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business manager for several storytellers. None of them were big time, but I was getting enough from fees to see me through. I was on a booking trip—"

"Booking trip?"

"I was trying to line up performance engagements for a client who was sinking fast. I had stopped at a little club on a godforsaken planet in the Fringe to talk to the manager about my client. Unfortunately, he already had a top-notch storyteller."

"Dorland?"

Paul nodded. "I'd never heard of him. I decided to visit the bar on my way out."

"To see Dorland?"

Paul grinned wryly. "To drown my sorrows. Dorland was on stage, and before I knew what was happening, I got wrapped up in his story." His mind went back to that night as he told Karyn about it, and he wondered suddenly how different his life might have been if he hadn't decided to stop for a drink in that dingy club. The timing was right; he'd just been dropped by a girl who meant a lot to him, and he was at the lowest emotional point he could ever remember. It hadn't been so much that she'd broken off the relationship, but how casually she'd done it. Paul sat alone at a small table downing one drink after another, annoyed that his reflection on misery was being interrupted by the storyteller. He turned his back to the stage and kept drinking. The soft voice of the storyteller droned on behind him. After a while parts of the story began to filter through the haze of self-pity—and Paul realized that the story was about himself.

He turned around then and got his first good look at Dorland Avery—and felt his scalp prickling. Dorland looked directly at him as he told a story of a man who was driving himself down into a deep pit of despair, a man riddled by self-doubts who was sure that he had been bom to fail and was 136 William Greenleaf CLARION 137

doing everything he could to live out that self-ordained destiny. Paul couldn't remember the details of the story, but he had recognized himself clearly enough. As the character in the story began to see his own self-worth and overcame his doubts and insecurities, Paul felt himself gradually accepting some hope that he might be successful after all, both in love and in his work. He had never been quite the same since.

And he had known without a doubt that he had run into something more than a Fringe storyteller in that little club.

Karyn hadn't interrupted him, but she had a puzzled look on her face when he finished. "You said your back was to the stage when Dorland began the story?"

Paul nodded. She hadn't missed it.

"Then how could Dorland read the visual clues from your face?"

"Good question. I asked him the same thing and I never got a direct answer."

She leaned back against the curved wall and was silent for a moment. Then her eyes came back to him and she said, "What happened next?"

"I knew Dorland could be the greatest player the stream had ever seen. And I wanted to be his manager worse than I'd ever wanted anything in my life. At first he resisted the idea of expanding his show, but I kept at him." Ironically, it was the new self-confidence instilled by Dorland himself that had made Paul approach him and had given Paul the drive to see that Dorland became the most famous psi-player in the Omega Sector.

"Why is he so good?"

"There are a lot of reasons," Paul said. News service reporters often asked the same question.

"Natural taient, for one. His timing and creative technique with the lights and music are perfect. There's never a distracting glitch. And he has a real sense of drama in his facial expressions and body movements. Dorland's show is like a symphony of sight and sound, and all the time he's measuring responses, watching for reactions, molding his performance around what he can see in the audience. He can bring them to whatever mood he wants. He—" Paul stopped suddenly as something struck him: the image of High Elder Brill in the sacred chamber, moving his arms and swaying as he called Lord Tern, and in the background the odd music of the deacons' tubelike instruments. The image had seemed familiar to Paul at the time, but he hadn't fitted it together. Now he realized that in calling Lord Tern, High Elder Brill had gone through much the same sequence of actions that Dorland used during his performance.

Coincidence?

Selmer Ogram had said something, too: It's too bad High Elder Brill couldn 't see your show. Actually, it's not too different from his own Godsday service.

Paul felt a slight chill, looked up and found Karyn's eyes on him. He cleared his throat and went on. "Anyway, I'm convinced Dorland didn't believe that he would become so popular; otherwise he wouldn't have gone along with me. I've had to talk him out of quitting more than once."

"Maybe you should have let him."

He didn't reply to that because it struck too close to doubts that had surfaced in his own mind. Dorland was vulnerable to the needs of others and would do almost anything to avoid hurting someone. Paul often suspected that Dorland had agreed to become a psi-player only because he knew Paul needed it so badly.

"Do you think he'll stay here when this is over?" Karyn asked.

Paul looked at her in surprise. He hadn't even