Dreamfall (4 page)

Because I couldn’t do anything but go on. I started forward
again—knowing I wouldn’t sleep nights, wouldn’t eat, would never be able to concentrate
on the work I’d come here to do, unless I let myself do this.

I stepped off the far end of the bridge, on Hydran ground at
last. once this entire planet had been Hydran ground; until we’d come and taken
it away from them. This was their homeworld, their Earth; they’d made this
world the center of a civilization that had spanned light-years the way the
Human Federation did now.

Their civilization had already passed its peak and been in decline
when the Federation made first contact. We’d been glad enough then to finally
have proof that we weren’t alone in the galaxy, more than glad that the first “aliens”
we encountered looked more like humans than some humans looked like to each
other.

Genemapping studies had proved that the resemblance wasn’t
just a coincidence of cosmic proportions: humans and Hydrans seemed to be the
two halves of a long-divided whole, who might both owe our very existence to an
incomprehensible bioengineering experiment. That we might be just one more of
the Creators’ enigmatic calling cards. Hydrans and humans ... the haves and the
have-nots, separated by one thing: psionic ability.

Hydrans were born able to access the quantum field, the
bizarre subatomic universe of quarks and neutrinos hidden at the heart of the
deceptive order we called Reality. The quantum-mechanical spectrum could have
been turtles all the way down, for all the sense it made to ordinary human beings;
even though human brains only seemed to make sense if they functioned by
quantum rules. The average person could barely take quantum electrodynamics
seriously, let alone imagine a way of collapsing the probability wave to
manipulate the QM field.

But a psion could tap the QM field instinctively, manipulate
improbabilities to the point where using the Gift directly affected the
tangible, visible world that they shared with “normal” psi-blind humans. The
macrocosmic entrainment of quantum effects allowed a psion to do things humans
had believed were impossible before we met the Hydrans. That one crucial
difference had been the Hydrans’ strength. And it had been their fatal weakness
when they finally encountered us.

In the beginning, the Human Federation and the Hydrans had
coexisted in peace. It had seemed only natural, when two “alien” races meeting
in the depths of space discovered they were similar down to the level of their
DNA. It had seemed only natural that there would be cooperation, friendship ...
intermarriage. Mixed-race marriages began to produce mixed-blood children,
spilling Hydran psi genes into the sterile waters of the human genepool like
droplets of dye, staining it a new color.

But the peaceful coexistence of first contact hadn’t lasted.
The more often the Human Federation encountered Hydrans living on exactly the
kind of worlds that interstellar combines wanted for exploitation, the less
they wanted to acknowledge that Hydrans had a prior claim to them.

Relations went downhill from there, went downhill faster as
the combines discovered that when they tried to push the Hydrans off their
worlds, the Hydrans wouldn’t push back.

Because of what they were, the things they could have done with
unchecked psi powers, the Hydrans had evolved in ways that made them virtually
nonviolent. If you could kill with a thought—reach into a chest and stop a
heart, cause an embolism in the brain, break bones without touching them—there
had to be some way to prevent it.

There
was
. If a Hydran killed someone,
the backlash took out all the defenses in the killer’s own mind. Any murder
became a murder-suicide. Natural selection had done them a favor ... until they
met the Federation.

Because humans had virtually no psi ability, they’d never
had any real problem with killing. They swept the Hydrans up like birds in a
net, killing them fast in hostile takeovers; killing them slowly by pushing the
survivors onto “homelands” that made them outcasts on their own world, or “relocating”
them to places like Oldcity, where I’d been born. There were still humans born
with mixed blood, but most of the blood had been mixed long ago, before humans
and Hydrans had begun to hate the sight of each other.

Those humans who still carried a few Hydran genes in their
DNA pool were treated as less than human, especially if they showed any psi
ability, which most of them did. Without support, without training in how to
use their Gift, psions were “freaks” to pureblood humans, who made sure they
sank to the bottom of the labor pool and stayed there, ignored when they weren’t
actively persecuted.

If you looked very Hydran, if your mother happened to have
been Hydran—if you were a halfbreed, a product of miscegenation so fresh that
most people you met had been alive when it happened—it was worse. I knew,
because I was one.

I’d spent most of my life in Oldcity, Quarro’s buried slum,
doing things that never got into most people’s nightmares just to stay alive.
And I couldn’t even use the Gift I’d been born with, the telepathy that would
have let me know who to trust, how to protect myself, maybe even let me
understand why the things that always seemed to be happening to me kept
happening.

In time, with a lot of luck and a lot of pain, I’d gotten
out of Oldcity. I’d learned to read, and then to access; I’d learned about the
heritage I’d lost with my mother’s death, so long ago that I couldn’t even
remember her face.

And now, after too many years, too many light-years, I was finally
standing on Hydran ground.

There was nothing, no one guarding this end of the bridge. I
looked back over my shoulder at the lighted span. It seemed impossibly long and
fragile, surreally bright. I saw the guard-post at the other end. And I
wondered suddenly what the hell made them think they could keep a people who
could teleport—send themselves through a spacetime blip to somewhere else in
the blink of an eye—from going anywhere they wanted to. But then I remembered
that you couldn’t teleport to a place you’d never been.

Or maybe the guards were intended to keep the humans where
they belonged.

A pair of humans passed me, wearing Tau business dress. fire
way they moved said that they were in a hurry to get onto the bridge and away.
Ahead of me the street was darker than the bridge had been; there was no
artificial lighting. It was probably getting hard for Tau citizens, with their
human eyes, to find their way.

It surprised me that the Hydrans hadn’t made things easier
for night-blind humans. But then, maybe that was what the guard had been trying
to tell me—maybe no human in his right mind visited Freaktown after dark.

I started down the nearest street. Even in the darkness I
could make out every detail of the buildings that fronted on it. None were more
than three or four stories tall, but they merged like segments of a hive, with
no clear sign of where one ended and the next began. The architecture was all
organic curves; the walls were made of a material I couldn’t identify, that
felt like ceralloy. Almost everywhere the smooth, impervious surfaces had been
covered with murals of colored tile, which must have been set into the matrix
before it had hardened.

I couldn’t have pictured anything less like the isolated
geometry of the human city across the river if I’d tried. I wondered whether
the Hydrans had built their city intentionally to answer Tau Riverton. But then
I remembered that the Hydran city, like the Hydrans, had been here first. It
was the human city that was the insult, the act of defiance.

I went on, following the winding course of the streets
deeper into Freaktown, trying to lose my sense of alienation in the growing
darkness. A few more ground vehicles passed me. Their passage through the
ancient streets echoed from every exposed surface; their windows were always
dark. There didn’t seem to be any mods at all in the air above this side of the
river.

The more my eyes adjusted to the night and the strangeness
of everything I saw, the more I began to notice places where the patterns on
the walls were damaged or crumbling. I saw the fallen tiles that lay in talus
slopes of dust and rubbish; barricades of abandoned junk; bodies slumped
against walls or stretched out in the shadows, sleeping it off.

The dirt, the derelicts, the way the buildings fronted on
the street, began to make me think of Oldcity, Quarro’s hidden underbelly,
where the roof of the world was only ten meters high, and walls closed you in
wherever you turned. I wondered why the resemblance hadn’t hit me right away.
Maybe because I’d lived too long in Oldcity; because it was what I was used to.
Maybe that was all.

Or maybe I hadn’t wanted to see Hydrans as anything less
than perfect, to discover anything that forced me to admit they were flawed,
embarrassing, too human ... too much like I was.

I tried to stop looking at the broken walls. The people
passing me were all Hydran now. Almost all of them wore human-style clothes
that must have come from across the river. Most of the clothing looked like it
had been worn for years before it had ever touched Hydran skin.

It surprised me that there were so few people on the
streets, so few buildings showing lights or signs of life. I didn’t see any children.
I wondered if they all went to bed with the sun, or whether there was something
I was missing. Most of the adults had hair as pale as mine; most of them had
skin that was the color of spice: ginger-gold, nutmeg-brown== cinnamon. The
colors were as varied as the colors of human skin, but not really any color I’d
ever seen on human flesh, even mine. They all seemed to move with a kind of
uncanny grace that I almost never saw in humans.

Refuge was supposed to be their homeworld: their Earth, the
place their civilization had started out from. According to Tau’s data, the
Hydrans living in Freaktown and on the surrounding reservation were Refuge’s
entire surviving population. The remnants of cultures and races from all parts
of the planet had been swept up and dumped, like so much dust, here on this “Homeland”—the
one piece of ground left to them by Tau/Draco ... the piece that must have had
the least exploitable resources.

It made me uneasy even to think that the handful of people I’d
seen on the street tonight might actually be a representative sample of their
numbers.

People looked back at me, half curious if they noticed I was
looking at them. Some of them went on staring after I’d passed. I could feel
their eyes on me, but I couldn’t feel their minds. I couldn’t tell why they
were staring, whether it was the way I moved or my face or the fact that when
they touched my mind they met a wall.

No one spoke to me, asked me the obvious questions, muttered
behind my back. They didn’t make any sound at all. You walked down a street in
a human city and you heard conversation, arguments, laughter. Here I felt like
a deaf-mute; here there was only silence, broken by an occasional shapeless
far-off sound that seemed to echo forever, like there was no distance.

I’d heard once that when Hydrans were with their own kind
they didn’t talk much; they didn’t need to. They had their telepathy: They
could reach out to each other with their minds, prove each other’s reality,
know each other’s moods, know that all around them were living, breathing
people just like them. They knew all that without speaking, without needing to
look at each other constantly.

Humans didn’t. Humans had to bridge that unbridgeable gap
with speech, and so they were always talking, proving that they weren’t as
alone in the universe as they were inside their own minds.

Most of the buildings along the street had doors or windows
at street level. Most of those were shuttered, private; a few were wide open,
like they were inviting everybody inside. Occasionally I saw the phantom
outline of an opening that had been walled up. In other places the access was
only a rough hole knocked in the wall, shattering a perfect line, the wholeness
of a mosaic pattern. I wondered why anyone would do that.

I thought about the humans coming across the river, who couldn’t
mind their own business or walk through walls. I wondered whether the sealed-up
walls, the crude doorways, were a kind of subtle message to their visitors or
whether they were just another sign of social disintegration.

Most of the doorways looked like they opened on shops of one
sort or another. There were occasional signs, some in Standard, some in a
language I didn’t know, some of them lit up. I even saw one that was
holographic, shimmering in the violet gloom like a hallucination. I began to
think that the signs were like the holes in the wall: Freaktown spelling it out
for the humans, the psionic have-nots== the deadheads ....

I wandered the streets for nearly an hour, without anyone
challenging me or even acknowledging me. At last, numb with cold but more or
less sober, I stopped in front of what looked like an eatery. No one had
harassed me so far. I told myself that it would be all right to go inside, to
sit down with them and eat what they ate, to pretend for an hour that I
actually belonged somewhere.

I stepped inside, ducking my head because the ragged doorway
was low by human standards. I was only medium height, but not many of the
Hydrans I’d passed in the street were as tall as I was. I felt a breath of
forced air kiss my face as I moved through it, keeping the warmth and the
cooking smells inside, the cold evening out. I wondered whether it was human
tech from across the river or a telekinetic field generated by someone inside.

I stopped just inside the doorway, glad to feel warm again as
I inhaled the smells. They were strange and strong, making me realize how
hungry I was. A dozen people were scattered around the room at low tables;
singly, in couples, even a family with a child. The parents and child looked up
together, suddenly wary. I stood there a little longer, my eyes moving from
face to face, not able to stop looking at the strange beauty of their features.
Finally I crossed the room and sat down at an empty table, as far from anyone
else as possible.