Psion

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Epigraphs

  Author’s Introduction to the 1996 Edition

  Introduction to the Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition

  Psion

  Part One. Cat

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Part Two. Crab

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Part Three. Crossroads

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  “Psiren”

  Psiren

  Books by Joan D. Vinge

  Praise for Psion …

  About the Author

  Copyright

  To Carol Pugner, who always believed in Cat.

  And to Andre Norton, who is Cat’s spiritual godmother.

  Life, misfortunes, isolation, abandonment, poverty, are battlefields which have their heroes; obscure heroes, sometimes greater than the illustrious heroes.

  —Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

  The Cat. He walked by himself, and all places were alike to him.

  —Rudyard Kipling, “The Cat That Walked by Himself”

  AUTHOR’S INTRODUCTION TO THE 1996 EDITION

  PSION IS THE first book in a series of novels and stories about a character named Cat. It is also the first novel I ever wrote. I began it when I was seventeen, about the age Cat is as Psion begins. I was lying in bed, putting my insomnia to good use by “making up stories” until I fell asleep, as I’d been doing since I was very young. On this particular night, a new character appeared in my own private virtual reality and started telling me his story, straight from his own mouth, as if I had no choice but to listen. I’ve heard writers say all their characters come to them that way, but this was the first and only time that it ever happened to me. The next day I started writing his story down.

  At the time, like many science fiction readers (and aspiring writers of all kinds), I had “started to write” a great many novels. But like many fledgling writers, I’d invariably bog down after the first chapter or two, toss the manuscript aside, and start doing something else.

  But I kept coming back to this one. It took five years to write, in fits and starts, but I actually wrote a whole book. I had no idea what made this one different from all the false starts. I only realized years later that there was something about the particular characters in this book—and especially Cat—that wouldn’t leave me alone.

  Not long after I finished the novel that would become Psion, I became a published writer (of shorter fiction), and unexpectedly found that my career was something I’d been preparing for all my life. I went on to write a number of other stories and two novels (including The Snow Queen, which won a Hugo Award), before I came back to Psion.

  Over the years, between other projects, I had tinkered with that manuscript again and again, but I was never satisfied with it. Finally, after The Snow Queen, I took it out again. This time, when I reread my “trunk novel” (i.e., that old first book every author supposedly has stuffed in a trunk or a closet somewhere), I realized two things: that I still wanted to tell Cat’s story and that the “exciting adventure” I’d started when I was in my teens was in fact a considerably darker story—when I looked at it from an adult perspective. (A friend of mine once remarked that “adventures are just tragedies that didn’t happen.” In this story tragedies, large and small, do happen.) At that point I did a major rewrite, using what I’d learned about writing (and human nature) in the intervening years to make it more the book it wanted to be.

  I get a lot of the same pleasure from writing a book that I get from reading one, because I don’t plan every detail about who will do what before I begin. It’s the lure of the next startling or unexpected development that makes me want to go on with work that often feels like pulling my own teeth. By the time I’d rewritten Psion, I realized that I wanted—needed—to write more about Cat; that in fact I wanted to write a series of stories about him, at significant points throughout his life. Several possibilities for future books began to occur to me and have continued to evolve in my mind, even while I worked on other novels. (Due to the vagaries of fate and the publishing industry, Psion wound up being published first in a somewhat bowdlerized fashion as a young adult novel. This present version has been restored to adult status.)

  At the same time that I was revising Psion for its first publication (in 1981) I also wrote the novella about Cat, called “Psiren,” for an anthology. In the mid-80s I wrote Catspaw, the second novel in the series, scrapping another book in order to do it. At that time in my life, I couldn’t get my head and heart into something else and once again had an irresistible compulsion to explore some part of Cat’s story. Catspaw, more than any book I’ve written, seemed almost to write itself.

  After I’d finished it I began the immense project of The Summer Queen, and found that my mind still did not want to leave Cat. As a result the plot of my third novel about Cat, Dreamfall, burst into my head almost full blown.

  Four years passed before I actually got to start writing Dreamfall; and it seemed like an endless stretch of time until I finally finished it. Ironically, Dreamfall turned out to be the most difficult book I’ve ever written—through no fault of its own. A writer’s imagination can influence how he/she relates to the real world, and the opposite situation is equally true … more so. But in the end I did finish the latest installment (so far) in Cat’s ongoing fictional autobiography, and I already have ideas for two or three more Cat novels.

  For years I wondered what it was about Cat that made the need to write about him so compelling. I often said to people that he seemed to be almost an archetypal character; his hold on my imagination was that strong. I finally got an insight into why: in the middle of a radio interview when I was asked about it, and I said, “Cat is the personification of my social conscience.”

  Much to my surprise, I realized that was the answer. Cat came into my head at a point in my life when I first began to grasp the unspeakable variety and immensity of the pain human beings can inflict on one another. His personal story was an empathic narrative about prejudice and injustice seen from the victim’s point of view. Cat’s survival was testimony to the resilience of the human spirit, and his innate goodness proved the importance of judging everyone by what they are inside, how they treat others, and not by race, sex, color, religion, or sexual preference. (The villain in Psion happens to be bisexual; however, the point I wished to make was not that his sexual orientation was responsible for his villainy, but rather that he personally was someone whose past has left him so scarred he was obsessed with control and power. Sex was merely one of the tools he used to gain power over
those around him. He should be judged individually—by what he is inside, how he treats others—just like anyone else.)

  I had known for some time that on a certain level Cat’s “alien blood” stood as a metaphor for all the things xenophobes denigrate in Them as opposed to Us. His telepathic ability, in a world of “deadheads,” symbolized how difficult it is for human beings to communicate honestly. We are afraid of Them on a gut level, because someone who appears different might not think like We do, therefore They might not like Us, They might hurt Us; maybe We’d better get Them first.… In Catspaw and Dreamfall, the other primal human survival instinct—need—steps forward to prove it can be perverted into greed just as easily as fear can become hatred. Hatred and greed—and not other beings—should be every sentient being’s real target. Or as the immortal Walt Kelly once put it, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

  Once I realized what role Cat was playing in my subconscious mind, these themes gave me real insight into the reasons his character has haunted me for the better part of my life.

  And yet, on some level, I almost regretted discovering “what Cat was,” because he had come to mean so much to me as an individual. One of the things that makes him so real to me (and, from the mail I get, to others) is his complexity: He’s not easy to peg as hero or villain; his appearance and his actions make him seem to be one kind of person, while inside he’s something else entirely. He takes a perverse pleasure in turning other people’s perceptions about him upside down. He’s a mass of conflicts: smart, loyal, tender, streetwise … distrustful, cynical, and self-destructive. His idea of “normal” is pain and rejection, because that is all he’s ever known.

  The creative process taps parts of the brain that we don’t generally have conscious access to, or much control over. The dark depths of that Jungian magic pool of inspiration sometimes produce images and insights that are startling and even horrifying. As a result, in the real world we do things for more than one reason; and a character like Cat takes on that same duality—like us, he may or may not really understand why he’s doing something, even though he thinks he does.

  That may sound peculiar (or even pathological) to people who aren’t writers; but the characters who live in the virtual reality of an author’s mind become very real. The writer may be playing God, but the characters still have free will. They stand up and yell, “You can’t make me do that!” in your brain, or take an instant unplanned dislike to another character, or step into a scene for a moment and wind up taking over the story. I once asked my husband, book editor James Frenkel, if it sounded absurd to say that I was psychoanalyzing one of my characters. He said no—that a well-written character should be real enough that you could analyze him.

  Cat is, to me, far more than the sum of his parts, and always will be. How long it will take me to finish telling the story of his life, I don’t know. I only know that I wouldn’t mind us growing old together.

  —JOAN D. VINGE

  1995

  INTRODUCTION TO THE TWENTY-FIFTH ANNIVERSARY EDITION

  THE “AUTHOR’S INTRODUCTION” to Psion is relatively new, compared to the book itself. At the time I wrote the essay, a few years back, I thought that Psion finally covered everything about Cat’s early life that needed saying; and that the new essay covered everything meaningful to me about the novel, the series, and my symbiotic (the only word that seems to describe it) relationship with Cat through the years.

  Nonetheless, as more years keep passing in which Cat’s virtual life and my real-time one seem to play leapfrog, I’ve found that few things we do are truly “done” after all. Since Cat was “telling his own story” as he went along, I always intended that the way he told it should seem to get more sophisticated.

  But while writing more about Cat, as well as writing other novels, plus coping with real life, I’ve learned more about my own species, my craft, and Cat’s beginnings. (When it came to raising teenagers, I discovered that Cat had a lot to teach my Inner Parent about mind reading, as well as sheer guts, protecting the innocent, and facing down bullies of all ages. It’s a rare authority figure who can intimidate me now … infuriate me, yes, stonewall me, even threaten to punch me; but one thing Cat knows is that indifference is not an option.)

  Furthermore, I’ve found that, more likely than not, it really is “what’s inside that counts,” whether you’re dealing with a street kid whose sensitivity and pain are hidden behind armor made of studded dog collars and steel-toed boots, or with a lawyer whose expensive suit is an empty shell, proving “lawyer” is just “liar” misspelled, and “the law” has nothing to do with justice.

  All that being said, this anniversary edition of Psion was intended to be an expanded version, exploring in more detail how the people Cat meets and the experiences he undergoes transform him … and why, in the end, he can still make the choice he does. (Just why I’m still obsessed with “getting this one book right” after so long is a mystery even to me. Maybe because it was my first. Maybe because it’s about Cat. I’m still very happy with how Catspaw turned out—although it made my mother stop reading my work—and Dreamfall’s genocidal corporate warfare, fanatical terrorists, backstabbing politicos, and “no good deed goes unpunished” moral seem even more relevant now than when I wrote it.)

  Unfortunately my own life, particularly the part where a fifteen-ton truck ended up more or less in my lap, has left me looking to Cat for inspiration about what to do next, more often than vice versa. As a result of that incident, and related complications, the expanded version of Psion did not get finished in time for this anniversary volume.

  Instead, the long-unavailable novella “Psiren”—a glimpse into Cat’s life not long after the end of Psion, and before Catspaw—is reprinted here, set into the chronology where it belongs at last.

  Aside from delving deeper into Cat’s origin tale, there are those future Cat novels still waiting to be written. I promised Cat—oh, okay, I promised many readers, after Dreamfall—that I would live long enough to give him a proper, hard-earned, and much-deserved happy ending to his story.

  Well, that’s why they call it “fiction.” …

  And I think that’s why we enjoy it so much that it becomes personal, and why we’ll always want stories, especially ones about hard-earned victories, in our lives. It isn’t simply much-maligned (and highly underrated) “escapism.” It’s hope. Hope, that would not abandon humanity when Pandora opened the gods’ cruel joke-in-a-box. Hope, that springs eternal.

  Like they say, you gotta have hope.

  —JOAN D. VINGE

  June 2006

  Psion

  PART ONE

  Cat

  THE GEM-COLORED DREAM shattered, and left the kid gaping on the street. Jarred by passersby and stunned by ugliness, he gulped humid night air. The dreamtime he had paid his last marker for was over, and somewhere in the street voices sang, “Reality is no one’s dream.…”

  A richly robed customer of the Last Chance suicide gaming house knocked him against a pitted wall, not even seeing him. He cursed wearily and fumbled his way to the end of the building. Pressure-sensitive lighting flickered beneath the heavy translucent pavement squares, trailing him as he stepped into the funnel of an alleyway. Aching with more than one kind of hunger, he crept into the darkness to sleep it off.

  And one of the three Contract Labor recruiters who had been watching nodded, and said, “Now.”

  The kid settled into a crevice between piles of castoff boxes, where the unsleeping gleam of the pavement was buried under layers of back-alley filth. He didn’t mind dirt; he didn’t even notice it. Dirt grayed his worn clothes, the pale curls of his hair, the warm brown of his skin. Dirt was a part of his life: like the smell, like the constant drip of sewage somewhere in the darkness, leaking down through the roof of his world from Quarro, the new city that had buried Oldcity alive.

  Water striking a metal walkway rang like endless bells through the fibers of his abused nerves. He raised unstea
dy hands to cover his ears, trying to stop the sound of the water torture and the sounds of the furious argument in a room up over his head. He felt the throbbing of distant music … the beat of heavy footsteps coming down the alley toward him.

  He froze, sitting as still as death, caught in a sudden premonition. His eyes came open slowly, intensely green eyes with long slitted pupils like a cat’s. The pupils widened, his eyes became pools of blackness absorbing every particle of available light—showing him with unhuman clarity three heavy bodies wearing shadow-black uniforms: the carrion crows of Contract Labor, a press gang searching the night for “volunteers.” Searching for him.

  “Jeezu!” His drug-heavy body jerked with panic. He dropped forward onto his knees, hands groping in the trash around him. His fingers closed over the plass-smooth coolness of a bottle neck. He pulled it to him as the alley filled with dazzling light and confused motion, and he was surrounded by men in black. Their hands caught his clothing, dragging him up, off-balance; he was slapped, shoved. Trying to find words, breath, time to protest … he found his arm instead, his hand, the bottle clutched in it. He brought it up in one hard sudden rush.

  The heavy shatterproof plass struck the side of one man’s head with a dull sponk; the impact jarred the kid against the greasy building wall, and the recruiter fell. Two were still coming, their faces dark with vengeance, ready to make him pay. He dodged left, right, making them counter; suddenly he kicked out and up with ruthless urgency. A second man went to his knees with a bellow of agony.

  The third one was on him as he tried to break away, dragging him back and down. The kid clawed at the pile of crates beside him, twisting like a snake in the recruiter’s grip. The load shifted and swayed; he felt it begin to fall—

  He sprawled free as the crates came down. He was on his feet and running before the crashes and cursing ended, before any of them were even up off their knees to follow him.