Read Xenopath for Free Online Page B

of the apartment, which he had failed to notice
earlier. It was accessible from the kitchen. He slid aside the glass
partition and stepped out.
    The breeze was
warm, spice laden. He stood and gripped the rail, listening to the
muted roar of the arriving voidliners, the distant drift of sitar
music.
    He examined his
handset, then looked along the length of the balcony. He was perhaps
ten metres from the neighbouring apartments—sufficiently
distant not to pick up the thoughts of their inhabitants, if he were
to activate his implant.
    He wondered what
the background mind-noise might be like, when the implant was in
operation.
    Tentatively,
fearing the consequences but knowing that he would have to take the
plunge sooner or later, he entered the start-up code.
    A familiar
warmth surged through his head, followed by the even more familiar
medley of a million minds. Familiar, he realised, but different,
muted.
    Whereas his old
implant would have amplified the emanations of surrounding minds to a
clamouring white noise, this rig kept the noise at a manageable
level, a background hum that he could tolerate.
    He experimented,
probed. Two years ago, he had needed a drug called chora to make this
mind-noise manageable at all times; now, even in scan mode, he could
live with it.
    He concentrated,
and it was as if the miasma of anonymous feelings and emotions that
swirled around him was a piece of music, a symphony in which various
individual thoughts were the instruments, each one different, unique,
some blaring, a surge of anger here, jealousy there; some
understated, a strand of contentment from someone strolling in the
park overhead, a feeling of love emanating from the corridor.
    Then someone,
obviously in the neighbouring apartment, came within scan range, and
their thoughts cried out at him.
    They were
clearer than he had ever before experienced: crystal sharp. He read,
first, a swirling undercurrent of emotion, almost like some
expressionist daub of colour on a canvas—a wave of elation, of
triumph. Then he read specific thoughts: >> D o ne it!
Yes... (Non-specific feelings of victory, of having bested a
business rival.) >>That will show the extortionist—!
    Vaughan fumbled
with his handset and killed the program, and instantly the balm of
mind-silence replaced the noise in his head. He felt obscurely guilty
for eavesdropping on his neighbour's thoughts, but more than that a
familiar, painful reminder of other people's shallow hopes
anddesires, preferences and prejudices. Life with Sukara had made him
even less materialistic than of old, and the reminder that for so
many citizens what mattered was the pursuit of wealth and possessions
he found dispiriting.
    He smiled as he
stepped from the balcony and shut the sliding glass door behind him.
He'd just accepted an extravagantly paid job and taken the lease on a
luxurious new apartment. He wondered if he was as shallow as those
around him.
    He found the
answer later that evening, when he and Sukara had eaten a sublime
dhal and aloo masala. They were sitting at the table before the
viewscreen, moonlight catching the cusps and curlicues of the distant
waves. Sukara was telling him about what the midwife had said at her
last appointment a couple of days ago, and Vaughan realised that the
only thing that mattered in his life, now, was the happiness of this
blithe and innocent woman, who loved him.
    The following
morning, as they had breakfast at the bar in the kitchen, his handset
chimed.
    It was Kapinsky.
    "Change of
schedule, Jeff. We're dropping all the cases on file and
concentrating on a laser killing that happened late last night. Meet
you outside the gates of Himachal Park at ten, okay?"
    And without
waiting for his response, she signed off.
    After breakfast,
which he finished in silence, he hugged Sukara to him and set off for
the park, managing to hide his apprehension for as long as it took
him to quit the apartment.
    He hurried
through the crowded corridors,