want to get kicked out of the
FNMA? What if I had sat in a jungle circle loaded to the ears with
herbs and spells, with the drums of my cousins throbbing around me,
and learned the best and subtlest ways of my technique back in time
looking through the eyes of my great grandfather, or conversing with
his ghost. Do you think I would say so?"

"No," Donahue admitted. He edged away a little.

The youth spoke gloomily. "Rapport and intensified empathy is
something you learn by exposing yourself to mirrors. The technique is
published, known and accepted among psychologists, but most of them
just don't try. It backfires too easily, and it takes too high a level
of skill. It originated with my family." The youth spoke even more
gloomily. "What I do is obvious enough if I make it so. It's simply
prior mimicry. I watch the trend of what goes on in his thoughts, and
express approximately what he is feeling and thinking a little before
he does. So that presently, subconsciously he is depending on me to
tell him what he thinks and how he feels.

"I was his mirror, his prior mirror. I am a clear, expressive
underplaying actor as an actor, and each shade of reaction is separate
and unmistakable. The subconscious is not rational, but it generalizes
from regularities that the conscious mind never has the subtlety to
notice. It saw me consistently representing its own internal
reactions, hour after hour in every situation more clearly than Bryce
ever saw himself express anything in a mirror, and more steadily than
he ever saw any mirror. The subconscious then associated the inside
emotion with the corresponding outside image for each one. I became
Bryce's subconscious self image. When he thinks of doing anything, the
image in the imagination that does it is not himself, it is me. This
can cause considerable mental confusion."

"It should!" Donahue agreed fervently.

"I put him in new places and situations where he was unsure and I was
sure, so that when I diverged from mirroring him, he gave me the lead
and mirrored me. One of us had to be the originator and the other the
reflection, but now it was reversed. He did not fight it
subconsciously because the results were pleasant. I kept the lead and
led him a mental dance through thoughts and reactions he had never had
before, in a personality pattern completely foreign to his own, one
that I wanted him to have. I hadn't been hired for that, but I had
time to pass before I could unt