Dreamfall (20 page)

“The Council has lost sight of the Way,” she went oo, as if
my speech was as opaque as my thoughts. “That happened long ogo, before you
were even born. They can no longer see anything clearly .... You suffered a
terrible wound. You must hold the wound closed,” she said gently, “until it
heals. You are a good person.”

I felt my face redden again. “You don’t understand! I killed
SOmgOng—”

“So ...” she said, as if she finally understood.

“I’ll go now.” I started to get up.

“You are a miracle,” she said, and bowed her head to me. “I
am humbled in your presence.”

“I’m not a fucking miracle,” I said, choking on anger. “I’m
just a fucking ‘breed.” I started for the door; stopped short as someone came
through it. Hanjen.

He stopped too, staring at me the way I must have been
staring at him. “‘W’hat arc you doing here?” he asked.

“Leaving,” I said. I tried to move past him but he blocked my
way. He glanced toward Grandmother and said something sharp and querulous in
Hydran. And then there was dead silence in the room. I watched their faces, the
only thing that told me they were still communicating.

At last Hanjen turned back to me and made a deeper bow than
I’d ever seen a Hydran give to a human, “
Namaste,
”
he murmured.
The change in his expression was so complete that I didn’t know what the hell
to make of it. “Please forgive me,” he munnured. “I have behaved in a way that
causes me shame.”

I frowned, not certain what he meant; shrugged, because it
seemed to be an apology. And then I pushed on past him.

He caught my arm; let it go again as I looked at him. “Please,
stay,” he said. “‘We need to finish what we came here to do.”

“What’s that?” I said, hearing the sullenness in my voice.

“{Jnderstand each other.” He faced me without expression.

“Sit down,” Grandmother said. “Sit down, Bian.”

I glanced behind me, wondering who she meant. She was looking
at me. She gestured, like I was a stubborn child.

“My name’s Cat,” I said.

She shook her head, made patient
sit down
motions
again.

I stayed where I was, frowning.

“Cat is your name among the Humails,” Hanjen said. “This is
a Hydran name, for when you are with your mother’s people.”

I looked at him, speechless. I looked back at Grandmother finally,
wondering why she hadn’t simply told me herself .... But it wasn’t her business
to talk with humans; it was his. And she couldn’t simply let me into her mind.
Maybe she was tired of talking. “What does
Bian
mean?” I asked.

“It means ‘hidden.’” Hanjen smiled.

“Is that a joke?” I asked, because I couldn’t tell what he
was smiling about, and he wasn’t a friend of mine.

He looked blank. “No,” he said.

I moved past him, drawn back toward the table as if Grandmother
had a magnetic field.

Hanjen followed, stood looking down at the empty tabletop. “I’ve
missed dinner,” he said.

Grandmother smiled and shook her head. The children who’d
taken the trencher away appeared in the doorway behind us, coming at her silent
call like they’d been conjured out of the air. They brought a dish to the table
and set it down so carefully that the flame barely wavered.

Hanjen smiled too, and made one of those bows to the
children, to her, before he sat down cross-legged. He started to eat, not using
a spoon. He looked up at me—stopped, swallowing, os if he realized he couldn’t
eat and communicate with a human at the same time. “Forgive me,” he mumbled. “It
was a long walk. I am very hungry.”

“You walked here from Fre—from town?” I asked. He nodded. “Why?”

He took another mouthful of food. “Out of respect,” he said,
like it was obvious.

“For what?” I pushed, annoyed.

“For myself,” he murmured, still eating. “For my body, my
Gift—my beliefs.”

I shook my head.

“It is the Way.” He was beginning to sound impatient; I saw
him glance at Grandmother, as if she’d said something, and swallow his
irritation like a mouthful of stew. “The body and the mind deserve equal
reverence; otherwise a person is not truly whole. The
oyasin
has been
giving me instruction.”

“
Oyasin
?” I asked. Wauno had called her that before.

“It means ‘guide’—she is a guide to the Way and a holder of
our beliefs and traditions.”

I looked at Grandmother. That fit what Wauno had said, but
it didn’t fit the reverence in his voice as he said it. “You mean, a religious
leader?” I looked back at him.

“Not a ‘leader,’ in the sense that Humans use it. ‘Guide’ is
closer.
Ke
is everywhere: it is the life force of the Allsoul,
something you might call the ‘god-within-us.’ But there is only one Way that
each of us finds ....” He glanced at Grandmother like he needed guidance right
here, right now. “It is difficult to explain, in words.”

“The Way which can be told is not the eternal Way,” Grandmother
said. I thought of how names were shared among the Community: the spoken names,
the true ones.

Hanjen sighed. “Most of our people no longer believe that
ke
even exists. That is one reason I decided to seek the Way for myself, with
the
oyasin’s
guidance.”

I sat down cross-legged midway between them. I watched him
eat. “I’ve eaten this food before. A long time ago.”

He glanced up, first at Grandmother and then at me. “Is that
so?” he said. “Where?”

“I think my mother made it.”

He stopped eating. “You lived here as a child?”

I shook my head. “On Ardattee. In Oldcity ... a place the Federation
uses to dump its garbage.”

He went on staring at me, as if he’d lost my meaning, fallen
off my train of thought because there was nothing for him to hold onto.

“It’s a relocation dump. A few Hydrans ended up there after
they’d been driven off of their own worlds. But there were more humans ... the
kind who don’t fit into a keiretsu like Tau.”

He blinked. “Where is your mother now?”

“Dead. For a long time.” I shook my head. “That’s all I
know.”

“Your father? He was ... Human?” He looked like a man being
led blindfolded through a strange room.

He was finally getting an idea of how I felt. I shrugged. “I
don’t know anything about him.” Whenever I thought about it, all that I came up
with was the sort of thing I’d heard from the Corpses two nights ago: my mother
was a whore, my father was a rapist. That was the only way my existence made
any sense. I tried not to think about it any more than I had to. “It’s not a
coincidence, your being here tonight, is it?”

He looked disoriented, like trying to follow my conversation
was difficult enough without my changing the subject. Finally he said, “When I
last saw the
oyasin,
I showed her our ... meeting. And she showed me
that I had not seen clearly. It was her feeling that if you and I met again,
without the Council, we might understand each other better.”

“That wouldn’t be hard,” I said.

He looked down. “The Council once had the best interests of
our people in mind. But now there are too many of us with—limitations.
Sometimes the Council members show too much self-interest; they always show a
lack of perspective. We all want our society to become more open to the Humans,
because we believe that is the only way we will ever prosper, under the circumstances.”

“By kissing Tau’s ass.”

His pupils narrowed, slowly widened again.

“Is that how you feel?”

“I think we must learn to live with the ones who have come
to share our world—accept life on their terms—because that is how things are
now. Denying what is obvious goes against the Way and is only wasted effort. We
have to turn the energy of our anger to useful ends. Otherwise it will destroy
us. It has destroyed too many of us already.” He glanced down.

I half smiled. “The Way tells you that when life gives you
lemons, you make lemonade.”

“Excuse me ... ?” He shook his head. “‘Lemons’?” he said. “You
mean, ‘Humans’?”

“It’s a kind of fruit. Sour. You have to fix it up.”

He half smiled, this time.

“So the Council wants things to stay the way they are,” I
said, still trying to get everything clear in my mind. “They believe that’s the
only way to get something more from Tau?”

He nodded. “Or, at least, to not lose more. They are very conservative
in their attitudes.”

“Is that what you believe too?” Asking it again.

He didn’t say anything for a few heartbeats, but he wasn’t
mindspeaking Grandmother. I glanced at her: She was looking at him, but her
face was unreadable. Finally he said, “I feel that working within the law is
the only way to achieve real progress. Even to change the rules—one must do it
carefully. So yes, I guess I am a conservative. HARM calls me an enemy of our
people—a collaborator. And yet ... sometimes I think I am a little sick of ‘lemonade.’”
The shadow of a smile came back, but it didn’t touch his eyes.

“So you do think things ought to change; that they could be
better?”

“Have you spent any time on this side of the river?” he
asked.

I nodded.

“So have I,” he said. There was no trace of smile anywhere
on his face now. “But few Humans have. The only ones who come here regularly
come for what they can bleed out of us—which is little enough, anymore. We need
so many things—we need access to the kinds of things Tau keeps to itself.
Knowledge and resources that we no longer possess independently. That is not
entirely the fault of the Humans—I am the first to admit our society was in decline
before they ever reached this world. But now we don’t even have the
opportunities—”

“That woman, Miya, the one who kidnapped the little boy. She
was trained by Tau, wasn’t she? To do the kind of therapy she did for him. They
let her work over there without monitoring her psi.”

His pupils nalrowed again. I had the feeling that he was
angry, or maybe he was just suspicious. I wished I knew which it was. “Yes,” he
said. “There are many things the Gift could do for Humans, if only they had the
... courage to trust us. Opportunity can flow both ways. It should; or anything
we gain would only be charity. That would not solve our problem. Our problem is
a lack of
hope,
more than a lack of
things.
”

The Council mistakes one for the other,” Grandmother said. “Their
need is like an infection. But they are using the wrong cure. Too many
things
make everything worse.”

Hanjen nodded, looking resigned. “What we need is the chance
to
do
as much as
get.
”

I remembered life on the streets of Oldcity, one empty
aimless day/night flowing into another. I’d done a lot of drugs then, anytime I
could hustle the credit, or even when I couldn’t, trying to fill the emptiness
of my existence, the empty hole in my mind where something had been taken from
me that I didn’t even know the name of. Trying to forget that there was nothing
better to do, no hope for me of ever having anything better to do.

I sat staring at the trencher of food in front of me. “I
know,” I munnured, finally. I watched Hanjen consider eating more; watched him
look at me and stop.

“What about HARM?” I asked. “Where do they fit in?”

“They don’t,” he said flatly. “They have turned their backs
on our traditions and abandoned the Way. They are wandering in the wilderness.
By trying to ‘save’ us, they will end up destroying us.”

I glanced at Grandmother, remembering that Protz had claimed
she had ties to the radicals. If that was true, it didn’t seem likely they’d
turned their back on the traditions she believed in. “I expect they don’t see
it that way,” I said to Hanjen, still watching Grandmother out of the corner of
my eye. I wondered what she knew, wished I knew how to find out. She smiled at
me, and I didn’t have any idea why.

I looked at Hanjen again. “Why can’t you ... communicate
with the radicals? If you believe that they’re doing more harm than good, can’t
you show them why—open your mind up, and show them? Have you ever let them try
to show you how they see the situation?”

He was perfectly still for a moment, traveling through the
words in slow motion to get to my point. “Tell me something first,” he said
finally. “Is it true you were forced to kill someone, and survived? And that is
why you don’t use your Gift?”

Don’t.
Not
can’t .... Don’t,
“Yeah,” I
whispered.

“Then it is true that your part in the kidnapping was
completely by chance? An accident?”

I nodded. “How did you find out?” He hadn’t known it at the
Council meeting; none of them had.

He bent his head at Grandmother. “But she said I must ask
you myself.”

She’d never seen me before tonight. I glanced at her, wondering
how long she’d known about it.

“The Council was afraid, when they discovered what you were—”
Hanjen broke off, looking like he’d just stepped in shit. He shook his head. “We
were afraid that Tau had sent you to ... cause trouble for us. To somehow tie
the Council into the kidnapping. To tie us to the radicals. The fact that you
were an—outsider, claiming to understand us, and yet you kept your mind
completely closed .... When I felt everyone else’s suspicion, it became my own.
It was very hard to understand all this, you see—” His hands fluttered; he
probably didn’t look that helpless very often. Satisfaction took some of the
sting out of my memory of the Council meeting, but not much.

“Why should you be any better than the rest of them?” I
asked, since he seemed to feel that he was.

“I am a
daesin,
”
he said. “The closest word
you have for it is ‘ombudsman.’ I am trained to avoid the contagious emotion
that overtook the Council. But I allowed my—suspicions to control me.”