Dreamfall, Page 2

  I nodded at her, grateful, not for the first time. And went on looking at her. I’d never seen her dressed like this, for a combine showplace instead of fieldwork. She’d never seen me dressed like this, either. I wondered how she liked it; if it made her feel the way I felt when I looked at her.

  We’d been friends for most of the time I’d been getting through my university studies. Friends and nothing more. As long as I’d known her she’d had a habit named Ezra Ditreksen. He was a systems analyst, and from what everyone said, he was damn good at it. He was also a real prick. They argued more than most people talked; I never understood why she didn’t jettison him. But then, I was hardly an expert on long-term relationships.

  Kissindre was the one who’d badgered me until I put into coherent form the ideas I’d had about an artifact called the Monument. Its vanished creators had left their distinctive bioengineering signature scattered throughout this arm of the galactic spiral, encrypted in the DNA of a handful of other uncanny constructs, including Refuge’s cloud-whales.

  Kissindre was with her uncle, Janos Perrymeade. He was a vip for Tau, like most of the warm bodies at this party. It had been his idea to bring a research team here; he’d gotten the permission and the funding for us to study the cloud-whales and the reefs. I looked at Kissindre and her uncle standing side by side, seeing the same clearwater blue eyes, the same shining brown hair. It made me want to like him, want to trust him, because they looked so much alike. So far he hadn’t done anything to make me change my mind.

  Ezra Ditreksen materialized on the other side of her, at ease inside his formal clothes, the way everyone here seemed to be except me. His specialty wasn’t xenoarch; but the team needed a systems analyst, and the fact that he was sleeping with the crew leader made him the logical choice. When he saw me he frowned, something he did like breathing. Not seeing him frown would have worried me.

  I let him claim my place in the conversation, not minding, for once. It didn’t matter to me that he’d never liked me, didn’t bother me that I didn’t know why. For a rich processing-patent heir from Ardattee, there must be more reasons than he had brain cells. Maybe it was enough that he’d seen Kissindre sketch my face once in the corner of her lightbox instead of making her usual painstaking hand drawing of some artifact. I took another drink off a passing tray. This time Protz frowned at me.

  I looked away from him, reorienting on the conversation. Ditreksen was standing next to me, asking Perrymeade how he’d come to be Tau’s Alien Affairs Commissioner. It seemed to be an innocent question, but there was something in the way he asked it that made me look twice at him. I wasn’t certain until I saw a muscle twitch in Perrymeade’s cheek. Not my imagination.

  Perrymeade smiled an empty social smile, one that stopped at his eyes, and said, “I fell into it, really … An interest in xenology runs in the family.” He glanced at Kissindre; his smile was real as he looked at her. “I had some background in the field. The time came when Tau needed to fill the Alien Affairs position, and so they tapped me.”

  “You’re the only agent?” I asked, wondering if there could actually be that few Hydrans left on Refuge.

  He looked surprised. “No, certainly not. I am the one who has direct contact with the Hydran Council, however. The Council communicates with our agency on behalf of their people.”

  I looked away, made restless by a feeling I couldn’t name. I searched the crowd for the three Hydrans; spotted them across the room, barely visible inside a forest of human bodies.

  “I suppose the job must pay awfully well,” Ezra murmured, drawing out the words as if they were supposed to mean something more. “To make the … challenges of the work worthwhile.”

  I turned back.

  Perrymeade’s smile strained. “Well, yes, the job has its challenges—and its compensations. Although my family still won’t let me admit what I do for a living.” His mouth quirked, and Ditreksen laughed.

  Perrymeade caught me looking at him; caught Kissindre looking at him too. His face flushed, the pale skin reddening the way I’d seen hers redden. “Of course, money isn’t the only compensation I get from my work—” He gave Ditreksen the kind of look you’d give to someone who’d intentionally tripped you in public. “The conflicts that arise when the needs of the Hydran population and Tau’s interests don’t intersect make my work … challenging, as you say. But getting to know more about the Hydran community has taught me a great deal … the unique differences between our two cultures, and the striking similarities.… They are a remarkable, resilient people.” He looked back at me, as if he wanted to see the expression on my face change. Or maybe he didn’t want to see it change on Ezra’s. His gaze glanced off my stare like water off hot metal; he was looking at Kissindre again.

  Her expression hung between emotions for a long second, before her lips formed something that only looked like a smile. She turned back to Sand, her silence saying it all.

  I listened to her finish telling Sand how we’d reached the conclusions we had about the artifact/world called the Monument and about the ones who’d left it for us to find—the vanished race humans had named the Creators, because they couldn’t come up with something more creative.

  The Creators had visited Refuge too, millennia ago, before they’d abandoned our universe entirely for some other plane of existence. The cloud-whales and their by-product, the reefs, were one more cosmic riddle the Creators had left for us to solve, or simply to wonder at. The reefs were also, not coincidentally, the main reason for Tau’s existence and Draco’s controlling interest in this world.

  “But how did you come to such an insight about the Monument’s symbolism?” Sand asked—asking me again, I realized, because Kissindre had given me all the credit.

  “I … it just came to me.” I looked down, seeing the Monument in my memory: an entire artificial world, created by a technology so far beyond ours that it still seemed like magic; a work of art constructed out of bits and pieces, the bones of dead planets.

  At first I’d thought of it as a monument to death, to the failure of lost civilizations—a reminder to the ones who came after that the Creators had gone where we never could. But then I’d seen it again, and seen it differently—not as a cemetery marker, but as a road sign pointing the way toward the unimaginable future; a memorial to the death of Death …

  “… because he has an unusual sensitivity to the subliminals embedded in the matrix of the Monument.” Kissindre was finishing my explanation again when I looked up.

  “Yes, well, that is what he’s best at, that sort of instinctive, intuitive thing,” Ezra said, shrugging. “Considering his background … Kissindre and I put in long hours of search work and statistical analysis to come up with the data that supports his hypothesis. We constructed the actual study—”

  I frowned, and Kissindre said, “Ezra…”

  “I’m not saying he doesn’t deserve the credit—” Ditreksen said, catching her look. “Without him, we wouldn’t have had a starting point. It’s almost enough to make me wish I were half Hydran.…” He glanced at me, with a small twist of his mouth. He looked back at Sand, at the others, measuring their reactions.

  There was a long silence. Still looking at Ditreksen, I said, “Sometimes I wish you were half human.”

  “Let me introduce you to our Hydran guests,” Perrymeade said, catching me by the arm, trying to pull me away without seeming to. I remembered that he was responsible for overseeing Tau’s uncertain race relations. “They want to meet you.”

  I realized suddenly that I was more than just another interchangeable team member, a node in an artificial construct created to impress the FTA. I was some kind of token, living proof that they weren’t genocidal exploiters—at least, not anymore.

  Everyone and everything around me slipped out of focus, except for the three Hydrans looking at us expectantly from across the room. Suddenly I felt as if the drinks and the tranks and the camphs had all kicked in at once.

  The Hydrans
stood together, looking toward us. They’d stood that way the entire time, close to each other, as if there was strength in numbers. But I was alone; there was no one like me in this crowd, or in any other crowd I’d ever been a part of. Perrymeade led me to them, stopped me in front of them, as if I was a drone circulating with a platter of mind-benders.

  The Hydrans wore clothing that would have looked perfectly appropriate on anyone else in the room—just as well cut, just as expensive, although they didn’t show any combine colors. But my eyes registered something missing, the thing I always checked for on another human: Databands. None of them had a databand. They were nonpersons. Hydrans didn’t exist to the Federation Net that affected every detail of a human citizen’s existence from birth to death.

  Perrymeade made introductions. The part of my brain that I’d trained to remember any input recorded their names, but I didn’t hear a word he said.

  There were two men and one woman. One of the men was older than the others, his face weathered by exposure, like he’d spent a lot of time outdoors. The younger man looked soft, as if he’d never made much of an effort at anything, or ever had to. The woman had a sharpness about her; I couldn’t tell if it was intelligence or hostility.

  I stood studying them, the angles and planes of their faces. Everything was where it should be in a human face. The differences were subtle, more subtle than the differences between random faces plucked out of the human genepool. But they weren’t human differences.

  These faces were still alien—the colors, the forms, the almost fragile bone structure. The eyes were entirely green, the color of emeralds, of grass … of mine. The Hydrans looked into my eyes—seeing only the irises as green as grass, but pupils that were long and slitted like a cat’s, like theirs. My face was too human to belong to one of them, but still subtly alien.…

  I felt myself starting to sweat, knowing that they were passing judgment on me with more than just their eyes. There was a sixth sense they’d all been born with—that I’d been born with too. Only I’d lost it. It was gone, and any second now their eyes would turn cold; any second they’d turn away—

  I was actually starting to tremble, standing there in my formal clothes; shaking like I was back on some Oldcity street corner, needing a fix. Perrymeade went on speaking as if he hadn’t noticed. I watched the Hydrans’ faces turn quizzical. They traded half frowns and curious looks, along with a silent mind-to-mind exchange that once I could have shared in. I thought I felt a whisper of mental contact touch my thoughts as softly as a kiss … felt the psionic Gift I’d been born with cower down in a darkness so complete that I couldn’t be sure I’d felt anything.

  “Are you—?” the woman broke off, as if she was searching for a word. She touched her head with a nutmeg-colored hand. Disbelief filled her face, and I could guess what word she was looking for. I watched the expressions on the faces of the two men change, the younger one’s to what looked like disgust, the older one’s to something I didn’t even recognize.

  Perrymeade broke off, went on speaking again, like someone refusing to acknowledge that we were all sinking into quicksand. He droned on about how my presence on the research team meant there would be someone “more sensitive to Hydran cultural interests—”

  “And are you?” The older man looked directly at me. My eidetic memory coughed up his name: Hanjen. A member of the Hydran Council. Perrymeade had called him an “ombudsman,” which seemed to mean some kind of negotiator. Hanjen cocked his head, as if he was listening for the answer I couldn’t give—or for something else that I hadn’t given, could never give him.

  “Then I suggest,” he murmured, as if I’d shaken my head—or maybe I had, “that you come and … talk to us about it.”

  I turned away before anyone could say anything more or do anything to stop me. I pushed my way through the crowd and headed for the door.

  TWO

  I STOOD IN the cold wind and the deepening twilight on the riverside promenade, wondering again why they’d called this world Refuge. The city lay behind me, its distant sounds of life reminding me that sooner or later I’d have to turn back and acknowledge its presence: Tau Riverton, the orderly, soulless grid of a combine ‘clave, a glorified barracks for Tau’s citizen/shareholders, whose leaders were still eating and drinking and lying to each other at the party I’d just bolted from.

  Ahead of me a single bridge arced across the sheer-walled canyon that separated Tau Riverton from the city on the other side. The canyon was deep and wide, carved out by what must once have been a multikiloton waterflow. Now there was only one thin strand of brass-colored river snaking along the canyon floor, a hundred meters below.

  I looked up again at the bridge span, its length brightening with unnatural light as the dusk deepened. At its far end lay not just another town but another world, or what was left of it. Hydran. Alien. This was as close as the preprogrammed systems of the aircab I’d hired would take me—or anyone—to what lay across the river: Freaktown.

  From here I couldn’t tell anything about the town on the other side, half a kilometer away through the violet dusk. I stole glances at it as I drifted along the light-echoed, nearly empty concourse toward the end of the plateau. Ghost voices murmured in my ears as my databand triggered every tight-beam broadcast I passed through. They whispered to me that there was a fifty-credit fine for spitting on the sidewalk, a hundred-credit fine for littering, fines up to a thousand credits and including a jail term if I defaced any property. There were subliminal visuals to go with the messages, flickering across my vision like heat lightning.

  I’d never spent time in a combine ‘clave before. I wondered how its citizens kept from going insane, when everywhere they turned they got feedback like this. Maybe they simply learned to stop seeing, stop listening. I was pretty damn sure they learned to stop spitting on the sidewalk.

  What was left of the river poured like dregs from a spilled bottle over the barely visible precipice up ahead. Up on the heights, poised like some bird of prey, was the Aerie. I could see its streamlined gargoyle form, the fluid composite and transparent ceralloy of its body straining out over the edge of the world like a death wish, silhouetted against the bruised mauves and golds of the sunset sky.

  I remembered how I’d left it; thought about the drinks I’d had up there tonight, that maybe I’d had too many, too close together. I thought about the trank patches I’d put on even before I got to the party.

  I reached up and peeled the used, useless patches off my neck. I dug in my pockets for a camph; stuck the last one I had into my mouth and bit down, because it didn’t matter now if having another one was a bad idea. As the camph numbed my tongue I sighed, waiting for it to take out all my nerve endings the same way, one by one. Waiting.… It didn’t help. Tonight nothing did. Nothing could.

  There was only one thing that could give me what I needed tonight, and I wasn’t going to find that in Tau Riverton. And with every heartbeat I spent not looking across the river, my need grew stronger.

  Damn you. I shook my head, not even certain who I meant. I leaned against an advertising kiosk, letting the shifting colors of its display holos bleed on me. The voices murmuring in my ears changed as I changed position, urging me to go here, buy this, reminding me that there was a fine for loitering, a fine for defacing a display unit. The colors turned the clothing I’d bought this afternoon into something as surreal as my memories of tonight’s reception.

  I looked back across the river again, pushing my hands into my pockets. The season was supposed to be spring, but Riverton was located far south, near Refuge’s forty-fifth parallel, in the middle of what seemed to be high desert. The night air was cold, and getting colder. The cold made my hands ache. They’d been frostbitten more than once, back in Oldcity. Quarro’s spring had been cold too. I watched my breath steam as I exhaled; condensation touched my face with dank cloud-fingers.

  I began to walk again, back the way I’d come, telling myself I was only moving to keep warm. But
I was moving toward the bridge, the only point of intersection that existed for two peoples living on the same planet but in separate worlds.

  This time I got close enough to see the access clearly: The arched gateway, the details of the structure. The guards. Two armed men, wearing Corporate Security uniforms, Tau’s colors showing all over them.

  I stopped as their heads turned toward me. Suddenly I was angry, not even sure why … whether it was what those uniformed bodies said about the access between their world and the one on the other side, or just the fact that they were Corpses, and it would be a long time before the sight of a CorpSec uniform didn’t make my guts knot up.

  I made myself move toward them with my empty hands at my sides, wearing neat, respectable clothes and a databand.

  They watched me come, their faces expressionless, until I was only a few steps from them under the gateway arch. It was warm under the arch.

  My databand triggered the pillars on either side of me; they came alive with mindnumbing displays of data: maps, diagrams, warnings, lists of regulations. I saw my own image centered in one of the displays, a scan of my entire body showing that I was unarmed, solvent … and not quite sober.

  I stared at the double image of my face, the file-match side by side with the realtime image, looking at them the way I knew the guards would look at them. Seeing my hair, so pale in the artificial light that it was almost blue. I’d let it grow until it reached my shoulders, pinned it back with a clip at the base of my neck, the way most students of the Floating University had worn theirs. The gold stud through the hole in my ear tonight was about as conservative as I could make it, like my clothes. The light turned my skin an odd shadow-color, but it was no odder than the colors the guards’ skins had turned in the light. I glanced down, away, hoping they wouldn’t look at my eyes.

  One of the Corpses studied the display while the other one studied me. The first one nodded to the second and shrugged. “In order,” he said.