Uncharted Stars Read Online Free PDF Page B

There had been a time in the immediate past when my skin was piebald, due to Eet’s counterfeiting of a plague stigma. I could remember only too well those loathsome purple patches. No return to those! I had no wish to be considered again a plague victim. However, a scar—
    My mind wandered to the days when my father had kept the hock-lock shop at the space port on my home planet. Many spacers had sought out his inner room to sell finds into whose origin it was best not to inquire too closely. And more than one of those had been scarred or marked unpleasantly.
    A scar—yes. Now where—and what? A healed knife gash, a laser burn, an odd seam set by some unknown wounding? I decided on a laser burn which I had seen and which should fit in well with the Off-port. With it as clear in my mind as I could picture it, I stared into the mirror, striving to pucker and discolor the skin along the left side of my jaw and cheek.

III
    It was an exercise against all the logic of my species. Had I not seen it succeed with Eet, seen my partial change under his aid, I would not have believed it possible. Whether I could do it without Eet’s help was another question, but one I was eager to prove. My dependence upon the mutant, who tended to dominate our relationship, irked me at times.
    There is a saying: If you close doors on all errors, truth also remains outside. Thus I began my struggle with errors aplenty, hoping that a small fraction of the truth would come to my aid. I had not, since I had known Eet, been lax in trying to develop any esper talents I might have. Primarily because, I was sure, it was not in my breed to admit that a creature who looked so much an animal could out-think, out-act a man—though in the galaxy the term “man” is, of course, relative, having to do with a certain level of intelligence rather than a humanoid form. In the beginning, this fact was also difficult for my breed, with their many inborn prejudices, to realize. We learned the hard way until the lesson stuck.
    I closed the channels of my mind as best I could, tamping down a mental lid on my worries about our lack of a pilot, a shrinking number of credits, and the fact that I might right now be the quarry in a hunt I could sense but not see or hear. The scar—that must be the most important, the only thing in my mind. I concentrated on my reflection in the mirror, on what I wanted to see there.
    Perhaps Eet was right, as he most always was—we of Terran stock do not use the full powers which might be ours. Since I had been Eet’s charge, as it were, I must have stretched, pulled, without even being aware of that fact, in a manner totally unknown to my species heretofore. Now something happened which startled me. It was as if, in that part of me which fought to achieve Eet’s ability, a ghostly finger set tip to a lever and pressed it firmly. I could almost feel the answering vibration through my body—and following on that, a flood of certainty that this I could do, a heady confidence which yet another part of me observed in alarm and fear.
    But the face in the mirror—Yes! I had that disfiguring seam, not raw and new, which would have been a give-away to the observant, but puckered and dark, as though it had not been tended quickly enough by plasta restoration, or else such a repair job had been badly botched—as might be true for a crewman down on his luck, or some survivor of a planetary war raid.
    So real! Tentatively I raised my hand, not quite daring to touch that rough, ridged skin. Eet’s illusion had been—was—tactile as well as visual. Would mine hold as well? I touched. No, I was not Eet’s equal as yet, if I could ever be. My fingers traced no scar, as they seemed to do when I looked into the mirror. But visually the scar was there and that was the best protection I could have.
    â€œA beginning, a promising beginning—”
    My head jerked as I was startled out