by Ryan Hughes
"This will be your room," Kitarak said. "We can move most of this material into the workshop and store the rest outside." He shoved a wooden crate aside and stepped into the center of the room, where the hemispherical roof was high enough for him to stand erect. "You will need a bed if you wish to sleep. Will one be sufficient, or do you require two?"
Jedra blushed immediately. Kayan didn't turn red until she saw him doing it, but then she made up for lost time. She stammered, "I-um-one is fine with me. I mean, if that's all right with you."
"That would be fine," Jedra said, trying not to sound too eager, but then he wondered why not. He should let Kayan know that he was. "I'd like that very much," he said to her.
If Kitarak noticed anything unusual he didn't mention it. He merely bobbed his head up and down and said, "Very good. One bed, then. We can use one of the mats from the great room." He held his arms out, two of them forward and two to the sides, and said, "Clearing this out to make room for a bed will provide your first lesson. We will move it all without touching it."
* * *
Telekinesis, it turned out, was quite a bit like Jedra's existing ability to shove things around with his mind. It just required more control. Kitarak helped him with that, mindlinking with him and showing him how to imagine an object rising gracefully into the air and gliding through the house into the storeroom.
Merging minds with the tohr-kreen was nothing like doing it with Kayan. There was no sense of expanded ability or heightened awareness, only the extra presence guiding his thoughts. They weren't necessarily pleasant thoughts, either. Kitarak's mind worked differently than Jedra's. When he imagined grasping something in his hands, Jedra felt a wave of aggression sweep through him, as if every acquisition, no matter how small, were a form of conquest. It distracted him, and he was glad when Kitarak unlinked and let him proceed on his own.
At first Jedra had to follow along behind whatever he moved so he could make sure it didn't bump into walls, but once he learned the layout of the house he could stay in one place and simply imagine the whole trip. Kayan, on the other hand, couldn't get the hang of it. First Kitarak, and then Jedra, tried to explain to her how it felt when their minds grasped whatever they tried to lift, but the concept remained foreign to her. Even mindlinking didn't help. When Kitarak tried to link with her, Kayan began to shudder and breathe rapidly, and when Jedra tried it she couldn't concentrate on the telekinetic feeling amid the swirl of other sensations.
Her nervousness and frustration kept them from achieving perfect rapport, but it was still close communion. All right, Jedra said, let's just try it once while we're linked and see if you can feel what it's like that way.
I don't think that's a good idea, said Kayan. We're barely in control here.
Sure we are. I've got this down. It's easy, see? He focused their combined attention on a small crate of rocks-mineral samples or maybe even gemstones in the rough, knowing Kitarak-and imagined them rising into the air.
A sharp crack startled them, and sunlight suddenly streamed in through an extra hole in the roof. Rock chips and dust rained down around them, and a moment later the house echoed with dozens of impacts as the rocks from the crate fell back onto the roof. There was a crash of breaking glass from the main room, and Jedra looked in to see a stone bounce off the floor after smashing through one of the skylights.
Their mental convergence had shattered as well. They stood there in the storeroom, alone with their own thoughts, while Kitarak examined the new skylight in his house. At last the tohr-kreen looked down at them and said, "You do have a significant problem to overcome, don't you? Let us go outside and try it again."
They practiced all morning, but Kayan simply couldn't pick up the telekinetic power. Linked together, she and Jedra could send boulders clear over the rim of the canyon, but on her own she couldn't even budge a pebble. At last Kitarak put an end to the attempts. "It's clear you simply don't have that talent," he said as he lowered a new stone into place over the hole she and Jedra had made in his storeroom roof. She watched the head-sized rock drift lazily into place, followed by dozens of smaller ones to seal the gaps. "Damn it, it's not fair," she said, her face red from effort and anger. "You and Jedra can do it without even breaking a sweat."
"Yes, but-" She swallowed. "Not with Jedra." She looked over at him, standing helpless beside the tohr-kreen, and suddenly Jedra knew what she felt. They were supposed to be bondmates, supposed to share everything, but here was evidence of a fundamental difference between them that would never be reconciled.
It didn't have to be a problem, though. "We'll always be able to share whatever each of us can do," he reminded her.
"Sure," she said. "And we'll always be knocking holes in people's houses, or tipping over entire cities."
Kitarak rasped his arms together. "We will train you to overcome your lack of control."
"Like you trained me to lift things psionically?" Kayan turned away and stomped off toward the lone tree that grew on the other side of the house.
"Kayan?" Jedra took a step after her, but Kitarak grabbed him by the shoulder. Jedra winced, remembering what went through Kitarak's mind when he grasped something.
Kitarak released him again, however, and said, "Come, let us leave her to resolve her anger in her own way."
Jedra wondered if that was a good idea. In his experience, people who stomped away mad usually wanted to be comforted, but he didn't want to defy Kitarak, who was the teacher, after all. So Jedra reached outward with his danger sense, and when he found no threat to Kayan's safety he turned away and went back inside with the tohr-kreen.
He helped Kitarak pick up the pieces of skylight in the main room. They were shaped like the surface of a rock, but thin enough to be translucent, as if Kitarak had peeled a shell off one. From outside, the skylight would be indistinguishable from a regular rock. "How did you make this?" he asked.
"I will show you," Kitarak replied, taking a quadruple handful of pieces into his workshop. He placed them in a ceramic tray on the bench, then set a thick candle in a stone bowl beside the tray. "Can you light the candle?" Kitarak asked.
"I left my flint and steel in Urik," Jedra said apologetically.
"Hint and steel?" Kitarak said, sounding offended at the very idea. "Oh, no. Here. Look at the wick. Imagine it made of tiny particles, all of them wiggling about but never escaping. Now imagine them wiggling faster. Make them move faster and faster until they grow hot from the effort."
Jedra concentrated on the candle for a moment, trying to see it as Kitarak had described. It was difficult, since he had never considered before what something as simple as a candle wick was made of, but eventually he managed to think of it as a long thread of fine sand held together by some kind of flexible glue. He imagined the sand flowing back and forth along the wick, surging from one end of it to the other...
... and the wick burst into flame with a soft pop, all along the length of the candle. The wax slumped into a puddle, and the wick snuffed out again in the liquid wax.
"Very good!" Kitarak said. "But next time, focus on just the part sticking out the top." He held his upper hands around the cup and the wick lifted up again, then the wax flowed up to coat it and solidify in layers until there was none left in the bowl. "Try it again," Kitarak said.
This time Jedra got it right. When the candle was burning normally, Kitarak said, "All right, now we amplify the candle's heat and melt the glass."
"Why don't we just wiggle the glass particles until they get hot enough?" Jedra asked.
"Try it," Kitarak said.
Jedra did. He imagined one of the glass shards as another bunch of tiny sand particles, imagined them moving faster and faster and faster....
The glass began to glow a dull red color, but no matter how hard Jedra tried to move the particles faster, that was as hot as he could make it. He was getting plenty hot, though; sweat ran down his forehead and dripped off the end of his nose.
"That's enough," Kitarak said.
"Don't wear yourself out."
Jedra took a deep breath and relaxed. "Why couldn't I melt it?" he asked.
"Because that way isn't very efficient," Kitarak replied. He set the candle closer to the tray. "Amplifying, on the other hand"-he waved both hands on his right side for emphasis-"takes what is already there and simply makes more of the same. Much more efficient. Now concentrate on the candle and imagine its heat flowing into the glass. Then once you get that, imagine more and more heat coming from it until the glass melts."
Another few minutes and the glass shards slumped into a puddle on the bottom of the tray. "Good," Kitarak said. "Now we simply form it into the right shape and let it cool." The molten glass bulged upward, inflating into a hemisphere, then crinkling into nooks and fissures to resemble the surface of a rock.
Jedra heard a thump from beyond the central room. It turned out to be Kayan closing the door; he heard her walk across the room to look in at him and Kitarak at the workbench. "Learning more tricks, I see," she said.
"Yes," said Kitarak. "Come, you may try it, too."
"No thanks," she said. "I've had enough disappointment for one day."
She turned to leave, but Kitarak spoke sharply. "No. You came here to learn, so you will learn. Come try this." The shell of glass hovered above the tray, then drifted toward Jedra. "Here," Kitarak said to him. "Take this- not with your hands!-and go put it in place."
Jedra levitated the fragile skylight carefully, conscious of Kayan's smoldering anger at his ability to do so, but unwilling to disobey Kitarak. He backed out of the workshop with the glass and took it outside, where he carefully climbed atop the house and cleared the hole until the new skylight fit snugly in place. The whole time he was working on the repair, he could feel Kayan's presence below him, her mind seething with resentment.
If anger could melt glass, he thought, she would have no trouble with this lesson.
* * *
Kayan didn't speak to him until that afternoon. Jedra had cleaned out the rest of the storeroom while Kitarak showed her how to melt glass, and he had floated a cushion from the main room into it for a bed. Since he was momentarily free to relax, he decided to try the bed for a short nap, the way he used to spend hot afternoons at home, but he had just lain down when Kayan stepped into the room.
He sat back up. "How did it go?" he asked.
She shook her head. "I evidently don't have any tele-kinetic ability at all."
"Oh."
She didn't come in and sit down, didn't react at all, so he stood up and held her in his arms. "I'm sorry."
She laid her head against his shoulder. "Me too."
"It doesn't matter," he said. "I can do it, and you'll always have me."
"Jedra, that's not the problem. I don't like knowing there's something I can't do." She pulled away from him, then crossed her arms over her chest.
"I'm sorry," he said again, not knowing what else to do.
She sighed. "I'll get over it," she said, then she turned away and went into the library.
But she didn't get over it. Not that day, nor any thereafter. Each passing day only produced another frustration for her as Kitarak tried one method after another to teach her what he knew of psionics. Some things she could pick up instantly, especially those powers that dealt with healing or metabolism in some way, and she was a quick study in the telepathic arts as well, but anything to do with telekinesis remained beyond her ability. It didn't matter to her that Jedra couldn't heal so much as a minor scratch, or that neither of them could teleport or even dream-travel the way Kitarak had done; no, all that mattered to Kayan was that Jedra could move things with his mind and she couldn't.
Kitarak held their training sessions in the central room, the "great room" as he called it. The three of them spent most of their time there, sitting on cushions while they learned how to manipulate light and sound, how to read minds and blank their thoughts from other mind-readers, and how to enhance their other senses. At least once a day he also took them outside into the dry canyon bottom and showed them how to fight with their minds and how to defend themselves from attacks both mental and physical.
After so much time together, they tended to seek out privacy during their few hours of free time. Kayan took to spending most of hers in the library, reading old books and ignoring Kitarak and Jedra whenever she could. At night she slept on the same bed with Jedra, but she might as well have been on the other side of the house for all the affection she showed. Jedra found himself wishing they were back in the desert again; at least it got cold enough there to require snuggling to stay warm.
Only when they joined minds did they have any kind of rapport. That was as good as ever, but it ultimately led to even more frustration because every time they did it they felt as if they'd resolved their problems, only to come down and find that they hadn't. They learned much about psionics that way, for Kitarak found teaching them easier when they were linked, but they both came to dread the long drill sessions, especially when the tohr-kreen focused on something they couldn't each do separately. And since Kitarak didn't need sleep, he drove them to exhaustion every day, which didn't help their frayed emotions either.
Finally one night, nearly two weeks after they had arrived at Kitarak's home, Jedra waited for Kayan to come to bed from another late reading session, and as she undressed in the dark he said softly, "Kayan?" He would have mindspoken, but even with practice in narrowing his focus, he didn't trust Kitarak not to listen in.
"Hmm?" Kayan paused in midmotion, a black silhouette against even greater blackness.
Jedra could have amplified the light reaching his eyes until he saw her as clearly as by daylight, but he respected her privacy. He looked up at the ceiling to remove the temptation and said, "Do you remember the first time we joined our minds just for pleasure?"
She finished pulling off her shirt, one she had made herself only a few days ago from an old cushion cover. "No," she said.
"That's because we never have."
"Yes, we did," she said, automatically gainsaying him.
"When?"
It took her a moment to come up with a reply, but she finally said, "That first night in the desert with Kitarak, when we kissed each other goodnight."
Jedra thought back to that night. It seemed a million years away, but he still remembered it clearly. "That was an accident," he said. "Not that I minded," he hastily added.
Kayan tossed her shirt into a corner and drew on her nightshirt: the robe the elves had given her, now laundered. "So what's your point?"
"My point is, why don't we do it again?"
"Because I'm tired," she said, sitting down on the bed. "And I'm in a bad mood, and I have a headache."
"All of which will go away instantly when we merge," he said.
"And all of which will come back to haunt me tenfold when we separate again," she replied.
"I bet it doesn't."
"What do you know about it? It's not your headache."
"Want to bet?"
"What's that supposed to mean?"
Jedra reached out and took her hand, using his light-amplification ability just enough to guide him. "It means I'm not exactly happy here either, Kayan. I had no idea it would be like this. I wanted to live happily ever after with you, not spend most of my time feeling guilty about what I can do or jealous of what you can do."
"There are no happily-ever-afters in this world," Kayan told him. But she didn't take her hand away.
Jedra pulled her gently back until she lay beside him. "So let's go to another one," he whispered. "Just for tonight. Forget Kitarak, psionics practice, and everything else. Let's spend tonight in our own world, just you and me and no cares whatsoever."
Kayan said nothing for quite a while. Jedra gave her time to think it over. He knew that any more coaxing would only make her decide against him. This had to be as much her idea as his in order for her to accept it, so he had to give her time to make her decision.
She was taking forever, t
hough. He was afraid she had simply fallen asleep, but she finally rolled over to face him and said, "All right. Tonight let's mindlink just for the fun of it. No cares whatsoever."
Jedra let out a deep breath he hadn't even been aware he was holding. "Thank you," he said.
She laughed, the first time he had heard her do so in weeks. "Hang on to your hat," she said. "We may end up miles from here."
She leaned forward, and Jedra didn't need night vision to know that she was waiting to be kissed.
When their lips met, so did their minds. Warmth and excitement swept over them, the perfect blend of emotional and physical stimulus drawing them deep into new realms of sensation. Kitarak and his lessons, Kayan and Jedra's inequalities-all dwindled to insignificance in the face of the sudden, urgent imperative to experience every possible aspect of their convergence.
After that, things changed. Not entirely-if anything, they were even more competitive by day-but they spent their nights exploring new territory that even Kitarak didn't suspect existed. If he noticed, he didn't mention it, but he didn't ease up on them, either. When they began to fall asleep during their lessons he merely taught them how to suppress their bodies' need for sleep and continued with his instruction.
Jedra lost track of how many things he learned. Most of them were becoming instinctive after so much repetition. When he entered a dark room, he amplified what little light was there until he spotted a candle, then he agitated the wick into flame. When he needed to speak to Kitarak or Kayan, he did it telepathically unless they were already in the same room. When he wanted something, he detached a part of his mind to search it out, then brought it telekinetically to where he needed it.
And when he wanted a drink, he levitated water from the well, just as Kitarak had done when they had been with him in the ancient city. The tohr-kreen had laughed his clicking laugh when he explained how he had deceived them. "The pressure tank hasn't held air for millennia," he told them. "Only a psionicist or a mage could lift water through those rusty pipes." Then he had sobered and said, "Now, of course, it would take more than that."