Dreamfall (18 page)

Kissindre turned to look at him and missed the annoyance
that was suddenly on Wauno’s face. I saw her hesitate, weighing the fact that Ezra
hadn’t been invited against his reaction if she didn’t tell him. “We have a
chance to ... to meet with an informant who knows about the reefs.” She glanced
at Wauno, back at Ezra. ‘Across the river.” One word she never used was “Freaktown.”

Ezra stiffened, not hiding his reaction fast enough. “Is
this something your uncle arranged?” he asked.

“No.” She folded her artns, as if she didn’t see the point
of the question. “This is someone Wauno knows.”

He looked at Wauno. ‘Are you sure this is safe—what with the
unrest and all? After all, that kidnapping—”

“It’s safe,” Wauno said.

“Well, we should let your uncle know—” Ezra turned back.

“And it’s a private party,” Wauno said. “He’s not invited.
If you don’t like that, staY here.”

Ditreksen frowned. If Wauno had been trying to lose him, he’d
guessed wrong ..’If you’re determined to go,” he said to Kissindre, “then I’m
certainly going with you”‘

She forced a smile, and he took it at face value.

wauno’s jaw tightened. But then he shrugged and settled behind
the controls again. He took us back across the river as the evening deepened
into night. Kissindre sat up front beside him==They spent the time discussing
the cloud-whales, the reefs, and how their existence had influenced Hydran culture.

I sat back, listening. Ezra sat across from me; I felt him
glancing at me like a thief would, stealing my concentration, until finally I
had to look at him.

“Is it true you used to be a contract laboret?” he said.

I glanced forward at Kissindre, realtzing she was the only
person who could have told him that. I looked back at him. “What about rt?” I
said.

“I always wondered how you and I ended up in the same place.”

“I had to kill Someone,” I said. “How about you—?”

He grunted in disgust and looked away.

“Did Kissindre tell you that her grandfather was a bondie?”

His face mottled. “You liar.”

“It’s true.” Kissindre looked back over her shoulder at us. “He
was, Ezra,”

.. YOU nevef tOld me—”

“why?” she asked .. oDoes it make a difference to you?”

He didn’t answer.

Wauno glanced back once, and away. There was dead silence in
the transport’s cabin for the rest of the flight.

I looked down at Freaktown, its random streets, its patterns
of light only a dim echo of the bright geometrics of Tau Riverton. Looking down
on the two sides of the river from up here, cloud-high, I thought about the
differences between them and about how, in spite of the differences, from up
here those patterns of light laid out on the darkness were only echoes of the
same need.

Wauno didn’t circle down to land in the maze of Freaktown
streets the way I’d expected him to. We flew on over it, not losing altitude
until we were almost beyond sight of both sides of the river. Ditreksen kept
moving restlessly in his seat. He murmured something to Kissindre as we began
our descent over a candle flame of light in the utter blackness. She ran her
finger across her lips and didn’t answer him.

As we descended I realized that the light was coming from a
structure the size of a low urban stack, a solitary island in the night sea.

Wauno set us down in the shadowland beyond its bright entrance.
I could see someone silhouetted against the light, but I couldn’t tell anything
about whoever waited there.

The hatch opened. Wauno signaled us out of our seats. He
picked up a box that he’d stowed behind his own seat and started out with it.

“Aren’t those our suppliss—?” Kissindre asked. She gave him
a look that didn’t want to accuse him but wouldn’t let it pass.

He shrugged. “ft’s traditional to bring a gift of food when
you visit. You can always get more,” he said, lowering his voice, emphasis on
the
you.
‘All you have to do is ask.”

Her mouth thinned. She looked past him out the hatchway,
looked back, and nodded.

“wait a minute,” Ezra said, coming forward.

“ft’s traditional.” Kissindre put a hand on his arm until he
eased up. “We can get more.”

He shrugged, and his own mouth quirked. “We’re invited to
dinner, but we have to bring our own food.”

Wauno just looked at him and smiled. Carrying the box, he
went down the ramp and out.

I followed the others down the ramp and toward the light.
Just for a moment I thought the figure waiting for us looked familiar; almost
thought I could make the silhouette into the form of the woman I’d seen in the
streets of Freaktown, a woman canying a child ....

I blinked as we entered the corona of glare, and I saw a
Hydran woman holding a child. I wavered, slowing—saw an old woman, her back
bent by the weight of time, and the child in her arms: a Hydran child, not a
human one.

The child’s eyes went wide at the sight of us appearing suddenly
in the light, like angels. Or
devils.
She turned into a wriggling eel in
the old woman’s grip. The old woman let her slide down. she disappeared from
the patch of light as suddenly as we’d come into it. Everything happened
without a word.

I took a deep breath. The air filled me with coldness. I
tried to make myself believe that she’d run away from the sight of all of us,
not just from me. I listened to the noises in the outer darkness, sounds made by
things I didn’t know the names or even the shapes of, the murrnuring voices of
an alien night. The strange perfume of another world’s foliage was in the wind.
I took a step deeper into the band of light.

Wauno moved past me, carrying the box of supplies. “Grandmother.”
He stoppld in front of the old woman and made a small bow, murrnuring something
I couldn’t make out. She bobbed her head in return and said the same thing. It
sounded like “
Namaste.
”
Her face was a netmap of time; its lines
deepened as she smiled. A veil covered her eyes. It was transparent enough that
I could look into them, but it gave her gaze an unnerving shadow of doubt.

Wauno stepped back, pointing us out to her; I heard our
names leapfrog out of a stream of unintelligible Hydran speech.

She bent her head at me, still smiling, a smile so open I
was sure it had to be hiding something. I just couldn’t tell what. She spoke to
me, still in Hydran, with a look in her eyes that said she expected me to know
what she was saying.

I looked at Wauno. “She only speaks Hydran?”

He shrugged. “She says she knew you were coming,”

I wondered whether she meant to the planet or just to
dinner. “
Namaste,
”
I murmured, and bobbed my head.

Grandmother nodded, as if she was satisfied. She looked past
me at Kissindre, who looked uncertain, and at Ezra, who frowned, back at Wauno
and at me, as if she was trying to read something into the way we stood
together. She was probably reading more than that, but if she was, I couldn’t
tell. At last she made a motion that included all of us. She led the way
inside, moving slowly.

“What does
namaste
mean?” I asked Wauno as we
followed her in.

“It means ‘We are one.’” He half smiled.

I watched Grandmother’s slow progress ahead of me, the heavy
knot of white hair at the back of her neck bobbing with her motion. She wore a
long tunic over loose pants, a style that I hadn’t seen on the other side of
the river. Without the burden of the child weighing her down, her back was
straight and strong. But still she moved slowly, almost stubbornly, as if it
took an effort of will. I wondered how old she was.

I looked back at Wauno. “How did you learn to speak Hydran?
There aren’t any files in Tau’s access—”

“Yes, there are.” He glanced at me.

I felt my hands tighten. “Can you get me into one?”

He nodded.

“What is this place?” We were following a long hallway lined
with closed doors. The building had the sinuous, nonlinear feel of the
Community Hall, but without the eye-popping decoration. “What was it? It’s old
...” I could feel its age weighing on my thoughts the way the child had weighed
down the old woman.

“Yes, it’s old,” Ezra muttered, behind my back ... your
percep-tiveness continues to amaze me.”

“I guess you’d call it a monastery,” Wauno said, ignoring
Ezra and the look I gave him. ‘A retreat. I can’t find a better word for it in
our language. Nobody seems to remember how old it is. The data could be in the
records somewhere, but a lot of the historical material has been lost. The
religious tradition that it belonged to has almost died out. The building was
abandoned for years.”

I wondered what sort of beliefs the original inhabitants of
this place had held; what had made them lose faith and abandon it. ‘And now?” I
asked as Grandmother stopped in front of a closed door. The door opened,
although she didn’t touch it. I didn’t see an automatic sensor.

“Most of the time Grandmother stays here alone. She’s an
oyasin
It means something like ‘memoty,,’ or sometimes ‘lamp’: a keeper of the
traditions.”

Grandmother disappeared through the doorway, and light suddenly
filled the space beyond.

“What about the child we saw?” Kissindre asked softly.

I turned back in the doorway. Wauno gave one of his shrugs and
said, ‘Sometimes people come out here from town, stay for a while, when theY
need to get awaY.”

From the conditions I’d seen there, ? lot of people must
need to get away from something in Freaktown. “How many people are here right
now?”

He shook his head. “Don’t know. I’m not a mind reader.” He
smiled, and went on in.

Grandmother sat waiting for us at a low table, its edges as
free-form as everything else in this place. There were no seats, only kneeling
mats. The light came from a bowl in the center of the table where a burning
wick drifted in a quiet pool of lamp oil. The illumination it gave off made the
room as bright as day to my eyes ... Hydran eyes. The room probably seemed dark
to the others. The lamp gave off a thin, spiraling tendril of smoke.

I felt myself relax finally, realizing that I’d gotten this
far without anyone attacking me, without Grandmother driving me out—without
being struck dead by some force I couldn’t even feel, the potential eneigy of
millennia stored up in the walls of this place like heat lightning, waiting for
something like me to set it off.

I took u d”“p breath, inhaling the warm, heavy odors that
filled the room. The air was thick with spices like none I’d ever smelled
before, except maybe a couple of nights ago, in a hole-in-the-wall Freaktown
eatery. The smell of food made me remember how hungry I was. I settled onto a
mat, looking across the table at the old woman. Her green eyes studied me,
hardly blinking, as the others settled around me. I swallowed saliva, keeping
my hands off the table surface until I learned what the rules were.

When we were all sitting, Grandmother began to speak again,
gesturing toward the center of the dark, featureless wooden slab, where half a
dozen small ceramic cups were laid out in a circle around a squat, amber-glass
container of liquid. From the size of the cups, I guessed that the drink wasn’t
water. Probably liquor==because alcohol affected humans and Hydrans pretty much
the same way. ProbablY strong liquor.

“She wants each of us to take a cup,” Wauno said. Grandmother
pointed at me.

I reached out, almost picked up the closest cup. But then I
noticed that each cup was different. Each one had been formed and painted
individually, given its own subtle charactet. I looked at them all, feeling
everyone’s gaze settle on my hand while it hesitated in the air, and the
seconds stretched. Ezra shifted his legs under him and sighed.

I reached for a cup on the far side of the circle, the one
that I liked best.
This was a test.
I wondered what the choice told
Grandmother about me, or whether the answer lay in the act of choosing itself,
or whether it was really no test at all.

Kissindre’s hand hung in the air above the table. She
glanced at me, then at Wauoo, who nodded. She chose a cup, reaching past me to
pick it up. Wauno took one next, slowly, thoughtfully. Ezra took the cup
sitting in front of him, pulled it toward him, his impatience skreeking it
along the tabletop.

Deep golden liquid appeared in my cup, in all our cups at
once. Ezra jerked back. I heard Kissindre’s indrawn breath. Wauno looked into
his cup like he didn’t see anything unusual. I wondered what it took to get a
reaction out of him. I swallowed my surprise, hoping that at least it hadn’t
been obvious to the humans in the room.

Grandmother chose a cup, using her hand, like everyone else.
But I watched the cup change: empty one second, full the next. She lifted her
cup. Wauno lifted his, and the rest of us followed him as she spoke words to
the air. The words began to take on a singsong tone, shifting into what could
have been a prayer. The tendril of pale smoke from the flame at the center of
the table began to unravel like a silken rope into finer and finer strands. I
sat breathing in the scent of the liquor in my cup, hypnotized, as the separate
strands of smoke began to circle in the air.

The smoke images vanished, suddenly cut off, like the old
woman’s song. The flame wavered and came back. The smoke rose straight up,
undisturbed. Grandmother looked at me across the table; I held my breath. But
her eyes released me again without accusing me of anything. She looked at Ezra
for a long minute; I watched him ignore her. The smoke from the lamp suddenly
looped sideways, as if there was a draft, and blew into his eyes. He coughed
and waved his hands.

There was no draft. I smiled. Grandmother lifted her cup to
us and said, “
Namaste.
”

I echoed it, along with Wauno and Kissindre. Grandmother
took a sip; we followed one by one. I kept my first sip small, until