Dreamfall (29 page)

I pulled her down to the floor—not able to reach the bed, not
wanting to—through a kiss that went on and on and was only an extension of what
was already happening between us. Not wanting what was happening to us now to
happen on that sterile slab of gel.

I dimmed the room lights with a word, giving us the freedom
of the night and all the stars in its sky as I worked my way into her clothing,
guided her uncertain hands in through my own. I felt the warm pressure of flesh
against bared flesh, the hard weight of bone, as I eased myself down on top of
her.

I felt her softness, my hardness searching for the place I needed
to be; desperate to find my way inside before something happened—or nothing
did, and proved that I’d be alone forever, lost between worlds.

Her body wouldn’t let me it.

Shock waves of
panic/confusion/distress
splintered
strands of psi energy like glass—

She was a virgin.
She’d never done this before.
Never.

All her life, she’d waited for me

(Miya ....) I lay still beside her for a long time, only
touching her with my mind, filled with an overwhelming tenderness that made
patience as sweet as pleasure. When she was ready I kissed her again, softening
every motion, gentling every touch. More than ever now I wanted to make the
joining of our bodies into something beautiful, an offering equal to what she
had given to me.

I’d never been with a virgin before. I’d never been with
anyone I’d mattered to for longer than it took them to tell me good-bye. But
she’d chosen me .... This time was different from anything I knew. I wanted to
make it everything that she’d imagined it would be. Everything that my own
first time hadn’t been.

And I could, because I shared her mind, I knew what she
wanted—exactly what she wanted. Exactly where to touch her, how to touch her,
when to begin touching her again .... I carried her with me, higher and higher,
until she reached a place she’d never been—and then let her fall into the
electric depths of a joy so intense it almost broke my heart.

All I knew about a woman’s first time was what I’d heard on
the streets: a ftagile membrane rupturing, blood, pain. But this was different,
as different from anything I’d ever known as she was, and the difference didn’t
stop with the sharing of her mind. The only barrier between us was one of will,
& conscious control of her body that told me I couldn’t have forced her if
I wanted to___

“
Nasheirtah
—” she gasped, and as she fell she opened
like a flower, and I lost myself inside her.

I’d never imagined it could be like this. I hadn’t believed
in my own innocence for half a lifetime, after half a lifetime in bed with
strangers, using their bodies and letting them use mine. I’d lost even the
memory of innocence so long ago I couldn’t count the years. But now she gave it
back to me, in one sweet, endless moment.

I felt young again in a way that I’d never been’young, whole
and new, infinite with possibilities. And if I’d believed in angels she was
one, and I’d become one with them. And if I’d believed in heaven it was here
and now as we made love below the night, with only the moon watching, with
nothing but stars everywhere, circling in the night ... winking out slowly one
by one as we drifted down again like dreamfall into our separate bodies.

“
Nasheirtah ...
”
she murunured again, and gave
me one more long kiss as we closed our eyes, our minds and our bodies still
joined inside the warm breathing darkness, safe, protected, no longer alone ....

I woke up alone, lying on the floor with the pattern of the
carpet pressed into my cheek, like a wirehead sprawled in a gutter after a
reality burnout.

(Alone.)
I lay there without moving, stupefied with
loss, not even certain for a few breaths where in the universal darkness I was.
Only certain of one thing:
(Alone. Alone.)
I put my hands up to my head,
holding my skull together as my mind drove itself against walls of silence,
razor wire, and broken glass. It came away bleeding.
(Miya
—
!)

Nothing. Nothing at all.
Gone.
Everything that had
happened tonight, to me, between us, had only happened because of her. And she
was gone.

I stumbled to my feet and called on the lights, searched the
room with the only senses I had. “Miya!” I screamed with the only voice I had.

A bell chimed. A sexless face appeared in the air in front
of me and informed me that screaming out loud in the middle of the night was a
fineable offense.

I stood gaping at it, trying to decide whether it was male
or female and whether it knew I was standing in front of it half naked. “
Sorry
....” I fastened my pants, finally. I watched it
disappear.

I let my hands drop and looked down at my body. My heart was
still beating, marking off seconds of universal time as soul-lessly as a quartz
clock. I ran my hands over my skin, breathing in the faint, lingering trace of
her scent, proving to myself that it hadn’t been a dream.

Why
—
?
I looked out at the night: still the
same night tky, pin-holed with stars. It hadn’t been a dream. And it hadn’t
been a lie. Then why? Why was she gone?

Because what we ‘d done was impossible.
Here, now, in
a place like Rivertor, at a time like this .... Forbidden. Unforgivable. Insane.
Impossible.

I stood there for a long time, barely breathing, until the
night began to fade into dawn.

I pulled my clothes together and ordered the wall to opague,
before some security drone added indecent exposure to the list of
sins-against-the-state I’d racked up since I’d arrived in this self-righteous
hell. I watched the window granulate in, the wall forming across it like a
layer of frost until nothing existed beyond the few square meters of space
around me.

I turned away at last, moved step-by-step across the
carpeted floor, registering the stability of the structure beneath my feet, as
solid as the planet itself. Trying not to imagine that suddenly it all might
disappeur, because really there was nothing stable or immutable—not in this
universe, not in my life.

I went to the wall unit that held everything I owned and
opened it. It spewed out four drawers, three of them empty, one of them half
full. I stared at the clothing that lay inside it, random heaps of dark colors.
I pulled out a green-brown sweater: Deadeye’s sweater. I thought about Deadeye,
the Ghost in the Machine, alone in his hidden room in a city called N’Yuk on a
planet called Earth—no vid, no phone, no callers== wanting to keep it that way.
Deadeye in his rocking chair, knitting to keep himself sane—sweaters and
scarves and blankets that he dumped in the street for total strangers to carry
away. A freak, like me. I put on his sweater, warmed by it even though I wasn’t
cold.

I picked through the dark formless pile until I found the
box buried underneath it. I pulled the lid off. Inside was a single earring
dangling a piece of green stone—a piece of junk I’d gotten from a jewelry
vendor, playing tourist When the Floating University had done its session at
the Monument.

I took the plain gold stud I’d been wearing to please a lot
of people I didn’t give a damn about out of my ear and put on the beaded
earring. I’d gotten the hole punched in my ear trying to convince myself that
everything in my life had changed, that hanging jewelry on myself didn’t mean I
was meat anymore for the kind of human animals who’d kill you over a piece of
flash ....

I hadn’t bought myself anything else that mattered since
then.

The only other object in the box was something given to me
by a woman named Argentyne before I’d left Earth: a mouth harp, she’d called
it. A palm-sized rectangle of metal that made smoky, haunting music when you
breathed through it. She’d said it was old: its flat, cool surfaces were marked
with coffosion no matter how I rubbed them down. I didn’t know if it was my
fault that it wouldn’t make all the sounds I wanted to hear or if the harp was
just broken. I put my mouth against the gap-toothed grin along its edge. I
listened to the sounds it made as my breath passed through the holes, sounds I hadn’t
listened to in a long time.

That was all there was. There’d been other people in my life
who’d meant more to me than Deadeye or Argentyne, but there was nothing here to
prove I’d ever known them. I remembered their names, trying to picture their
faces:
Jule taMing. Ardan Siebeling. Elnear taMing ..
.. It was getting
hard to remember their faces, harder all the time. They had their own lives,
all of them, lives I’d never really fit into.

I wondered whether any of them even thoughf ?\ut me anymore.
I wondered what kind of a difference it w(uldltake to me, tonight, if I could
feel them do it. I thought aboff Qilicksilver, the terrorist who’d died inside
my head and left me with nothing—a memento mori guaranteeing that I’d never
forget him or what we’d meant to each other.

I stretched out on the bed and put the harp to my mouth,
blew, listening to the music it made, never the right music. I tried to remember
the kind of music Argentyne had made, as sense-blistering as a drug rush, the
kind of music you didn’t ever hear in a place like this because it was too
real. I tried to remember the light/music of her symb group playing, a violent
eruption of sound, hallucinogenic visions, the overwhelming sensory input
whiting out all conscious thought, dissolving your flesh and bones until
flnally all conscious thought disappeared ....

I sruubled our into the open space in front of the hotel a
couple of hours later, expecting to find the rest of the team waiting for me.
Still trying to shake loose the memory of where I’d been last night—
Miya ...
her world, her body, her mind
—I wondered what in hell I was going to say to
Kissindre when I saw her, what she was going to say to me.

The plaza was empty.

I stood staring out across the empty square, up into the
empty sky. When I looked down again, Janos Perrymeade was standing beside me.

“I sent them ahead,” he said, “I told Kissindre you weren’t
coming.”

“Why?” I wondered for one brief, stomach-knotting minute if
it was because she’d told him about what had happened between us.

“Because we know what you were doing last night.”

I froze. “How?” I said stupidly, asking the single most
useless question I could have asked him. I had no clue to what he was thinking:
last night hadn’t changed anything permanently. My psi was as dead, as useless,
as ever.

“Your databand. Corporate Security has been monitoring your
activities.” He sighed, looking at me with something that could have been
disappointment or simply disbelief. “I managed to convince the Ruling Board
that I should be the one to pick you up, instead of Borosage. I hope you have
found out something that’s worth the Board’s attention.” He nodded over his
shoulder. A mod was dropping on cue to pick us up. We got into it.

“We’re meeting the Board?” I repeated, not sure what the expression
on my face was. All he knew was that I’d been to Freaktown. At least they
couldn’t trace Miya through me; at least he hadn’t said anything about
miscegenation or public fornication. I wiped my hands on the knees of my pants.

He nodded, shifting in his seat. He seemed to be too preoccupied
to notice my own restlessness. “[—fsrely—managed to convince them that you are
totally committed to helping Joby. I hope I’m right about that, or soon we’re
both going to be sorry we ever met.”

I didn’t answer. I looked out the window, watching the dawn.
Red and bronze limned the knife-edged silhouette of the city. The inevitability
of morning pulled my perspective back into line. I thought about how far I’d
come; how much of my life and the universe still lay waiting, beyond this
moment and whatever gravity sink of fate was trying to drag me down. I looked
back at Per-rymeade, finally.

“Tell me I’m not wrong,” he said.

“Not about me,” I said softly. “I can’t speak for Tau.”

He gave me a long, hard look, and I couldn’t even guess what
lay behind it.

Tau Riverton’s government center lay on the far side of the
city, as distant from Freaktown as it was possible to be and still be a part of
Riverton. I wondered whether that was just a coincidence. The complex sat like
a split geode in a fold of the land, its angular silhouette diffracting
unnatural rainbows.

A mutant spire rose from the plex’s glass heart; at its top
was a transparent knob. The mod set us down on the knob’s blunt apex. No wind
buffeted us as we got out; the whole space around the tower was protected by
security fields.

Perrymeade led me to a spot a few meters awz!, ringed like a
target. Something waiting there sucked us down through the illusion of a solid
surface into whatever lay below.

We stepped out into a wide torus of carpeted meeting room,
facing a transparent wall. Beyond the wall was a view of the iridescent complex
below us, and in the distance the perfect symmetry of Riverton. The vips who
met here would be reminded every time they looked out that this was Tau’s
world. Right then, standing at the pinnacle of power and yet hanging
precariously in midair, even I could imagine how it must feel to be the Head of
Tau’s Board ....

I looked at the corporate vips already waiting in their
ceremonial seats at a table below the window/wall.

Borosage was waiting with them. He looked as out of place as
a pile of shit; as out of place as I suddenly felt. Sand was there too. His
effortless imitation of a human being fit in better with the half-dozen Tau vips
surrounding them. My eidetic memory identified Kensoe, the Head of the Tau
Board, and a couple of others I’d met at the reception. I didn’t see Draco’s
Lady Gyotis Binta.