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got sarcastic, telling me I could do that well by guessing, and that I wasn’t really trying. I told them I was trying, they didn’t give me any choice. “What the hell’s going wrong that I can’t just be a stinking telepath? Maybe you’re wrong about me.” Wanting them to be wrong, wanting to hear Goba tell me it was all a mistake, that I was as normal as he was; even while I was afraid he might really say it, and send me back to Contract Labor.
    But Goba caught my jaw with his hand, turning my face until I was looking at my reflection in the side of a metal storage cabinet. He said, “You look at that face, psion, and ask me again if I could be wrong about your mind.”
    I only shook my head, not understanding.
    He looked disgusted, which wasn’t unusual. “You are a psion; don’t try to kid yourself. You’ve got a lot of scar tissue in there,” pointing at my head, “figuratively speaking. That’s what’s gone wrong. Something fed you a tremendous telepathic shock once, so intense it burned out the circuits. Your mind could have repaired them itself, but whatever happened was so painful that it never did. So we’re trying to do it for you. But you’re still resisting. . . .” He sounded like he took it personally.
    “What kind of a shock?” I wondered how something that bad could have happened and left me without even a memory of it.
    He shrugged. “That doesn’t matter. It’s not our business to find out. We just repair the circuitry.”
    “I ain’t a machine; you can’t reprogram me. It ain’t that easy.” Bastard, wishing he could hear me think it.
    “Get back to your exercises.” He started to turn away.
    I stayed where I was and folded my arms. “I got a headache. I don’t think I want to work anymore.”
    He looked back at me. “Our job is to work around your problems, not to solve them. If you want to know why, see a psiopsychologist. Now get back to work.”
    And so I moved through the days like a robot, answering when Goba told me to, talking to myself if I wanted a real human conversation. The rest of the techs might as well have been robots too, for all they ever said to me. I never even knew the names of most of them. I was just one more experimental animal to them, and every night they locked me in my room. And night after night I had dreams so ugly that I started sleeping with the light on; nightmares I could never remember, that faded into the morning and left my head filled with the echoes of screaming. I never told Goba about it, or any of the others. They could all go to hell, I’d be glad to give them references, but I was damned if I’d ask them for help.
    Then one day I got my visit with a psiopsychologist, without even having to ask. Nobody bothered to tell me that was what I was getting. All I knew was that I was going to see Siebeling.
    He was more surprised than I was when the tech showed me into his office. He raised his eyebrows when she said, “Here’s Cat,” and actually looked past her out the doorway before he looked back at me. I felt the sharp stab of his surprise puncture my mind as he finally recognized me. I stopped dead, shaking the surprise loose from my thoughts, fighting my own disgust. I wasn’t used to picking up strays; for some reason his mind focused much more clearly than any of the techs’ did. There was an afterimage of confusion that cut off suddenly, leaving me alone again and off-balance inside my thoughts.
    “Sit down,” he said.
    I dropped down into the sling of the nearest chair; the metal frame creaked like old bones. Siebeling grimaced. I leaned back, swaying a little, glancing past him. This wasn’t the same room I’d seen him in before; this one was higher up and there was a slanting skylight instead of a glass wall. I tried to imagine what shape this building really was. The room was about like the other one except for the skylight, and Siebeling sat behind the desk like he was just visiting in this one, too. I wondered