Xenopath - [Bengal Station 02] by Eric Brown Read Free Book Online

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: >>> Done 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 and desires, 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, then took an upchute to Level One, arriving at the park fifteen minutes later.
     
    Kapinsky was waiting for him in the passenger seat of an over-engineered Russian air-taxi. She signalled him and he slipped into the rear of the vehicle as it lunged into the air with a whine of labouring turbos.
     
    She passed him a holstered weapon. “Keep this on you. You don’t know when you might