Sunburst

by Phyllis Gotlieb

  “What do you want?” said Colin Prothero. He added, “I’m not a mind-reader,” and grinned; the cage was evidently a small Field.

  “Aah, you know,” said Prothero wearily. Perhaps he had been through this a thousand times before. He reached back to knock a block of ash into a tray and turned to the boy again.

  Colin twined his fingers in the mesh. “You know I didn’t have anything to do with that brannigan over your peeper.”

  “I know,” said Prothero. He turned the cigar in his fingers and watched the red flaming through layers of gray.

  “You always said I never had enough guts anyway.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “You thought it.”

  “You should have kept out of my mind, then…and proved to me—”

  Colin sneered. “What? That I had enough guts to jump Jason Hemmer?”

  “No…just that you were a person. Not especially a hero—just a human being. With the psi or not.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “You know what I mean. You’ve had eighteen years to prove you’re a person. You didn’t start the row. You didn’t join in right away. And you didn’t try to stop it.”

  “You nuts? You figure I’m gonna help him?”

  Prothero looked at him levelly. “No,” he sighed. “Maybe I would have respected you more if you did start it. I don’t know.”

  The boy laughed. “Great! Now I’m a slob because I didn’t do anything dirty. If I’d started it you’d have pulled my ears off, eh? Look!” He pounded his fist against the mesh and the cage trembled. “Look, Pop! I’m not scared of you! You’re scared of me, or you wouldn’t have me here in a cage—”

  Prothero snapped: “You’re in a cage because you’re an animal!… You’re in this room because you’re my son. I know about Quimper and the Kingfish—but a toothache’s no excuse for them to turn you all into wild bulls with banderillas in your backs… I know them. They think they’ve got plans to fight it out. It’s not going to happen—and I’ll deal with them separately.” His voice changed and shaded almost imperceptibly. “I brought you here because I hope… I want—”

  Colin screamed, clutching the wires with both hands, “I don’t care what you want! You want! You want me to snivel and cry and lick your boots and be your little soldier-boy! You can go to hell! I want to be out of here, back there! I’d rather die in the Dump than live in the same world with you!”

  Shandy writhed in her corner of shadow. She had grown more uncomfortable by the second, and now she was wishing with all her heart that she had braved Prothero’s initial fury and made an escape. She glanced toward the door, but the guard had not moved. Perhaps he had grown used to this.

  Prothero had stood up. He took the chair by its back and threw it against the wall. The cigar rolled on the floor, scattering ash and streaming thinly with smoke. “I’ll break you!” he whispered. “I’ll break you!” Colin laughed.

  “Tapley! Get this thing out of here!”

  He turned away as the cage was wheeled out, until it began to crunch on the gravel. He righted the chair, slowly. Under his hand it shook in its loosened joints. He picked up the cigar, set it in his cheekpouch, and absently scuffed at a burned spot on the floor.

  He swung into the dark room, snapped the light on, and went over to the sink. His eyes were blank, almost blind. He opened the mirrored door and took out a bottle of branded whiskey and a glass. Then he turned and saw her.

  Sunburst: 6

  “You!” He put back the bottle and glass and dumped the cigar in the sink. She stood up. As the cabinet door swung to she glimpsed the reflection of her face, slate eyes livid against dark skin.

  “You sneak!” He grabbed her shoulders and began to shake her. Ridiculously she was reminded of Ma Slippec beating her carpets out of the window. “You filthy guttersnipe! Spying—”

  She twisted in his grasp. “I didn’t come to spy! I—”

  “—sticking your nose in—”

  “—came to ask—”

  “—everything, digging up dirt! What do you want here?”

  “—if I could see the Dump files!”

  “There’s no money in this place! Human garbage, wrecked lives—”

  “I don’t want to pry into your life, and I don’t want money!” She wrenched her shoulders away from his hands. “I came to ask to see the Dump files,”—she stamped her foot—“to ask, to ask, to ask!”

  They stood glaring at each other, both winded. She gulped and finished lamely, “I was sitting here waiting and when I heard everybody coming I got scared and hid.”

  He said slowly, “Maybe you don’t belong in the Dump…but you do belong out there in a court of civil law.” He took a deep breath. “I don’t want you here, but I haven’t got all the say in the matter.”

  He strode into the office and over to the filing-cabinet, jerked open a drawer—her eyes were too blurred to see whether it was marked D—and yanked out a thick wad of folders. He slammed it on the desk and leafed through it with trembling hands, pulled out one folder and threw it back in the drawer. He looked up and said through his teeth, “Urquhart said if you asked I was to give you the Dump files.” He picked them up and shoved them at her, and she clutched them to her chest.

  “Urquhart has lots of bright ideas,” said Prothero. “But if you want to know what I think, I think he’s a fool—and you’re a thief! Now get out!”

  At the door she tripped, twisted to keep hold of the files, and sat down hard on the hall floor. She saw that what she had tripped over was a foot, and looked up at the soldier by the door. It was Davey. She scrambled up and glared at him, but his face was expressionless.

  “Touché!” she snarled, and made her way down the hall, into the first dark doorway, where she found a chair, set the files on the floor, and burst into tears.

  * * * *

  Simultaneously the lights went on and the peculiar tp sound broke on the air.

  Jason was sitting at the desk. They were in Urquhart’s office.

  “Auditioning for the next Passion Play?” His voice was heavy with sarcasm. She looked up through the tears and saw her hair had broken loose and was bursting out all around her head. Still sobbing, she reached down, fumbled the lace out of a shoe, and tied it back.

  “You nut! You had him all ready to like and trust you, and you had to louse it up. What are you blubbering for?”

  “I’m insulted.”

  He began to laugh.

  “Go ahead, if you can get fun out of my pratfalls.”

  “I didn’t think that was funny. Are you hurt?”

  “Only when you laugh.”

  He did his best to smooth his face. “I’m not laughing. Why are you insulted?”

  “Because I went in there to—”

  “Yeah, I know. You went in there to ask. Well, why’n hell didn’t you?”

  “I got scared.”

  He snorted. “Oh boy, the Reckless Roamer of Sorrel Park. Never scared in your life…so what? So he would’ve been mad. He wouldn’t have bit your head off—just an ear or two. Now look what you did to him. Was he broadcasting! Nearly took my head off.”

  “Why didn’t you stop him? You could’ve.”

  “Stop him! You’re a panic. He’s got a head like a bull. I couldn’t try anything on him without his finding out sooner or later, and I couldn’t stay around here ten minutes after he did. He doesn’t really believe it can be done, and I wouldn’t want to be the one to prove it to him. All that stuff with Colin—that was his pride being broken for the hundredth time—twice over because you saw it.”

  She took a wad of tissues from Urquhart’s desk and swabbed her face. “I didn’t want to see it.”

  “I know you didn’t. But you were sneaky, and you can’t be sneaky around psi even if you’re an Imper—it’s not the
best policy. Besides, you heard him. Urquhart told him to let you have the files if you asked.”

  “Why didn’t Urquhart just give them to me?”

  “He wanted you to think it up for yourself.”

  “Oh yeah. So I thought it up and this is what I get for it.”

  “You got the files.”

  “I don’t want them now—oh, I guess I do. Why did Urquhart want me to ask for them?”

  “Ask him.”

  She rested her chin on her hands and thought for a moment. “Suppose it was like a test?”

  He was silent.

  “If I’m not interested in people I’m useless—and I’m too scared to handle them properly it doesn’t matter how interested I am. If you look at it that way I’ve passed one part of it and failed the other.” She smiled. “Maybe I’ve passed a third part by figuring it all out for myself.”

  He whistled a bar of melody elaborate with grace notes and arpeggios. “Maybe. Figure you know everything now?”

  “No. I still don’t know why you’re here.”

  His brow became a pair of joined circumflexes, but he relaxed and stretched. “Look in my file.”

  “It wouldn’t be here. These are Dump files.”

  “Kiddo…we’re all in the Dump.”

  She picked up the heap of files and leafed them.

  Names flicked before her eyes: COOK, Elizabeth (Lexy); DOLLARD, John (Jocko); …HALSEY, Grace; HEMMER, Jason; HURLEY, LaVonne; KING, Harvey (Scooter) (Kingfish); …PROTHERO, Colin Adams; PROTHERO, Stephen Decatur…

  She stopped. “Swift said it was a brave man that first ate an oyster… Prothero’s put his file in my hands.”

  “Oh, he’s brave, all right. But in this case he’s just dumb.”

  “I know he took one out. I guess it was mine. But Urquhart’s here, I see. He must have handled the interviews. Who did his?”

  “He handed in his analyst’s report.”

  She put the files down. “Does your file tell why you’re here, Jason? Don’t ask me to look at it. It’ll tell me all about when you were born, and what you weighed, and whether you were a good-natured kid, and if you broke windows or stole apples. I don’t need that kind of junk. I know I’m the only person you can’t read, and you could say it’s a good enough reason not to trust me…maybe you forget to look at the outsides of people once in a while, because you’re so busy with the inside. But you know what people look like and how they sound when they’re telling lies; you haven’t forgotten everything you learned before you found you had psi.”

  Jason sighed. “Yeah. It’s possible. But maybe you’d like to tell me something: why you want to know.”

  “I want to know why I ought to stay here,” said Shandy. “I think I could get out if I really tried. You could say it’s my duty to stay, but what do I know about this kind of duty? I’m thirteen years old.

  “Nobody knew about you when the Dump was set up. You came here four years later, so you must have come of your own free will. I can see you’ve got a necessary job, but it’s a terribly ugly and dangerous one. Marczinek and the rest just fell into their jobs when they didn’t know they were going to have to stay so long. Nobody forced them to come in the first place, but they had age and experience to help them decide. How could you make such a complicated moral decision at the age of fourteen? Why should I even have to think about it at my age?”

  “Maybe,” said Jason, “we just oughta say that if I couldn’t, I’d be in the Dump—and if you couldn’t, you wouldn’t be Shandy Johnson.” He stood up and went over to the window. There was a Walpurgis-Night glow over the rim of the Dump; it gave the watcher the sense of a place where hideous sacrifices were being offered. “That might be nearly all of the answer for you…but it isn’t all of it for me…”

  Shandy said, “If you think I’m being too snoopy I won’t pester you anymore.”

  “That’s kind of an ambitious statement! Nah, I have to be a lot snoopier—in meaner ways. What I’m getting round to telling you, Shandy, is: there’s two other psis like me in Sorrel Park.”

  “Is that right! I guess I don’t know them.”

  “No. I hope you never will. One’s a girl—a married woman now—about twenty-four, and the other’s a boy of eleven.”

  “Are they bright?”

  He turned away from the window, grinning. “I could’ve guessed you’d ask that. Bright enough.”

  “Gee, if they could get along like that, without anybody knowing, maybe Doydoy—”

  “No.” He sighed. “Not with the present set-up.”

  “Powerful?”

  “Not in Doydoy’s class, though the boy’s a firecracker. He’s strong and healthy and lively, everything Doydoy should have been… I never forgot him crawling on his hands like that. I wouldn’t let it happen again. I knew Prothero needed somebody like me, because pulling in all the kids in Sorrel Park for examination every year or two was too chancy and sloppy. I got together with the others and worked it out. The kid’s too young and irresponsible. The girl would’ve come, but she wasn’t really strong, physically, and she’d been going to get married…and I’m a tough lunk and don’t look too bright. So I let myself get pulled in. That way I got to have a say about who comes—and who stays. That’s all there is.” He came over and sat down again.

  “You’re lucky you didn’t get thrown in the Dump.”

  “It wasn’t easy—I had to come out like a solid citizen on the tests, and still not look like I was here on purpose. It nearly got queered because Urquhart figured there was something up right away. But he knew a good thing when he saw it.”

  “Does he know about the others?”

  “He’s met them, and he’s tested them too. When I was sure I could trust him I thought that’d be the best way to get him to trust me…you saw he knows how to keep his mouth shut.”

  “I can do the same.” She bit her lip. “One more thing. I know I really shouldn’t ask—”

  “Don’t let that stop you.”

  “You’ve gone through a lot to keep others out of the Dump…but you knew I had no psi—and you knew pretty well that if you brought me here I’d be staying. How come you brought me in, Jason?”

  He laughed. “It’s what I like about your questions: you can always answer with a simple yes or no. Well, kiddo,”—he slapped the desk and stood up—“the minute I saw you, I says: Jason, here’s one you don’t have to worry about. This doll can take care of herself.”

  Shandy was sitting on her bed, trying to put her thoughts in order. She was a little ashamed that she had chivvied Jason into telling her about the other psis, but at least she had penetrated the mystery she had sensed around him. She was resolving to leave him alone and try to forget them, when she felt a sudden stab of jealousy. From his words about them she had deduced a network of friendship and dependence among the three of them; the Dumpling pack had evolved nothing comparable.

  But she had never belonged to anything, and she didn’t belong to anything now, either. She muttered, “Feelin’ real sorry for yourself, kook?”

  She had just been given her first emotional hotfoot. She had told Urquhart that she had previously gotten her emotions from books, and it was true. Yet, she had also seen the Slippecs in orgies of fury and drunken hate, and had moved aside in her mind to watch them, believing that there was something artificial about them because she herself had never been touched. She conceded now that she might possibly have been mistaken.

  If the Slippecs flung their emotions about it did not necessarily mean that they were not real and painful, if only for the short time they lasted. She deduced this because she was feeling real and painful. She had flubbed the business of the files from A to Z and would have given quite a lot to have missed the interchange between Colin and Prothero. She had seen Prothero with something on his back that was every bit as terrible as her father’s sc
ar; and the face of X had come too close for comfort. It was not the kind of experience she thirsted for.

  Besides all of which she had been chewed out by both Prothero and Jason. She was furious at herself. She trudged into the bathroom to clean her teeth and confronted her reflection.

  “Dumbhead!” She snarled at the dark face the locked-in gene of some forgotten Italian or Spaniard had given her, the child of fair-skinned northern parents. Her eyes were red-rimmed.

  Prothero had called her a thief.

  But she had seriously considered stealing the files when they were hers for the asking all along. She had never thought of herself as immoral—only a person who had to know things and made sure she found out. For years she had toted jugs of corn from the Slippecs’ still to Fitch’s Joint, without stopping to wonder whether it was wrong. Prohibition was a stupid business; but although the civvies may have encouraged spying and betrayals, the law did not require them. If the law had been obeyed as it stood would the people have been harmed by it?

  The spirit of Sorrel Park had been warped by tragedy, barbed wire, and terribly repressive policing. Did this give the citizens an inalienable right to break laws in order to make themselves sick with rotgut? And she had taken full jugs from Ma Slippec and handed them to Fitch; empties from Fitch to be filled by Ma Slippec.

  If she had refused would they have forced her to go on, or found her some other way to be useful? She had never put the matter to a test and now it was too late.

  But I was only a kid then, I didn’t know what I was doing. And I’m still a kid, anyway. I can’t help…

  …thinking like a Dumpling.

  She tugged at the frayed lace binding her hair. It snapped, and she flung it away. She made a face in the mirror. Beautiful. Now your hair’s hangin’ down like spaniel ears. She yanked at it, but it stayed. It would have been pretty silly if it had come out.

  She noticed a pimple under the angle of her jaw: a stigma of adolescence. That and two hairs in the left armpit. Whee, I’m growing up! She peered down the neck of her jersey. Nothing dangerous there yet. Her feet came to her attention. Long red sneakers, 7½AAAA, no laces. She kicked the unlaced shoe off her foot into the bedroom and followed it in. Thin soles, rubber parting from the uppers, toes about to come out. They had stained her socks many a time in the winter slush, and no new ones in sight. Mebbe when I git the new batch out, dearie? Couple jugs ought a make it? Even if the cigar store had not been a front it would not have brought in enough money to buy her shoes. Her life had been founded on immorality.