Chapter 8

I don’t remember ever opening up like that before. I couldn’t tell if it was some effect of Shezzie’s Talent or if she was just naturally easy to talk to, but I’d spilled my guts for fair. It was too early to tell if it would help or hurt me. Would she have some kind of idea about dealing with my problem? Maybe she could talk a surgeon into removing the control from my neck; she was a nurse, so they might listen to her where they’d simply blow me off. Worse, they might turn me in, report that I’d asked them to operate on me. Just who they’d turn me in to was problematic, but I understood that letting anyone know that I knew about the bomb would increase my danger.

Meantime, Shezzie had latched onto the description of my Talents and appeared to have glossed over the struggle I’d had, trying to develop an ethic for using them or at least come to terms with what I’d done. “How do you manage to actually move an object at a distance? Do you have to grab it or something?” She was clearly intrigued. I suppose it had become such an everyday act in my mind that I no longer wondered about it or found it remarkable.

“I have to ... well, it’s complicated. I ‘feel’ the object, using the PK. I need to sense all of it, top to bottom and side to side, and I need some idea of depth and rough shape. The need to visualize everything is what makes moving larger things difficult. It’s not the weight so much as it is forming a mental picture of all that bulk, sensing its relationship to the ground. Precise control is also more difficult than simply lifting. Moving a rock got pretty easy after the first few exercises. I simply grabbed whatever I was concentrating on and lifted. Really, there’s nothing to it; I channeled energy, focused it around the object, visualized it separating from what it was resting on so that the distance increased.

“Flipping a penny lying on the ground, that was a stone bitch! I got chunks of dirt and weeds when I tried turning it over. I did it, finally, but it took two weeks of practice. It’s hard to explain; it’s not just visualizing the penny, it’s excluding everything around it, and after I got it off the ground I had to rotate it in the air so that it landed with the other face up when I let it drop.

“There aren’t any words, so it’s not easy to think about Talent. I can’t move anything at all if the bubble is in place. It takes every bit of concentration I’ve got to hold the bubble, and there are dangers. Shrapnel can’t penetrate if it’s in close, but I can pass out in a few seconds from lack of oxygen. I also don’t try to make the field larger if there’s a high wind, because it acts like a big balloon. I’m not exactly centered inside, because gravity drags me toward the ground. The gap under my feet is thinner than the space over my head.

“Anyway, the wind blows the bubble the same way it would blow any balloon. It was disconcerting the first time it happened, but then it became a game. It’s how I taught myself to concentrate. If you can keep your concentration while you’re rolling head-over-heels, that’s real control! Newton was right, there must be an equal and opposite reaction to move, and when I’m in the bubble I can’t get that. The most I can do is overbalance and rotate as I tumble. I have a little bit of directional control by tilting my head and shifting my weight. The first time I used the bubble during a windy day, I found myself upside down and lost my concentration. I landed on my shoulder, fell over, and finally ended up against a wall.”

“Would it be easier to explain if we linked through our Talents, T?”

I nodded. I should have thought of that myself! “Let’s try it. I’ll try to establish resonance with you if you want.”

“No,” she said. “I think we both try and just see how it goes. I’m not accustomed to linking my thoughts; I’ve just shared emotions and picked up fragments of thoughts before Surfer, and now you. Fear and pain sensations are very strong, so it’s easy for me to feel those, but trying to read a person’s thoughts is a lot harder. I think my first link was Surfer’s doing more than mine, even though the link was very strong once it was established. This link with you is strong too.

“Anyway, let’s try it. I want to understand what you’re saying.” I watched her expression slacken as she began concentrating. I let my own senses roam and quickly found hers, and then it happened. Before I realized it, before I could do anything to change what we were doing, my mind ... altered.

This was nothing like what I’d experienced with Surfer. I felt her thoughts, then began to lose my own identity in hers. I felt myself ... blur! The self-identity at my mental core linked with hers, and I became two people in one. T and Shezzie, not one or the other, yet never quite a single entity. It was as if the two personalities were layers, stacked against each other but blending into almost-oneness.

I knew her shock as the same thing happened to her. I didn’t read her thoughts, I understood them, they were mine too. I knew them more intimately than anything I had imagined was possible; I thought her thoughts, she thought mine. It can’t be explained; it can only be experienced. I held onto my concentration and forced myself not to let go of my body. If that happened, would that core of my mind that I call ‘me’, die? Would the two of us be trapped in her body, or both of our personalities enter my body? Could we both die because our shared consciousness was no longer anchored to a body? I felt the feeling of panic as she knew my thoughts; my fear was her fear, and my sense of danger was her danger too.

I don’t know how long the melding lasted; it could have been a minute, it could have lasted a second, it might have been an hour. When I finally began to regain my senses, slowly separating from the one I’d been when I was T/Shezzie, I was stiff and sweat-soaked. I would be very careful before I allowed this to happen again!

During the time that we were joined, I knew her thoughts, all of them. They were my thoughts, just as mine were hers. I was Lieutenant Colonel Schmidt, I was Shezzie, yet I was also T as I replayed the memory. I knew her sense of being T! The sharing was now fixed indelibly in my mind. The best possible sexual experience, the mental and physical joining of two people that takes place during the act, might be compared to strolling up a hill.