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

you ever going to rule, Jaibriol? Your
people will never accept a telepath as their Emperor.”
    He flushed. “There is nothing wrong with my mind. My people
will accept me.”
    No. No. It was a lie. It had to be. But with his mind
opening up to me now, there was no room for misinterpretation. We had been
wrong, all of us.
    Ur Qox had an heir.
    I made my voice stay calm. “You’re a provider. It’s the only
way you could have been born a psion. You have to get the genes from both
parents.” Both. Both. I stared at him. Now that I was looking for it,
there was no mistaking his Qox lineage. Not only did he bring to mind the late
Jaibriol Qox, but I could see his resemblance to the present Emperor as well. “That
means your father—the Emperor—is at most only half Highton. You can’t be
more than one quarter.”
    “Stop!” Jaibriol clenched his fist. “Stop your filthy
insults.”
    His blocks were dissolving like salt in water. I felt him.
It was incredible. Beautiful. And sensual. I wanted him, just as an Earth
salmon ready to spawn felt driven to swim upstream, against all obstacles, to
reach home and reproduce. It made me want to strike out at him, furious that
he—the Highton Heir—could so move me.
    “They’ll lust after your pain.” I was losing my battle to
stay cool. “All of them, your ministers, your peers, your women, your guards,
your generals. Your life will be hell.”
    “You’re insane,” he said.
    “You don’t know. You’ve had barriers protecting you. But you
can’t do it forever. If you slip once, just once, they’ll know. You’ll
find out the truth about your precious Hightons. About your father. The man is
a monster.”
    He pointed at the Jumbler I held. “This is all you
understand. You see everything as war and hate. My father is a great man, far
greater than you could ever comprehend.”
    “Where have you been for the last twenty years? In a cocoon?”
I wanted to hit him. “Hightons torture people. Your father probably did
it to your mother while he was siring you.”
    His face went white. “You are sick. Sick.”
    “You think I’m lying?” I waved my gun at him. “Fine. Come
into my mind, phony Highton. You want to know what providing is like? Come and
look. If you have the courage for it.”
    He watched me like a man balanced on the edge of a cliff.
Then he fell.
    I had meant only to make him see what had happened to me on
Tams, to make that memory hurt him the way it hurt me. But I couldn’t pull out
of our link. His mind was too strong, more so even than what I had expected
given the warning of his immense barriers. We dropped together, melding as we
plunged, a joining I had known only once before with a seven-year-old boy. Only
this time it was with an adult, with an intensity heightened by anger and
sexual desire that hit me like a tidal wave.
    Jaibriol Qox was Rhon.
    I could smell him now, a musky, masculine smell that permeated
the air around us and muddied my thoughts. Pheromones, Rhon pheromones, unlike
anything normal humans produced. My whole body reacted to it. Our mental link
picked up my arousal and fed it back to me, exciting me even more. It
multiplied Jaibriol’s reaction as well, locking us into a double feedback loop
that fast became almost unbearable in its intensity. Had our personalities been
incompatible, it would have been revolting. But he fit me. He was like
an aphrodisiac, firm and masculine, warm, sensual, inviting ...
    I fell into his memories like a diver plummeting into the
ocean. His thoughts curled around me as if I were the only solidity in the sea
of loneliness where he had lived for so long. He had spent the entire
twenty-two years of his life, until a few weeks ago, living alone ... only the
visits of his tutors broke his solitude ... his father rarely came to see him—
    The demands of his life leave him no time, Jaibriol thought.
He has more than me to consider. He is Emperor of Eube.
    I recognized what he couldn’t see: to his