Free Psion by Joan D. Vinge Page A

out of my fist, and the letters looked like pieces of string. I made myself relax. C-A-T. C-A-T. CAT. CAT. CAT. The picture of my name. It got easier and easier. A feeling I’d never known before took hold of me. Maybe it was pride.
    “A waste.” Siebeling let the words slip out and squash it. His mind showed me an ignorant criminal, a green-eyed Oldcity hoodlum who was wasting everybody’s time.
    I looked up, smarting with anger, ready to do something we were both going to regret. But a burst of fresh feeling from Jule cut between us-a kind of startled triumph, and then echoes of the same feeling that had started inside me. She was walking toward us again; the Corpse was gone from the doorway. She didn’t seem to notice our tension, for once. Her own mind was clenched around the irony that her family only interfered in her life when it was going right. But her gray eyes were shining and alive as she said, “I’m staying.”
    Siebeling’s tight face relaxed into a sudden smile, his relief was almost as loud as hers was. But he said, “Are you sure that-?”
    “Yes.” She nodded, ending it. She started to look back at me.
    Siebeling caught her hand, trying to pull her away; but she broke free. “Wait.” Siebeling shot me a dark glance past her. I didn’t say anything. Jule looked at what I’d done on the screen. She grinned at me for a second like we’d both had a triumph, and pride filled me again. Siebeling put an arm around her then, the first time he’d ever done that in front of me, and this time she went with him.
    I went back to the comm console and switched it on, and went through the sequence she’d been trying to teach me. I did it a few more times, perfectly, and then I went back and wrote my name some more. I thought about asking Jule to show me some other words tomorrow: maybe I could get an instruction tape, or something. . . .
    But after that there wasn’t any more equipment I had to learn, and somehow Siebeling always seemed to have something better for Jule to do than waste her time on me. Without her pulling me, I went back to watching the threedy like the ignorant hood I was, and just forgot about learning anything else.
    But that didn’t change how I felt about being at the Institute. Being a psion, working with the other psions, was still like nothing I’d ever known. Even if some of them called me “the mental pickpocket” in the back of their minds, when we worked together there was still a bond between us. Because then we were all the same, and nothing else counted. If the psi talent made me angry, I knew that most of them knew how it felt.
    Only they’d lived with it, and maybe hated it, a lot longer than I had. I knew I’d been lucky in burying it all my life, and that made living with it now easier for me.
    I guess it was making it easier for all of us, sharing the changes. I thought some of them even began to like me a little-Dere Cortelyou, for one. And Jule. Back in Oldcity the closest I’d ever come to having a friend was sleeping in the same room with somebody. I’d never even run with a gang. This was the first time I’d ever belonged to anything; I never figured it would feel so right. I finally had something to lose. Sometimes I was afraid I’d pinch myself once too often, and wake up for good.

4
     
    “Here!”
    (Behind you-)
    “Got it!” (Thanks.)
    “ Keep it moving. Again!”
    “All right, all right. . . .”
    “Here!”
    “No, there!” Laughter.
    We were working together, caught up in what Siebeling called “juggling.” Each of us used our psi talents any way we could, to take the others by surprise or warn each other, in a free-flowing, shapeless game. We tossed things and moved things and moved ourselves, reached out with our bodies and minds; making our control surer and more fluid, training ourselves to respond without losing focus or dropping guard-
    “Damn!” Or dropping a block, or a bowl.
    (Gotcha!) “Gotcha!” More