Dreamfall (14 page)

The field suit had been programmed to allow a human prospector
to walk through walls, or anyway move through the variable matrix of the reef
as though it was made of water. There was hidden space inside the molecular
structure of all but the densest materials, and the phase shift opened, a
passageway, shoehorning the molecules apart, creating a vacuole that a human
being could exist inside of—as long as he kept moving. “Okdy,” I said at last. “Let’s
do it.”

Hawkins glanced up at me, back at her displays. ‘All right,”
she said, resigned. “But make it short. This isn’t virtual, it’s real. Nobody’s
charted this reef. You never know what you’re going to find in there.”

I nodded, glancing toward the foot of the hill. The steep,
eroded slope was furred with mossy growths in green-black like tarnished metal,
browns the color of dried blood, here or there a sudden flare-up of bright
green-gold. I started toward it, checking out systems with a word as I moved,
getting the feel of moving inside the suit’s cage of spun silk. Data readouts
flickered in front of my eyes like moths; I had to fight the urge to brush them
away,

Everything seemed to function the way my memory said it
would, but SaUan’s fear lay across my vision like an extra lens. I told myself
the death of the other bondie had been a freak accident; even though Saban believed
things like it happened to them too often. Tau wouldn’t dare let a man go
reef-diving in faulty equipment in front of so many witnesses, in front of the
Feds ....

At last, after what seemed like time spent in suspended animation,
I was standing in front of the reef-face. I stopped, turning back for one final
look at the others. They stood in three groups: the research team and the
technicians in one, the observers in another, the bondies bunched in a third. I
heard the tech speaking to me through my headset, verifying data. I let my mind
shift into autopilot, let the training I’d force-fed it take over, giving her
the right answers as the reefs loomed up and over me like a cresting wave. I
held my breath as I sensed my body making contact, experiencing the first soft
compression of the alien growth that layered the interface of reef and air. I
murmured the words that activated the phase shifters and pushed my body through
it.

I flowed into the reef-face with a sensation like sinking
standing up as the reef and the motion and my physical boundaries became one
fluid whole. I gasped, felt cool sweet air enter my lungs freely and easily
until they were full again. I took another breath, and another, turned,
maneuvering like a swimmer to look behind me. The world outside was gone, and I
was looking into a haze of shifting silver-grays, luminous gray-greens. I’d
known there would b; hght—from the electromagnetic fluctuations around me, translated
into the visible by my helmet sensors—but I hadn’t known exactly what I’d see.

There was no sound at all except the cautious rasp of my
breath. Displays still flickered across my vision; I ordered them off. Let the
technical data of the reef’s makeup read out on the tech’s displays for
everyone else to see. Suddenly they weren’t the way I wanted to experience
this, the way I wanted to remember it.

“Ho\il are you doing?” Hawkins’s voice blared suddenly from
some other dimension.

“Okay,” I murmured, hating to sPeak at all. ‘About what I expected.”
But it wasn’t. No simulation could be like the real thing, because the real
thing, I suddenly realized, was never the same thing twice. “Don’t talk to me.
I want to ... concentrate.”

“G0 slow, then,” she said.

“Yeah,” I whispered, the single word barely loud enough for
my own ears, because anything more seemed like a shout. Even my heartbeat was
too loud, fading in and out of my consciousness as I pushed deeper into the
shimmering mystery that had swallowed me whole.

And slowly I began to realize that the silence around me
wasn’t complete. The reefs whispered: hidden meanings and murmured secrets lay
just beyond the boundaries of my perception. I watched light and color and
density shift with my motion, as if I’d merged with it, nothing separate, the
displacement field dissolving my sense of self until I became amorphous.

I began to move again, phasing forward into the unknown,
ffiy passage lit by the coruscating energy of the fields. The only sensation I
felt now was a kind of pressure change, the difficulty of movement changing
with my every move. The matrix I was phasing through caressed me, now gently
like a mother, now with the urgent hunger of a lover. I passed through surfaces
that were rough, rust-red, as stratified as a wall of brick but peppered with
seeds of darkness, like the night sky turned inside out; I broke through
suddenly into an empty whiteness and was left snow-blind in the formless heart
of a blizzard. I swam upward through whiteness, burst out of it into a hollow
vacuole filled with glowing fog, tumbled, suddenly weightless, until the field
suit restabtlized.

“You all right in there?” Hawkins’s voice demanded, making
me spasm.

“Fine. I’m fine,” I muttered as I swept upward through
eddies of luminous gas.

“You want to come out now?” It didn’t really sound like a
question.

“No.” I reached the far side of the vacuole, felt my motion
turn into slow-motion as I sank into an area of concentrated matter. I forced
my way deeper. “You getting good readings?” Managing to say something coherent,
to remember that the hard data was supposed to matter to me.

“Good,” Hawkins said. “Real good. Good and clear.”

I’d already stopped listening, balanced precariously on what
my mind insisted was a stairway. I called on the displays, made myself study
them, proving to myself that it was only a density differential between bands
of layered protoid ceramic and sapphire foam. I shut off the displays again and
let myself climb, until suddenly I swept through another wall that rippled like
flames.

“Aah—!” My own shout of surprise exploded in my ears.

“What is it?” The tech’s voice hit my senses almost as hard.

“A head. God, there’s half a head in here!”

“It’s all right,” Hawkins said, her voice easing. “It’s
nothing ... it’s not real. You find things like that in the reefs ... they’re
just aberrations. You’ve been in there long enough; come on out.”

“No ...” I whispered, holding my glowing hands up, cupping
the half-finished thought of a Hydran face—I could even see that it was Hydran,
although the eyes were closed. It might have been sleeping, but there was
something about it, as if it was caught in a moment of rapture. It shimmered
and disappeared like a reflection in water as my hands closed on it. I let my
hands fall away and watched it reappear. I shut my eyes as I pushed through it,
moving deeper into the millennia of ancient dreams.

The touch of the matrix surrounding me began to seem like
more than just simple undifferentiated pressure; I could sense the reef changing,
as elusive as rainwater and rippling silk, as viscous as oil, honey, tar, as
empty as vacuum, os random as my life.

The Hydrans believed the reefs were holy, miraculous; places
of power. I wondered what they’d found here to make them believe that, when
they could never experience the reefs the way I was doing now. And I wondered
why experiencing them this way hadn’t had an effect on how human beings saw
them.

I reached out, shifting myself around a pulsating sphere of
light, felt something shiver through me like a plucked string—heard it, inside
my head, as if I was an instrument and the reef was playing its song through
every neuron in my body. I spiraled to a stop, listeniog, realizing that now
every motion, every shift of phase, seemed to resonate inside me—not just
colors and lights anymore, but all across the spectrum of my senses. I heard
music when I breathed, I smelled fog and tasted the lightning-sharp tang of
ozone. My senses were bursting open like shuttered doors, one by one, letting
in the pure radiance of sensation .... My mind was an outstretched hand as the
reef filled its emptiness ....

Somewhere a voice was calling me. The words stung like pebbles
against the naked skin of my thoughts. I brushed them off with a muttered
curse; felt them sting me again, hardel”—r\nswer me!”

I didn’t answer, because there were no words that could describe
what was pouring in through all my senses now. My rhind was a prism,
diffracting input into a synesthesia of pleaslrre ....

There were no boundaries: no inside, no outside, only a
rapture as sweet as the oxygen I was breathing. There was no need even to
breathe; no room for breath inside me, only a pure hot flame of pleasure,
consuming me until ... I ... I ...

/
couldn’t breathe.
I dragged air as thick as fluid
down into my lungs. All at once my chest felt as if something was crushing the
life out of me.

Sound made my ears bleed light: a human voice was screaming
at me, but I couldn’t remember whose it was, couldn’t make out the words—

“Can’t ... breathe.” I heaved the words out like fist-sized
stones, not knowing if anyone could understand them, if anyone else was even
there to hear them.

“... bringing you back ....” The words were written in
liquid fire across my vision. “... release your controls!”

I looked down, watched my hands fumble at my belt inside a
golden aura, not sure whether anything was actually touching anything else,
whether I even could, or even should. I felt my body shifted, moved, not able
to tell if I was the one doing it. o’Get me out ...” I mumbled.

“...
get you out ..
.” the voice said, or maybe it was
only an echo in my head. The blinding flavor of the sound was so bitter that it
made my eyes tear.

I didn’t say anything else; didn’t hear anything else, taste
or feel anything else except the pain every time I dragged in a breath of
molten air. My whole body felt wet, as if death was oozing in through the
bandages of the protective fields. Pressure, density, weight, the sudden
wrenching shifts between solid mass and emptiness were all intensifying as a
force beyond my control dragged my helpless body through the gauntlet. I felt
the reef’s enfolding womb of sensation begin to metamorphose me into the stuff
of its own mass, making us one forever ....

But the irresistible drag still kept me moving forward, caroming
off densities of matter like a molecule escaping a boiling pot. It wrenched me
around and shoved once more, flung me abruptly through the translucent agate of
a solid wall into the absence of everything but light.

I crashed down onto solid ground as the glow of the displacement
fields flickered out around me. Suddenly there was fresh an, free for the
taking. I sucked it into my lungs between fits of coughing, sprawled back on
the gravel, grateful for every agonized muscle twitching in my body.

“Cat—!”

“What happened?”

“—he breathtng?”

Familiar shadows blocked the sky, and then I was lost inside
a surreal forest of legs. Ezra Ditreksen pressed something over my face,
forcing oxygen laced with stims down my throat. I struggled upright, coughing,
shoving it away.

“Told you—!”

Someone was screaming, someone hysterical. Surprised that it
wasn’t ne, I caught the net of extended hands and hauled myself up, pushed
through the barrier of bodies, half supported by them, as I tried to see who it
was.

It was Saban, the worker whose place I’d taken ... whose
life I’d almost traded for my own. I saw him struggling against the barrier of
workers who were trying to hold him back. One of the bondies hit him, hard,
doubling him up. Shutting him up—they’d done it to shut him up. I watched the
workers close ranks around him, the looks they gave the Tau vips, the Feds, me
and the team members standing around me. I wondered who they’d been trying to
protect—him, or themselves.

I looked away from them, searching for the tech who’d let me
go into the reefs in a suit that hadn’t been properly maintained ... who’d
gotten me out again just in time. Hawkins shoved past Ezra and Chang just as
Kissindre reached my side.

“Cat, for God’s saks—” Kissindre gasped, just as Hawkins
pushed in front of me and said, “For God’s sake, what happened? Why the hell
didn’t you come out when I told you to? You’re not—”

“You saying this was my fault?” I asked, looking straight
into her eyes.

I saw her react as my long pupils registered on her. But
then she looked away, at the Tau vips and the Feds closing in on us, and
muttered, “No. I’m not saying that.”

She held some kind of instrument up in front of me; made me
stand still while she took a reading. Her face eased. “You’re clean. You weren’t
exposed to any toxins.”

I took a deep breath, remembering things Tau had encountered
inside the reefs: enzymes that turned human lungs and guts to putrescent
sludge; virals that triggered spontaneous, uncontrollable cell mutation. My
shirt and pants were wet, stained with something alien, something that smelled
like nothing I’d ever smelled before. I felt my flesh crawl. “Then I want to
say two things. One is—thanks.”

She looked back at me, sharp-eyed but not angry anymore.

“The other is, how often do you lose a diver?”

“Malfunctions are rare,” she said. She raised her voice as
she said it, glancing again at the tight-lipped faces of the Tau officials, the
frowns on the faces of the Feds. “We’ve never had a fatality.”

“That’s not what I heard.” I glanced away at Saban, silent
and barely visible now inside the group of other workers. “If it’s so safe, why
do you use contract laborers and not your own people?”

Her mouth thinned. Protz said, “We wouldn’t send anybody
into the reefs if the risk factor didn’t meet our safety standards.”

“I’m sure they’re real stringeilt,” I said, and Protz
frowned. I looked back at the Feds. “Why don’t you ask those workers about
fatalities?” I pointed toward the knot of bondies.