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read everything he was thinking if I’d wanted to. I didn’t want to. I kept my own mind as tight as a fist, but he didn’t try to reach me that way again. It was a laying down of weapons, and even I could understand that much. Which maybe was why I let myself answer his questions, and after a while even talked about psionics.
    He knew more than I ever wanted to know about telepathy, and when he found out that I didn’t know anything, he made me sit through it all. The only thing that kept me listening was the camph slowly dissolving in my mouth, and more where that one came from. But by the time the lights of Quarro were a net of stars in a nebula outside the window, I knew all about the different degrees of telepathic ability. I had what should be the greatest, the most flexible: “wide spectrum,” the ability to read everything from conscious thoughts lying on the surface of another person’s mind to buried memory fragments and even pure emotion.
    I’d learned that the mind was a net of electric fire-nerve fibers reacting to every sensation and image, every thought and feeling that let human beings interact with life. In most humans the input and reactions were woven into a snarl that even biofeedback training could barely begin to unravel. Psions were born with something more-a set of self-controls that let them weave the snarl into patterns and, more than that, to tap and use a kind of energy normal humans were blind to. Psions had a sixth sense-and their minds were both more open to it and more protected against it.
    Some of them had two or more talents at the same time, different ways of manipulating an energy as universal as life-force, and as much of a mystery. Not all psions had the same level of control over their talents, the way not all artists had the same amount of skill. There were psions who were born with multiple talents like a crown of semiprecious stones, and ones born with a single talent like a perfect diamond. . . .
    “A ‘diamond in the rough.’” I repeated the words, finally understanding them. “That’s what Goba called me.” A flawed, ugly stone that needed cutting, he’d said, but that resisted every tool except the hardest. . . .
    “He’s right,” Cortelyou said. “You have a level of control that would make anyone who wanted to be a psion green-eyed with envy.” He laughed like that was a joke, but I didn’t get it. “Except you’ve twisted it back on itself. You’ve used it to weave the fibers of your mind into a barrier, a wall of defense. They’ve been doing their best to fracture it-“
    “’And they don’t much care if I break clean or shatter.’” I finished Goba’s speech for him.
    His mouth quirked. “I can imagine. I know the type.” He sounded tired, suddenly.
    I wondered again about what he was, and did. This time I asked, “What’s a corporate telepath do, anyhow?”
    “I screen clients for Seleusid executives, and sometimes do security checks at their headquarters.”
    “You mean you’re a croach.”
    “A what?”
    “A backstabber. A paid snitch.” I shrugged.
    His mouth thinned, but if he was angry or insulted, he didn’t let it show. “Some people have said that, yes.” The words sounded used, like he’d said them too often before. But then he told me that he was also a precog-that he made predictions about the economic and political future of the combine’s holdings. I asked if he’d do it for me, but he only said that you couldn’t predict when you’d get a prediction, and that they weren’t always accurate, anyway. “Besides, we’re here to work on telepathy, not precognition.”
    That was only the first time he came to work with me, and it wasn’t long before a part of me looked forward to seeing him. He was a new face, and he didn’t treat me like I was a pain in the ass-another change from Goba and the rest. But besides that he was more interesting than he looked. He told me that he had total recall, he remembered