Ubik

"It bothers me that people will feel hostile toward me. But I guess you can't live very long without arousing hostility; you can't please everybody, because people want different things. Please one and you displease another."

Joe said, "What is your anti-talent?"

"It's hard to explain."

"Like I say," G. G. Ashwood said, "it's unique; I've never heard of it before."

"Which psi talent does it counteract?" Joe asked the girl.

"Precog," Pat said. "I guess." She indicated G. G. Ashwood, whose smirk of enthusiasm had not dimmed. "Your scout Mr. Ashwood explained it to me. I knew I did something funny; I've always had these strange periods in my life, starting in my sixth year. I never told my parents, because I sensed that it would displease them."

"Are they precogs?" Joe asked.

"Yes."

"You're right. It would have displeased them. But if you used it around them - even once - they would have known, Didn't they suspect? Didn't you interfere with their ability?"

Pat said, "I -" She gestured. "I think I did interfere but they didn't know it." Her face showed bewilderment.

"Let me explain," Joe said, "how the anti-precog generally functions. Functions, in fact, in every case we know of. The precog sees a variety of futures, laid out side by side like cells in a beehive. For him one has greater luminosity, and this he picks. Once he has picked it the anti-precog can do nothing; the anti-precog has to be present when the precog is in the process of deciding, not after. The anti-precog makes all futures seem equally real to the precog; he aborts his talent to choose at all. A precog is instantly aware when an anti-precog is nearby because his entire relation to the future is altered. In the case of telepaths a similar impairment -"

"She goes back in time," G. G. Ashwood said.

Joe stared at him.

"Back in time," G. G. repeated, savoring this; his eyes shot shafts of significance to every part of Joe Chip's kitchen. "The precog affected by her still sees one predominant future; like you said, the one luminous possibility. And he chooses it, and he's right. But why is it right? Why is it luminous? Because this girl -" He shrugged in her direction. "Pat controls the future; that one luminous possibility is luminous because she's gone into the past and changed it. By changing it she changes the present, which includes the precog; he's affected without knowing it and his talent seems to work, whereas it really doesn't. So that's one advantage of her anti-talent over other anti-precog talents. The other - and greater - is that she can cancel out the precog's decision after he's made it. She can enter the situation later on, and this problem has always hung us up, as you know; if we didn't get in there from the start we couldn't do anything. In a way, we never could truly abort the precog ability as we've done with the others; right? Hasn't that been a weak link in our services?" He eyed Joe Chip expectantly.

"Interesting," Joe said presently.

"Hell - 'interesting'?" G. G. Ashwood thrashed about indignantly. "This is the greatest anti-talent to emerge thus far!"

In a low voice Pat said, "I don't go back in time." She raised her eyes, confronted Joe Chip half apologetically, half belligerently. "I do something, but Mr. Ashwood has built it up all out of proportion to reality."

"I can read your mind," G. G. said to her, looking a little nettled. "I know you can change the past; you've done it."

Pat said, "I can change the past but I don't go into the past; I don't time-travel, as you want your tester to think."

"How do you change the past?" Joe asked her.

"I think about it. One specific aspect of it, such as one incident, or something somebody said. Or a little thing that happened that I wish hadn't happened. The first time I did this, as a child-"

"When she was six years old," G. G. broke in, "living in Detroit, with her parents of course, she broke a ceramic antique statue that her father treasured."

"Didn't your father foresee it?" Joe asked her. "With his precog ability?"