Free Behind the Eyes of Dreamers by Pamela Sargent

meant to kill you. He only wanted you to release him.” Even as she said this, she knew it wasn’t so. Josef might have been only fearful at first, desperate to get away, but he had meant for Kitte to die as soon as his hands found her throat.
    “He could have been happy with me,” Kitte said. “He was so unhappy when I found him in the Garden. I would have done anything for him, you know.” The woman’s intensity and disordered emotions repelled Orielna; Kitte was wallowing in longing and rage. “He’ll pay for it when you bring him out. He’ll pay for murdering me.”
    I can leave now, Orielna thought, walk out of this Garden, return to Aniya, and leave the pursuit of Josef to others. She dismissed the notion; she could not abandon him now. If she brought him back to Aniya, he would be safe, however unhappy he was at being with the sharer he had wanted to escape; he could live as long as he never left Aniya’s side. If Aniya surrendered responsibility for her eidolon, others would hunt him; he would surely endure erasure then and might even be destroyed. Kitte might demand the right to decide his fate herself, since she had been his victim. Perhaps Josef would prefer the loss of his thoughts and memories or even the destruction of his body to imprisonment with Aniya.
    They would all suffer, whatever happened to Josef. Aniya would struggle to bend him to her will or else endure the pain of having him wiped; she would wonder how the man whose thoughts reflected her own had grown to hate her. She would have to imprison him in her house as long as he remained as he was so that others would be safe from him. Orielna would be trapped with both of them, feeling their pain inside herself whenever she reached out to them.
    Kitte, of course, wanted them all to suffer. She would probably take as much joy in that as Josef had in murdering her.
    “Let me give you some advice,” Orielna said. “Drop the memory of your death. You’ll just find it harder to remain in balance if you don’t.”
    “Oh, no. I want it. I won’t go through that little death to lose the memory of the one he brought to me. I won’t let him have that victory—I won’t give up part of myself, not yet, not until he’s paid for what he did. I want to feel that fully.”
    Orielna edged past Kitte, ready to shove her aside if necessary, but the other woman moved out of her way. “You want to strike at me, don’t you?” Kitte shouted after her. “The same thoughts were put into your mind and his, so you must feel the way he would. You can’t even have your own feelings, eidolon!”
    Orielna hastened into the forest. Kitte pitied her, and there was no reason for pity. She asked nothing more than to be her sharer’s eidolon and to reflect Aniya’s thoughts; she had not wanted to leave Aniya to come here.
    No, she thought; that wasn’t quite true. Though Orielna had at first wanted to go, to be apart from Aniya for a while, she had later begged Aniya not to send her on this search because she feared what it might do to her. She might diverge and become whatever Josef was now.
    An eidolon—Kitte had lashed her with the word, as if it were an insult. The term was somewhat misleading. An eidolon’s body did not have to resemble that of its creator; its mind was the eidolon cast in another’s image. Aniya, alone in her house, shunning other people, had wanted a companion, someone with whom she would always be in perfect accord. The Net of minds, the interlinked intelligences that served everyone, had only to draw on its store of human genetic material to mold a body to Aniya’s specifications, then bring it rapidly to maturity before impressing the pattern of Aniya’s mind on the new being. Josef had been Aniya’s first eidolon, Orielna the second. Josef had his sharer’s dark hair, while Orielna was blond, but their eyes were Aniya’s large black ones. All their memories, thoughts, and feelings were Aniya’s; their sharer could look into