Dreamfall (25 page)

“Before you throw me back,” I said, “maybe you ought to ask
what else I know.” I turned to Miya. “You’re right. I helped you the other
night because I wanted to. And I want to help you now. I know what Tau’s trying
to do to the Hydrans here—the same

DRtrAMnALL / t67

thing the Federation’s been trying to do to every Hydran,
every psion—” I broke off again. “I didn’t mean that. I meant ...”

“Humans,” Naoh said, as Miya gave me an odd look, “are a
disease without a cure. None of them are any good.”

“You know, I keep trying to believe that,” I said softly. “But
I keep meeting the wrong ones. Ones who keep changing my mind.”

“You can say that,” Naoh muttered. “You have Human blood.”

“That doesn’t count for anything across the river.” I shook
my head. “That doesn’t change the truth, either. If you believe all humans are
the same and they’re all scum, how does that make you any different than they
s1s—‘t”

They were all silent this time. I wondered whether they were
talking it over mind-to-mind, or whether I’d actually shut them up. I sat down
suddenly on the bench near Miya, buckling under the weight of too many hours
awake. I felt her eyes on me. I looked back at her. Even prepared for what I’d
find, I couldn’t look away.

Finding my voice again, I said, “I know someone who can help
you. A vip in the FTA, back on Earth ....”

Naoh laughed in disbelief. “How would you know someone like
that?”

“I worked as a bodyguard for Lady Elnear taMing.” I held
Miya’s gaze. “She’s on the Federation’s Security Council.”

Miya nodded, her surprise showing. Maybe she hadn’t heard of
the Lady, but she knew enough to know that the Security Council made policy for
the entire Federation.

“Natan Isplanasky is a friend of hers; he oversees the FTA’s
Contract Labor Services, as much as anyone can. He can order an investigation—”

“Why would he help us?” Miya asked. “Contract Labor doesn’t
hire us out for money.”

“I think he’d help you because justice matters to him.”

Naoh made a rude noise.

“I was a contract laborer,” I said slowly. ‘At the
Federation’s telhassium mines, on Cinder. The bondies there were as expendable
as dirt. If someone hadn’t paid my bond ...” I was seeing Jule taMing’s face
suddenly, instead of Miya’s. I blinked the room back into focus. “When I met
Isplanasky, all I wanted was the chance to spit on him. But when I saw what was
in his mind ....” They both stared at me, then, but they didn’t intemrpt. “The
fact that the Feds treated their bondies worse than most combines did mattered
to him. I was nothing, an ex-street tat, a freak; but what I’d been through
mattered to him. He spends most of his life jacked into the Net—he was the
closest thing to God I’ll probably ever see, but even he couldn’t know
everything that went wrong in his universe.”

“Did he make things right, then?” Miya asked.

I shrugged. “I know he made a start. Like you said—you can’t
get to justice without the truth to lead you there.” I looked up again, half
smiling. “Besides, he owes me more than one lousy beer. Tell me what he needs
to know.”

Miya was silent again, looking at the others. I watched
their faces, their hands, the subtle clues to their interaction. At last she
turned back to me. “We can tell you. We can show you ... if you have Hydran
eyes.”

I wondered whether she meant that literally or figuratively.
I nodded.

Miya got up and led the way out of the room. The two men who’d
been in the room all along came with us. As we walked together down a dim
hallway, they finally told me their names: Soral and Tiene. When they looked at
my eyes this time, the only thing their own eyes registered was curiosity.

The hall ended at a timeworn spiral staircase. “Watch your
step,” Miya said to me, as if she wasn’t sure whether I could see in the dark.
I wondered why Hydrans even bothered with stairs. Then I remembered Hanjen,
walking out from town to visit Grandmother
Respecting his body, as well as
his mind.

We started upward, not down. I didn’t ask why. The nanow
stairwell was dark, even to my eyes. I heard the suffeal echoes of life going
on invisibly somewhere beyond the walls: hollow banging, clattering, rattles;
somewhere a thin, high whistling. I couldn’t make out voices, if there were
any; couldn’t make sense of the random sounds. The Hydrans ahead ahead of me
climbed without speaking or looking back. The stairwell’s spiral became
tighter; I watched my footing more carefully, following them up through the
funnel of silence.

Finally we stepped through a doorway into the clear night
air. I

DKEAMF’ALL / t69

took a deep breath. We were standing on a platform at the
top of a tower above the building’s domed roof. The building beneath us was
identical to a hundred others I could see, looking out over the town. Most of
them were domed and spired like this one; something I hadn’t realized when I
was wandering through the streets down below.

I turned back, saw Miya’s face silvered by the rising
crescent of Refuge’s moon. I stared at her a moment too long, again; looked
away as she caught me.

I studied the surface of the pillar beside me, one of half a
dozen that supported a smaller, transparent dome over our heads. My fingers
traced its cool frescoes, disturbing a layer of velvet dust. I couldn’t tell
what material the pillars were made of or what the designs on their surface
meant. A slender metal tube dangled from a cord against the post beside me.

“This is called a
sh’an.
It’s
for ... an,
”
Miya
said softly behind me, hesitating as if there was no human word that would say
exactly what she meant. The Hydran word registered in my mind as
meditatiordprayer/dreams.
“For when the
an lirr
—the cloud-whales—would come to share their
en
with us. Often it rained then, or snowed, and so the
sh ‘an
is
covered.” she moved away; a cold wind filled the space between us as she looked
out at the night. “But they don’t come anymore. It almost never rains or snows.”

I looked out across the rooftops, away into the distance
where the dregs of the river emptied into the darkened land of the cloud-reefs,
the hidden world of the Homeland. “Why don’t they come anymore?”

She shrugged, resting against the edge of the platform’s low
wall. “From what I’ve ... heard, Tau manipulates Refuge’s mag-netosphere to
draw the cloud-whales to areas where they have more ‘productive’ dreams.” She
shook her head. “But the
oyasin
says they left us because they no longer
know us, because we don’t follow the Way ...”

“The
oyasin?
‘Gtandmothsy’—’1”

She faced me without surprise. “Yes.”

I grimaced.

“What?” she asked.

“Protz,” I said. “I didn’t want to believe it.”

“That an
oyasiru
shares our goals—1”

I shook my head. “That Protz could be right about something.”

She actually smiled.

“How involved is she?”

“She teaches us to see the Way clearly. She teaches us our
heritage. She doesn’t judge us for the kinds of things we have to do to save
our people. Nothing else.”

“She didn’t tell you to kidnap Job], then.”

“Of course not.” A flicker of irritation showed in her eyes.
“That isn’t her Way ... i.t’s ours.” Her hand tightened into a fist, but the
gesture wasn’t a threat. I thought of the truth-swearing pledge in Oldcity
handtalk.

“They say you can tell when a combine vip is lying,” I said.
“His lips move.”

She glanced away instead of smiling this time. I wondered
whether they said the same thing about all humans on this side of the river.

“Do you believe the cloud-whales would return here if they
were given a choice?”

She looked up at me again. This time I’d surprised her. “I
don’t know ....” She reached for the metal tube hanging against the column. She
raised it to her lips, almost reverently, and I realized that it was a flute.
She began to play it. The music was like the motion of clouds across the sky.

“Is that how you call them?” I asked, my mind falling away
into memories of other music on other worlds under other skies.

She shook her head again, gently replacing the flute against
the column.

I glanced down at my feet, somewhere in the shadows. When I
looked up again, the bat-thing was sitting on her shoulder. She stroked it
absently with her hand. I wasn’t sure where it had come from.

I watched it, wary. “One of those tried to put my eye out,”
I said.

She looked surprised again; the surprise faded. “Some people
train
taku
to attack anyone they sense ... closedness in.”

“Why?” I asked, too sharply.

“someone with guarded thoughts might plan to hurt them,” she
said, almost reluctantly, almost as if she could feel the guilt that burned my
face. “But
taku
ate gentle ....”

I looked back as she turned her head to nuzzle the
bat-thing. It rubbed its furred forehead against her, making soft clutterings
and squeaks. “It shows what we’ve come to, that anyone even thought of doing
something that unnatural.” I watched her try to urge the bat-thing off her
shoulder toward me. It clung to her awkwardly, stubbornly, clutching her heavy
coat with taloned fingers.

I wasn’t sure whether to be embarrassed or relieved. “You
said it
sense.r
people? It’s telepathic?”

“Yes.” Again the surprised look, as if a part of her kept
forgetting that I wouldn’t know those things and couldn’t find them out for
myself. I didn’t know whether that made me feel better or just alien. “They’re
like the
mebbet,
which are native here. But the
mebbet
can’t fly,
and they aren’t telepathic. The
taku
are the only telepathic creatures
on Refuge, besides us and the cloud-whales. The cloud-whales created them.”

My breath caught. “You actually believe the cloud-whales did
that?”

“We know it. There weren’t any
taku
on Refuge until
about a thousand years ago.”

I shook my head. “Meditation is the mother of invention ....”
I wondered whether random chance had created them, like the half-finished face
I’d seen in the reef ... or whether the cloud-whales had been lonely, or
thought that the Hydrans were. “Wait a minute. You said the cloud-whales are
telepathic—?” Nothing I’d seen in the data even hinted at that.

But it fit with what Wauno had claimed: that the Hydrans experienced
a kind of thought-residue existing in the reefs. I realized suddenly that my
own response to the reef—the way my psi had seemed to come alive inside the
matrix—might not have been a fluke after all. “Then why—”

“fs this how the halfbreed is supposed to learn what we’ve
lost?” Naoh appeared out of thin air beside me.

“Jeezu!” I stumbled back; felt my face flush as Naoh looked
at me.

“
MebtakLt,
”
she said. The bat-thing—the
taku
—fluttered
around her face. I wondered what
mebtaku
meant, whether it had anything
to do with them. I couldn’t tell whether the bat-thing was glad to see her or
was threatening her. She brushed it away. It came back, and then suddenly it
was gone, like she’d wished it out of existence. Miya frowned, but if anything
more passed between them, they didn’t share it with me.

“I’ve seen what Freaktown looks like,” I said. ‘And I’ve
talked to Hanjsn—”

“Hanjen!” Naoh made a disgusted noise. “He might as well be
Human.”

“The
oyasin
trusts him,” I said. And then I said, “She
trusts me too.”

Naoh glanced at her sister, as if Miya had silently seconded
it. Naoh’s hands jerked; she shook her head. “Hanjen is a fool!” she said to
me; but she didn’t say anything about Grandmother. “He will spend his life
spitting into the wind, or else he will W to push the Humans too hard once, and
they will break him, just tike Navu—” She broke off. “I hate words,” she
murmured, looking away.

For once I understood her perfectly.
Words were nothing
but empty noise: nothing but traps.
“So do L,” I murmured. “But they’re all
I’ve got.”

“
Mebtaklt,
”
she muttered again, and the one
thing I was sure of was that it wasn’t a compliment.

I searched my freshly laid memories once more for a definition.
I couldn’t find one. “Who’s Navu?” I asked.

Something that might have been pain showed in Naoh’s eyes.
She signaled at Miya to keep quiet.

“You wanted him to understand how our people suffer.” Miya’s
face hardened. “Then let him see Navu.”

Naoh’s gaze broke first, for the first time since I’d begun
to watch them interact. At last she made what I took for a shrug.

And then I had my answer, as lightning struck my brain—

Sunonnly i was out in the street, staggering with surprise.
Miya and Naoh were standing beside me. The free-fonn walls told me that we were
still in Freaktown. Other Hydrans moved around and past us, but none were the
ones who’d been with us before. I swore under my breath, knowing Naoh had done
it this way—transporting us without warning—intentionally.

Naoh was already striding toward the entrance of a building.
I followed with Miya. Miya was tense and silent beside me, keeping her gaze on
her sister’s back. Neither of them seemed concerned about being recognized. I
wondered whether HARM had so little support in the Community that it wasn’t a
risk ... or whether they had so much. I kept my head down, not wanting anyone
to look at me; wishing for once that I could make my flesh and bones as invisible
as my thoughts.

In Freaktown it was hard to tell where one building began
and another ended; but as we went inside, I saw that this one was large by any
standard. Hallways fanned out in all directions from a central hub by the
entrance. The place reminded me of a transit station: a trickle of people
circulated through its space, sat on benches, dozed on mats, even now, in the
middle of the night. Some of them were obviously sick; some of them were bloody
from injuries. The near silence was still the most alien thing about the place.