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this.”
    “But you loved her. I can see it in you, the space where love was, the fossil of it. And you turned her in.”
    “She was going rogue. It was my duty. I’m not going to defend myself to you.”
    Byron laughed.
    “But I’m not me, am I? I’m you, or part of you. You said so yourself.”
    He cocked his head.
    “Why didn’t you ever have me removed? It would have been a simple matter.”
    “Shut up.”
    “Maybe you think you need me, since you have no heart of your own. To help you feel the guilt.”
    “I feel no guilt. I only did what I had to do. You were the one who divided us, who made me…”
    He broke off.
    “Made you kill your own kind? The Corps is mother, the Corps is father. You always thought of us as your children. And yet you slaughtered telepaths, tortured them. You made the reeducation camps into killing fields…”
    “You did that,” Bester said.
    “Until you, I never understood how diseased the rogues had become. What you were planning would have destroyed us all. What you did accomplish will destroy us. It will be a slow death, by degrees. Psi Corps was always meant to be a tool for the normals, allowing them to control us.
    I fought to take that tool and turn it against them, to put the Corps in control of telepaths. I succeeded, finally, and you chose just that moment to make your grand play, your idiotic attempt to create paradise, just like every other self-deluded messiah with a mindless following. You could never see the big picture, the reality, that the normals are always waiting, waiting for us to relax, until our guard is down. They fear us as they fear no alien race, because we are them, only better. The next step in evolution. And you wrecked it all, gave it all back to them. They’ve won, thanks to you.”
    “Now who is a self-deluded messiah?”
    “Do you know who backed your precious rebels after you died? Who funded them?”
    “My love, Lyta.”
    “Lyta. For all her power, she was as much a fool as you were. A child given too big a gun. No, the man behind the rogues was a mundane-Garibaldi. A teep-hating bigot who got his fortune from another teep-hating bigot. To see us destroy ourselves must have given him terrible pleasure. You asked why I keep this little part of you alive? This is why. So you can see what you have wrought.”
    “So you can say I told you so.”
    “Yes.”
    “Petty”
    “It’s all that’s left me. Everything I’ve ever worked for lies in ruins. A lifetime of accomplishment swept away. I always believed that if I had nothing else, I had my people, my telepaths. You took even that from me, Byron. Even that.”
    “So lie down and die, then.”
    “No. I’m not you. I am not a coward. I live with the consequences of my actions. And I live.”
    “Well, then, by all means-let’s watch this.”
    “No. This is a dream. I can end it.”
    “No, you can’t. You know that. Not until it’s done.”
    “Let me go, Byron.”
    “I can be petty, too.”
    He tried to turn away, but the scene just followed him.
    It would have been the masterstroke. It would have ended the rebellion, brought the rogues to their knees. Two hundred of his finest, his most loyal…
    He could still hear their screams, still feel the terror of their obliteration, the awful snuffing of their lives, their very souls.
    “You ran away,” Byron said.
    “You found out, seconds before, and you ran away. You saved your own skin and leave your men die.”
    “They were going to die anyway. There was nothing I could do.”
    “And you call me a coward.”
    “Shut up.”
    “Listen to them, Bester.”
    “Shut up!”
    “Listen.”
    Byron’s eyes were holes, holes in a skull, and the flames were everywhere. Byron was Satan, surrounded by damned souls.
    “Listen!”
    Byron was Bester, the cold face in the mirror, smiling without humor.
    “Shut up!”
    Then he awoke, with someone trying to kill him.

Chapter 4
    Old instincts sent his hand darting for a PPG that wasn’t