Llyn laced her fingers and stared at the ceiling. The windowless room was absolutely silent. She could hear nothing but her pulse, and she felt as if she were swimming in Karine’s padded recliner. Heavy external headphones mashed her ears. Karine leaned forward on a nearby chair, crossing her ankles against its frame.
Llyn amended the imagery. She wasn’t swimming in this recliner, but floating downstream while Karine tried to climb onto her back. Into her mind, actually.
“Llyn.” Karine’s voice crooned, mildly reproving, through the headphones. “Show me that episode.”
Karine punished resistance, though she didn’t always call it punishment. She had experimented—once—with a disciplinary AR sequence. It so terrified Llyn that even Karine panicked … and Llyn had remained catatonic for days, or so Tamsina told her. Llyn didn’t recall either the sequence or its aftermath.
An inpatient crisis had kept Karine busy around the clock after their trip to Nuris University, and then she’d needed rest, so Llyn had enjoyed the unusual privilege of relaxing and reflecting for two days. The choral concert had deeply affected her. So had the flashback that followed, with its unique gift of song. She yearned to repeat them.
Karine mustn’t know that.
Gathered white culottes made Karine look heavy. She would squash Llyn—or sink her—if she sat on her much longer.
“Llyn?” Karine said quietly. “Your thoughts are wandering.”
Llyn resigned herself to the usual ordeal. “All right.”
Karine’s hand tightened on her remote unit. White noise drilled into Llyn’s head. Hesitantly at first, and then with better focus, she recalled the sweet sense of floating. Once again in memory, she swam lazy somersaults around the bright grid lines. The flirtatious green geometric appeared, plainly communicating playfulness. The white noise kept her from fully reentering the inner world. For some reason, this worked—although using the noise to ward off unanticipated flashbacks never did. She’d spun into the inner world only once from this chair, despite Karine’s white noise, and she’d flung off a set of lightweight featherphones. Now Karine clamped these monsters onto her ears.
“Why did you find the green pyramid enticing?” Karine’s voice reverberated left of center inside Llyn’s skull.
This was the most humiliating aftermath of her episodes, exposing her beloved inner world to Karine’s scrutiny. “The way it moved, I think.”
“How so?”
Llyn sifted her memory. “Its—its points waved at me.”
“Did you choose to wear green today because of the pyramid?”
Llyn glanced down. She’d chosen spring green for her tunic, forest for her culottes. “I don’t think so.” She wished she, too, were an empath. She’d heard they could block synch by rapidly modulating their inner frequency—
“Llyn, where is your mind?”
Anger surged through her, then regret. Hurriedly she thought about something pleasant—Regent Salbari’s kindness, Niklo’s attempt to help her—but by the time she’d shut off her resentment and opened her eyes, Karine stood wiggling her fingers over control surfaces on the sound generator.
Sighing, Llyn pulled off the headphones. “Sorry,” she mumbled. “I didn’t mean to hit you.”
“Anger is a normal human reaction.”
But no one liked to feel it aimed at themselves. Maybe Karine wouldn’t discipline her, but there would be consequences. How Karine felt about her determined the freedoms she withheld.
“What do you want to do now?” Llyn laid the headphones on the stand beside her.
“Talk.” Karine settled back onto her chair.
At least she’d stopped halfway through the flashback. “What about?”
“Your trip to the library. Refusing to go straight to Professor Ruskin’s home, the way I told you to.”
“I’ve lived here for five years,” Llyn said. “I’m ready for more independence.”
“You’re not going to earn it that way.”
“I’m not a child.”
“Not physically.” Karine raised an eyebrow. “But in many ways, you are.”
“No, I’m—”
“You lost two years of development at a crucial point of your life, and you remember nothing before that.”
“I grew and learned. In the inner world.”
“That doesn’t count in this world. We are battling a severe addiction. Where did you have your previous episode?”
Llyn thought back several weeks. “Out in the orchard.” Karine kept twelve fruit trees under fiberglass. They clung to life in Antar’s hot, humid environment.
“Why?”
“I was listening to the stream down below the hill.”
“That is correct. And the time before that?”
How could she forget? “I was walking past the kitchen. The staff was clanking dishes.” She’d crumpled in front of the whole clinic population, less than fifteen minutes after Tamsina complimented her on her poise.
Karine nodded. “It only takes two notes, if you’re in a relaxed, vulnerable mood.”
“Then I won’t be vulnerable anymore. I’ll never relax.” Llyn compressed her lips. The inner world was sweet, but if she ever hoped to escape Karine, she must leave it alone.
Still, stress also made her vulnerable. If only she could convince Karine!
“Good idea.” Karine glanced over Llyn’s shoulder, probably at a clock. Llyn hoped this session had gone long enough to satisfy her. “The apples are ripe,” Karine said in a bland but probably insincere voice. “Go pick a gallon or so.”
Freedom! Llyn swung her legs around and sat upright.
“Freedom?” Karine asked.
Llyn froze. She had thought Karine had finished synching. She should’ve known better.
“You can be perfectly free at any time.” Karine crossed her arms.
That sounded too good to be true. “Yes?”
“But only within strictly defined limits. Think of children playing on a steep-sided mesa. Frightened, they stay in the very center. But if someone erects a strong fence, they’re free to play at the very edge of the cliff. You are safe only within fences, Llyn.”
Prison walls, Llyn corrected her silently.
Karine lowered her voice. “I wish you’d stop thinking like an adolescent.”
That was progress. Generally she accused Llyn of thinking like a child.
The wall intercom beeped four times. Karine had received a message from someone on her priority list. “Think about what I told you,” she said as she strode out.
Llyn rubbed the back of one hand with her other thumb. She could almost feel it. Almost. If she could regain her sense of touch, maybe that would help her hold on to the real world when a flashback threatened.
Feathers would help her more than electric shocks. Didn’t Karine understand?
She slipped back into her shoes and walked down the hall, out a door on the other side of the hillside clinic, then down toward the small grove under the inflated fiberglass half-dome. Elroy stood steadying a ladder for a patient who stood dropping red fruits into a box. They both waved.
Squeak, the clinic’s pet dedo, dashed uphill toward her, wagging his whip-like tail. Llyn bent to pet him. Purring, he rubbed his huge black-and-white head against her thigh. She barely felt the pressure, but his throaty purr was irresistible.
It had been bred into dedoes for exactly that reason. Named for an ancient gargoyle they supposedly resembled, they had been genegineered by an unorthodox animal advocate in Vatsya Habitat. Utterly unintelligent, unable to register pain, and totally omnivorous, dedoes had surprised humankind by thriving. They’d been equipped with several stomachs and such a wide range of intestinal bacteria that they could subsist on compost.
Even more vitally, they satisfied the hab-confined Vatsyans’ need to care for other creatures. “Biophilia,” Karine called it. Their value to medical patients was so well established that most clinics kept a dedo or two.
Squeak was getting fat. The patients loved his purr so much that they often slipped scraps to him, despite Karine’s orders.
Llyn scratched Squeak’s flop-eared, leonine head. He pushed it higher into her hand. A dedo’s main instinct was to snuggle. Squeak could nestle against a cinder block and purr about it.
Llyn had been told that she couldn’t feel much more pain than Squeak did. Since she hoped to live independently someday, to her it was a liability. “That’s enough, gargoyle.” She gave Squeak a final pat. “I need to pick apples.”
Without her to lean on, Squeak toppled. He purred and scrambled back up onto short, muscular legs.
As Llyn propped a ladder against one tree’s stoutest branch, a cloud seeder plane flew over, its engine buzzing steadily. With one more load of sky seeds, one more half ton of moisture would be precipitated out of the cloud cover. Besides undoing the Devastators’ damages by thinning that perpetual shroud, they were watering and widening the algae paddies.
She climbed up, poked her head between branches, and started picking. She liked garden work. It gave her time to think. After today’s class (if Karine let her attend it), this evening would be the clinic’s biweekly Patient Social Encounter. Karine scrutinized her behavior at these “parties” and critiqued every word, stance, and gesture. She punished casual behavior with bland food, extra time on the sweat machines, or cutbacks on her net privileges.
Where was it all leading? Llyn didn’t want Karine’s answer. She didn’t want to be marginally self-sufficient. Somewhere was a job only she could do.
She set a red-streaked yellow apple into her box and reached for another.
Karine checked the clinic’s central multinet terminal near the kitchen. A call request had been logged from Vice Regent Filip Salbari. Delighted, she turned on one foot and hurried to her private office. When she sat at this wood-toned fiberglass data desk, she could look out the window on her right, or left into the hallway, or over the multinet at a stereo portrait of her late husband. She sat down, recited Filip Salbari’s NU access code, and slid on her view-glasses.
His face appeared immediately. She thought she saw more gray in his hair than two days ago, but it could’ve been a poor transmission.
“I’m returning your call, Filip. Have you heard any more on the Aliki?” He must be carrying more stress than usual.
He shook his head. “Nothing. Our lives and our work go on. I wanted to know if Llyn survived the trip back from Nuris without another episode.”
“Sadly, no.” Karine detailed the return-trip incident.
Filip’s expression sobered. “There have been several more attempts at stripping the net for information about her.”
“In two days?”
He nodded. “There appears to be special emphasis on locating her. Please keep a close eye on her. Two eyes, if you can spare them.”
“I shall.” So, her reluctance to take Llyn to town had been justified. Someone had seen her at the concert.
“You should also know that Nuris University has been anonymously threatened with violence if she isn’t brought forward.”
“What?” Karine straightened her glasses. “That’s ludicrous!” Empaths feared violence even more desperately than most Antarans. A victim could broadcast anguish and pain at astonishing range. That disciplinary AR episode had been her single real mistake on Llyn’s behalf. “Do you see any connection with the previous stripping attempts?”
“It would be difficult not to.”
“Then I assume that the on-site class is out of the question.”
“Absolutely not. If we protect Llyn so closely that no risk is ever involved, she will never learn to be human. Besides, the class will be held up there in Lengle, not Nuris. Our mysterious observer should not see her there.”
“I don’t like the idea.”
He shook his head. “Llyn is no child. I synched with her for some time at the concert. She is extremely mature in some ways—”
“And an infant in others. Don’t say she doesn’t need—”
“I am asking you to send her to the on-site class at Lengle. When does it begin?”
“This afternoon,” Karine snapped. “It’s too late.”
“I’ll have my staff register her. Get her dressed and get her there.”
“Is that an order, Filip?”
“Yes. It is.”
Filip Salbari rotated his chair away from the office terminal. Vananda and Favia sat side by side in deep chairs along the other wall, near an open window. His wife Favia, taller and older, had the darker hair, but both sisters wore curls, and both had put on deep rose-colored tunics this morning. They’d spent the last two days planning a private memorial service for their father.
“She fought it,” Vananda observed.
“Hard.” Filip straightened a stack of printouts that a colleague had dropped on his desk.
Vananda, his fellow empath, shook her head. “Karine is a fine clinician and she has always been considered an excellent caregiver, but this relationship is becoming toxic.”
“It seems incongruous.” Favia’s fresh grief showed in her swollen eyes. “How could she err like this? Someone of her profession should know better.”
“The best of us develop blind spots,” Filip said. “And there was nothing toxic when the adoption was approved.”
“She lost Namron years ago.” Favia looked off into space. “She is losing Niklo. She is determined not to lose Llyn. Controlling Llyn has become a vital part of her happiness.”
Vananda raised her head. “Could we have an attempted enmeshment case here, Filip?” she asked.
He pursed his lips. Attempting enmeshment was a serious accusation among empaths, a real risk to personhood. “I am not sure. It should be checked, though.” He straightened. “Do you have any suggestions? You’ve both relinquished grown children.”
“So have you,” Vananda said. “Trust your instincts.”
“There are differences between fatherly instincts and motherly ones.”
Favia smiled back at him. He shallow-synched with her and mentally splashed in his wife’s affectionate warmth. “If I think of anything more,” she said, “I’ll suggest it.”
“My hands are tied.” Filip raised them, separated. “Unless Karine commits a legal offense, she has jurisdiction over Llyn for another full year unless she declares Llyn competent.”
“She may never do that,” Vananda said.
“Someday she will see what is under her nose.” Filip glanced out his office window, across the city. Ground traffic looked slow today. “Anything else to accomplish before we head out?” The memorial service was planned for the family estate, northwest of Nuris. His pioneering grandparents had rebelliously sunk roots far from the new power center.
“Only a few things,” Favia said. “I’ll be ready in three or four hours.” The sisters embraced. Vananda slipped out.
Favia paused at the door. “Shall I meet you at the town house?”
“That will be fine.” As her footsteps receded, Filip dictated a message to his staff: enroll Llyn Torfinn in that Antaran history class at Lengle townsite. “You have only an hour,” he finished it. “Please act immediately.”
Llyn tried to stroll casually into the classroom, as if she did this every day. Tables and chairs surrounded an empty stretch of tile flooring, like the spokes of a wheel. Most of the chairs were occupied, and to Llyn’s satisfaction, a few students looked almost as old as she was. Normal children, raised in warm, caring families. She’d bypassed the upper-primary children in her first satellite group, plus two midgrade classes beyond them. She felt stupid in some ways (she’d been told that mathematics would always be closed to her—something about arrested development of one of her brain connections), yet she excelled in most other subjects. What would she have been, what might she have accomplished, if she’d been allowed to live normally?
At any rate, she already knew Basic Antaran History. Insisting on this class was her own contribution to her social education. She wanted to rub shoulders with other young people.
She had also hoped to escape Karine for two hours each day—for three weeks—but Karine stalked beside her, clutching the shoulder strap of a large purse. She probably carried a medical arsenal.
A thin, mustached man waved them to a table. Karine remained standing and caught his attention. “Have they all been told?”
Llyn flushed. She guessed she knew what was coming.
“No,” the man said. “I thought I would wait until everyone arrived.”
“That will be fine,” Karine said.
Not with me. No one consulted me. Llyn sat down and stared at the tabletop, fighting anger. Thanks to Karine, her fellow students would never consider her normal. Still, if she coped with this situation, maybe another class—another group—would accept her friendship.
Several early-teen children murmured and looked back at the door. Another girl entered, staring straight ahead. Balanced on her shoulders was a black object shaped like a fat letter C. The girl was a gillie, one of the other recent throwback mutations. The black object was her prosthesis, a water tank fitted to her neck. Oxygen from a second tank that she wore like a backpack bubbled through the clear black gill-tank, letting her breathe.
Once all seats had filled, the mustached man gestured to Karine, who introduced herself and announced, “I am here supervising Llyn Torfinn, who has a rare brain disorder. If she hears music, she could collapse. That might endanger her or any of you, so for the duration of this course—or as long as Llyn stays with you—I must ask you all to refrain from singing, whistling, letting metal objects clink against each other, or playing instruments. Any sounds that her subconscious could construe as music will be strictly forbidden. Do you all understand?”
Llyn wished she could slide under the table. She clenched her hands on the tabletop and examined her fingernails. When she finally dared to look up, she saw the gillie’s blue eyes. Llyn returned her shy smile. Compared to that girl, she looked normal.
Antarans accepted the gillies—and empaths—as easily as the thousands of artificially conceived children, because their souls and minds remained human. But one evening, brooding about Niklo’s rebelliousness, Karine had wondered aloud whether Llyn’s soul was damaged by spending so much time in the AR.
Distracted by that black thought, Llyn lost track of the instructor’s narrative until Karine pinched her arm and pointed. The instructor was twirling an ethereal red-gray ball in the air in front of him.
“Evidently,” he said, “those same previous inhabitants of the Concord cluster moved our planet to its orbit. Our binary star’s gravitational tides prevented planets from forming within its habitable zone. Vatsya, though, is the only B-class sun in the middle of a ‘burp’ of otherwise uniform star formation. It emits too much high-energy radiation to allow life, but our planet formed there. We don’t know who moved it, or when. Or, more vitally, how they generated enough energy to do it.”
A sharp-chinned boy of eleven or twelve sat behind the gillie, running a finger around the back of her tank. He looked like trouble. Llyn hoped he didn’t decide to whistle just to see what her episodes looked like.
“Why did they move it?” a girl near the gillie asked.
“We can’t even guess.” The instructor shrugged his narrow shoulders. “Because this system is central to the cluster—that’s what we’ve always assumed. The Concord cluster has obviously been desirable real estate for millennia.
“The first human settlers did know what they were approaching. They had full data on all nine systems, two generations before landing. They knew, for example, that Miatrix was deficient in radiational wavelengths necessary for growing any plants that terrestrial herbivores could eat. They also spotted the Gates, although they didn’t know what—”
Another girl spoke up. Blond and soft-faced, she had a precocious tone to her voice. “Do you know what happened to Earth?”
The instructor didn’t seem to mind being interrupted. This must be his day for covering groundwork. “The Devastators probably sterilized it. If Earth has been resurrected, we haven’t heard, and we haven’t got the technology to go back there and see what happened.”
Llyn decided to try speaking up. “But we haven’t picked up any messages. Not even modulated radio waves.”
The mischievous boy tapped the gillie’s tank. She leaned away and gave him a dark look. The boy stared blandly at the instructor. Llyn watched, fascinated. He was getting away with it! “I heard,” he said as if he’d done nothing wrong, “Antar’s orbit is unstable. We’re going to crash into one of the suns.”
“It’s possible.” The instructor sounded unconcerned. “Evidently the civilization that placed Antar had the tech to correct its orbit if necessary, but we don’t. Our world could crash into a sun in a mere twenty or thirty thousand years. Or it could be slung out of orbit into deep space. In either case, I don’t expect to be here. Do you?”
Two of the younger children tittered.
The sharp-chinned boy finally looked serious. “But why didn’t the Devastators use nuclear weapons? That would’ve sterilized Antar forever.”
“We honestly don’t know. Maybe it gives us a clue to their mindset. They seem to have been driven by fears—”
The ground rumbled underfoot. The instructor glanced up and smiled at his students. “These tables are reinforced, of course, in case we ever have a Big One—”
The ground shook again. Llyn looked from the instructor to Karine, who raised an eyebrow. “Just a moment,” the instructor said. “Let’s see if—”
The floor heaved, tossing children and chairs.
Llyn dove under her table, where she nearly collided with Karine. Dodging Karine, she butted heads with another student. The ground shook again. Windows rattled. Llyn slowly counted to ten. The rolling subsided.
Her stomach hurt.
“Stay where you are.” The instructor’s voice shook. “I’m going to contact Nuris for an epicenter. It looks as if we’ll study geology today.”
Llyn huddled in her place, trying not to shiver. “That was the biggest rattle in five years,” she murmured to Karine. “Wasn’t it?”
“Yes,” Karine muttered. Llyn heard pain in her voice. Sweat beaded on her forehead.
Someone within Karine’s sensing range must’ve been badly hurt. Maybe even killed. Llyn didn’t say it out loud for fear of frightening the children. “Do you want to lie down?” she asked. “Put your head in my lap? You don’t look good.”
“Just for a moment.” Karine nodded. “The teacher might need me.”
The ground rumbled again. “Aftershock,” an older boy announced. His voice squeaked.
Staccato footsteps pounded back to the classroom. The instructor reappeared. “Everybody follow me!”
Llyn’s classmates surged after him, older boys first, then the younger children. The older girls hung back. That was a social behavior she’d have to ask Karine about. She found herself jogging in step with the gillie, culottes flapping as they trailed the others. “What is it?” Llyn asked.
“I don’t know. This is scary. I don’t like it.”
“Me neither.”
Llyn glanced at Karine. Her tunic’s collar looked dark. Maybe wet.
The instructor herded them down a flight of stairs into a dark, echoing storage area thronged by other teacher-student groups. “Your parents have been called. You’ll all go home as soon as they come for you. Apologies, Medic Torfinn. I should have just sent you and Llyn away.”
“You had other children to worry about.” Karine’s voice came out thick and cloudy.
“What’s up?” The sharp-chinned boy had an equally sharp shouting voice. Several others echoed him.
The instructor motioned them to stand closer. He bent down and lowered his voice. “Please keep this quiet,” he said softly. “There are younger children nearby and we cannot panic them. But Nuris University has been bombed.”
Karine clutched Llyn’s hand. The boy turned whiter than Karine did. “Bombed?” he asked. “Who did it? What’s going on?”
“I don’t know yet,” the instructor said. “I don’t know if anyone knows.”
Karine sat motionless, staring horrified—at Llyn.