Primary Inversion (Saga of the Skolian Empire) Paperback by Catherine Asaro Page A

to know his anger was genuine. He believed
he was a Highton. “We never kill without compunction. How could we? We’re
empaths. We feel what our targets feel.”
    “This thing you call empathy—it weakens the mind.” His voice
quieted. “It is a frailty. Those with weak minds must work that much harder to
become strong, to overcome their failings.”
    Where did all that come from? “Did your parents tell you
that when they taught you to hide your telepathic abilities?”
    He paled, and I was sure I had hit the truth. He was a
psion, which meant neither of his parents was an Aristo. But someone had
taken great pains to conceal that fact. Why? Yes, many Hightons had children
with their servers and some elevated those children to the taskmaker caste. But
to pass off such a child as a Highton—I had never heard of it before. It would
be a phenomenal “pollution” of their incessantly glorified bloodlines.
    “How long did you think you could hide it?” I asked.
    He stared at me. “What are you going to do?”
    I couldn’t believe it. He was afraid of me. I had felt many
emotions from Hightons: scorn, lust, anger, obsession, disgust. But never fear. As far as they were concerned I was a provider, and they refused to
acknowledge that a provider could have the power needed to inspire fear
in them. Yet I felt his as clear and sharp as broken glass.
    I felt him.
    Sweat beaded on my temple. A moment ago his barriers had
been impenetrable. Now they were dissolving, at least to me. He was a mental
fortress, one that should have taken a tortuous battle of wills to break, yet
now I felt him. He had to be voluntarily dropping his walls; I had done
nothing. Yet I sensed neither the intent from him to drop his shields nor the
realization it was happening.
    He watched me with a healthy, sensual desire that caught me
unprepared. Blood rushed to my face and to far more private places. Block! The
wall-and-synapse psicon flashed in my mind, and kept flashing, telling me the
block wasn’t working. Either his desire was too intense to shut out or else I
was feeling my own as well as his. What was going on? It was wrong, all wrong.
No, it wasn’t wrong, it was right, and that was what was wrong.
    I took a deep breath. Stay cool. Find out who he is. But
how? Well, I had a good starting point; if someone wanted him to pass as a
Highton, they would have given him a Highton name.
    “What surprises me,” I said, “is that your parents gave you
a name you obviously had no claim to.”
    The comment didn’t provoke his anger, as I had hoped. He
just shrugged. “I have far more right to it than the hundreds of other people
who use it.”
    Hundreds. Given that only a few thousand Aristos existed,
his name had to be a popular one. What were well-known Aristo names? That was
easy. Kryx, as in Kryx Tarque. I would never forget it. Vitar was another, and
Jaibriol, and ...
    Jaibriol. Jaibriol. Now I knew why Rex and I thought
this man looked familiar, but neither Helda nor Taas recognized him. This false
Aristo, this dove hiding in a night-wolf’s body, was a living reminder of a
dead Highton, a man who had died when Helda was a small girl and before Taas
was born. Comtrace hadn’t reported it because we had looked for a living
Highton. This man brought to mind a young version of the late Emperor Jaibriol
Qox, the father of the present Emperor.
    But a dramatic difference existed between the Trader who
faced me now and the holos I had seen of Jaibriol Qox. Although the late
Emperor may have been handsome in his youth, his face had aged into harsh lines
that showed the truth of his nature. His son, the current Emperor, was a
leaner, quieter ruler, softer-spoken—and just as vicious. The years had stamped
that cruelty into his features, just as they had stamped it into his father’s
face. The man in front of me now showed no mark of that harshness.
    The thought budding in my mind was absurd. It had to be
wrong. But I had to test it. “How are