Dreamfall (11 page)

“It wouldn’t look good,” Sand said. “Obviously we don’t want
it to appear that some group of radicals is functioning, unchecked, as the
major influence in the Hydran Homeland. It isn’t good for Tau’s image—or for
the Hydrans’ either—if the FTA sees social chaos over there.” He jerked his
head in the direction of the river. “The kind of attention that it will attract
from the FTA will not be the sort that HARM intends, believe me.”

I listened, squinting at him in the reflected glare of too
many windows in too many towers, grimacing as my mind cut through the
self-serving bullshit to the truth:
They were right.
Humans would never
feel safe enough to share real power with Hydrans. And the FTA was just as
human as Tau, when it came to that.

“I see what you mean,” I said, getting up again. I looked toward
the plex where the missing child’s parents were going through a kind of hell
that cut across all the artificial barriers of race and money, that proved the
only universal truth was pain. “But what do you think I can do to change that?”

Perrymeade’s body language eased, as if he finally
understood what he saw in my face, or thought he did. But still he hesitated
before he said, “We’ve told the Hydran Council everything that Sand has
explained to you. But they still claim to know nothing. I can’t believe that.
You share a ... heritage with them, but you’ve lived among humans. You have a
better chance of making them understand what they’re risking by harboring these
dissidents ....”

What they were risking.
I touched my head. I could
tell the Hydrans what they had to lose ... but who knew if they’d even give me
a chance. All they had to do was look at me; all they had to do was try to
touch my mind. I glanced at Perrymeade and Sand. There was no point in trying
to explain anything to them; they wouldn’t give a damn anyway.

“I have a question, before you go,” Sand said, turning to
me. “Why aren’t you a functional telepath? Perrymeade said you used to be a
telepath, but now you’re not. How do you get rid of a thing like that?”

I looked straight in through his dim, dead eyes. “You have
to kill someone.”

He started. I wondered how long it had been since someone
had surprised him. I wondered exactly what it was about what I’d said that had.

“You killed someone?” Perrymeade echoed.

“That’s what I said, isn’t it?” I glanced at him. “‘When I
was seventeen. I blew him away with a tightbeam handgun. It was self-defense.
But it doesn’t matter if you’re a psion and someone’s brain goes nova inside
you. If I was really Hydran, it would’ve killed me. But I wasn’t Hydran enough.
All it did was fuck up my head. So now I’m only human.”

Perrymeade’s face went a little slacker. I watched him pull
it together again with a negotiator’s reflex.

Neither of them said anything more, until finally a mod came
spiraling down out of the heights and Sand said, “Good-bye.”

A pruvLre corporate mod took us over to Freaktown. No wandering
through its streets on foot for a Tau vip, even one whose job was to pretend
that he understood its people as well as he did his own. As we passed over the
river I looked down, seeing the lone bridge, one tenuous filament connecting
two peoples and the different ways they looked at the same universe. I thought
about Miya: how she’d been chosen, trained, to help a human child the way no
human could. How she had helped him ....

And then she’d betrayed him. I wondered whether I was seeing
too incomplete an image to make sense of the truth, or whether Hydrans really
were that alien, so alien I’d never understand how their minds worked.

The mod came down again somewhere deep in the heart of
Freaktown. We stepped out into the enclosed courtyard of a sprawling structure
Perrymeade told me was the Community Hall.
Community
meant
Hydran,
to
Hydrans.
Community ..
.
communing, communication, to live in a commune
...
to have a common destiny, history, mind ....
My own mind played
with the word like a dog gnawing a bone, finding meanings layered inside
meanirgs, wondering whether any of them were ones the Hydrans had intended.

Here in the courtyard, sealed off from the decaying streets,
there were actually a few shrubs and trees; a few of the colors of life, only a
little dusty and overgrown. I looked down. A garden of brightly tiled mosaic
spread outward from where I stood. Dim with age and dust, it still made my eyes
strobe.

Off to my left a stream barely the width of my open hand
wove a silver thread through the dry shrubbery. Half hidden in the bushes I
could see a velvet patch of mossgrass, so green and perfect that I started
toward it without thinking.

I stepped across the stream onto the waiting patch of green ...
and found the knee-high sculpture of a Hydran woman sitting cross-legged on a
mandala of tile. Her inset eyes of green stone met mine, as if she had been
expecting me to be expectittg this.

No one in the courtyard could see what I was seeing now. No
one who didn’t step across the stream would ever see it. I smiled.

I looked up as someone emerged from the shadows at the far
side of the courtyard: a Hydran, striding toward the others as if he was only
human, &S though he didn’t have a better way to get from one place to
another. He was one of the guests from the reception last night. My memory
offered up his name: Hanjen.

He stopped almost in midstride as he saw me. The look on his
face was the same look my own face still wore: pure astonishment.

I stepped back across the stream into the courtyard. He
stood perfectly still, watching as I rejoined Perrymeade by the mod.

At last he made a small bow and said something in a language
that must have been Hydran.

“What did he say?” I murmured to Perrymeade.

“I don’t know,” Perrymeade said. “Some sort of greeting. I
don’t know what it means.”

“You don’t speak their language?” It wasn’t that difficult
to learn a language by accessing. And someone at his level in a corporate
government had enough bioware to let him run a translator program, if accessing
was too much trouble for him. “Why not?”

He shrugged and looked away from me. “They all understand
ours.’t

I didn’t say anything; I just went on looking at him.

“Besides,” he murmured, as if I’d said what I was thinking,
or maybe because I hadr’t, “the Hydrans claim all language is only second best.
So there’s really no difference.”

DKEAMnALL / 79

“Yes, there is,” I said. I looked away again, listening for
something else: trying to tell whether Hanjen reached out to me with his mind,
trying to be open. Waiting for a whisper, a touch, anything at all; desperate
for any contact, for proof that I wasn’t a walking dead man, or the last one
alive in a world of ghosts.

But there was nothing. I watched the Hydran’s face. Emotion
moved across it like ripples over a pond surface. I didn’t know what the
emotions were because I couldn’t feel them, couldn’t prove that he was real,
any more than I could prove that I wasn’t utterly alone here.

“Mez Perrymeade,” he said, glancing away from me as if I didn’t
exist. “We have been expecting you. But why have you brought this one,” meaning
me, “with you?” The words were singsong but almost uninflected, not giving
anything away.

“Mez Hanjen,” Peffymeade said, trying to hold himself as
still as the Hydran did. He looked like he was trying to hold back water. “I
asked him to come.”

“No,” I said, forcing myself to meet Hanjen’s stare. “You
asked me to come. Last night, at the party.” We were all speaking Standard,
now. I wondered whether anyone from Tau had ever bothered to learn the Hydrans’
language. I wondered suddenly why Hydrans even had one, needed one, when they
could communicate mind-to-mind. The data on Hydran culture that was freely
accessible on the Net was so spotty I hadn’t been able to learn even that much
about them.

Hanjen made a small bow to me. “That is true. However, I
hardly expected, under the circumstances ...” He broke off, looking toward the
spot where I’d discovered the hidden statue. He shook his head, glancing at me again
as he began to turn away.

He stopped suddenly and turned back, making eye contact with
us. “Excuse me,” he murmured. “I meant to say, ‘Please follow me, the members
of the Council are waiting.’”

“Are they all like that?” I muttered as we started after
him.

Perrymeade shrugged and grimaced as Hanjen disappeared into
patterns of light and shadow.

For a second I thought Hanjen had disappeared entirely,
tele-ported himself, making some point by leaving us behind. My chest hurt as I
wondered whether I’d been the reason. But when I stepped into the shadows
beyond the courtyard I saw him moving ahead of me through a lightplay of
organic forms—trees and shrubs, columns and arches built on the same fluid
lines. There wasn’t a right angle anywhere; wherever I looked, my eyes had trouble
telling life from art.

Hanjen led us without a word, not looking back, along a sheltered
walkway. The pbth wandered like a stream through a maze of vine-hung arbors;
the arbors became a series of chambers, their ceilings and walls as random as
the walls of caves. In some of the chambers every inch of wall was covered with
patterned tiles; some had ceilings inlaid with geometries of age-darkened wood.
There were flower-forms and leaf-forrns spreading like vines up any pillar or
wall that wasn’t decorated with mosaics. My mind could barely take it in as we
passed through one room and then another. Perrymeade had called this the
Community Hall, but the words didn’t begin to describe it. I wondered what it
really was, how old, what meaning it must have held for the ones who had
originally constructed it.

Other Hydrans passed us as we made our way deeper into the
maze of chambers and passages. The unconscious grace of their movements seemed
to match the sinuous beauty of the spaces we were passing through. I kept my
gaze fixed on the ceiling, the walls, the floor; afraid to meet anyone else’s
eyes, afraid I’d catch them looking in through mine.

At last we entered an echoing vault of a room where a dozen
other Hydrans waited. They sat or kneeled at a low free-form table, looking
toward us as if they’d been expecting us. I looked away from them—looked up,
and thought I was looking at the sky. Above us there was a blue translucent
dome painted with clouds. Birds, or something like them, were soaring toward
the brightness of the sunlit zenith, 3s if they’d been startled into flight by
our arrival.

I stopped dead, looking up; stood staring a moment longer, until
my mind finally convinced my eyes that what they were seeing wasn’t real—that
the birdlike things were only images, frozen in flight against a painted sky.
No wings fluttered; there was no movement toward that burning glaze of light.

I looked down; the room and its faces rushed back into place
around me.

“Remarkable, isn’t it?” Perrymeade murmured as he passed me.
“It always stops people cold the first time they see it.”

I followed him, keeping my eyes on his back until I reached
the low table. Around it were seats, more than enough, although some of the
Hydrans kneeled on mats on the floor. The seats were made of wood like the
table; like the table, they’d been carved into nonlinear, organic forms. Their
wood smelled of oil and age. I hoped they were more comfortable than they
looked.

There was no sign of a high-tech insert on the table or anywhere
else in the room, even though this was apparently the meeting space for the
only formal government the Hydrans had. I wondered whether they really didn’t
need human-style data storage or whether Tau had simply refused to give them
access to it.

Hanjen bowed to the waiting Council members. They nodded in
return. Perrymeade was already sitting down. I faced the silent circle at last,
hesitating as I chose a seat. I recognized two of the Hydrans as Moket and
Serali, the ones who’d been at the party last night with Hanjen. There were
more older members than younger ones on the Council, but it was divided about
equally between the sexes.

All of them looked well fed. They wore new, well-cut
clothing that must have come from across the river; the clothes they’d chosen
looked expensive, even stylish. It didn’t match what I’d seen on people in
Freaktown’s streets. Neither did the jewelry they wore—and there was a lot of
it—although some of the pieces were odd and old enough to have been heirlooms.
Several of them wore nose rings, which were definitely not the look over in
Riverton.

A creature that matched the ceiling’s painted birds perched
on one man’s shoulder. I studied it, trying to get a better idea of what it
actually was. It was gray-furred, not feathered, more like a bat than a bird,
with a long pointed face and enoffnous ears folded like origami. It raised its
head, looking back at me with bright darting eyes.

And then suddenly it launched into the air, spreading
leathery wings a handbreadth wide. It flew straight at me, right into my face.

I flung my hands up as claws raked my flesh inside a
slapping, flapping confusion of wings. I fell into a chair as the bat-thing
lifted off of me again.

I lowered my hands. Figures loomed over me; one of them was
Perrymeade. He was speaking to me, but I couldn’t seem to make out the words.

I struggled upright in my seat, smarting with scratches and
humiliation; saw someone pass the chittering bat-thing back to its owner.

The Hydran who gathered it into his hands glared at me as if
the attack had been my fault, but I couldn’t tell what he was thinking, what
any of them thought, what the hell had happened ... Except for the shrill,
almost inaudible squeaks of the bat-thing, the room was totally silent.

And then the bat-thing’s owner disappeared.