Dreamfall (47 page)

“Men,” she spat, her voice thick with disgust. “You let your
bodies have their way with you. You betray everything you are, everyone you
care for. It all means nothing, compared to your o\iln selfish needs—” She
broke off, and I remembered her lover Navu, his mind an empty room, his body
wasted by drugs.

You betray everyone you care for ....
My mind was
suddenly empty of every memory except one:
WAuno’s transport. Where I’d
dreamed I ...
. “God, oo,” I breathed. Naoh had used my body as the key to
break into my mind—to take her revenge. “What ... what did I do?” I whispered. “What
did you ...”

“You want to know?” Naoh asked, her voice dripping poison. “YOU
Want 19 ggg—?”

No ..
.. I nodded, speechless.

“Then go and see for yourself.”

I felt her tap the potential energy of two dozen other minds
to crumple my consciousness, fold up my physical existence like a wad of old
paper, and make me disappear.

I cnue our the other end of the teleport with just enough
time to realize that wherever I was, I’d matenalized five meters up in the air,
moving sideways .... I had just enough time, falling, to realize that I didn’t
want to hit the ground.

I hit the ground. Pain exploded all my senses.

I opened my eyes again. My nose was clotted with blood, my
mouth was thick with it. I lay drifting for a long time in a blood-red sea so
wide it had no shore. After a longer time, I realized that red was the color of
pain ....

I remembered falling out of the sky. I remembered being cast
out. I remembered that I was a mebtaku.

Every paft of my body that wasn’t screaming out a pain
signal had gone somewhere beyond pain, not even responding. I wondered whether
the fall had paralyzed me or whether I was only numb with cold and slowly
freezing to death.

Cold.
The wind probed the rips in my flapping clothes
with icicle fingers; the ground crushed against my face and body felt cold as
ice; the frost-clouded air burned my lungs ....
Cold like Old-city. But not
cold like Cinden Cold ....

Refuge. It’s cold here,
I thought, the first memory I
recognrzed. I struggled to integrate body systems that had splattered like
globs of mercury when I’d fallen from a height.
A height
—I remembered
everything, then:
Naoh. HARM.
But there was no one in rny head now. My
mind was an empty room.

Ice coated my jacket, plastered my hair against my face—or
maybe that was blood. I wondered how long I’d been lying there. I wondered
where the hell I was, if I wasn’t in hell.

Find out fo, yourself.
Naoh’s last words:
Kissindre.
Wauno’s transport ....

I pushed myself up on my elbows, spitting clotted mud; fell
back again as pain wrenched my shoulder like the rack. I tried again, managing
to raise my head. There was no sign of the reefs or the river; no sign of a
crty, Human or Hydran. No sign of anything I recognized. Only a gray
rubble-strewn plain, broken by the muted ochres and rusts of lichen, a
scattering of stunted purple shrubs filmed with ice. In the distance I saw what
could have been a line of hills, or just a bank of clouds. The image changed
and changed back again, like a mirage inside my mind’s eye.

I tried to get up, breathing curses as my cold-numbed senses
came back on-line. I kept trying until I was on my knees, and then finally got
my feet under me, feeling things grate and slide that shouldn’t have. One leg
didn’t want to hold me up. My foot had swollen inside my boot until the only
way I’d ever get it off would be to cut it open. I went down onto my knees
again, too drzzy to go on standing, with every nerve ending a nexus of pain.

I wasn’t just hurt; I was hurt bad .... I forced myself to
get up again, because my body wanted so much just to lie there, in the middle
of nowhere—just lie down and die. But the pitiless survivor who had always spit
in the face of my own weakness wouldn’t let me give the universe that
satisfaction; at least, not the part of it that had abandoned me here.

I took everything slower this time, using my Gift in ways
that I still could to block the electrode shocks of pain every move sent
through me, shutting down the systems meant to warn me against moving my broken
body.

I stood there breathing, each breath a conscious decision,
in and out. I couldn’t stop shivering. I sealed my coat and jerked the hood up
over my hair, searched the deep pockets for anything that might help me
survive. They were empty, except for the mouth harp and the field glasses Wauno
had given me. My left arm was useless; I pushed the hand into my coat pocket,
gritting my teeth. My good hand was gummy with blood; I breathed on it to warm
it, making handfuls of fog. At least I had my coat. I wished I had gloves. I
wished I knew what the hell to do.

Kissindre.
If what Naoh claimed was true, then she
was out here somewhere. If I’d done what my memory said I had to the transport’s
onboard systeffiS, she was probably with Wauno, and they needed help, maybe
even more than I did. And maybe the transport still had some way to call for
it. I turned in a slow circle, fighting dtzziness. I didn’t see wreckage or
smoke. I scanned the dreamlike line of the horizon again, using Wauno’s field
glasses this time. As they came into sharp focus, I realized that it wasn’t
clouds or mountains I was seeing. It was reefs.
Cloud-reefs.

I dropped the glasses, let them hang from their cord around
my neck, fingerprinted with blood. I took a step, and then another, swearing
under my breath as I forced my bad leg to hold my weight. I started toward the
distant smudge on the sky, sure that the reefs would be where they were headed,
even though I wasn’t sure logic had anything to do with how I knew. All I knew
now was that I had to find them. I had to know how unforgivable the truth was.

Pain had no hold on me now that could compare to my grief or
my rage. I’d slipped off the edge of the world, and my mind was free-falling. I
kept on across the plain, stumbling, falling, getting up again. Hearing some
qazy burnout mumbling curses, singing half-remembered lyrics of half-remembered
songs ... crying out when I fell, sobbing when I got up again and went or,
step-by-step across the broken land. Sometimes the voice sounded like my own.
But it couldn’t be my voice, because I wasn’t there .... My consciousness
drifted like a cloud, free of my body’s suffering, only bound to it by a
fraying thread of will. There were two of me when I knew there should only be one:
like I’d never really been whole, not Human enough, not Hydran enough ....

The setting sun threw a single shadow ahead of me like a
pointing finger. As its reach lengthened, I saw at last that it really had been
leading me toward something after all ...
toward a crushed beetle, swatted
out of the slq by the hand of God.

The nearer I got, the larger it grew, the more real it became,
until I was stumbling through a field littered with a broken carapace that
gleamed darkly in the last light of day. I stopped, staring in confusion, as I
found familiar markings on a piece of alloy shell ....
TaLt’s logo, the
designation codes ... the buckled metal of Wauno’s transport.
Reality hit
me like a backhanded slap, bringing me out of my stupor into the real world full
of pain again.

The hatch hung open. I didn’t know whether that meant there’d
been survivors or whether it had been sprung by the impact of the crash. I
collapsed against the ship’s hull, letting the heat-scarred surface support me
as I pulled together the courage to look inside.

I pushed myself, finally, to climb the ramp, weaving and falling
down, swearing with pain that was both physical and mental. I stopped just
inside the hatchway, wiping my eyes clear of grief.

There were no bodies. The inside of the transport had taken
a lot of damage, but it didn’t look as bad as the outside ... except for the
blood. I dropped to my knees, touching a rust-red stain on the floor. My eyes
searched out a trail of bloodstains through the wreckage of the ship, the wreckage
of my thoughts. The blood was all dry. There was no way to tell what had
happened to the passengers, how many there’d been. If Wauno had been taking
Kissindre to see the cloud-whales, it could have been only the two of them.

I pulled myself up again as something dangling from the instrument
panel caught my eye. It was Wauno’s medicine pouch: the beaded bag he always
wore hanging around his neck along with his field glasses. Now it hung from a
bloody jag of metal, a mute accusation.

I unhooked the pouch with a shaky hand, wrapped the cord
around my wrist, and knotted it with my teeth. As I glanced at the panel again,
I saw a red light flashing. I leaned forward, supporting myself against the
console as I queried the onboard systems, half afraid the light meant the power
unit had gone critical.

I didn’t expect anything would still be functioning, but the
display read out emergency beacon. A homing signal, activated by the crash. I
glanced over my shoulder at the empty cabin again, realizing what it must mean—that
Tau had come and taken them awit), dead or alive. There was no way I could know
which it had been, any more than I could expect another search party, or any
hope or rescue.

I told myself that rescue by Tau only meant being killed on
sight. I couldn’t expect justice from the Humans now not after what I’d done;
any more than I could hope for help from the Hydrans. My only hope was Miya.

But I had no more idea of where she was now than she could
have of what had happened to me. It had taken two dozen Satoh linking their
Gift to send me this far away. There was no way for a single telepath to search
an entire planet. And there was no way that my mind would ever reach her, even
if I knew where she was. I slid down the panel to the floor, suddenly sick with
a whole new kind of pain.

The sky outside was almost dark. The wind that moaned past
me into the transport’s interior was getting colder. If I left the transport
now, I’d freeze to death. I didn’t want that even more than I didn’t want to be
here .... I dragged myself along the aisle to the rear of the cabin, finding
more bloodstains there, and scattered first-aid supplies. At least somebody had
been alive long enough to use them.

I shoved the few unused patches of painkiller up under my
clothes, numbing whatever pain my hands could still reach, and choked down most
of an emergency ration before I spilled it.

There was no strength left in me for anything else. I
huddled in a corner, trying to find a position that would let my lungs fill, a
centimeter of floor space that didn’t feel like a bed of blades. There weren’t
any. I shut my eyes, and my mind did a fade to black.

I lost count of the times I woke during the night, shivering
with cold or shaking with fever in the lightless coffin of the transport. I woke
from dreams of Miya taking me in her arrns, healing my pain ... dreams of Naoh
using my body and mind as her weapon of vengeance, of death in the streets of
Oldcrty, of dying alone in an alien wilderness ....

I woke up finally with the light of a new day pouring in on
me through the port above my head. The anesthetic patches had worn off. The
sudden blow of pain made me want to retch, but I didn’t have the strength.
There was no heat in the glaring shaft of brightness, but my body was burning
like a protosun. Every breath cost me more than it had yesterday, for less
effect. I lay squinting up at the morning light, trying to think of a single
reason to feel glad I’d lived to see it.

Pulling myself up, I found a canteen I’d missed last night
in the dark. I gulped the last of the water inside it, spilling more than I
drank, gasping as the icy cold sluiced down into my clothes. My flesh crawled
like the fingers of wetness belonged to the hand of Death, but I went on
drinking, desperately, until the canteen was empty. My throat felt drier than
before.

I searched the bloodstained floor for anything else I’d
missed. There was more blood than I remembered seeing last night. Fresh blood.
Blood that had soaked through Yny torn pants and my coat. I struggled to my
feet, hanging onto the seatback, suddenly needing to get out of there, to not
see any more blood, any more proof of what I’d done or what had been done to
me.

I lurched forward to the hatch, half slid and half fell down
it, landing on ground that was heat-seared black from the crash. I lay for a
long time waiting while the red tide of agony slowly subsided, until there was
room in my thoughts at last for something more to exist, until the cold sharp
scent of the wind had cleared the stink of blood and burned things out of my
lungs.

I pulled myself up until I could sit against the side of the
transport, not knowing why I bothered, why I really wanted so much to die out
in the open. I’d hated open spaces ever since I left Old-city, the way somebody
who’d spent his life shut in a closet would hate an open door. I looked up at
the sky, saw a broken field of clouds drifting toward me from the still-distant
reefs. I thought of the an lirr; I thought of Miya. I wondered whether she’d
ever had even the glimpse of them that Wauno had given me, wondered if she’d
ever get the chance ... or if ....

Miya
—The randomness of the clouds seemed to show me
her face. I wondered if I’d see my whole life play out in the sky, if I watched
long enough. If I lived long enough. But I only saw Miya, in the clouds, in my
memories. Only Miya. Everything else was randomness, chaos.

(Miya ...) I called her name with my mind, an act as
senseless as refusing to die, in every way that mattered.
(Miya. I’m sorry.)
Not sure, even as I thought it like a prayer, what I was the most solTy for
...

Far off, the clouds seemed to shimmer and flow like water
hit by a skipping stone. I rubbed my eyes. Then, a sudden impulse made me
fumble for Wauno’s lenses and hold them up to my face. My breath wheezed in my throat
as I moved, But the lcnses clicked into focus, and I saw the clouds for what
they were: an lirr. The ones that Wauno must have been bringing Kissindre to
see. I remembered him promising us both that trip, forever ago.