Dreamfall (16 page)

The trip took close to an hour, which at the speed the
transport was moving meant we’d gone nearly a thousand klicks. Clouds hid most
of the terrain we were passing over. We began to drop down through them
finally, into a landscape that left my eyes struggling, familiar and alien all
at once.

The world was greener here, with so much more color that I
had to do a reality check on the sky to convince myself it wasn’t artificial.
The contours of the land showed me where the reefs had been laid down—were
still being laid down, if what I’d heard was true. We must have traveled north,
because I didn’t think anything about Riverton had ever looked as lush and soft
as this land did. My instincts told me this was where the Hydran people should
be living; where probably they had lived, by choice, before they’d been driven
to the ends of their earth by Tau.

There was no sign of a settlement anywhere, Hydran or human—nothing
to keep the cloud-whales from their purpose, or Tau’s planners from theirs.

I saw the Tau interface now, in the middle of the green,
rolling sea of the reefs. The main complex wasn’t even visible from the
surface: none of the laboratories and processing plants; no wonn-holes riddling
the matrix of thought-droppings, leading to whatever discoveries Tau’s
high-tech prospectors had identified as most likely to fit the parameters of
their highly spectalized interests. There had never been a systematic, purely
scientific study done on one of these reefs, one that wasn’t designed to
produce the most profit in the fastest way possible.

I wondered how far our research team would get in conducting
its study, between the restrictions Tau had already laid on us and whatever
objections the Hydrans had to our intruding on their last piece of sacred
ground. We’d been told the Hydran Council had given our project their approval,
but after what I’d learned about the kidnapping, I wasn’t so sure that they
actually spoke for the Hydran Community. I wondered how much we’d really accomplish
before the Feds finished their investigation and left the planet, and Tau didn’t
need us as a showpiece anymore.

We set down on an open landing field in the middle of the
complex. On the way in I’d heard Wauno interacting with a security net; we’d
passed through a midair no-man’s-land of invisible defenses as we’d dropped out
of what seemed to be open sky into the deceptively open heart of the compound. Tau
might be lax on safety measures for their workers, but they weren’t lax about
protecting the operation from sabotage by corporate competitors.

As we got out of the transport, there was nothing visible
except the installation and the sky. I shielded my eyes with my hands,
squinting up at the blue, glaring dome over our heads. Clouds patterned the
brightness, rippling and translucent, like water flowing over unseen stones.
They reminded me of the images I’d seen on the threedy, but they were too
amorphous, too formless against the glare, for me to be certain. ‘Are those
clouds—?” I asked Waullo.

Wauno glanced down at the piece of equipment hanging around
his neck. He passed it wordlessly to me.

I held it up to my eyes like I’d seen him do once,
discovering a set of lenses that fitted themselves to my face and adjusted to
my vision as I moved my head. I focused on the displays superimposed over my
view of the world, a view that had transformed as suddenly as my mood. I lifted
my head to the sky—and saw them.

Everything else fell awil!, stopped, ceased to exist. The
cloud-whales drifted overhead, their camouflage of water vapor stripped away by
the lenses’ filters. I counted three, four, five individuals, each one a
community of countless mite-sized creatures. They moved through the ocean of
air like gods, their vast forms slowly shapeshifting through one fluid
transformation after another, moving to the hidden music of their meditations,
the counterpoint of the wind. Here and there a fragtle veil of thought made
visible drifted down like rain, or glinted like a brief, impossible star in the
clear air.

Thinking of music, I remembered the Monument: remembered
standing on a plateau at sunset, or the artificial world that was another
incomprehensible gift of the Creators. I remembered the eroded arch of stone
that humans called Goldengate, the haunting music the wind played through its
fractured spao .... I thought about music as the universal language, speaking
truths that nothing could altet and I wondered what the Creators had been
trying to tell us, by making their music visible.

Someone jolted my arm—Protz. I looked down, pushing the
lenses back on my forehead. The expression on his face was half impatient and
half inspired. I realized that he was telling me to hand them over. I passed
them to him, watched him pass them to one of the Feds. I glanced at Wauno. He
was standing like I had, his hands shadowing his eyes as he stared up into the
sky. His body was drawn like a bow with longing.

I wondered if the shields surrounding this complex existed
partly to protect it from the mysteries falling out of the air, how dangerous
Wauno’s work really was, and whether he’d ever been caught inside a rain of
cloud-whale inspiration that might have killed him.

The Feds passed the glasses back and forth, and then back to
Protz,, nodding without comment. I wondered if they’d been left speechless or
just unimpressed. I looked at their faces.
Unim
pressed.

Protz handed the lenses back to Wauno, ignoring my outstretched
hand.

Wauno handed them to me again as Protz turned away. “Keep them,”
he murmured. “I have another pair. They promised me I could take your team out
to a watchpost when this is finisfusd—” He jerked his head at the Feds. I realized
he didn’t mean this visit, but the whole investigation. His look said he didn’t
know what either of us was doing here, like this, when we could be out there
somewhere, watching the cloud-whales drift by without intemrption. I only
nodded, and didn’t ask him what he thought the odds were that we’d get that
opportunity. He headed back to the transport, maybe to get himself some more
lenses.

A welcoming committee had emerged from the shining carupace
of the research facility, dwarfed by it. I hadn’t realized how big it actually
was until their arrival gave it perspective.

“Did they give you a choice about what interface you got to
see?” I asked Osuna. This must be the closest reef-mining operation to
Riverton. If Tau controlled what the Feds got to see, then it would be simple
to show them a perfectly run installation.

“We were offered a choice of three,” she said, clipping off
the words like paper. “They said this was the most convenient.”

“Did you ever wonder if it was too convenient?” I asked.

She looked away without answering.

The half-dozen people coming toward us wore the uniforms of Tau’s
CorpSec, but as they got closer I could see from their data-patches that they
were plant security guards.

As we started forward to meet them, I realized that I knew
one of them: the one whose datapatches read chief of securitv. It was Burnell
Natasa, the father of the kidnapped boy.

He wasn’t looking at me, at first, couldn’t have been
expecting me, any more than I was expecting him. I watched him acknowledge
Protz with brief resignation, watched him measure the two Feds with a longer
stare that barely passed for noncommittal. And then he looked at me. His dark
face froze. I saw him mutter under his breath; wondered whether he was calling
up verification data on me or just swearing.

I looked at Protz, who didn’t seem to get it. He had to know
about the kidnapping—he’d been at the Corporate Security station with the
others when they’d come to get me. Maybe he’d never been told the identity of
the victim. I looked at Natasa again, at the desperate questions in his eyes.

I shook my head, letting him know that whatever else happened,
ro one was going to hear more about it from me today. I understood my own
situation well enough, even if I wasn’t sure about his.

Natasa and his security team went through the motions, mouthing
speeches designed to reassure the Feds that everything about this installation
was as meticulous as its security and was typical of all their operations. They
led us in through a cathedral-vaulted causeway of geodesic arches, to a waiting
tram.

Natasa dropped back, walking alongside me, as soon as he
dared. “What are you doing here?” he muttered.

“Research,” I said. He was a full head taller than I was. I
looked up at him, suddenly even more uncomfortable. “What are you doing here?”
I was sure there hadn’t been any change in the kidnapping situation.

“My wife is here,” he said, as if that explained everything.

We got on board the tram that would carry us deeper into the
installation. Like players in a virtual fantasy world, we shot down a long
tunnel walled with mirrors that reflected our passage toward infinity. It was
more than the showplace it seemed to be—I recognized the walls of a
decontamination chamber. I wondered whether they were more concerned about
decontaminating the ones who came in or the ones who went out of here. The last
time I’d gone down a hall of mirrors like this one, they had lined the entrance
to a black lab, and I’d been looking for illegal drugs, the kind that would
give me back my Gift.

I stared out through the transparent hull, searching for my
reflection; saw the featureless surface of a silver bullet reflecting back. I
thought about what my last trip down a hall of mirrors had cost me. The debit
reading on my databand had only been the beginning of what I’d paid to free my
mind, even for a few days, from the prison I’d built for it myself.

We went on for what could have been another kilometer
through sleek ceralloy-walled passages and chambers half a hundred meters high,
skeletoned with beams of composite and fleshed by panes of transparent
aluminum. I had to admit, if only to myself, that it impressed the hell out of
me. I listened to Protz drone on about form and function with more interest,
wondering whether any of this really had any bearing at all on the question of
worker safety, let alone the kind of treatment Tau was dealing out to the
Hydrans. I glanced over at Natasa more than once. He was never looking at me
when I did.

Finally the tram whispered to a stop, letting us out into
another security area. We passed through the lightshow of verifications and
warnings, and an EM field so strong I felt it crackle like static through my
thoughts, running its mindless fingers over my brain and triggering a reflex in
my psi. I was still shaking out my head as we went on into the research area.

Another reception committee was waiting there for us; researchers
and technicians this time, in pastel coveralls. I wasn’t surprised to see a
face I recognized at the front of the crowd: Ling Natasa, the kidnapped child’s
mother. I saw her freeze as she spotted me. Her eyes darted to her husband’s
face for an explanation, or at least reassurance. She must have found something
there that she needed: I saw her pull herself together in time to show the Feds
an expression as secure as the research complex was supposed to be.

She moved through the introductions like she was on
autopilot, clenched and pale. To my eyes she looked worse than her husband did.
The only time she reacted visibly was when Protz pointed me out. “He was
curious about our processing of the reef materitl,” he said. Nothing about how
curious I was to see the way they treated their workers. And nothing about the
kidnapping.

The same confusion was in her eyes as she looked at me
again. I shrugged, not able to think of a single word that would fit into this
moment== wishing that I could reassure her, mind-to-mind—that somehow I could
find a way to wipe that stricken look off her face and answer the questions she
wasn’t free to ask me. But there was nothing I could do, except match her
artificial smile.

She seemed to be in charge of the subcomplex of laboratories
we were inspecting now and whatever projects were going on in them. Tau must
have insisted that she put in an appearance; that keiretsu meant putting Tau’s
interests first, ro matter how she felt.

The series of labs seemed to go on forever. So did our tour
of it. Everything looked right—it was a fucking temple of technology, and
everything the Feds asked to see displayed or demonstrated seemed to show up or
function for them in the ways they expected. They muttered constantly to each
other, and to themselves, until I realized they must be using implanted memory
systems to feed them the endless variations of specraltzed knowledge their jobs
required.

But as I went on watching and listening, went on observing
the same things they did, getting the same answers, something began to bother
me. The Feds were cool, professional, analytical: perfect machines. Nothing
more. No more than a mobile extension of their augmentation. I’d interacted
with AI’s that had more personality than these two Feds did. I’d seen dead
bodies with more personality.

They were a null set, without the concern or even the
curiosity to ask the kinds of questions I was starting to need answers to in a
bad way: Who were all the technicians I noticed who moved tike they were on
strange ground? Did they really work here, or had they been brought in to
expand the regular staff during the inspection? Was it just coincidence that
the matrix dispersal system had had a total safety upgrade so recently? Was Lab
Plex 103 only inaccessible because they were decontaminating it after a
high-risk experiment, or had something happened in there that Tau didn’t want
the Feds to see?

None of those things seemed to bother Givechy or Osuna.
Nothing much even seemed to occur independently to them. They went where they
were led and they didn’t push any limits. I wondered whether they’d ever even
noticed what species they were.