“Real name?” I shook my head. “I don’t have any other. Maybe once . . . but not any more.” I felt an old loss cut deeper. “I’m not hiding anything.” But you are, damn it, you are. “What about you? I don’t know any of your names.’’
“Ineh. Call me that.”
“Is that your real name?”
“No.” Her hands stroked the bench, never quiet.
My mouth twitched. “Oh.”
“I could not show you that name. You would have to see it in my mind’s heart.”
“Oh,” again. I couldn’t decide whether to get annoyed or get angry, so I didn’t. “You’re telling me that I’ll never know you that well.”
She didn’t answer.
“Why did you come to see me, anyway?”
“You stopped coming to see me.” She glanced up, her pupils wide and black. “And then I had a sending that you would help me.”
I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. A sending…precognition. The wild card power. Nobody who had it could control it; they could only learn to sift images when they came, try to pick the true ones out of the static. “How? How can I help?”
“I don’t know.”
“What’s wrong that should be right?”
“Nothing.” Her pupils like black pools of emptiness swallowing the sun said, liar, liar.
I laughed again, frustrated. “Is it the Dreamweaver, the Haven—do you want out of it?” I remembered what Jule had said. No answer again. “What is it, are you afraid to tell me? I owe you a debt. Let me pay it.”
“I have no right.” She looked away, searching the glade for enemies, or an escape.
“I want this. Ineh—” I caught her hand, like a handful of bones; jerked, but then it was only a hand, soft-skinned, pulling free. “Who owns the Haven? Have they got something on you, is that what you’re afraid of?”
“Stop it! Stop!” She held herself rigid like a shield.
I stopped.
“I should not have come to you. If they find out they would keep you from seeing me.” Her face fell apart. “You can’t help me, I was wrong to speak of it. Promise me that you will not ask me any more.”
“It’s drugs, isn’t it?” It had to be the answer; how else could any human hold someone like her, and make her obey?
“No.” Yes, yes, her eyes said.
“Yes.”
She wavered, losing substantiality, going—
“No, no wait! Don’t—” I reached out, caught her arm, felt it solidify into flesh again. I let her go, sitting back. “I’m sorry, I should’ve known better. We are what we are. It won’t happen again.” I kept watching her body still held like a shield, her closed face; my own face promised her.
She let herself loosen, nodding. “I cannot share with my own people, or with the humans. But you are both and neither . . . when I see you I will not feel so alone. Will you come in the evenings to my show?”
I moved against the bench, feeling uncomfortable. “Look, Ineh . . . this is hard to say, but I can’t keep coming forever. I don’t have that kind of money.”
“No?” She looked at me as though she couldn’t understand why not.
“No.” I shook my head. “Do you even know what it’s like to be poor?”
“Yes.” She looked through me. “My people were poor when I came here. But that was a long time ago. . . .” As if it didn’t matter any more.
“And you’re not poor any more. What about the rest of them? What about your family?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know where they are.”
Anger rose in me again. I swallowed it, and said, “That doesn’t seem to bother you much either.”
“No. It is a long time. ...” She shifted listlessly. “Before my people came here we shared a life, we shared our minds’ hearts. But the humans took our life away, and in this place no one shares anything. There was nothing left for us. We stopped sharing. We stopped wanting to. Because what was the use? There are better ways to stop pain.”
And you know the best. I grimaced. It wasn’t hard to see where her life had gone from there; or to see the possibilities some Oldcity user had seen in her, that had put her into this trap. But I only said, “I know.”
Her eyes came back to me.
“I’ll come to the Haven when I can. But I can come here too, it’ll be better that way. Just let me know, somehow. I’ll get the time off.”
She nodded. “Come to the Haven soon. I’ll know then.”
I stood up, not needing to be told that she was leaving. “Promise me this isn’t the last time.”
(I promise.) The words whispered into my mind. And then she was gone.
When I got back to the Center, Siebeling called me into his office again. Jule came with me, and together they asked about what had happened. And suddenly I didn’t want to tell them. “We talked. About things—you know,” shrugging. “What we are, who we are. She’s lonely, she’s lost her people.”
“Where is she from?” Siebeling asked. I couldn’t know what he was thinking, but he must be thinking about his dead wife not about Ineh. He couldn’t see her, he wouldn’t understand her kind of trouble the way I could. . . .
“Koss Tefirah. She was relocated here.”
His face turned down.
Jule said, “Did she tell you why she came to the Center?”
“She missed me.” Somehow even that was too personal, too much. I could imagine what I would have been getting from her mind: she couldn’t cope with this, she couldn’t understand any more than he did, maybe she was even jealous of me for doing what she couldn’t. . . .
“Is that all?”
“I guess it’s something,” I said, resenting it. “It’s a beginning.” I knew then that I wouldn’t say the rest, the whole truth. This was my affair, mine, and I’d handle it myself because I was the right one, the only one who could. “I’ll be seeing her again; and not just at the Haven.” Daring them to stop me. “I’m going to help her, I know it. She knows it.” Everybody knows it! wishing that everyone could.
Siebeling glanced at Jule and back at me. They didn’t say anything. The kinetic sculpture on his desk stopped dead in the air.
I met Ineh in the Gardens more than once in the next couple of weeks, and watched her at the Haven. Watching her now, knowing that drugs fed her the dreams she was feeding to the crowd, I hated the place; hated myself for still needing them, even while I was trying to stop them. But nothing else changed. When we were together she never let me any closer.
Then one afternoon at the Center Mim came up to me with a strange, glazed look on her face. “Message for you.”
“Huh?” I straightened up from the storage cabinets. Her hands were empty. “Where is it?”
She tapped her head. “In here. What are you, deaf?” The joke had teeth and it bit me hard. “Somebody’s screaming her brains out for you, trying to tell you she wants you now. Make her stop, damn it! And tell her not to use my head for a call box in the future.” She started to turn away.
“Where’s Jule?”
“Out.”
I let out the breath I was holding. “Mim—”
She turned back, still frowning.
“I’m sorry.”
She grimaced. “Just find her before she puts every ‘path in the building into an epileptic fit. When I say this is a pain, I’m not kidding.”
“I’m going out.” I left the uncalibrated meters lying helpless on the table and started toward the door.
“Hurry!” She threw it after me.
I left the building and headed for the cab caller. Ineh was waiting there for me. I hadn’t expected it.
“Why didn’t you come to the Center?” It came out more sharply than I’d meant it to.