Dreamfall (26 page)

“What is this—?” I murmured.

“A hospital,” Miya said.

I stopped moving. “I thought it was a transit station.” But
even a transit station should have had accesses or data kiosks visible.

“There aren’t any transit stations here,” she said.

I glanced at her, wondering whether the irony was
intentional.

“I never saw a hospital that looked like this.” This place
made Oldcity’s decaying med center look state of the art. This was like
something from Prespace Earth, so primitive that it was actually
unrecognizable.

Her expression said that she knew exactly what I was
thinking. She’d been trained as a therapist across the river. She must have
seen for herself what a modern corporate medical facility was like.

“This place isn’t a hole because you prefer it that way, is
it?” Not a question.

Her gaze glanced off my face. “You mean,” she said bitterly,
“because, with our alien mental powers, we can cure all diseases or injuries
and don’t need intrusive Fluman methods of diagnosis and treatmsnf—J”

“Yeah,” I said.

“No.” She shook her head, pressing her fingers to her
temples. “This is not the way we want it to be.” She turned slowly, looking at
the room the way I had, with eyes that knew better. “We have to eat or we
starve to death. We have to exercise our bodies or they waste away. Just like
Humans. If you cut us, we bleed—”

Three total strangers appeared out of thin air in the space
beside her and moved past us like we weren’t even there: a man and a woman,
both supporting a younger man, or restraining him, inside a telekinetic field
they’d spun around him. Neither one of them touched him directly; his naked
chest was a mass of dripping red, as if he’d been flayed. I wondered how the
hell a Hydran could possibly do something like that to someone else ....

He stared at me staring back at him; blood began to leak
from his nose as I watched. His eyes were all pupil, night-black. He mouthed
curses without any sound. The two Hydrans holding on to him were white-lipped
with shared pain, and their eyes were full of tears. And suddenly I understood.
He’d done it to himself.
Someone called to them from one of the
hallways, and they disappeared again.

I sucked in a ragged breath.

“We live, and we die ...” Miya went on, as if her breathing
hadn’t stopped like mine had. “Sometimes we hurt ourselves just to stop the
pain.”

DKEAMF’ALL I t75

o’Just like humanS,” I whispered.

“Humans are luckier,” she murmured. “They can tear at each
other. We can only teat at ourselves.”

I bit my lip until it hurt, and didn’t answer.

We stood together staring at the empty hallway, the nearly silent
room. At last Miya shook herself out, like she’d been hit by a physical blow. “It
is ... it is true that we have methods of healing Humans don’t,” she said,
forcing the words out, picking up the conversational thread, anchoring us in
the present. “We do some things differently. We sense things .... There ate
ways we could heal a Human. The body isn’t just a biochemical system; it’s also
a bioelectric syste111—”

I laid my hand against the metal pipe that climbed the wall
beside us, winced as a static spark leaped across the gap to my fingertips. “I
know,” I said.

“But humans aren’t constantly aware of it. We are ....” Her
glance traveled the room again. I knew she saw auras of energy whenever she saw
another person, not simply a face, a body. Probably she could even see where
they’d been injured or how sick they were. “Tau’s doctors, their med techs,
barely know half the body’s potential. They can’t even imagine how much they
miss, because they can’t
feel,
and they won’t listen—” She swallowed
frustration like bile.

I wondered how often she’d tried to get the Tau meds to see
a treatment from her perspective and failed. I imagined the hidden slurs that
hadn’t been hidden from her, the kinds of harassment, the pressure she’d
endured, day after day, just to get the training she’d needed to work with
Joby. It had taken guts and strength, no matter what her motives were. And no
matter what her motives were, since she’d been with Joby she’d done more to
help him than any human could have done.

She was still gazing out into the room, though I wasn’t sure
now whether she was just avoiding my eyes. “Once we had the technology too,”
she said. “Once it was better than anything Humans ever had—” I wondered if
that was true, or just something HARM wanted to believe. She glanced down, as
if she had her own doubts. “Tau won’t even let us access their database. If
they’d just give us that much to work with—” She broke off.

“They claim it’s impossible for Hydrans to wear the kind of
neural taps that Humans use. But that’s 4 lis—”

...
P,,Sions don’t even need a tap ....
Her words
became the carrier wave for another voice speaking: deep in my memory, a human
freak named Deadeye was telling me again how just by being a freak he’d found a
way of turning psi into cyber without any bioware at all.

The EM activity that made the warp and weft of the Net’s hidden
universe existed outside a psion’s nonnal range of function. But once Deadeye
had discovered an interface was possible, there was nothing to stop him, or any
psion, from becoming a ghost in the machine ... except Federation law and a
mandatory brainwipe.

But that didn’t change the fact that any Hydran could qeate
a psionic cyberlink ... if someone had the guts to show them how.

Deadeye had barely trusted me with his secret; he didn’t
need to tell me why. If the Feds or the combines had learned what he’d done,
xenophobia would spread like a plague through Federation space, and the noose
of persecution around the neck of every psion, human or Hydran, would tighten
....

I wasn’t ready to face the consequences of setting a change
like that in motion. I turned back to Miya, pushing the thought out of my head.

Miya was gone. I searched the crowd, half afraid she’d abandoned
me, until I spotted her standing across the room beside Naoh. Whatever they
were doing, it didn’t seem to include me. I stayed where I was, trying to
ignore the looks I got from the Hydrans moving past file, trying not to think
about their absence in my mind, or mine in theirs. I wondered what had happened
to make Miya and her sister forget my existence completely, in such a public
place.

I shifted from foot to foot, grimacing as I noticed the
time, wondering whether I was going to make it back to Riverton before somebody
discovered I was gone; wondering what Kissin-dre would do if I didn’t.
Wondering what she was doing now, sleeping, or—

Someone touched me. Someone put their hand down the front of
my pants and squeezed. “Ieezu—|” I grabbed my crotch, searching the room with a
kind of panic. No one was close enough to have touched me. Any Hydran who got
near me always seemed to veer away.

But then I saw the woman standing across the room, gazing at
me through the Brownian motion of bodies. She was Hydran, like everyone here
except me. But there was something about her any human male would recognize
instinctively—the way she dressed, the look in her eyes as she started toward
me. I knew a whore when I saw one.

“Oh, my God,” I muttered, because something was touching me
again, and it wasn’t an invisible hand. It felt like a mouth. “Oh, my God.”

I stood there, paralyzed by disbelief and sensation, as she
reached my side. “Hello, Hum&fl,” she said, speaking Standard. She smiled,
a vacant rictus, her glance searching for my databand before it found my face. “I
know what you want—” She broke off as she got a good look at me. I watched her
expression as she tried to grope my mind the way she’d groped my body; watched
her hit the wall. Just for a second she lost her composure the way I’d lost
mine. Then her smile came back, as automatic as breathing. “That’s okay, honey,”
she murunured. “I can still give you what you need ....”What she’d been doing
to me suddenly got so intense that I gasped.

“Stop it!” I hissed, glad I was wearing a coat.

“You don’t want me to stop ....” She reached out, laid
actual hands on me, running her fingers along the coat’s seal. “I know you didn’t
come to Freaktown to spend the night in this place—” She jerked her head at the
room around us. “Come spend it at mine.”

I peeled her hands off my coat, reaching out with my mind to
block her sending at the source, one psi response I could still control. “I don’t
want it,” I said, “and I’m not paying for it.”

She stepped back, blinking, and I couldn’t tell whether the
surprise on her face came from what I’d said or what I’d done. She started to
turn away, and suddenly she was face-to-face with Miya. There was an endless
moment of silence between them. Naoh came up behind Miya; the prostitute made a
gesture I recognized,, that took them both in. And then she disappeared into
thin air.

I swore under my breath. My erection felt like a red-hot
poker as the two women turned to look at me.

I watched Miya search for words: “She was—”

“I know what she was,” I muttered. “I know when I’m being
hustled.” I took a deep breath, feeling the heat and pressure begin to ease.
The two of them staring at me was a real cold shower, but Miya made a strange
moue with her mouth.

“I thought humans weren’t allowed to come here after curfew,”
I said thickly. I thought about Oldcity, how it only came alive at night, when
the darkness up above matched the darkness down below, the darkness inside the
people who came there to satisfy hungers it wasn’t safe to feed in the light of
day. It didn’t surprise me to realize there were people like that even in Tau
Riverton. There were always people like that, with needs like that. It shouldn’t
surprise me to learn they’d found a way to satisfy them.

“There’s a big midday trade,” Miya said, expressionless now.
“Some good Tau citizens have such a craving for the ‘exotic’ that they even
stay overnight.”

I grunted. “What was she doing here?” There couldn’t be a
lot of human marks looking for alien sex at midnight in a Freaktown hospital.

“Probably getting a disease treated,” Naoh said sourly. “I
would rather starve to death than have sex with a human.” She looked away, her
eyes haunted by something darker and more twisted than simPle revulsion.

“Maybe you’ve just never been hungry enough,” I said. I saw
Miya’s face freeze. Naoh turned back. I watched her swallow an angry response
and wondered what it was that stopped her, what she wouldn’t say to me.

Miya gave me another look, long and searching this time; but
it didn’t tell me anything. And then her eyes changed, as if she’d heard
something I couldn’t.

Naoh glanced away,, distracted by the same silent message. “He’s
gone!” she burst out, as if this time she couldn’t stop herself. “Navu is gone.”

“Again?” Miya munnured, with infinite weariness. “Navu ....”

“He didn’t even tell anyone. He just walked out.” Naoh shook
her head, pacing like a cat.

Navu.
I wondered who he was, why he mattered to them,
why they were talking about him the way I’d talk about a deadhead.

“Then you know where we’ll find him,” Miya said, resigned.
Not
how. Where.

Naoh did something that made Miya wince, but she nodded. The
look that passed between them left me out entirely.

But then they looked back at me. “Come with us,” Naoh said
grudgingly. “Come and learn something else.”

Before I could even answer, I felt their psi wrap itself
around my senses—

Everything changed in an eyeblink ... everything was totally
unfamiliar again. I shook my head, feeling queasy, wondering how much more of
this jerking around I could take before I vomited. “Damn it—” I broke off.

We were standing in shadows, in the most claustrophobic
alley [‘d seen so far in Freaktown. The darkness was deeper than night; the
only light I could see was overhead, a narrow sliver of indigo sky.

There were other Hydrans around us again; the half-visible
spasms of their startled bodies told me they hadn’t been expecting us. I heard
grunts and curses, heard some of them scramble out of reach.

Naoh turned and moved deeper into the pit of shadows. Miya
took me by the affn, drawing me after her, proving that Naoh hadn’t walked
through a wall, but only through a hidden doorway. She led me down a hall so
black that even my eyes couldn’t make out any detail. She seemed to be
navigating by touch. I couldn’t tell whether she was using her hand or a
teleport’s special sense. She moved like she’d done this before—something I
couldn’t manage.

The tunnel echoed with formless noises, more unnerving even
than the place where HARM was keeping Joby. I wondered why we hadn’t teleported
directly to the spot where Naoh and Miya wanted to be: whether it was too
risky; what the limits really were on their ability to sound out a space large
enough to teleport into.

Naoh pushed aside a heavy blanket and light streamed out,
blinding.

The stench hit me full in the face as I ducked through the
hidden doorway into the light—piss and unwashed bodies, garbage and decay. “JeeztJ!”
I covered my nose, more to block the memories than the smells.

There had been too many scenes like this in my life ... I’d
been a part of too many of them. This one was a dozen or so people, all Hydran,
squatting on the bare, filthy floor or slumped against the peeling walls of a
windowless room. Two or three staggered to their feet to stare at us.
The
living dead.
I didn’t know what kind of drug they were or, but it didn’t
really matter. In the end it was all the same.

“Navu!” Naoh called, striding across the room like it was
empty. Miya followed her, just as unflinching, but never stepping on a helpless
outstretched hand. They hauled one of the addicts up between them and held him
against the wall. They were speaking to him, out loud but in voices so low that
I couldn’t hear what they said. I started across the room through the muttered
complaints, the stench and the filth. Things I didn’t even want to think about
stuck to the soles of my boots. I kept my eyes straight ahead, not glancing at
anyone for longer than I had to. Straight ahead of me, Navu looked better than
most of them, not as starved, not as dirty. But then, he’d just left a rehab
facility.