Fury and the Power by John Farris

quick study when it came to languages.
    And women, of course.
     
    W here did you meet him? Eden asked Bertie when they had an opportunity late in the day to chat privately. Vegas?
    Where else? He lives and works there, or just outside of town, in a dinner theatre I think Mies van der Rohe designed. Steel and glass, halfway up a mountain. Looks like it's suspended in the sky at night, remember the mother ship in Close Encounters , the Spielberg movie?
    No . Eden yawned. Sunset at Shungwaya, the lake deepening to indigo. The hippos a couple of hundred yards to the south and near the shore were a glossy shade of copper as the sun began to set. There was a good breeze and few dudu to contend with. Somewhere in the brush a couple of cheetahs of perhaps two dozen that inhabited the fifty square miles of the reserve were talking in their odd bird-chirp language.
    Eden and Alberta Nkambe sat back to back and a few feet apart on one of the verandas of the main house. Someone passing by might have thought they were angry with each other, to judge from the tension in their brows, the rigid jaw lines. But it was a practice session in sub-vocalization, Bertie the tutor and Eden the student. One of the psychic talents that had always been second nature to Bertie. Two months before giving birth, Bertie's mother Guan Ke had been struck by lightning while serenely attending to her daily routine of tai ji quan a few yards from their house in the highlands of Thika. Both survived. But the lightning (Bertie had surmised, as an explanation of her gifts), or what the lightning had left behind in her almost fully developed brain, was still there twenty years later.
    In a certain state, just this side of sleep, I see it sometimes. A mind within my mind. A separate consciousness.
    Bertie's powers were telepathic and telekinetic. Eden, since her "coming out" exercise in a frighteningly high-stress situation that involved the disarming of a nuclear bomb in a parking garage next to a packed stadium in Nashville, Tennessee, had made rapid progress in precisely controlling her psychotronic ability—moving objects with the power of her mind. She possessed other talents that surpassed all of Bertie's potential. Eden dreamed prophetically, had done so all her life. And she had the rare "left-handed Art" that set her well apart from other psychics:   she could produce her doppelganger, a mirror image, visible to others only when clothed. Eden was, whether or not she liked the idea, an Avatar, lodestone for all psychics.
    Did he hit on you? Eden asked after a few moments. She was peeling a small red banana for her pet colobus monkey. Eden had named her young monkey "Uncle Norm" for a relative of Betts Waring, who had the same druidical face, darkening from pure white as the monkey matured. Keeping her hands busy and her mind semidetached made thought transmission less of a chore.
    That's just a showbiz formality , Bertie responded, ritual intrigue of the high-profile crowd, status as an aphrodisiac:   you know —
    Aph—? I didn't get all of that. Can we just talk now?
    "Sure."
    "I'm getting my usual afternoon headache. Blood sugar's low."
    Eden pinched off half of the banana and gave it to Uncle Norm, ate the rest, turned around to face the red sun cut in half by the Mau Escarpment.
    "I got the idea at lunch that you wanted Grayle and me to meet," Eden said with an idle sidewise look at Bertie.
    "You haven't seemed to be making a lot of progress with Jean-Baptiste."
    "Progress toward what? The sack? A roll in the hay?" Eden said, wiping perspiration from beneath her eyes with a fingertip. Her eyes had a vexed burn going, the redness of the setting sun. " Aphrodisiac? Do you think I need a quick fix in bed from a disappearing act like Lincoln Grayle?"
    Bertie shrugged and said with a certain impishness, the appearance of a white dimple in one cheek, "There was maaagic in the air! He couldn't keep his eyes off you, darling."
    "A little too good-looking. Not