Psion by Joan D. Vinge

time, just to be sure.
    “Cat. Come in out of the rain.”
    It was Jule: I knew her voice; I knew the quick, shy whisper of her mind. I hadn’t heard the lift come up; but she didn’t need the lift. I turned on the couch and she was standing there half smiling in her dark, shroud-soft clothes, with her black hair in a heavy braid hanging to her waist. The room seemed warmer and lighter suddenly, now that I was sharing it with her. “You still here?”
    She shrugged, glancing down at herself. “The world’s a prison, and we are all our own jailers. . . . I was still here the last time I looked.” Jule was a poet-poetry was like psi, she said, like thought, a thing that compressed images to essence. Sometimes she talked like a poet; she made a little joke of it, so that you wouldn’t mind. I didn’t mind, anyway. She came over and sat down beside me, not too close. She was like a shadow, somehow too insubstantial to be an intruder. She always seemed to know what was happening inside me-sometimes better than I did myself-and whether she should stay or go away again.
    I’d asked her once, early on, what it was like to be able to teleport. She said, “It’s good when you want to get away from it all,” not looking at me. The image that slipped out of her mind then was such a surprise that I didn’t believe it. But I knew it had to be true, so after a while I’d asked the only question I could: “Jule, what made you come here?” And knowing she’d already shown me half the answer, she said, “One night I tried to drown myself.” She told me about it like she was telling a story about someone else; how a Corpse who was a telepath had pulled her out of the lake in the park. He’d spent hours talking to her about why she hated her life, and in the end he’d told her about this research program, how they were looking for psions who needed help. He’d made her promise to look into it, so that she’d have something to hold onto again. She kept the promise.
    I’d told her then why I was here-my side of it. Everyone already knew Corporate Security’s side. And it was being able to tell that mattered, letting it out; what we were telling didn’t make any difference, as if there was an understanding that no judgments would be made. But she never told me why she’d wanted to drown. She only said, “It happens when you’ve forgotten all your excuses for not doing it. I’ve remembered some of them again, now.”
    Now she sat beside me looking out at the rain. I looked at the smooth profile of her face; I wondered again about questions without answers. But I didn’t go after the answers in her mind. Not because I was afraid she’d catch me, but because I knew how she felt about intruders. I knew how I’d feel. Even now she was so shy that she barely spoke to any of the others, except for Siebeling. I didn’t know why she still liked to share space with me, but somehow I was glad she did. I didn’t want to do anything to make it end.
    “Your mind was all gray,” she said. “Where was it taking you?” She still watched the rain. It was hard for her to look at anyone for long, she’d said: the eyes were a window to our minds.
    “Oldcity.” I shrugged, working my twisted thumb, watching the rain.
    “Oldcity . . .” She murmured the word, closing her eyes. “Here in Quarro they call it the Tank. Why is that; do you know?”
    “No.” I glanced back. “Maybe because once you’re tossed down there, you can’t ever get out.”
    “Fish tank,” she sighed. “Feeder tank.” She looked at her own hands; her nails were bitten down to nothing. “When I was a little girl, my father took me to a pet shop. There were hundreds of creatures there, all crying, yearning at me with their hearts; I couldn’t choose. Then I saw the fish-two walls full of them, beautiful living jewels, and another tank, half hidden away. The sides of that one were green with slime, and the fish were gasping on the surface for air,