Dreamfall (10 page)

“Joby doesn’t look Hydran.” Burnell Natasa gave me a look as
he sat back down again.
Not like you do.
I saw it in his eyes.

“ft was dark,” I said again. “I couldn’t tell.”

“And if you hadn’t interfered, they might have caught her?”
his wife asked. There was more grief than anger in her voice.

I shrugged, slumping back in my seat.

“He feels responsible, Ling. That’s why he volunteered to
help us negotiate with the Hydrans,” Perrymeade said, as slick as glass. “To
make up for his mistake.”

“What do you think you can do that the Tau authorities can’t?”
the father asked me. “Can you read their minds? Find out what they’ve done with
our sen—?”

I glanced at Perrymeade, because I didn’t have an answer for
that one either. He didn’t give me any help. So instead I asked the question
that had been gnawing at my thoughts since last night: “Why did you hire a
Hydran to take care of your son?” Considering how most people reacted to
Hydrans on this world, I couldn’t believe it was something they would have done
just because Hydrans were cheap labor.

The father stiffened, barely controlling his reaction. He
looked at Perrymeade and then Sand. His mouth thinned, and he didn’t say
anything.

The mother got up and moved across the room to a low table.
She picked up a picture and brought it to me. “This is Joby, with Miya,” she
said. “Is this the woman you saw last night?”

As she put the frame into my hands it activated, showing me
a Hydran woman—the one I’d seen last night—crouched down, holding a human child
in her arms.

“That’s her,” I whispered finally, 8S I realized that my
silence had gone on for too long. A rush of sourceless heat made me giddy, as
if her face was the face of a lost lover. I forced myself to focus on the child
in her arms. He was maybe one or two, with dark curls and a round, sweet baby
face. I watched him wave, saw him smile ....

There was something wrong with him.
I couldn’t put a
name to it as the realization slid down my back like cold lips. I glanced at
Ling Natasa; saw her catch my expression. This time she was the one who looked
away.

She took the picture back. “Our son suffered neurological damage,”
she said, barely audible. “Before he was born. I’m a biochemist. There was a ...
an accident in the lab while I was pregnant. Joby was affected.”

I wondered what kind of accident would cause a defect so severe
that they couldn’t fix it. I wondered why she’d gone ahead and had the baby, if
she knew ... but maybe that was a question no one could answer. I wondered what
had gone on in her mind then; wondered what was going on in it now.

“Joby has no way of interacting with the world around him,”
she said, the words dreary and full of pain. “He can’t speak, he can’t hear, he
can’t control his body. His mind is whole, inside that ... that precious
prison. But he’s completely helpless.”

Her eyes turned distant; she wasn’t seeing any of us
anymore. I wondered whether she was wondering where he was now, whether he was
crying and afraid, whether someone was hurting him .... I glanced at his
picture, and my stomach knotted.

She looked at me again, and she didn’t react at the sight of
my strange eyes. “We hired Miya to care for him because she’s the only one who
can reach him.”

I blinked as I realized what she meant: what made a Hydran
perfect for the job of caring for their son.
Her psi.
A therapist with
the Gift could penetrate that shell of flesh, make contact with the mind locked
inside it, in a way that no human ever could ... not even his parents.

“She did things for him that ... \rye couldn’t do,” Ling
Natasa said, as if she’d read my mind. This time I heard longing and pain—her
own pain—in the words.

“Do you have any other children?” I asked.

She looked up at me, suddenly, sharply. I wasn’t sure what
the look meant. “No,” she said, and that was all.

I didn’t ask why not. Maybe one like this was enough.

“Miya ... Miya was devoted to Joby. She was always there for
him ... she was his lifeline. And ours, to him.”

“She was trained at our medical facilities to do
rehabilitation therapy,” Burnell Natasa said. “She was able to help Joby so
much because—” He broke off, glanced uncomfortably at Sand.

“Because of her Gift,” Ling Natasa said, glancing at me. It
surprised me to hear someone who wasn’t a psion call it that, speak about it
the right way.

“Then she wasn’t wearing a detector?” Sand demanded.

“A detector?” I said. “What’s that?”

“It delivers a shock when it detects psi activity.” He
looked at me with his usual pitiless indifference. “Like the stun collars Corporate
Security uses to monitor petty criminals. I assume you’re familiar with those.”

I flushed and looked away.

“She was a fully licensed therapist,” Perrymeade said, sounding
defensive now. “She was the first to complete the program ... a cooperative program
that I set up with the support of Riverton’s medical center and the Hydran
Council. They were training Hydrans as therapists to help patients like my
nephew, who can’t be helped by conventional treatment. Joby’s condition gave me
the idea for it.”

Sand half frowned, but he didn’t say anything more.

“Miya was like a part of our family,” Ling Natasa said. “Why
would she do something like this—?” She looked at Perrymeade this time, her
eyes begging him to make sense of something that was beyond her comprehension.
He shook his head.

“We’ve heard rumors—” Burnell Natasa glanced over his
shoulder at the visitors waiting in the next room. “Everyone’s heard
about—rituals the Hydrans have,” he said bitterly. “That they steal our
children and use them—”

“Jeezu!” I pushed up out of my seat. I caught Sand’s warning
gesture; sat down again. His gaze pinned me there. “It’s not true,” I said,
glaring at him, ?t all of them, even though it could have been, for all I knew
about how Hydrans lived. But my gut told me only a human could do a thing like
that, or even imagine it.

“How do you know?” Burnell Natasa said. “If you’re not one
of them.”

I stared at him, at his uniform.

“Cat is a xenologist,” Perrymeade answered. “He works with
Kissindre .... You know how much time I’ve spent with the Hydrans, Burnell. I’m
sure he’s right.”

Natasa shook his head. “Borosage said he has cases on record—”

“District Administrator Borosage has many years of experience
dealing with Hydrans, but I think we all know that he also has certain ...
limitations.” Perrymeade mouthed the words as if they were hot, glancing at
Sand. “But Corporate Security’s concern about the involvement of Hydran
dissidents in your son’s kidnapping isn’t unjustified, considering the
situation within the Tau keiretsu ....”

“Did this Miya ever mention anything about the inspectors or
the FTA?” I asked. “Were you involved in anything that the Hydrans might not
have liked—something she might have picked out of your thoughts?”

“No.” They both said it so quickly that it seemed to echo.
Their eyes met, and then they both looked at me. “Is he a telepath?” the
husband asked Perrymeade. Perrymeade shook his head with no hesitation;
Kissindre must have told him that I’d lost my psi. Maybe that was why he’d
brought me here:
Because I was safe.
There was a reason why most humans
didn’t want a mind reader anywhere near them. Everyone had things they wanted
to hide, and a telepath didn’t just eavesdrop on conversations—he could listen
in on your most intimate secrets.

The Natasas must be a matched pair of saints if they were
willing to share their home with a Hydran. Or else they loved that crippled
child more than the keiretsu ... more than their work, their privacy,
themselves.

But then I saw the look they exchanged as my question registered,
the looks that went on changing the other faces in the room, always turning
them grimmer. And I knew that whatever these people were, they weren’t
innocent. I could almost feel their hidden panic. There had to be secrets—big
ones, bad ones, filling the silence around me. Right then I would have given a
year of my life to have one bloodred drug patch riding behind my ear, the kind
that could lay open the scar tissue blinding my Gift and let me see, for an
hour, for even ten minutes—for however long it took.

But I didn’t, and I couldn’t. And maybe it didn’t matter anyway.
It wasn’t my problem, any of it, except the missing child—and that was only
because my guilt said I’d been to blame. I’d do whatever Perrymeade and Sand
told me to do, knowing it wouldn’t help anything; do it because then they’d
leave me alone and my conscience would leave me alone, and I could get back to
doing things that were important to me.

I looked up again, directly into Ling Natasa’s gaze. Memory
stabbed me behind. the eyes, the way it had last night. But this time the pain
was genuine. Reality had reached into this expensive, perfect room, into two
comfortable, protected lives, and destroyed all their illusions in one
irreversible moment. There was no escape for anyone from grief and pain, from
fear that wore the face of a lost child, helpless, crippled, afraid, in the
hands of strangers, aliens .... Her husband put his arms around her again. This
time when he looked at me, I still saw it, the grief and the fear.

“I’ll do what I can,” I murmured, hating how it sounded; wanting,
needing to have something better to say. “I know how you feel,” I said finally.
I looked away as the disbelief in their eyes turned the empty words back on me.

Perrymeade and Sand were already on their feet, looking eager
to be gone now that they’d gotten what they’d come for. I followed them through
the empty good-byes and out of the building, more eager to leave than they
were.

When we were out in the open plaza again, I raised my head
for long enough to see what expressions Perrymeade and Sand were wearing. “What
do you want me to do?” I asked, hoping they had more of an idea than I did.

Perrymeade glanced at me, as if he wondered why I wasn’t angry
anymore. “Some of the leaders of the Hydran community have agreed to see me, to
discuss the situation and what might be done about it.” He sounded as if he
didn’t want to say that much. “I want you to come with me to meet them.” I
wondered what was wrong with everyone here, whether they were all that paranoid
about keeping an appearance of control, or whether Tau’s ax was always that
ready to fall on someone’s neck.

I sat down on a bench. “Maybe you ought to tell me more
about it,” I said. “I’m not a mind reader.” I took out a camph and stuck it
between my teeth.

Their mouths quirked. I sat watching them stand, uncomfortable,
against the backdrop of Tau Riverton’s deceptive order.

“You don’t want the Feds to know this is happening, do you?”
I asked.

“No.” Sand looked back at me with his unblinking eyes. “‘What
we’re doing is damage control, at this point. We want this matter settled
cleanly and quietly—immediately.”

That explained why there hadn’t been anything on the news
about the kidnapping. “Why did the Hydran woman take the boy? You said she was
working with terrorists?”

“The Hydran Aboriginal Resistance Movement,” he said. ‘A
radical group. They’ve sent us a list of demands for the boy’s release.”

“‘HARM’?” I said, realizing what the letters spelled. “They
call themselves ‘HARM’—?”

“We do,” Perrymeade murmured, rubbing his neck. “They don’t
use the term ‘Hydran.’ The Hydrans prefer to call themselves simply ‘the
Community.”

The Human Federation had called them “Hydrans” because we’d
first encountered them in the Beta Hydrae system. But the real meaning of the
name cut far deeper: in human mythology, the Hydra had been a monster with a
hundred heads. “What kind of demands are they making?”

“The usual,” Perrymeade said, sounding tired. “More autonomy
... but also more integration, more job opportunities, more of Tau’s money;
reparations for the entire planet, which they claim we stole from them. They
want the Federation’s attention turned on them while the pf[‘s inspection team
is here.”

“That sounds fair to me,” I said. I rolled the camph between
my fingers, focusing on the bitter cold/heat inside my mouth.

Perrymeade raised his eyebrows and sighed. “I’m sure it does
to them too. It even does to me, when I try to see it their way. But it isn’t
that simple. It wasn’t Tau that took control of this world away from them—or
Draco, for that matter.” He glanced at Sand as he said it. “If they had more
autonomy at this point, what good would it do them? They’ve come to rely on Tau
as their support system just as much as Tau’s human citizens ... possibly more.
The Hydrans have no real technological or economic base; they lost their
interstellar network long before we got here. Where would they be without us?”

I put the camph back between my lips so that I didn’t have
to answer.

“If they think the FTA will see it differently, they’re
wrong.” He shook his head. “They don’t want to believe that—I don’t even want
to believe that—but that’s how it is. The real problem isn’t simply that their
eyes look ab—” he broke off as I looked up at him, “strange ... that their eyes
seem strange to us,” he muttered, “or the color of their skin, or that they don’t
eat meat. None of that matters anymore.” His hand tightened. “Hydrans are
different
They have the ability to intrude profoundly on another person’s life, to
violate a person’s privacy at any given moment—” His eyes, which had been
looking at me without seeing me, suddenly registered my face, my eyes again. “It’s
not that easy,” he said, looking away. “ft’s not easy at all. Maybe it’s
impossible.”

“Tell me about it,” I said, and swallowed the butt end of
the camph. “So if the Feds won’t do anything to force Tau to change its
policies, why is Tau afraid to let them find out what happened?”