Dark Mirror - Diane Duane [114]
“You may as well tell me,” the counselor said. “I am not going to stop until you have told me what I want to know. And that’s just the Booth I’m talking about. Once you’ve finally told me, I’m going to go in the other way … and make sure.” Geordi shuddered all over and cried out again with the pain of it; every nerve cringed and twitched at the motion.
“The sooner you tell me,” she said reasonably, “the more useful you are to me. And the more useful you are to me, the more likely it is that I’ll keep you alive after we finish this. Your counterpart—oh, yes, we found him, that didn’t take long, after you told us where to look—your counterpart is a very talented man. Having two of him in the Empire would be better still. I daresay we could make your working for us very pleasant. But there’s no hope of it happening unless you’re alive at the end of all this. … And whether or not you’re alive depends on whether you annoy me or not.”
He shuddered again. Told them? he thought, through the confusion of the pain and fear. I don’t remember telling her anything about … But that was the horror of this situation. He might have told them. He might have. And if he had—what else might he tell them? Stop this now, part of him shouted. Stop it now and control what you tell her! Give her a little piece of information at a time.
The shock of the pain caught him again. “Don’t you want to live?” she said softly while it rolled over him and left him writhing.
He knew it was a lie. He knew there was no way that they could leave him alive—that she would kill him, and enjoy it, after she had extracted the information she wanted. But the pain began to build again, washing away reason, and he drew a long breath and screamed again and again, the body trying desperately to get someone to stop this. Everything hazed out, nothing was left but that pain, a world gone white and dead with it. It would not stop.
“I hate having to rush things this way,” she said an eternity later when the pain lessened a little. “It’s so slapdash—not to do things in neat stages, but to have to chop and change.” He felt, then, the first fingers touching his mind—almost casually. The effect was horrific, like being touched on an open wound by someone slowly, delicately drawing a finger over the ragged edge, the place where the hypersensitive tissue was beginning to crust and dry. He sobbed.
“I suppose I can just be resigned to it. Unless you change your mind very quickly and start telling me what you know. It’s so draining to have to go through someone’s mind the hard way … but I will if I must. I may be tired of it at the end, a little, but I’ll be better in an hour or so. But you’ll be dead.” She smiled more broadly. “Not without feeling what will feel to you like several years of this pain.”
He moaned. Oh, yes, I can prolong it, she said from inside him again, and it was as if his own mind spoke to him, having turned traitor, punishing him for all the secret wrongs of a lifetime. Time sense is one of the most easily altered of all the interior senses. I can’t spend a long while with you myself—I’ve got a lot of other things to do—but the little while I spend with you will feel like months of this. I know where to touch the mind to make it happen. See?—
—and something happened, so that the moment froze with the pain increased to a point so shocking that he was no longer even able to