Dreamfall (8 page)

I shook my head.

“Then:’

“Leave it alone, Kissindre.”

She glanced down, with the look on her face that only I
seemed to cause.

“It’s not important,” I said, feeling like a bastard. “It’s
over. I just want to forget about it.”

She nodded, but I saw her doubt, the unanswered questions.

“How was your visit with your uncle?” Only asking because I
had to say something, anything else.

She shrugged, pushing the corners of her mouth up. “Fine.”
For a minute I almost believed it, because she almost believed it. But then her
face fell, as if the weight of the lie was too much. “Their neighbors really
don’t know he’s the Alien Affairs Commissioner.” She stared up into the sky, as
if she’d discovered something incredible in the empty heights. “They really don’t
know.” Her fists clenched inside her coat pockets, straining at the heavy
cloth. “They don’t.”

I let my breath out; it sounded like a laugh, instead of the
anger that was half choking me.

“Kiss—” Ezra Ditreksen came up beside her, putting his arm
around her. “Missed you ....” He leaned over and kissed her on the mouth.

I looked away, figuring he was making a point. I searched my
pockets for a camph, remembering that he hadn’t been with her at the Corporate
Security station last night. Maybe after the way he’d made Perrymeade look at
the reception, he hadn’t been invited.

“What happened to you?” he said, to me this time ... Did you
get in a fight, for God’s sake?”

I stuck the camph in my mouth, letting him have a good look
at the bruises and the split lip. That he had to ask meant that he didn’t
actually know what had happened to me last night, that none of the others did.
Suddenly I felt a lot better. “I fell down,” I said.

He grimaced, disgusted, while all the expression disappeared
from Kissindre’s face. “I told you he was drunk,” he muttered.

“Ezra,” she said, frowning. It seemed to be the only thing
she ever said to him, at least in my presence.

“You’re lucky you didn’t get into trouble with Corporate Security,
going off like that,” Ezra said to me. ‘Aside from the fact that you insulted
our hosts.”

I moved away, before I did something he’d regret for longer
than I would.

A vibration that was both more and less than noise filled
the air above me. I glanced up with the others, to see a transport dropping
down out of the early morning sky. It settled onto the smooth surface of the
landing terrace; its metallic skin flooded with logos in Tau’s combine colors,
endless safety warnings, and a diarrhea of instructions.

The hatch opened and Protz stepped out, wearing thermal
clothing. I saw other figures waiting behind him in the shadowed interior. I
wondered whether any of them were Hydran, since the whole reason for our team’s
existence was to study the cloud-reefs the Hydrans considered sacred ground. I
wondered whether anyone had asked the Hydrans what they thought of our mucking
around in their religious traditions. probably not.

I watched as the others exited one by one. They were all human.
I wasn’t sure whether I was disappointed or relieved. The two FTA inspectors I’d
seen at the party were here—a woman named Osuna and a man named Givechy.
Neither of them looked like they expected to enjoy this much. Protz looked
nervous. I wondered if he was afraid I’d spill my guts about last night. He
didn’t meet my eyes.

The last person out of the transport didn’t look like he belonged
with the rest. He could have been a hitchhiker, except for the Tau logos on his
coat. He was tall and lean, probably in his late twenties, with black hair and
dark eyes. His face was long and skeptical-looking, weathered to a kind of
nutmeg color that reminded me of faces I’d seen in Freaktown, although I was
sure he was all human.

Protz began to make introductions. That seemed to be his
entire reason for existing. He introduced the stranger as Luc Wauno, a
cloud-spotter for Tau. I looked at Wauno again with more interest: what he did
was observe and record the movements of the cloud-whales ... except for today,
when his job seemed to be playing guide for us.

Wauno nodded, if he made any response at all, to each person
he met. He looked like he’d rather be in the middle of nowhere staring at the
sky. The only time he opened his mouth or even cracked a smile was when Protz
introduced him to Kissindre. I saw him say a couple of words to her; noticed
his teeth were crooked. You didn’t see that much.

When Protz got to me, Wauno met my stare, and I could see
his interest. “Hydran?” he asked me.

And because there was nothing behind the words, no insult, I
nodded. “Half.”

His deepset eyes flicked over the people around us. “Then I
guess you’re not a Refugee.”

“Not lately,” I said.

He studied my face again, checking out the damage. His hand
rose to the small beaded pouch that hung from a cord around his neck ... Don’t
let them make you into one,” he murmured. He shook his head and turned away as Protz
closed in on us, frowning.

Wauno started back toward the transport. I followed with the
others. Kissindre got the seat beside his, up front where the view was the
best. Ezra took the seat next to mine, looking resentful and sullen, even
though as usual I didn’t see any reason for it.

Wauno leaned back in his seat and plugged his fingers into
the control panel. I hadn’t noticed anything unusual about his hands, only his
teeth; even his augmentation had been sanitized by Tau. The transport took us
up, leaving the plaza and the city behind like an afterthought.

I took a deep breath, looking ahead as we dropped off the
edge of Tau’s world, following the river over the falls and on along its
snake-dancing course into the eroded landscape of the reefs, the heart of the
Hydran reservation. The “Homeland,” Tau called it, as if one part of this world
could belong more to the Hydrans, by right, than another.

I forced myself to stop thinking about Tau, forced myself to
stop replaying memories of last night and focus on the new day. I was about to
experience something incredible, something that ought to put all our lives into
some kind of perspective.

The cloud-whales, the aliens responsible for the existence
of the reefs, had been a part of this world longer than either humans or
Hydrans. They were colony-creatures, each individual—made up of countless
separate motes functioning together like the cells of a brain. They absorbed
energy directly from sunlight, substance from the molecules of the air.

They spent their entire existence in the sky, condensing the
atmospheric water vapor until they were shrouded in fog. To someone looking up
with only human eyes, they were impossible to tell from the real thing. And
looking down, if they
did
, nothing that humans or Hydrans
had ever done here on this world seemed to concern them.

Nothing about their own existence was permanent; their forms
mutated endlessly with the restless motion of the atmosphere ... their thoughts
flowed and changed, each one unique, shimmering, and random. But like the
hidden order inside the chaos of a fractal pattern, there were moments of
genius hidden in their whimsies.

And their thoughts were unique in another way—they had
physical substance. As solid and tangible as human thoughts were insubstantial,
the cloud-whales’ cast-off musings fell from the sky, a literal fall of dreams.
The dreamfall accreted in areas where the cloud-whales gathered, drawn by
something about the landscape, the weather conditions, fluctuations in the
planet’s magnetosphere. over time the excrement of their thoughts, their
cast-off mental doodlings, formed strange landscapes like the one that was
passing below us now. After centuries, or millennia, the reefs had become
strata hundreds of kilometers long and hundreds of meters thick, rich with
potential knowledge.

A ‘wild library” was what Tau’s researchers called it, in
the background data I’d accessed. The research team called it “cloud shit” when
they thought no one was listening. The untouched reef formation we’d come to
study—like the ones Tau was already exploiting—was an amino acid stew of
recombinant products just waiting to be plucked out of the matrix and sent to
labs hungry for progress, all for the greater profit of Draco.

Draco, through its subsidiary holdings, was a major player
in nanotechnology research, but the nanotech field had been stagnant for years.
Billions had been spent on research and resources by some of the most powerful
combines in the Federation, but their successes had been limited at best, and
the few useful tools and products they had developed were equally limited, no
more than mindless, semifunctional industrial “helpers.”

proteins, especially enzymes, were nature’s own nanotech,
and the reefs were riddled with protoid matter so complex and bizarre that for
the most part nobody had ever seen anything like it. Tau sent their most
promising discoveries to specialized labs throughout Draco’s interstellar
hegemony, where researchers analyzed the structures and tried to reproduce the
folding. Draco found a way to synthesize the ones that had potential; or if no
technology existed that was sophisticated enough to reproduce a find, they
demanded more of the raw product from Tau’s mining operations.

But the same matrix that had produced bio-based “machines”
stronger than diamond, and the hybrid enzymatic nanodrones that made ceralloy
production possible, was booby-trapped with unpredictable dangers.

There were fragments of thought that did nothing but good;
far more that were totality incomprehensible. And then there were the ones you
could only describe as insane. The reef matrix kept them inert, Potential,
harmless.

But complex proteins degraded rapidly when they were removed
from their stabilizing matrix; and there were “soft spots,” vacuoles inside the
reef itself where the matrix had begun to decay. The decaying material could
cause anything from a bad smell to a kiloton explosion. There were a thousand
different bio-hazard disasters just waiting for careless excavators ....

The databox my brain had been marinating in folded shut and
shunted back into long-term memory, suddenly leaving my thoughts empty.

I let them stay that way. My mind sidestepped into a silence
where no one else existed, where nothing existed for me but the reef along the
river course below us, layer on layer of monolithic dreamscape. In the deepest
part of my mind something stirred, and I knew why the Hydrans called these places
sacred ground .... I
knew it. I knew it ....

Something jolted me, and suddenly it was all gone.

I started upright in my seat, crowded between bodies in the
transport’s humming womb.

Ditreksen jabbed me again with his elbow. ‘Answer her, for
God’s sake,” he said. “Or were you talking in your sleep?”

I leaned away from him, frowning.

“Yes,” Kissindre murmured, but she wasn’t looking at either
of us. “That’s exactly what it’s like ... how did you describe i1—J” I realized
she was talking to me. Except that I hadn’t said anything.

Something I’d been thinking had slipped out. Just for a
second, lost in awe, my mind had dropped its guard long enough for one stray
image to escape. I swore under my breath, because it had happened without me
even realizing it—the only way it ever happened anymore. The harder I tried to
control my telepathy, the less control I had. As soon as I believed in it, it
would be gone.

“I forget,” I muttered. Wauno glanced back over his shoulder
at us, away again. I risked a look at the rest of the passengers: Protz, the
Feds. None of them were looking at me. At least the image hadn’t strayed far.

I slouched down and closed my eyes, closing everyone out.
Their curiosity, their arrogance, their resentment, and their pity couldn’t
touch me, as long as I didn’t let them in ....

I heard Kissindre shift in her seat, her attention drifting
away again. She began talking to Protz, asking him questions about how to
access Tau’s data on the reefs: where to find it, why there wasn’t more of it.
He muttered something that sounded apologetic and bureaucratic.

“If you really want to know more about the reefs, You should
talk to the Hydrans,” Wauno said.

I opened one eye.

Protz made a snort that could have been a laugh. “There’s no
point to that. Anyway, it’s out of the question.”

Kissindre leaned toward Wauno. “Is there someone you know
that we could talk with?”

Wauno nodded. “There’s an
oyasin.
She knows more
about the reefs than—”

“Now, just a minute,” Protz hissed. “You’re talking about
that old witch—that shaman, or whatever she calls herself? We suspect her of
supporting HARM! you aren’t seriously suggesting that members of this research
team go into the Homeland and look her up?” He glanced at the two Feds sitting
in the rear of the transport, as if he didn’t want this conversation going any
further.

“Nobody’s ever proved anything against her,” Wauno said.

“At best she’s nothing but a con artist. She’ll tell you
anything you want to hear.” Protz glared at the back of Wauno’s head. ‘And
since she can read your mind, she knows what you want to hear.” He looked back
at Kissindre, pointing his finger. ‘And then she’ll want you to pay for it,
just like the rest of them. For God’s sake—” he muttered, lowering his voice
even more as he looked at Wauno again, “how can you even mention her with a
straight face? And why are you encouraging outsiders to involve themselves with
Hydrans, given the current ... situation?”

Wauno looked out at the sky and didn’t answer.

I shut my eyes and kept them shut.

I stayed like that for the rest of the flight, letting the
conversations drone on around me until finally I did doze off.

I wasn’t sure how long I’d slept by the time we reached the
initial survey site. The transport let us out on a spit of beach caught in the
river’s meander below the reef-face. Everything we’d need to begin preliminary
data collection was already there, in dome tents laid out with all the
precision of Tau Riverton, as painless as anesthesia.