Dreamfall (37 page)

“You know that—?” I said.

He grimaced. “They don’t admit rt, even to themselves. But I
see the thought, always just below the surface in their minds. They promised us
that this one piece of sacred ground would be untouched. But they are lying to
themselves, just as they have always lied to us.”

I stood staring at the ruins of the monastery. The number of
survivors and rescuers had diminished already. As I watched, another group of
silhouetted forms disappeared. “What now?” I asked finally, looking back at
Hanjen.

“I must speak with Janos Perrymeade.” His face turned grim,
or maybe grimmer. “He has sent me three messages already. I do not know how to
Answer him. Not after 1fuis—” He glanced toward the ruins, away again. ‘Are
there words for such things, in your language? You know those people—” not
your
people,
“better than I ever will. How does a Human speak to ... his enemy?”

I shook my head, looking down. “How do you contact Perrymeade,
if you need to?” I looked up again. Freaktown wasn’t even tied into Tau
Riverton’s communications net, as far as I knew, let alone the Federation Net.
And somehow I didn’t think Perrymeade communicated telepathically.

“He gave me a port that I can use. It’s at my home.”

I nodded, surprised. “Is it still functioning?”

He looked surprised, now. “Yes. There was a message from him
just hours ago. I didn’t answer it, because the Council could not agree on what
kind of response to give. And then, 1fufs—”

“You’d better start answering him, right now,” I said. “you
can’t wait for the Council to decide. You’re the only one of them who has any
idea what the Humans really want. And you’re right. I do know more about them
....” Realizing as I said it how much more I knew about Tau, and Draco, and
keiretsu ... wondering whether any of it would be enough to do any good. “Take
me with you.”

I’d been lost inside my own thoughts; suddenly I was lost inside
something larger, deeper, darker, as Hanjen’s mind picked me up like an
afterthought, and teleported—

We were back in Freaktown: the alienness of the walls and furniture
was beginning to seem ordinary to me. I stumbled to the nearest thing that
would hold me up—a curving bench padded with mats—and sat on it. Jags of bright
color showed in the deep earth tones of the woven mats.

Hanjen leaned against the edge of a carved wooden cabinet,
as if he could barely stand—like it had been more exhausting for him to
transport my dead weight than it had ever seemed to be for Miya. I remembered
that the strength of a Hydran’s Gift—or a Human psion’s—fiad nothing to do with
physical strength or size.

He glanced at me; looked away again, as if contact with my
eyes was painful. Or maybe it had been the contact with my mind that made him
look away. I let my own eyes wander the floor, the walls—anything, anywhere, as
long as it was inanimate.

This was Hanjen’s home. I couldn’t tell how large it was
from where I sat. But compared to the monastery, and the rooms I’d shared with
Miya and the Satoh, this room was plush—filled with furniture, frgs, hangings,
carved wooden lintels. The floors showed the elaborate mosaic patterns that
seemed to have been almost an obsession with the original builders of this
city. I wondered if they’d actually set each shard of ceramic or glass by
hand—or if they’d set them without ever touching one. My mind imagined a
freeform cloud of colored fragments moving through the an, like the
cloud-whales drifting across the tky; pictured them suddenly falling into place
with the precision of thought.

“This is nice,” I munnured. Most of the furniture looked
old. Looking at the pieces more carefully, I noticed the scars of time marring
the beautiful workmanship of almost every age-darkened table and chest.

Hanjen cocked his head at me like he thought that was a peculiar
comment, but he only nodded. “Everything here is something I discovered in an
abandoned building or something that had been put out on the street. I have
tried to salvage what I can of the past. Perhaps someday it will mean something
to someone besides me. I hope, by the time I die ...” He broke off and left me
to silence, to wondering where his thoughts had gone.

I let my eyes search the room again, scanning artifacts and
works of art until I found the one thing that didn’t belong here: a computer
port. It sat in a shadowed alcove, &s though he’d tried to make that symbol
of his association with the Humans as unobtrusive as possible. But still it
stood out, an alien thing, its message function light blinking in the gloom
like an unnaturally green eye.

Hanjen followed my stare, shedding his coat almost absent-mindedly.
It was cold enough in the room that I kept mine on. He made a sound that was
half a sigh, half a grunt of resignation, as he crossed the room to call on the
access. The messages left by Perrymeade flowed across its screen; were repeated
by a disembodied voice in the air—a Human voice.

Hanjen stood in front of its empty, waiting screen and didn’t
speak or touch it. He looked at me. “I should have the Council’s backing—”

I shook my head. “You know you’re the only one of them who’s
got the courage. Someone’s got to act, now—”

He turned back to the screen, his face hardening, and input
the call-code.

Perrymeade appeared in the electronic window the instant Hanjen
finished. He must have been waiting for an answer, maybe for hours. I searched
the background around his image, trying to tell where he was, whether he was
alone. What little detail I could make out looked like a private home, not an
office. “Hanjen,” he said, as if he’d been holding his breath all that time. “Thank
God. I’ve been trying to reach you. Borosage—”

“I know what he has done,” Hanjen said flatly. “He has destroyed
a holy place and killed innocent people ...
children ....
” His voice
slipped out of control.

Perrymeade’s hand covered his face, as if he’d been
blind-sided by his worst fears. “God! I tried to warn you, Hanjen .... Dammit,
why didn’t you answer my first call—]t”

I couldn’t see Hanjen’s face, but his whole body recoiled. ‘Are
you blaming us for this atrocity? Humans did this—only Humans are to blame!”

Perrymeade’s gaze turned cold. “Hydran radicals kidnapped a
child! Tau will not allow itself to be manipulated by terrsllsfs—”

“Perrymeade,” I said, taking the chance of moving into his
line of sight. “Don’t You get rt Yet?”

“Cat?” he said, and I saw his disbelief. “What the hell are
you doing?” I wondered if he had any idea what had happened to me since he’d
dropped me off at the hotel.

“Doing what I was ordered to do. Your job.”

He didn’t look surprised at the bitterness in my voice, but
he looked confused. “Have you spoken to Miya?”

I nodded. “But she’s not listening anymore. And neither am
I.”

“I don’t understand,” he said. I was Sure, by the look on
his face, that Borosage had cut him entirely out of the loop.

“I almost had her convinced that it made sense to give Joby
back. But every time she started to believe fite, Tau tried to kill us.
Borosage is out of control, dammit! He’s forcing an incident, so he’ll have an
excuse to kill more Hydrans. Tau’s Board has backed off him because they think
that’ll save them, and Draco’s backed off Tau. I can’t talk to anybody on the
Human side but you. If you sit there and let this happen, it’ll drag you down
with i1—” I broke off, searching his face for a reaction, for some kind of
understanding. I didn’t find what I needed to see. “Even if it doesn’t, if I
were you I’d never look in a mirror again.”

He looked down, as if suddenly he couldn’t face his image in
my eyes or Hanjen’s. His attention flickered offscreen, distracted by something
I couldn’t see. He looked back at us== at me, finally. “someone wants to talk
to you,” he said. He moved aside, making room for another floating head.

I stiffened, expecting Borosage or one of his Corpses, expecting
threats—expecting anything but the face that I suddenly saw there in front of
me. “Kissindre?”

She nodded. She looked as though she had as much trouble believing
we were facing each other this way as I did. “Cat ... ?” she said, faltering. “What
arc you doing?”

“Why don’t you ask your uncle?” I said.

She glanced offscreen at him, back at me again. “He told me
... about Miya, and the—and HARM, and the Board meeting.” She grimaced, as if
the blow had left a bruise. “What are you trying to do?” She asked it again,
not sounding angry but only bewildered.

“I don’t know ....” I shook my head, rubbing my eyes,
because suddenly looking at her face was like staring into the sun ...
like
trying to do something impossible.
“Kissindre ... this is so fucked up. I
don’t know how it got like this. It just happened too fast.”

“Cat, come back to Riverton. This is crazy. Come back now,
before it goes too fa\ and you can’t ever ... Before you get hurt. My uncle can
straighten it out. I need you on the field crew—”

“r can’t.” r shook my head. “I can’t come back.”

“6Bgf—” She broke off. “rs it ... it’s not because of ...
us?”

“No.” I looked down, knowing that was partly a lie. But even
the lie was nothing compared to the truth. “It’s gone way beyond the two of us.
It’s Borosaga, it’s all of Tau—what they’re doing to the Hydrans. For God’s
sake, they dropped a plasma burst on a monastery full of children! Your uncle
couldn’t help me if he wanted to. But he can stop this .... You hear me,
per-rymeade?” He had to be listening, even if I couldn’t see him. “Tau’s Board
won’t control Borosage, and Draco’s out of the picture. You’ve got to stop this
yourself. Get those Feds back here, and let them know what’s happening before
everything goes to hell and takes you with it.”

Kissindre was looking away from me now, looking at her uncle.
“Kissindre?” I said, and waited until she looked back at me. “You have to make
him understand. It’s about keiretsu: He thinks he’s protecting you and his
family. But you’re not going to have a research project—he’s not going to have
a job, a home, or a world, if you can’t make him listen. All he’ll have will be
a lot of deaths on his conscience. Maybe—
maybe
—if he acts before it’s
too late, some of that won’t happen. But if he doesn’t it will. It will, damn
it!”

“What makes you believe you’re such an expert on keiretsu,
son?” Perrymeade stepped back into the picture behind Kissindre, his expression
professionally empty again. “You spent most of your life nameless and
creditless on the streets of a Free Trade Zone.”

My hands tightened. “I believe in ‘know your enemy,” I said.

Something filled his face: desperation, anger, it didn’t
matter what he was feeling. I knew that look ... the blind stubbornness of
somebody whose whole mental house of cards would collapse if he said the wrong
thing or even let himself think it. “None of that is going to haPPen.”

Bleak—“y”d, he l,ooked past me at Hanjen. ‘And nothing else
will happen to your peopre if Joby is returned unharmed by tomorrow night.
Because you wouldn’t help us find his kidnappers, we ... Administrator Borosage
was forced to ... retaliate, causing innocent people to suffer.” He took a deep
breath. “We want results. only you can give them to us. You have one day’s time
to get my—to get the boy back. That’s all the time I can guarantee you.”

I saw Kissindre look at her uncle like he’d been replaced by
a total stranger. “Uncle Janos? I don’t believe this!” She looked back at the
screen, at me. “Cat, listen—”

Perrymeade cut the connection, and the screen went blank.

I looked down, my fists still knotted at my sides. “Damn
you,” I muttered, not sure who I meant. I looked back at Hanjen, finally.

He was sitting at the table with his head in his hands, like
the weight of his responsibility, of everything that had happened, had become
too heavY to bear.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered. I felt his grief and anget like an
echo multiplying inside my own, not even able to feel the elation that should
have come with any sense of him at all.

“No. I am the one who should apologrze,” he said, still
resting his head in his hands. There was no accusation in his eyes as he looked
up at me. “There was nothing you could have done to change anything.” He
glanced away at the empty screen. “There is nothing he can do to stop it,
either. He is as powerless as I am to control the situation.”

I frowned. “Then why did we just do this?”

“Because you felt so strongly that we should.” He sat back
in his chair with a shrug. “‘Your Way or my Way,’ we say. ‘It is different for
everyone .... ‘vv’ho knows which is more true.’”

But I’m not even a precoS.
I Swore under my breath.

“perrymeade’s niece—she was more to you than just your team
leader. And You were—”

“That’S over,” I muttered. ‘All of that iS over,”

He looked at me strangely, as if what I was feeling now was
incomprehensible ... or maybe just unreachable.

“What about Miya?” I asked, turning his stare back on him. ‘And
Naoh? What are they to you?” Remembering that he had worked with Perrymeade to
get Miya the training that let her help Joby. He must have been the one to
choose her. And the way he’d reacted when he saw them, the way they’d reacted toward
him, at the monastery, hadn’t been the way strangers treated each other.

“They ate my foster daughters,” he murmured. “I raised them
... tried to raise them ... after their parents wers—”

“Murdered,” I said, before he could backtrack. “How did it
happen?”

“(I—” He broke off, struggling with something deeper than
memory, the emotion naked on his face.

Seeing him lose that much control scared me, because it told
me how close to the edge even he was getting. I wondered if my face—not Human
enough, not Hydran enough, with no psi to give him feedback—was what kept
making him look away from me.