Dreamfall (12 page)

“What the hell—?” I mumbled, rubbing my face. The words
sounded like a shout. The Hydrans were looking back and forth at each other,
some of them gesturing in the silence that went on and otl. The room was filled
with conversation, if only I could have heard it.

My hands tightened over the table edge. Perrymeade sat down
beside me, trying not to look as shaken as I did. If he wasn’t fooling me, he
wasn’t fooling anyone else. The silence stretched; everyone looked at us,
somehow without acknowledging us.

Finally Perrymeade took a deep breath and said, “We’ve come,
as you know, to ask your help in finding a kidnapped human child—”

“Excuse me,” Hanjen said, almost impatiently, as if Perrymeade
had interrupted some private discussion. Maybe he had. “We must ask if you
would please leave us for a time, Mez Perrymeade. We need to speak with this
s11s”—he raised his hand to point at me, a beat late, as if he’d forgotten it
was necesSary—“alone.” And then, seeing the surprise on Perrymeade’s face, he
said, “Forgive me, Janos, we mean no offense. I know we have serious matters to
discuss. I promise we will come to that. But—” He shrugged, as if he was
saying,
Yor,t brought him here.

Perrymeade got to his feet, looking down at me where I sat
dumbly in my seat. He gave me a strained smile, as if this had been what he’d
hoped for all along, as if he counted on me to use this opportunity to make his
case with the Hydrans.

I watched him leave the room. I looked down at the tabletop,
at my hands still clamped over its edge, the scars standing out on my knuckles.
waiting ... Trying to feel something.

Just like they were.
They were waiting for me to
reach out, to do something. Something impossible.

“Who are you?” Hanjen asked finally, aloud.

“Cat,” I said, glancing up at him, down again.

“That is your Human name?” someone else asked. She spoke
slowly, as if having to speak my language was hard for her. “Is that all the
name you have?”

It wasn’t the same question that humans always asked me, or
at least wanted to. Hydrans had spoken names, and they had real names, the
names they carried in the heart of their mind. Names that could only be shared
mind-to-mind. I’d had a name like that, once—a name given in love,
mind-to-mind, heart-to-heart. A name that I wouldn’t have given to this roomful
of strangers passing unspoken judgment on me even if I could have. I shook my
head and shrugged. The silence in the room got heavier, weighing on my mind
until it crushed every coherent thought.

“We were told last night that you are half Hydran,” Hanjen
said. His voice was empty as he used the human’s name for his own people. His
face was as empty of clues as my head was empty of thoughts. “We would like to
know which of your parents is Hydran?”

“My mothef,” I muttered. “Was.”

“Was she from this world?”

“I don’t know.” I shook my head.

“Then why have you come here?”

“You know.” I looked up at him, finally.

“Why have you come here?” he asked again, as if I hadn’t answered
his question.

Or maybe I hadn’t answered the one he was really asking. I tried
again. “I’m with the xenoarch research team Tau hired to study the reefs here
on the Homeland.”

He shook his head slightly, and his mouth pinched. He rubbed
the bridge of his nose. I sat feeling every muscle in my body tighten as I
tried again to imagine what he wanted to hear. “Why did
you
come to
this
world?”

I sat and looked from face to face around the table, seeing
a dozen faces, smooth, lined, male, female ... all of them fine-boned Hydran
faces, their green cat-pupiled eyes fixed on me. And suddenly I knew the answer
to his question:
Because there wos a hole in my lrft.
For years I’d
wanted to know how it would feel to be surrounded by my mother’s people; needed
to know what I’d find in their eyes ... whether it could ever be forgiveness.

I looked down. “I don’t know.” My hands made quiet fists. “But
I came here today because of the kidnapped child.” I raised my head again. “The
boy is helpless; he has severe neurological damage. You have to tell us how to
find him. Because it’s the right thing to do ... alrd because if you don’t, if
HARM uses him to create trouble for Tau with the FTA, Tau will make you all
pay—”

“You saw it happer,” Hanjen intemrpted, as if he hadn’t been
listening. “More than that—you caused it to happen.”

I grimaced. Of course they knew that—they had to know more
about what had happened last night than the Corpses did, or I wouldn’t be here.
“It was an accident.” They didn’t know everything, or they’d know that.

“Then please tell us why Tau sent you to deliver this
message to us?” Hanjen said.

I glanced around the silent circle of Council members, searching
for a recogntzable response in even one face. “Because [‘p—Hydran.” It was hard
enough just saying it; suddenly I’d never felt less Hydran in my life, a
psionic deaf-mute sitting here in the middle of a debate about life and death. ‘And
because I know what happens to psions who cross Tau.” I put my hand up to my
face, feeling scabs and bruises. I lowered tt again, laid both hands on the
tabletop, where one could touch the other. “They thought you might believe me.
That you’d be willing to talk to me ... or trust me enough to listen.”

I sucked in a breath as something formless struck a blow behind
my eyes, as someone tried to break down my defens—to discover what was hidden
there; why my mind had stopped them all cold.

“Don’t,” I whispered. “Don’t.” Someone made a disgusted
noise. There was another sourceless collision inside my head. “Stop it!” I
shouted, pushing to my feet.

DKEAMF’ALL / 85

I stood there, barely breathing, while the silence healed
again seamlessly. No one else moved; they were all staring at me. I dropped
back into my seat.

“Why are you
closed,
then?” Moket, the woman I’d seen
at the reception, demanded, her voice singsongy and sharp. She gestured at my
head.

I frowned. “I’m not.” My fingers twisted the gold stud in my
ear.

“Perhaps you are not aware,” Hanjen said slowly, as if he
was groping for words, “because you are not really Hydran—” He broke off. “I
mean, because you have lived so long among Humarls ... you are not aware that
what you are doing is considered offensive.”

“What am I doing—It” I leaned forward, wanting him to tell
me it was only that I was talking too much, or too loudly, wearing stupid
clothes, forgetting to say “thank you”—

“Your mind is completely ... closed.” He glanced away, as if
even mentioning it embalrassed him, as if I should have known.

I shook my head.

“Are you a
seddik?
”
someone said. “Have they
sent a
seddik
to us?”

“A what?” I asked.

“No,” Hanjen said tonelessly. “He is not a
seddik.
A
user of nephase,” he looked back at me. “The Humans”—l heard the capital H—6’give
nephase to our people in their prisons, because otherwise they cannot hold us.
Some prisoners become ... addicted to the drug, because it blocks their psi.
They choose to withdraw from their lives, their Gift ... their ‘humanity,’ as
you would say. It is a sickness they bring back home and spread among the
hopeless.”

I put my hand up to touch the spot behind my ear where nothing
was, knowing that a single drugderm of topalase-AC would let me use my psi,
anytime, anywhere. With enough drugs to numb the pain I could be a telepath
again ... just like I could have gotten up and walked on broken legs. But there
was nothing behind my ear.

“why are you closed, then?” the woman repeated.

H4njen silenced her with a single shake of his head. He
faced me without looking directly at me, as if looking at me hurt his eyes. ‘Among
the Community, one tries always to keep one’s mind a little ... open, so that
others can read one’s mood, see that one’s actions are sincere and well
meaning. The more open one is, the more ... respected one is. Within limits, of
course. Just as to keep a complete silence, to close your mind like a fist, is
an insult.”

He met my stare, finally. “To assault your privacy was also
an offenss—” He glanced at some of the others, who were frowning now around the
table. “For which I apologrze. I hope you will understand and help us to
understand you.” He bent his head, as if he were inviting me to explain ...
expecting me to open my mind to them, now that he’d shown me what the problem
was.

I shook my head.

“You won’t?” Moket snapped. “Then how can we trust you, a
stranger ... a mixed-blood?” Her tone said
half Hydran
meant
freak
on
this side of the river too.

“You came into the Community and caused this trouble!”
Ser-ali said.

“What ate we to think,” someone else muttered, speaking to
Hanjen, “when the Humans send such a one to us, asking for our help? Except to
think they want trouble for us with the FTA too: maybe an excuse to take over
the last of our sacred grounds?”

“Why should we believe anything you say when all you give us
is words?”

“I can’t,” I said, my guts knotting, my mind clenched. “I
can’t ... do it.” Knowing they had every right to ask didn’t change anything. I
couldn’t do rt.
Couldn’t. Couldn’t.

“You don’t know how?” another woman, younger, asked me. “You
can’t control your Gift?” She glanced at the man sitting next to her. “He is
like a—” The words just stopped, as if I’d suddenly gone deaf. She’d slipped into
telepathic speech. I wondered if she didn’t want to say it out loud in front of
me or whether she didn’t know how to. I watched her make an odd gesture,
jerking her hands up.

“No,” I murmured. “I could do it once. I can’t now.” The
urge to confess rose in my throat; I swallowed it down.

Hanjen pressed his lips together. “I am what the Humans call
an ‘ombudsman,’ you know. I am trusted by the Community to ... look into
troubled minds. To search out the blockage ... to try to heal or resolve it.”

“You can’t help me,” I said, almost angrily. “No one can. A
lot of others have tried.”

“A lot of Humans,” he said softly. “will you allow me—?” He
seemed as reluctant to ask it as I was to let it happen, But I realized that if
I refused, it would be the last I saw of any of them.

I nodded, my hands white-knuckled. I tried to relax, but the
filaments of lambent energy deep in my brain only became more tangled, more
impenetrable, the harder I tried to open myself. I felt Hanjen run up on my
defenses, his concentration snagging on razor wire as he searched for some
unguarded point of entry some chink in my arrnor that would give him a way
inside.

My birthright had given me just one facet of the Gift, a
single psi talent—telepathy. But I’d been good at it, damn good. I was still
good at protecting myself. Too good. Nothing got in; nothing got out. The
psiotherapists I’d seen had all told me the same thing: Someday I would be in
control again; they just couldn’t tell me when. Only I would know when I was
ready to become a telepath again.

But I was never going to be ready, not for this—letting a
stranger loot the wreckage of my life, letting him put a name to every one of
my sins ... witness the moment I’d made a bloody ruin of another telepath’s
mind and body, using my mind and a gun. I could never let them see what I’d
told to Perrymeade and Sand, who’d never understand. I could never let them see
the truth—

“Death!” Hanjen spat out the word, pressing his eyes. Slowly
he lowered his hands. “You are filled with death ....” He shook his head,
staring at me. “You have killed?” he demanded. “How could they send you to us
knowing you have done such a thing? Did they think we would not see it? Did
they really think we are as blind as they are?”

I shut my eyes. The other Council members stood up one by
one around the table, spitting on me with words: spoken words, some in a
language that I couldn’t understand ... some that I could, and none of them
were forgiving, or kind. Then they began to disappear, blinking out of
existence as I watched. I felt the soft inrush of air against my skin.

“Stop!” Hanjen said out loud.

There were more angry murmurs from the Hydrans still standing
around the table; more silence with hands gesturing, pointing at me. Not one of
them looked at me or offered me a chance to explain something that was beyond
their comprehensiorl ....

All at once spacetime parted around me; the world went black
as I was torn out of reality by a kind of energy transference I recognized
instinctively, even though I’d never control it—

And then I was in the courtyard; everything was brightness
and confusion. I sat down hard on the ancient tiles, because suddenly there
wasn’t a chair under me.

I sat stunned, blinking up at the shadow play of dusty
leaves; at Perrymeade hurrying toward me from where he’d been waiting beside
the mod. I started to pick myself up.

Suddenly Hanjen was standing there between us. Perrymeade
recoiled in surprise; I fell back onto my hands.

“What—?” Perrymeade broke off, tried again. “What does this
mean?” The sound of his voice was pathetic, like the look on his face.

Hanjen shook his head. “We cannot have him here,” he said. “You
should not have brought him. He is not one of us.”

Perrymeade looked at me, back at Hanjen. “What do you mean?”
he said. “Of course he is—”

“He is alive.” Hanjen’s glance touched me, flicked away
again. He searched Perrymeade’s face; his eyes shifted, clouding. “I see that
you do not understand this, Janos.” His mouth thinned with what could have been
frustration, or simply disgust. “If you wish to discuss the kidnapping further,
join us inside. But not with this one.” He turned his back on us both as he
said it. He walked awit), moving with inhuman grace, but still moving 1ik9 a
human, so that Perrymeade could follow.