold Hill’s spiel about trouble right there in River City was perfect. She memorized it, and then tried to find Dr. Verrick’s station again.

  Nothing, which was good. He was still out of range. She took her shower, recalling ironically that a couple of days ago her biggest worry had been being spied on by C.B. What time is it now? she wondered, getting out and drying off. Surely it’s close to seven.

  It was five forty-five. She wondered how early she could go into work without it looking suspicious. Eight? A quarter till? The sooner Sky taught her those “other screening techniques,” the better she’d feel.

  She sang “Luck Be a Lady” to herself as she dried her hair and dressed and then tackled Decline and Fall, and immediately regretted it. Its pace made the actual centuries-long collapse of the Roman Empire look like the hundred-yard dash by comparison.

  At quarter to seven, she decided she didn’t care about the fate of Rome or looking suspicious and went to get her purse and keys.

  There was a knock on the door. It couldn’t be Sky. He’d specifically said they shouldn’t be seen together, so that meant it was Kathleen. Or Mary Clare.

  But it was Trent. “Oh, good,” he said, looking approvingly at her. “You got my message.”

  “Message?”

  “Yes. I’ve been mentally telling you I was coming to pick you up for the last half hour. Didn’t you hear me?”

  She shook her head.

  “Then why are you ready to go?”

  “I was going to go into work early. I’m so far behind—”

  “Or you were subconsciously receiving my message and knew you needed to be ready.”

  “Ready for what?” she asked, afraid she already knew.

  “Dr. Verrick’s back, and he wants to see us right away.”

  “There’s nothing so bad that it couldn’t be worse.”

  —IRISH PROVERB

  “D-Dr. Verrick’s back?” Briddey stammered. “But, Trent—”

  “He flew back on his Lear jet right after he got off the phone with me.”

  Of course. She and C.B.—correction, Sky—should have thought of the possibility that he had a private plane.

  “I told you about him flying back in the mental message I sent you,” Trent said. “I can’t believe you didn’t hear me! I’m hearing you more and more. Are you sure you’re concentrating?”

  She fastened the bar more firmly across the door of her safe room. “Yes,” she said. “What did you hear?”

  “Oh, all sorts of things. I heard you say you need me, and ‘I wonder if Trent’s asleep,’ and a bunch of stuff about needing to make a phone call, which you don’t seem to understand we don’t need to do now.”

  “Is that all you heard?”

  “No. There were other things, but they didn’t make any sense, something about a dog on the highway and needing change and the sky. What were you thinking about?”

  “I have no idea,” she said. “I must have been dreaming.”

  “That’s what I thought. We’ll have to ask Dr. Verrick why I can hear you so much better than you can hear me. So, are you ready to go see him?”

  “No. I mean, I need to run by Commspan first, so why don’t
you go on ahead, and I’ll meet you there? I have a meeting with Art Sampson this morning. I’ll have to reschedule—”

  “You can do it from the car. Where’s your phone?”

  “I’ll get it,” Briddey said, walking swiftly into the bedroom for it. She wished she’d given C.—Sky a key to her apartment so she could at least scrawl “Help!” on her mirror with lipstick for him to find when she didn’t show up at work.

  She grabbed her phone, checked the call log to make sure Sky’s name wasn’t on it, deleted Cindy’s calls and messages, and then stopped, staring blindly into the mirror she couldn’t write on, trying to think of some way to convince Trent to let her take her own car so she could at least lose him in traffic and stop at BizziMart to tell Sky what had happened.

  “What’s taking so long?” Trent said, appearing in the doorway. “I told him we’d be there by eight, and we don’t want to keep him waiting after he’s flown all this way. Not that he’ll mind once he hears what we’ve got to tell him.” He hustled her out of her apartment, down the stairs, and over to his Porsche.

  “I really think I should meet you there,” she said again as he opened the car door for her. “I’ve already rescheduled my meeting with Art Sampson twice, and he’s going to be furious at my canceling again unless I explain—”

  “Text him,” Trent said, and there was nothing for it but to get in the car.

  While he pulled out of the parking place, she looked at the dashboard, with its elaborate computerized streaming/CD/satellite radio system, wondering how hard it would be to find “Ode to Billie Joe.” She reached for the MENU button.

  “No music,” Trent said, reaching past her to turn it off. “If we’re going to convince Dr. Verrick we can communicate telepathically, we need to be totally focused on sending and receiving.” He headed downtown.

  “But I don’t understand why we need to convince him, or why he has to be involved at all.”

  “Because this isn’t just about us anymore. The fact that telepathy exists means it affects everyone. Don’t you understand? People won’t have to use smartphones or email or social media to communicate anymore. They’ll be able to do it directly. It’ll be a whole new form of instant messaging. Mental IM.”

  “But how?” she asked, turning wide, innocent eyes on him. “Wouldn’t they have to be emotionally committed to each other?”

  “No. If we can find out what’s causing this and how it works, we can make it work for everyone. That’s where Dr. Verrick comes in. He can run tests that’ll show us the brain circuitry involved, and we’ll be able to use that to design a device that lets anyone communicate telepathically with anyone else.”

  “Have you told Dr. Verrick this?”

  “Not yet. All I told him was that something extraordinary had happened, that you and I were able to hear more than each other’s emotions. I didn’t call it telepathy. I didn’t want to scare him off. I just told him he needed to get back here.”

  So Sky was right, Dr. Verrick wasn’t part of this. “But if you haven’t told him, how do you know he’ll agree to running tests?” Briddey asked, and Trent took his eyes off the road long enough to look incredulously at her.

  “How could he not? This is the scientific discovery of the century! Think what it’ll mean. People will be able to truly understand each other. There’ll be no more secrets or misunderstandings or conflicts.”

  It doesn’t work like that, Briddey thought.

  “Think of all the problems it’ll solve, and not just personal problems. Important problems. Take terrorists. We’ll be able to stop them before they kill innocent victims, and we’ll know exactly where our enemies are and what they’re planning to do. Telepathy will give us an enormous advantage in foreign affairs. And in business. And on Wall Street. The possibilities are endless.”

  You’re right, Briddey thought. Corporate spying, insider trading, police states. And for telepaths like Sky and Mae—Cindy, testing, experiments, torture, burnings at the stake, and horrible, horrible voices, torrents of them, raging wildfires of them, roaring out of control.

  “You’ll see,” Trent said confidently. “Dr. Verrick will be as excited about the possibilities as we are,” and turned into the hospital’s parking garage.

  “I thought we were going to his office.”

  “No, he asked us to meet him here.” Where they could run into one of the staff who’d found her in the staircase. Or the nurse who’d taken her out to Sky’s car.

  But the office that the volunteer at the information desk directed them to was on a different floor and at the opposite end of the hospital, and Briddey didn’t recognize any of the staff they met on the way there.

  Dr. Verrick himself came out to meet them. “Good morning, Ms. Flannigan, Mr. Worth. We’ll be meeting just down here,” he said, gesturing toward the end of the hall.

  He didn’t look at all put out by having had to fly back from Arizona in the middle of the night, even when a doctor stopped him halfway there to say, “I thought you were in Sedona.”

  “I was,” he said cheerfully.

  Sedona. Why did that name ring a bell? She’d heard it somewhere…

  “We really appreciate your cutting your trip short to see us,” Trent was saying.

  “Not a problem,” Dr. Verrick said. “Here we are.” He showed them into a consulting room with a desk and two upholstered chairs pulled up in front of it. “Sit down. I’ll be right with you. I just need to speak to my nurse.”

  He went through the door behind the desk, and Briddey could hear him say, “…should be coming in shortly…want to know the moment she arrives,” and then, “…airport…” Did that mean he was going back as soon as he’d dealt with them and this patient who was flying in?

  I hope so, Briddey thought.

  Dr. Verrick came back in and sat down. He leaned across the desk. “Now tell me exactly what’s going on. You’ve connected, I take it?”

  “We’ve more than just connected,” Trent said eagerly. “We’re not just sensing each other’s emotions, we’re talking!”

  “Talking?” Dr. Verrick looked from one to the other. “You mean that now that you’re more empathetic to each other’s feelings, you’re communicating better?”

  “No, I mean we can talk to each other like you and I are talking right now, only in our heads.”

  Briddey hadn’t realized just how crazy it would sound until Trent said it. Sky was right. If he’d told me before it happened to me, I never would have believed him.

  “There!” Trent said, pointing at her. “Just now I heard Briddey say, ‘He’s never going to believe us!’ That’s what you were thinking, wasn’t it, Briddey? Tell him!”

  “Yes, but—”

  “But that would be easy to guess from her expression,” Dr. Verrick said. “And her body language. Are you certain that’s not what you’re doing? Using her emotions and nonverbal cues to—?”

  “No,” Trent said. “I can hear her when we’re miles apart. And she can hear what I’m thinking, too.”

  “Is that true, Ms. Flannigan?” Dr. Verrick asked, turning to her.

  “No.”

  “No?” Trent said. “How can you say that? We were talking! I can prove it. Look.” He pulled out the lists of words they’d written and slapped them down side by side on Dr. Verrick’s desk. “We went into separate rooms and each thought of ten things, and the other one wrote them down. I got nearly three-fourths of the ones she sent right, and she got almost as many of the ones I sent. And we’d do a lot better now. My ability to communicate keeps improving. Run a brain scan on us, and you’ll see we can hear each other—”

  “First things first,” Dr. Verrick said, looking at the lists.

  I hope he’s as unimpressed by Trent’s notion of a correct response as I was, Briddey thought, trying to gauge the doctor’s reaction as he went over the lists, but his face remained completely impassive. Finally, he laid them back down, clasped his hands together, and leaned forward. “I think you’d
better begin at the beginning, Mr. Worth.”

  Trent nodded. “The night before last, we took your advice about taking our minds off connecting and went to a play.”

  “And this was where you first had this…mental communication?”

  “No, Briddey had to leave for a family problem, and we were apart for the rest of the night. But the next morning I heard her calling, ‘Where are you?’ and I said, ‘Briddey, is that you?’ ”

  “And you heard him say that?” Dr. Verrick asked, turning to Briddey.

  “Ye-es,” she said, putting as much uncertainty in her voice as she dared. “At least, I thought I heard it.”

  “You did hear it,” Trent said, “because you said, ‘Yes,’ and then I said, ‘I can’t believe we connected,’ and I asked her where she was, and she told me she was in her apartment in bed.”

  Briddey watched Dr. Verrick closely as Trent told him what had happened. His expression remained skeptical, and he asked all the right questions for someone who’d just heard a patient make a ridiculous—and possibly disturbing—claim.

  And yet there was something not quite right about his responses. He didn’t seem surprised enough, nor angry enough that they’d dragged him all the way back from Arizona to tell him some insane story. But it wasn’t just that. His responses were off in some other way that she couldn’t put her finger on.

  He is in on it with Trent, and this is all a charade put on for my benefit, she thought, but, as Dr. Verrick asked more questions and Trent grew more and more frustrated attempting to explain, she decided that wasn’t it. So what is it? she wondered, watching him. Why do his reactions seem wrong?

  It hit her with a shock: He’s not just not surprised; he’s not interested. He was distracted, like a person holding one conversation while worrying about something else, and she wondered momentarily if he was thinking about the patient he’d talked to the nurse about, the one he’d wanted to be told about “the moment she arrived.”