Dreamfall

I would like to acknowledge the invaluable input and support
of the following people, without whom neither this book nor my life in general
would be in such good shape right now—Jim Frenkel, Barbara Luedtke, Carroll
Martin, Betsy Mitchell, the Peach-Poznik clan, Mary and Nick Pendergrass, and
Vernor Vinge. Thanks, guys—you’re the best.

“What’s th’ goal of th’ game, Mr. Toad? A
monster
slain?
A
maiden
saved? A
wrong
righted?”

“A standoff achieved.”

—Bill Griffin

I have spread my dreams under your feet;

Tread softly, for you tread on my dreams.

—W. B. Yeats

The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.

—Karl Marx

Five or six centuries ago, the Prespace philosopher Karl
Marx said the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. Marx understood what
it meant to be human ... to be flawed.

Marx thought he also understood how to end an eternity of
human suffering and injustice:
Share whatever you could, keep only what you
needed.
He never understood why the rest of humanity couldn’t see the
answer, when it was so obvious to him.

The truth was that they couldn’t even see the problem.

Marx also said that the only antidote to mental suffering is
physical pain.

But he never said that time flies when you’re having fun.

I glanced at my databand, checking for the hundredth time to
see whether an hour had passed yet. It hadn’t. This was the fifth time in less
than an hour that I’d found myself standing at the Aerie’s high parabolic
windows, looking out at a world called Refuge; escaping from the noise and
pressure of the Tau reception going on behind me.
Refuge from what
?
For who
?
The background data the team had been given access to didn’t
say.

Not from Tau’s bureaucracy. Not for us.
The research
team I was a part of had arrived at Firstfall less than a day ago. We hadn’t
even been onworld long enough to adjust to local planetary time. But almost
before we’d dropped our bags here in Riverton, Tau Biotech’s liaison had
arrived at our hotel and forced us to attend this reception, which seemed to be
taking place in stasis.

I dug another camph out of the silk-smooth pocket of my
bought-on-the-fly formal shirt, and stuck it into my mouth. It began to
dissolve, numbing my tongue as I looked out again through the Aerie’s
heartstopping arc of window toward the distant cloud-reefs. The sun was setting
now behind the reefs, limning their karst topography of ragged peaks and
steep-walled valleys. A strand of river cut a fiery path through the maze of
canyons, the way it must have done for centuries, transforming the landscape
into something as surreal as a dream.

Below me, the same river that had turned the distant reefs
into fantastic sculpture fell silently, endlessly over a cliff. Protz, Tau’s
liaison, had called this the Great Falls. Watching the sluggish, silt-heavy
waterflow, I wondered whether that was a joke.

“Cat!”

Someone called my name. I turned, glancing down as I did because
some part of me was always afraid that the next time I looked down at myself I’d
be naked.

I wasn’t naked. I was still wearing the neat, conservatively
cut clothes I’d overpaid for in a hotel shop, so that I could pass for Human
this evening. Human with a capital H. That was how they said it around here,
not to confuse it with Hydran:
Alien.

An entire city full of Hydrans lived just across the river.
There were three of them here at this reception tonight. I’d watched them come
in only minutes ago. They hadn’t teleported, materializing unnervingly in the
middle of the crowd. They’d walked into the room, like any other guest. I
wondered if they’d had any choice about that.

Their arrival had crashed every coherent thought in my mind.
I’d been watching them without seeming to ever since, making sure they weren’t
watching me or moving toward me. I’d watched them until I had to turn away to
the windows just so that I could breathe.

Passing for human
.
That was what they were
trying to do at this party, even though they’d always be aliens, their psionic
Gift marking them as freaks. This had been their world, once, until humans had
come and taken it away from them. Now they were the strangers, the outsiders;
hated by the people who’d destroyed them, because it was human to hate the ones
you’d injured.

The butt end of the camph I’d been sucking on dissolved into
bitter pulp in my mouth without doing anything to ease my nerves. I swallowed
it and took another one out of my pocket. I was already wearing trank patches;
I’d already drunk too many of the drinks that seemed to appear every time I
turned around. I couldn’t afford to keep doing that. Not while I was trying to
pass for human, when my face would never really pass, any more than those alien
faces across the room would.

“Cat!” Protz called my name again, giving it the querulous
twist it always seemed to get from someone who didn’t believe they’d heard all
there was to it.

I could tell by the look on his face that he was coming to
herd me back into the action. I could see by the way he moved that he was
beginning to resent how I kept sliding out of it. I took the camph out of my
mouth and dropped it on the floor.

As he forced me back into the crowd’s eye I looked for somebody
I knew, any member of the research team I’d arrived with. I thought I saw
Pedrotty, our bitmapper, on the far side of the room; didn’t see anyone else I
recognized. I moved on, muttering polite stupidities to one stranger after
another.

Protz, my keeper, was a midlevel bureaucrat of Tau Biotech.
His name could have been anything, he could have been any of the other combine
vips I’d met. They came in both sexes and any color you wanted, but they all
seemed to be the same person. Protz wore his regulation night-blue suit and
silver drape, Tau’s colors, like he’d been born to them.

Probably he had. fn this universe you didn’t just work for a
combine, you lived for it.
Keiretsu,
they called it: the corporate
family. It was a Prespace term that had followed the multinationals as they
became multiplanetary and finally interstellar. It would survive as long as the
combines did, because it so perfectly described how they stole your soul.

The combine that employed you wasn’t just your career, it
was your heritage, your motherland, existing through both space and time. When
you were born into a combine you became a cell in the nervous system of a
megabeing. If you were lucky and kept your nose clean, you stayed a part of it
until you died. Maybe longer.

I looked down. The fingers of my right hand were covering
the databand I wore on my left wrist—proving my reality, again.

Without a databand you didn’t exist, in this universe. Until
a few years &go, I hadn’t had one.

For seventeen years the only ID I’d worn had been scars.
Scars from beatings, scars from blades. I’d had a crooked, half-useless thumb
for years, because it had healed untreated after I’d picked the wrong mark’s
pocket one night. The databand I wore now covered the scar on my wrist where a
contract laborer’s bond tag had been fused to my flesh. I had a lot of scars.
The worst ones didn’t show.

After a lifetime on the streets of a human refuse dump
called Oldcity, my luck had finally changed. And one of the hard truths I’d
learned since then was that not being invisible anymore meant that everybody
got to see you naked.

“You’ve met Gentleman Kensoe, who heads our Board ....”
Protz nodded at Kensoe, the ultimate boss of Tau, the top of its food chain. He
looked like he’d never missed a meal, or a chance to spit into an outstretched
hand. ‘And this is Lady Gyotis Binta, representing the Ruling Board of Draco.”
Protz pushed me into someone else’s personal space. “She’s interested in your
work—”

I felt my mind go blank again. Draco existed on a whole separate
level of influence and power. They
owned
Tau. They controlled the
resource rights to this entire planet and parts of a hundred others. They were
the ultimate keiretsu: Tau Biotech was just one more client state of the Draco
cartel, one of a hundred exploiting fingers Draco had stuck into a hundred
separate profit pies. The Draco Family, they liked to call it. Cartel members
traded goods and services with each other, provided support against hostile
takeover attempts, looked out for each other’s interests—like family. Keiretsu
also meant “trust”.... And right now Draco didn’t trust Tau.

Tau’s Ruling Board had drawn the unwanted attention of the
Federation Trade Authority. Cartels were autonomous entities, but most of them
used indentured workers from the
1i11\
’s Contract Labor
pool to do the scut work their own citizens wouldn’t touch.

Technically, the Feds only interceded when they had evidence
that the universal rights of their laborers were being violated. The FTA
controlled interstellar shipping, and no combine really wanted to face FTA
sanctions. But I knew from personal experience that the way bondies were
treated wasn’t the real issue for the Feds. The real issue was power.

The FTA was always looking for new leverage in its endless
balance-game with the combines. Politics was war; the weapons were just better
concealed.

I didn’t know who had reported Tau to the Feds; maybe some
corporate rival. I did know the xenoarchaeology research team that I’d joined
was one of Tau’s reform showpieces, intended to demonstrate Tau’s enlightened
governmental process. We’d come here at Tau’s expense to study a living
artifact called the cloud-whales and the reefs of bizarre detritus they had
deposited planetwide. The Tau Board was sparing no expense to show the Feds
they weren’t dirty, or at least were cleaning up their act. Which was a joke,
from what I knew about combine politics, but not a funny one.

It was just as obvious that Protz wanted—expected—everyone
on the team to help Tau prove its point.
Say something,
his eyes begged me,
the way I knew his mind would have been begging me if I could have read his
thoughts.

I looked away, searching the crowd for Hydrans. I didn’t
find any. I looked back. “Good to meet you,” I muttered, and forced myself to
remember that I’d met Board members before. I’d been bodyguard to a Lady; knew,
if I knew anything, that the only real difference between a combine vip and an
Oldcity street punk was what kind of people believed the lies they told.