Dreamfall (13 page)

Perrymeade stopped beside me. He put out a hand to help me
up. “What happened—?” he murmured.

I struggled to my feet, ignoring his outstretched hand. “You
did. Fuck you. Get away from me.” I turned my back on him and the sight of
everything behind him, everything he stood for.

I reached the mod and let myself in, sealing the doors
behind me. “Take me back,” I told it.

“I’m sorry,” its voice came back at me like the voices of
the Hydrans, flat and impassive. “I am still waiting for Mez Perrymeade.”

“Send him another mod. Take me back now!”

“I’m soffy. I am still waiting—”

I swore and slammed my booted foot against the control
panel.

A display came alive suddenly, with Sand’s head floating in
it. o’What is it?”

“Get me out of here,” I said.

“Why?” he asked. “Didn’t it go well?”

“No,” I said, my voice raw. “It was a fucking disaster.”

“what did you 6fs”—fue frowned—”to offend them?”

“I didn’t die.” I pushed back in the seat, hugging myself. “I
listened to you, /ou son of a bitch, but you didn’t listen to me. Get me out of
here.” I looked away from his image in the display.

“I don’t understand this,” he said.

“You never will.” I kicked the panel again, and Sand’s face
disappeared. The mod came alive around me and carried me out of the courtyard.

Ir was midafternoon by the time Wauno picked me up at the
hotel and brought me back to the survey site beside the river. I didn’t say
anything on the way there. He returned the favor.

I walked into camp, my head singing with the sound of the
river, the solid crunch of gravel under my boots. Everything looked the way I
remembered it, except that the shifting boundaries of shadow had changed.
Everything sounded the same, smelled and felt the same. My mind tried to tell
me that I should feel some kind of relief that the ordeal was over. I was back
on safe ground, back where I belonged, with people I knew and trusted. I wanted
to believe that, as much as I’d wanted to believe it last night when those same
people had come to save me from Tau’s Corporate Security.
Safe ....

But I knew as I crossed the gravel into the shadow of the
reef that I’d never really believe that.
I’m safe
was only a lie that everyone
told to themselves in order to stay sane. I
belong
was only a lie that I
told to myself. Since I’d left Oldcity, years ago now, I hadn’t stayed anywhere
long enough to feel like I belonged there. It wasn’t any different here.
Everywhere I looked I saw strangers’ faces, walked streets I didn’t know the
names of, slept in unfamiliar rooms alone in empty beds.

And I knew that as much as I’d hated my life back in
Oldcity, sometimes, in the middle of the night, some sick part of me missed it.
I’d remember its walls closing me in like a mother’s arms; how simple it was to
know that the sky was only a roof over my head, thirty meters high, and not
infinite. And those were the times when I ached to be nothing but an ignorant,
fucked-up freak again, back in a place where I understood the rules.

“CaF—” Kissindre’s voice reached me over the noise and motion
of the camp like a lifeline dragging me out of quicksand. She came striding
toward me, her coat flapping.

She stopped as I stopped in front of her, &S we suddenly
collided with the inevitable, invisible barrier between us. I watched her
swallow words—probably
Are you all right?
because she hadn’t wanted to
have to ask me that again before even a day had passed.

“I’m back,” was all I said.

“Good,” she murmured, but I saw concern in her eyes. Concern
for her family and the kidnapped boy; concern that she didn’t know how to ask
me the questions she needed to ask but couldn’t.

“I wasn’t any help,” I muttered, looking down. “Your uncle’s
still with the Hydrans.”

“Oh,” she said. The word was empty and noncommittal. She
started to turn aw&], looked back, hesitating long enough to make it an
invitation. We moved on through the site, walking together.

When we’d gone a short way she pointed out some kind of tech
equipment being set up. “They’ve brought in the field-suit system. Ezr’s
helping them get it online. You got back just in time for a demonstration.”

I let my gaze follow her pointing hand, glad to let my
thoughts go with it. It was a relief to focus on something that had nothing to
do with me personally. The maroon-coveralled workers were standing around the
displacement-field equipment now. I remembered the looks I’d seen on their
faces before, the dull resentment. I looked at them again as we got closer. A
few of them had their sleeves pushed up, as if they’d been sweating in spite of
the cold.

I stopped as I spotted the red band ringing a worker’s wrist,
and then another one, and another. Bond tags: what you wore instead of a
databand if you were contract labor. My hand went to my wrist, to the databand
that covered the scar a bond tag had left on me, proving to me again that I was
really who I thought I was.

Protz and the other Tau vips were still there, along with
the two Feds. A handful of techs stood waiting to demonstrate the sounding
equipment. On the way here to Refuge I’d accessed files on the equipment they
used to prospect inside the reefs, along with everything else Tau had forwarded
to us. I’d drained the advance feed trying to get a real sense of what the
reefs were like, to learn about Refuge and the Hydrans, about how they all fit
together.

The best way to get a detailed picture of what lay inside a
cloud-reef was to send in a human prospector wearing an upgraded version of a
common displacement-field unit. The field suits let a diver move through solid
matter like it was fluid, sending back readings until a technician on the
outside registered ro-.thing Tau wanted to explore further. The upgraded suits
they used for exploring an environment this complex weren’t ordinary mining
equipment: each suit was a spiderweb of monofilament woven with sensors and
phase generators, a microtech version of the skin of a starship—and had
probably cost Tau nearly as much.

No one from Tau had ever explored the few thousand hectares
of matrix here on the Homeland. This was the last unexploited reef formation on
the planet, which could only mean this formation had been the least
interesting, from Tau’s standpoint. That made it the most interesting to us,
and the most impoitant to the Hydrans. Tau claimed that this last formation
would always be inviolate. But
always
meant something different to a
combine government than it did to the rest of the universe.

Yelina Prohas, the team’s microbiologist, and Ezra Ditreksen
were standing with the Tau consultants and their equipment. I watched them nod
and gesture, not able to hear what they were discussing over the noise of the
camp. Another moment of stupefying numbness broke over me—the sense that
nothing was real, that no one really existed, because I couldn’t hear them,
feel them, touch them with mY mind.

I forced myself to keep moving, concentrating on the
pressure of the ground against my feet, the air I pulled into my lungs and
pushed out again.

“we’re actually going into the reefs today?” I asked as I
caught up with Kissindre. I hadn’t expected a bureaucracy like Tau to move that
fast, even with the Feds looking over their shoulder.

Ezra glanced up at me as I stopped beside him, and shook his
head ... They’re juit here to famthanze us with the data retrieval system. one
of the Tau workers will be going in. If we want to do any diving ourselves, we’ll
have to certify on a field-suit simulator.”

“Saban!” the Tau tech in charge shouted over her shoulder at
the knot of laborers I’d passed through to get here.

One of them dropped a crate of supplies. It hit the ground
with a
crunch
and split open. He didn’t even seem to notice. He was
staring at the tech, ut the equipment, at us, and I watched panic glaze his
face.

I grimaced, thinking this was all the team needed right now,
all I needed to make my day ... for some contract laborer to have a nervous
breakdown in front of the Feds, in the middle of all our insanely exPensive
equiPment.

The tectr shouted the bondie’s name again like a curse. This
time Saban came toward us, moving as if the tech had control of his brain. I
watched him shuffle closer ...
coming to use a field suit because he had no
control over his ttfe: he was a slave, he was nothing but meat. But if he put
on that gear he’d be dead meat just like Goya, who ‘d, been his friend until
one of those suits had kiued him, barely a month ago. The field generators
would slip out of phase. That was what had kilted Goya. And when Goya died he
knew they’d call him next, and now they had
—

And everything he knew, everything he felt, was screaming
through my brain, “Ieezu, shit—!” I gasped, blinking. I slammed my mind shut,
squeezing him out like water through a closing fist.

Ezra glanced at me; the others were watching the tech explain
procedures. Ezra made a face, as if the look on my face just proved to him that
I was crazy.

I turned away, still dazed, as Saban reached the place where
we stood. Saban wasn’t looking at me, didn’t know what had just happened,
couldn’t, any more than I could have found my way back inside his head. There
was nothing left of my psi to—proul that he was still terrified or even still
alive.

I swore under my breath and forced my attention back to the
others.

“Suit up,” the tech said to Saban. Saban looked down at the
field-generating skinsuit and the sensor gear waiting in a container at his
feet. He picked up the suit. He was probably no more than thirty, but he looked
older, sucked dry. I wondered how long he’d been a bondie, what he’d looked
like before thaf. As h; began to pull the suit on, he looked up at the team
where we stood in a half circle, watching. I didn’t have to be a mind reader to
know what he thought of us, a bunch of Tau-kissing imported techies sending him
to do our dirty work in a rig that he thought would kill him.

He looked at me.

And I was looking into the eyes of a roomful of
strangers, att staring back at me:
half a dozen human psions sitting on a
bench like targets in a shooting gallety, & bunch of losers hoping for one
last chance. I remembered how they’d watched my .u”ry move as I crossed the
room to join them, filthy, exhausted, beaten. I remembered how the look in
their eyes had told me I was nothing, not even human ... not even to them.

Except for one woman, her hair like a midnight river, her
eyes as gtay as solrow.
Jule taMing.
She’d looked into my eyes, the eyes
of a wild animal, and seen a humanity that even I had believed was dead. And
she’d said—

“I’ll go. Let me go.’

Everyone standing around me in the reef’s shadow turned to
stare at me, their expressions caught somewhere between confusion and
disbelief.

“What?” Ezra said.

I licked my lips, swallowed. “r want to do it.”

The Tau tech in charge of the equipment, whose datapatch read
hawkins, shook her head. “Your team hasn’t qualified on a field suit. Can’t do
it. It’s against safety regs.”

“I’m qualified,” I said.

Kissindre looked over her shoulder at me.

“No, he’s not,” Ezra said. “None of us has done the training
sim.”

“I have,” I said, Pushing Past him.

“When—” He caught my arm, jerking me around.

“On the way here,” I said, controlling the urge to sprain
his wrist. “There was a virtual sim in the background databank we brought with
us.”

“No one had the time.”

“I did.” I shrugged and smiled, twisting the knife as he realized
what I was saying. I could memorrze anything I accessed, or even read,
perfectli, t[e first time. Being a psion wired your brain in a way that gave you
an eidetic memory if you wanted one. when I’d signed up for ttre university, I
hadn’t known how to access; for most of my life, I hadn’t even known how to
read. And the law said psions weren’t allowed to have augmentation hardwired
into their brains.

I’d needed a kind of miracle to make up for the years I’d
lost on the streets. when I rearized I’d been born with one, I learned to use
it to survive in my new life. Getting this far hadn’t been easy for me, but
some people thought it had.

Ezra let go of my arm, his mouth pinching. “Freak,” he muttered.

I stiffened. I’d smelled the word on his breath every time
he spoke, but he’d never had the guts to say it to my face before. I
straightened my sleeve and moved past him. “I’m qualified,” I said again, to
the tech. “Check me out,”

Hawkins shot a 100k at Kissindre, raising her eyebrows. Kissindre
looked once at me. I nodded. She nodded, then.

“It’s still not a good idea.” Hawkins glanced at the ring of
onlookers, the Tau vips and the Feds, as if she was looking for someone who’d
back her up and stop me. But no one gave her a sign. Either they didn’t know it
was dangerous, or they couldn’t admit they did.

I took the field suit from Saban’s strengthless hands. The
suit

DREAIVIF’ALL / 95

fluttered in my grip; it was like holding a shadow. Saban
shook his head, his eyes dark and uncomprehending. He began to back aw&!,
slowly, like a man afraid of stepping on cracks.

I turned to Hawkins. “Has this equipment been completely
checked out?” A displacement suit like this was cutting-edgl technology, which
meant that its potential rate of failure was about as high as its cost.

“what do you mean?” Hawkins said, resenting it, and me.

“fs it safe?”

“Why wouldn’t it be?” she snapped. “If you know what you’re
doing.”

I couldn’t tell from the look on her face whether she was
just nervous or actually worried that I might be right. I tried not to think
about it. I stripped off my outer clothing and put on the helmet, fastened the
sensor belt around my waist. Thin I pulled the skinsuit or, felt it wrap itself
around me like cobwebs, molding itself to the contours of my body. The feel of
it made my flesh crawl, but I’d been expecting that. I stretched, felt it move
with me.