Dreamfall (55 page)

I nodded, watching his hands in case he decided to hit me
again anyhow. After a minute I murmured, “How’d you know about that?”

“They sent some of that work team here to fill out our crews
when the Feds made their inspection.”

“Oh.” I’d been here less than a day, and already I’d proved
that every suspicion I had about this place was true. And the FTA was coming
back . == . but there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it now.

A rna,m carrTed us deep into the heart of the interface. It
let us out in a spot I recognrzed, a work face inside the reef itself. I felt
the reef even before I saw it—felt its eerie euphoria dance like heat lightning
through my senses. I fought to keep my survival instinct functioning, not
trusting myself or the mood I was in right now. It would be too easy to lose my
mind in a place where no one could reach me .... If I ever gave in to the
rapture, once I put on a field suit I’d be lost forever.

When the crew foreman called for reef-divers, my crew spit
me out like a pit. At least they believed what I told them. I hoped it meant
that tonight I’d be able to close my eyes for long enough to get some sleep.

The foreman looked at me twice, but only because he was expecting
to see somebody else. “You cleared to use a suit?” he asked.

o’Yes, sir,” I said.

“Okay.” He shrugged and sent me with the others to pick out
a suit.

I spent the rest of the work shift in inner space, moving
through the mysteries of the an lirr’s thought-droppings. Staying focused was
easier than I’d thought, because this time I knew to expect the unexpected ...
and because these suits had a feedback control I hadn’t been shown that let the
tech on the outside give me a shock if I didn’t respond fast enough to his
instructions.

I was a fast learner. After the first few zaps I held on to
my brains for the duration, letting myself sense the reef matrix just enough to
keep my mind from sensory deprivation. At least in here I still felt something;
still felt alive ....

That night when I dropped into my bunk and closed my eyes,
strange images and indescribable sensations still played my nerves like a ghost
harper. I let them come, let them smother the burning ache in my chest that was
worse than it had been yesterday. Sinking deeper into my memories, I saw/felt
the cloud-whales drifting through the heights of the sky like indifferent gods ...
felt them settle around me, shrouding me in thought, until I was only thought,
ephemeral, dreaming ....

The next couple of days passed without any more trouble. The
bondies in the barcacks kept our truce, as long as I put on the suit every new
work shift without complaining.

I didn’t complain; it was all I had to look forward to. My
personal future figured to be short and unpleasant. Even if another FTA
inspection team discovered everything about this place, they wouldn’t get the
chance to learn it from me. Natasa would turn me into organ transplants first.

Even if I lived through their visit, there was nothing left
of my life. Reef-diving was the only thing worth living for—a chance to touch
the unknowable, to feel my Gift come alive in ways that even I couldn’t begin
to describe. What I’d experienced the first time I’d gone into a reef, or when
the an lirr had come to lre, hadn’t been a fluke. If the unknown suddenly
reached out and killed me one day, at least I’d die happy.

My psi gave me something more that I hadn’t expected: It
made me good at my work; better than other divers at guiding the techs to the
kinds of protoid concentrations Tau wanted to see. Once I got a sense of the
sector’s feel, I began to recognrze certain patterns in the stimuli the matrix
fed to me and learned how to track them to their source. I stopped getting
shocks and started getting praise from the techs. Having their respect seemed
as alien to me as looking at my eyes still seemed to be to them.

Their respect didn’t make them like me any better, but that
didn’t matter. The only people I cared about were on the outside, in the world
I’d thrown away with my freedom: People I still loved, people I still hated.
People I still owed, big time.

I repeated their names, tried to see their faces in my
memory each day on the way to a new work shift; making it a kind of ritual to
keep me anchored in reality as I put one foot down in front of the other,
following the body ahead of me until it led me to where I was going. The pain
in my chest was constant now, eating at my body and mind every waking moment
when I wasn’t in a field suit, lost in the reefs.

This morning I’d come to sweating and dizzy. I hadn’t looked
at the burn in a couple of days, hadn’t had the nerve to. I told myself it
would heal, everything always healed, with enough time ... anything that didn’t
kill you made you stronger.

A hand clamped over my ann, making me swear in surprise. “You,”
the guard said, and pulled me out of line. “Chief of Security wants you.”

Natasa.
I groaned under my breath.
NAtasa was
back. And he knew everything.
Suddenly I felt dtzzy again; suddenly I was
sweating.

I went with the guard, went where I was told, because there
wasn’t any other choice. We passed through sectors of the complex I’d never
seen, passed excavation teams already working their assigned stations. Just
passing by the naked face of the reef, I felt it seeping into my
hypersensitized brain like my mind was as porous as a sponge. I let it take me,
sucking my mind out of my body.

“
Stop!
”
I said suddenly, stopping short.

“What—?” The guard turned back, his stare and his weapon
both fixed on me.

“Stop the work!” I shouted at the crew foreman. “You’re
going to hit a volatile pocket.”

I heard the whine of equipment shutting down as the workers stopped,
without being ordered to, and turned to look at me. The foriman frowned,
thought about ordering them back to work, then thought better of it. She
crossed the floor to us. “What the hell do you mean, a volatile pocket—?” It
was the thing the work crews were most afraid of: hitting some unfinished
thought that would turn out to have an unstable molecular structure. There were
too few divers, spread too thin, to do a thorough job of exploring every
millimeter of reef-face. “You can’t predicl—” No one could, not even the divers
or their techs, with absolute certainty. No one Human.

“I can,” I said, making her look at my eyes.

She swore, turned to the guard. ‘A freak? They let a freak
in here—?”

The guard shrugged. “Natasa wants him now.”

“.What do you know about this—?” the foreman asked me. She
gestured at the reef behind her. It was more of an accusation than a question.

“I’m a diVel—”

“That doesn’t mean you can see through walls, freak,” she
snapped.

I shrugged; grimaced as it hurt my chest. “Go ahead then,” I
muttered. “Don’t check it out. Just let me get away from here before you blow
yourselves up.” I started oil, making the guard scramble to catch uP.

“Hey!” the crew chief shouted, but I didn’t look back.

We reached another tram stop. As we waited there, I listened
for an explosion behind us. It didn’t come. I didn’t know if I was glad or
soffy.

The tram let us out in another area of the complex I’d never
seen: one that looked too pleasant, too open. Everything I saw told me any
bondie who got this far would regret he’d seen it.

Natasa’s office was just as open, just as unprotected. Maybe
nobody believed a real problem would ever get this far. I wondered whether the
forest of potted plants along the wall was real or just a good-looking sim,
like the virtual view through the window behind his desk. It wasn’t a view of
this world.

“you want him in binders, sir?” the guard asked, pulling my
attention back to Natasa.

Natasa shook his head, looking at me with unreadable eyes.

His hands lay empty and motionless on the surface of his
desk. All I could tell from his expression was that he didn’t think I was any
threat.

The guard left the office, leaving us there alone. I stared
at Natasa, and he stared at me, and all I could think about was pain: the pain
in my chest, the pain in my memories, pain overflowing until it seemed to fill
all the world ... and more pain coming, now that we were finally face-to-face.
He lifted his hand and made a gesture I didn’t understand; I kept expecting to
see him pull a weapon.

Someone stepped through the wall of greenery—
holo; it was
only a holo
—and into the room. Natasa’s wife, Joby’s mother. She was alone,
wearing lab clothing.

I backed up a step as I recognized her, almost lost my
balance as it made my vision strobe.

They both looked at me like they thought I was about to
bolt. I stood with my knees locked, staring back at them. Ling Natasa took a
seat near her husband, glancing at him then with a half frown that could have
meant anything. Perrymeade would have told Natasa to make sure I paid. Somehow
I hadn’t thought his wife would want to watch. Or help. No matter how hard I
tried, I never seemed to underestimate Human behavior completely enough.

I went on standing, waiting, damned if I’d be the first one
to speak. My hands tightened over the loose cloth of my pants legs.

“Sit down, Cat,” Ling Natasa said, finally, when her husband
still didn’t say anything. I stood numbly. “We just want to ask you some
questions.”

I glanced away, saw two seats like cupped hands in a corner.
I backed up slowly, sat in one, trying not to stumble, not to take my eyes off
them, not to show any sign of weakness. Sweat tracked down the side of my face.
I wiped it away, pushed my filthy hair out of my eyes. I stank; I wondered if
they could smell me from across the room.

“We want to talk to you about our son,” Burnell Natasa said
finally. He touched something on his desk/terminal. An image of Joby appeared,
floating above the desktop. I looked away from it. “what did you do to him, you
and Miya—?” There was no anger in his voice. “He was ... all right. And then—”
He glanced at his wife. There’d been enough left of what the reefs had given
Joby that she’d seen it too, even as she’d seen it disappear.

DKEAMF”ALL I 567

“IS ... anything left?” I asked, final|y. “IS he any better?”

Ling Natasa nodded, her lips pressed into a line. “Enough,”
she munnured. “Enough so that we know== enough so that he knows—” She broke off
suddenlY.

I slumped back in the seat, my eyes blurring out of focus. I
stared at the image of some other world’s blue-green seas and sky beyond the
virtual window behind the desk. I wondered whether ifs seasons changed; if
their fantasy world had seasons.

“.How did you make it happen?” She asked it this time, and
the real world of sorrow and pain was suddenly surrounding us again, and I was
drowning in it.

“you said it was something about that place, the reefs—”
Bur-nell Natasa’s voice prodded me when I still didn’t say anything. ‘Answer
her, damn it!” He started up from his Seat.

His wife gestured sharply, shaking her head. He dropped back
into his chair. ‘Are you afraid to tell us?” she asked me. “Why?”

I thought about something I could have said, and then something
else, and something else. Finally I just held up my wrist.

Burnell Natasa frowned, staring at the bond tag until comprehension
came into his eyes. His wife didn’t even look surprised. “This is off the
record,” he munnured, glancing away.

“Yeah, right,” I said, and saw his face harden again.

“It’s our
son,
”
Ling Natasa said.

It’s my freedom.
But I didn’t say it, and she went
on, “We know you helped him ... how well you cared for him. We know that you
must ... love him ... too.” She cleared her throat. “‘We’ve lost Miya. You’re
all the hope he has left.”

I covered my face with my hand, feeling sick and giddy as
the adrenaline rush of my fear subsided. “I told you everything I knew,” I
mumbled. “something about the reefs out there, on the Homeland ... it cleared
out the static, or completed damaged circuits in his brain. I don’t know how.
It freed my psi, and ... and his.” I let my hand drop, looked up at them as the
silence stretched.

“Joby’s nOt A psiOn,” Ling NataSa munnured. “There’S nO
Hydran blood—”

“It was the accident,” I said. “Before he was born .... The
reefs did it to him. A mutation.”

She blanched.

“That’s impossible—” Burnell Natasa snapped.

“No, it’s not,” she said faintly.

“You only have to tweak a couple of genes in the right DNA
codestrings to make the difference between a”—
s freak and a deadhead
—“a
Hydran and a Human,” I said. “I’m a half-breed. If it wasn’t true, I wouldn’t
be here.”

He stared at me like I’d suddenly started speaking a
different language. I ran the words back through my head, to make sure I hadn’t
said them in Hydran.

They looked at each other while the implications settled on them
as silently and inevitably as dreamfall.

Slowly, almost painfully, Ling Natasa reached out to take
her husband’s hand. She looked back at me. “The accident ... the reefs ...
damaged Joby before he was born. And now you’re telling me the reefs have a way
to ... to heal him?” She shook her head as she asked, as though she didn’t want
to hear the answer. “rt sounds like you’re talking about—God ....”

“No,” I said softly. “I’m talking about something
alien.
Tau
thinks you can just go in there and take the reefs upuit, read what you find
there like binary code ... but Humans didn’t make it. Humans don’t understand
it. A work gang nearly blew itself up today because they missed a volatile
pocke—”

“When?” Ling Natasa demanded.

“On my way here.”

They glanced at each other again. “How could you know that?”
she asked.