Dreamfall (2 page)

Lady Gyotis was small and dark, with hair that had gone
silver-white. I wondered how old she really was. Most vips on her level had the
money to get their genetic clocks set back more than once. She wore a long,
flower-brocaded robe that covered her from neck to foot. Nothing about her said
combine vip
except the subtle, expensive design of her necklace. Its
scrolls were the logos of corporations; I recognized Tau’s somewhere midway up
her shoulder.

I also recognized the pendant at the center, a stylized
dragon wearing a collar of holographic fire. I had the same design tattooed on
my butt. I must have been gorked when I’d done it, because I couldn’t even
remember how it got there. I didn’t tell her that wearing Draco’s logo as body
art was something we had in common.

Lady Gyotis smiled at me, meeting my stare as if she didn’t
notice anything strange about my face, not even the cat-green eyes with their
long slit pupils: Hydran eyes, in a face that was too human, and not human
enough. ‘A pleasure,” she said. “We are so pleased to have you as a part of the
study team. I’m sure your unique perceptions will add greatly to whatever discoveries
are made.”

“Thank you,” I said, and swallowed the obedient “ma’am” that
almost followed it out of my mouth, reminding myself that I didn’t work for
her, any more than I belonged to Tau. This time I was part of an independent
research group.

“We feel his being a part of the team will demonstrate our goodwill
toward the”—Kensoe glanced at us—“local Hydran community.” He smiled.

I didn’t.

“Let us hope So,” Lady Gyotis murmured. “You know, the inspection
team from the FTA is here tonight.” I’d met the Feds; I didn’t envy Kensoe. But
then, I didn’t feel sorry for him either.

“Yes, ma’am,” Kensoe said, glancing away like he expected
assassins. “We’ll be ready for them. I think they’ll find the, uh, problems
here have been grossly misrepresented.”

“Let us hope so,” Lady Gyotis said again. “Toshiro!” she
called suddenly, lifting her hand.

Someone came through the crowd toward us. Kensoe stiffened;
so did I. The stranger coming toward us wore the uniform of a combine’s Chief
of Security. I checked the logo on the helmet he hadn’t taken off, even here.
It was Draco’s. His business-cut uniform was deep green and copper, Draco’s
combine colors. A lot of meaningless flash paraded across the drape he wore
over it. His ID read Sand.

There was no way in hell a Corporate Security Chief would
cross half the galaxy from the home office just to attend this party. I
wondered exactly how much trouble Tau was in.

“Lady Gyotis.” Sand bowed slightly in her direction,
smiling. He was still smiling as he followed her glance toward me.

I couldn’t tell what the smile meant.
Couldn’t read him
.... Stop it
—I couldn’t force my own face into an expression that even resembled
a smile. I’d met a lot of Corpses in my life. I’d never met one I liked.

Sand’s skin was smooth and golden; his cybered eyes, under
epicanthic folds, were opaque and silver, like ball bearings. One glance from
eyes like that could scan you right down to your entrails. The last CorpSec
Chief I’d known had had eyes like that; they came with the job. The more power
a combine vip had, the more augmentation came with it. Usually the most
elaborate wire jobs didn’t show; most humans were too xenophobic to want the
truth visible, about themselves, about each other. There was nothing I could
see about Lady Gyotis that looked abnormal, even though she had to be hiding a
lot of bioware. Draco’s subsidiaries made some of the best.

But in some occupations, looking strange was power. Sand’s
was one of them.

“Mez cat,” Lady Gyotis was saying, “may I introduce you to
Toshiro Sand, Draco’s Chief of Security”—as if the evidence wasn’t obvious
enough by itself. She didn’t introduce him to Protz or Kensoe. Protz and Kensoe
looked like they wished they were anywhere else; maybe they’d already met him. “He
was also most impressed by your interpretive work on the Monument.”

I grimaced and hoped he took it for a smile. He held out his
hand. I looked at it for a few heartbeats before I realized what it meant.
Finally I put out my own hand and let him shake it.

“Where are you from, Mez Cat?” Lady Gyotis asked me.

I glanced back. “Ardattee,” I said. “Quarro.”

She looked surprised. “The Hub?” she said. Quarro was the
main city on Ardattee, and Ardattee had taken Earth’s place as the center of
everything important. “But wherever did you get that charming accent? I’ve
spent much time there, but yours is unfamiliar to me.”

“Oldcity,” Sand murmured. “It’s an Oldcity accent.”

I looked up to see her glance at him, surprised again. She’d
probably never even seen Quarro’s Oldcity—the slums, the Contract Labor feeder
tank. I’d tried to get the sound of it out of my voice, but I couldn’t, any
more than I could get the place itself out of my memories.

Sand looked back at me. “Then I’m even more impressed by
your accomplishments,” he said, to my frown.

I didn’t say anything.

“I expected you to be older, frankly. The concepts in your
monograph suggested a real maturity of thought.”

“I don’t think I was ever young,” I said, and Lady Gyotis
laughed, a little oddly.

“Mez Perrymeade told me the original interpretation was
yours,” Sand went on, as if he hadn’t heard me. “That remarkable image about ‘the
death of Death.’ What was it that gave you the key to your approach?”

I opened my mouth, shut it, swallowing words that tasted
like bile. I didn’t believe that he meant anything he was saying, that they
were really looking at me as if I was their equal. I wished I knew what they really
wanted—

“Cat,” a voice said, behind me; one I recognized, this time.
Kissindre Perrymeade was there at my back like the Rescue Service, ready to
pick up the conversational ball I’d dropped. She’d been cleaning up my social
messes ever since we arrived; her sense of timing was so good that she could
have been the mind reader I wasn’t.

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 bio-engineering 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, 3t
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 we11,” 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. Stilt 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.