Dreamfall (48 page)

The cloud-whales moved across the sky like a vision of
higher truth—one that had always escaped me and always would while

I was trapped inside my body, chained to the dead weight of
my past. I saw the residue of their thoughts falling from the aln: dreams
filled with wonders unimaginable to a solitary Human mind. I realized then that
Humans had never been meant to share this gift from the Creators. It had been
the Hydrans’ leglcy, theirs alone. I watched the numinous rain brighten as the
cloud-whales’ numbers grew with the light of day, watched them drift slowly
overhead. I felt the kiss of icy mist on my upturned face; lowered the glasses
for long enough to see that snow was falling in the universe visible to my
eyes.

I opened my mouth, let the falling snow soothe my parched
lips and tongue, fearless no% because fear had become meaningless. I opened my
mind to the intangible touch of dreamfall, not sure whether I was dreaming or
dying ....

The clouds were lowering, settling to the ground, wrapping
me in a restless fog-cloak. Ghostfire limned the broken hull of the transport;
lightning shimmered inside the mist. Taunder cartied to the distant hills and
came echoing back, until there seemed to be no surface to my skin, nothing
separating the sensation inside the hollowed-out core of my body from the
uncanny energy surrounding me. Visions formed and faded inside my head, and I
didn’t know if my eyes were open or closed. Lightning danced on my fingertips,
as ephemeral as the snowflakes that sublimed on my burning skin.

Miya.
Her face haunted the fluid wall of fog, haunted
my thoughts until I was sure this could only be a delirium dream. Her lips
formed my name soundlessly, calling me to her,
calling me away ....

The air was silver with light, limning my body with halos
that splintered, when I moved, into the shifting forms of things I seemed to
know by instinct, but would never know the names of .... An unimaginable mind
flowed into mine, filling it with secrets and mysteries. Oneness.
Namaste
....

(Miya.) Her touch, limned with gold, reached out to me from
a lozenge of light, drawing me into its rippling gold/blackness until I lost
all mass, becoming as ephemeral as thought, beyond pain, beyond any sense but
wonder ... rising, rising, into the light ....

“Where am i?” somebody kept asking. The same raw whisper
asked it again while the blue blue infinite vault of heaven opened overhead, as
pure and undisturbed as the peace inside me. There was no pain, no need for
thought, no need to do anything but exist .... And it didn’t matter where I
was, only that here in this place l was safe ....

“Where am I?” I whispered again, because I didn’t believe in
heaven.

(with me,) a voice answered. (With us ...) The words sang inside
my head. A cool hand touched my face, as gently as a thought. A thought touched
my mind like a feathered wing.

I struggled up onto my elbow. Then there was pain—enough to
make me gasp and swear, enough to prove I was still breathing. I looked down,
found myself stretched on a sleeping mat, my body covered with bandages and
blankets. I lifted my eyes to find Miya lying beside me, with dark hollows of
exhaustion ringing her emerald eyes and depths of light in her smile as she
touched me and felt my awe; saw my disbelief. Beyond her Joby lay sleeping quietly,
with his thumb in his mouth. “How ... did I get here?”

“I brought you.”

“You—found me? How? I was ... lost.”

(The an lirr.) She leaned toward me; tears ran down her face
as she kissed me softly, like she was afraid any touch at all would hurt me.

My mind joined with hers, wordlessly, effortlessly, like a
miracle ... and suddenly I understood how much my just being alive could mean
to someone else. Tears ran down my face, as unexpected as rain in the desert. I
could count on the fingers of one hand the times I’d cried in my life. Before
this it had never been because I’d been happy, of safe, or simply alive .. Or
loved.

I used my good arm to draw her down beside me; felt the
flicker of her concern. (It’s all right,) I thought, only wanting my hand free,
my ann free, to hold her== My pain fell away with the contact of her body, the
contact of her mind; like everything we shared was shared unconditionally, pain
and pleasure, weakness and strength.

“The an lirr—” I murrnured. I looked up at what I’d taken
for the open sky. I realized I was looking at walls: a dome made of something
translucent, transcendently blue, glowing with the daylight beyond. I glanced
along the wall until I found a window, only recogntzing it by the antishadows
of clouds passing in the distance.
Only clouds, nothing more ....
Looking
at them with my senses and Miya’s senses joined, I could be sure of it in a way
no Human could. I watched them disappear again into another expanse of wall as
perfect as a cloudless sky.

I pulled my gaze away at last, looking back at Miya. (The
cloud-whales helped you find me?)

She nodded, caressing Joby’s sleeping head. (I didn’t know
what Naoh had done with you ... just that I couldn’t find you. So I followed
the Prayer Way the oyasin showed me, and the Allsoul led me to the an lirr ....)
They’d been far away too, almost beyond reach of her Gift. But each macrocosmic
being of the an lirr was made up of millions of microcosmic minds, which made
them more powerful and more sensitive than any single telepath’s. They’d heard
her prayers—and they’d answered them.

I felt for Wauno’s medicine pouch, its weathered softness
still bound to my wrist. My fingers closed, covering it. I tried to empty my
mind of the thoughts that came with it, looked up as I caught movement at the
corner of my eye. Something fluttered in the shadows of another room, beyond an
arched doorway and a filigreed wall: taku. Their bodies were flashes of
randomness across a geometry of light and shadow in the space beyond. And this
time I didn’t just see them or hear them; for the first time, I felt them in my
mind.

(A week,) Miya said, answering my question before I asked
it. (A week ago I finally found you and brought you here ....) She smiled with
weary pride.

I lay back in her arrns, feeling her warmth against me, my
mind aware of nothing else but her now. Her healing lore seemed to flow into my
veins, outward through the nerve net of my body, like just being here
transformed me somehow. (Where am I?) I asked it as much because I wanted to
feel her words form inside my head as because I wanted to know the answer.

(A holy place,) she answered.

(A monastery?) The image of another monastery filled my
mind: one reduced to rubble and flames, the night around it filled with horror
and grief. I remembered Grandmother ... grimaced as pain distorted the
interface of our thoughts again.

“Namasle—” Miya murrnured, out loud, to the a:..
We are
one.
She pressed her face against my neck, like she was trying to stop my
mind from bleeding memories, So we could go on believing that the wafin, silent
moment where we’d taken refuge from Refuge would last forever.

I could almost have gone on believing, in spite of
everything ... in spite of the shadows that haunted my memory, the pain I felt
every time my body shifted position. Because my mind was alive again, not just
to Miya’s every thought, but to Joby, quietly dreaming—even to the taku. And
beneath it all I felt a profound peace that was more than even the sum of us,
giving
here
and
now
more reality than they’d ever had, making
safe
and
belonging
into words that had some kind of meaning for me at
last. (How ... ?) I thought. (Are you doing this? This—)
Miracle.
Not
able to let myself speak the word, not even in my mind.

(No,) she answered, (it’s this place. The reefs are all
around us here== they touch us all the time. The oyasin ... the oyasin showed
me this place, a long time ago. She showed me how it can heal .... I wanted to
bring Joby here before, but his parent—Tau—would never let me.)

(RefuSe,)
I thought, and then I didn’t have any
strength left for questions, no more need for answers. I lay in the warrn sea
of her thoughts, aware of every breath I took, aware that I was breathing
easily now. Once before I’d felt my damaged body work to mend itself this way.
Afterwards what I’d done had seemed like a fever dream. It hadn’t been under my
control then ... and maybe it wasn’t now. I only knew that in all my waking
life I’d never felt as whole as I did here and no\ry.

I woke and slept and woke again, losing count of the times
and how much time had passed in between. At last I opened my eyes from a
half-remembered dream of a child’s laughter. I lay listening, uncertain, until
I heard it again, echoing out of the shadowy room beyond the archway where the
taku nested. I heard footsteps, the uneven patter of a child’s feet.

I sat up slowly, expecting pain to take my breath away. It
didn’t. I still hurt all over, but not like I’d hurt before. I glanced over at
the place by my side where Miya and Joby had been sleeping, expecting it to be
empty. Miya was there, asleep. But Joby wasn’t.

I stared at the empty space beside her. A child’s laugh
echoed again behind me. I turned, peering into the light-dappled inner room.
All I could see were more shadows moving. And then I did something I hadn’t
done—hadn’t been able to do—for too long: I set my mind free, letting the
uncertain filaments of my thoughts search for Joby, trying to remember the
sense of him that had always filled my head like incense along with Miya’s
thoughts.

Joby.
It was Joby—laughing, moving freely, like any
other little boy, like he hadn’t been born with neurological damage, like he’d
never been held prisoner by his own body, never needed Miya’s help even to move
a finger ....

She wasn’t helping him now. There was no trace of her control
in his mind. And yet he was aware of her somehow, as aware as I was now, always
no more than a thought away from somebody else’s reality.

I got up, fighting drzzrness, still not really sure I wasn’t
dreaming. I took one step and then another toward the doorway, testing the
floor under my feet, suddenly no more certain that this place really existed
than I was that we weren’t all walking ghosts.
Walking, breathing, laughing
..
.. Pain shocked me with every step, but my bad leg held my weight, and
the rest of my body did what it was supposed to, step-by-step. I reached the
doorway, felt its solid frame under my hand; still not convinced that I’d
actually find Joby on the other side.

But he was there, in the long hall patterned with shifting
light and shadow. He was following the darting path of a taku, and his body was
the universal word for joy. The other taku soared and swooped around him like
leaves in the wind, sharing his game of tag.

(Joby.) I spoke his name, not with my voice, but in my mind.

He stopped with an awkward lurch to stare at me, like he’d actually
heard me. And then he changed trajectories, coming toward me with his face all
smiles. I knew it must be true, then, that we were all dead. And that I’d been
wrong all my life about heaven.

He collided with me, making me grunt with pain, his small
body as substantial as the wall that barely kept me from collapsing. “Cat!” he
said. (Cat!)

My senses strobed as I heard my name echo inside/outside my
head. I picked him up, grimacing as I held his weight and thinking that if this
was life after death, nothing I knew could prove it wasn’t the real thing.

o’Mommy!”

I turned arouod, holding him close, to see Miya sitting on
her sleep mat, smiling at us. She came into the room and put her affns around
us. (We aren’t ghosts, nasheirtah,) she thought. (Namaste ....)

We are one.
It was a long minute before I trusted
myself to speak, even to think. Because all I had to do to speak was to think,
now. (Joby ... he’s walking, by himself.) That part still seemed unreal. (How
is it possible—?)

(There are
ke
—rhythms the an lirr sense: currents of
the air and water, and even within the earth, lines of electromagnetic force.
Where certain patterns form, the an lin think of certain things. We call those
places
shue;
the place where the oyasin took us to find our Way was also
one. She told me that the monastery was built here because here the an lin had
thought about healing ....) I felt her grope for a way to show me more clearly.
Even mind-to-mind it was hard for her to explain to me a concept so alien to
anything in my experience—to the Human way, the only way of interacting with
the universe around me that I’d ever known.

I remembered her vision of the body as a bioelectric system
as well as a biochemical one, her awareness that most Humans barely got half
the equation that made a living being whole. Deadeye had called Human brains
the cells that made up the artificial intelligences that were interstellar
combines’ microprocessors for an organic computer. I felt her catch the image
and show me the starport computer’s secret sentience, how it had become more
than the sum of its parts ... like the an lirr.

A taku fluttered over my head. Joby put his hand up, and the
taku settled on his fingers. I stiffened as he brought it down to eye level,
but it didn’t react to me, except to give me an opal-eyed glance as it climbed
along his arm and settled on his shoulder.

I took a deep breath and followed Miya’s lead as she started
on across the chamber where taku nested. Joby trailed behind us, the taku still
balancing precariously on his small shoulder. I was surprised that the chamber
floor was clean, like even the taku regarded this as a sanctuary and didn’t
shit on the floor.

Beyond that space was one of the winding hallways Hydrans seemed
to prefer, maybe for aesthetic reasons, maybe because when they were in a hurry
they could always teleport. It still took painful effort just to stay on my
feet, but I didn’t feel any need to hurry now. I realized that all my life up
to this point had seemed to be about urgency. Now I couldn’t remember why. Even
my thoughts seemed to move in slow motion here, my mind taking in every detail
of the monastery’s austere grace: the ways that it was different from the
Council Hall, the ways it was the same. My senses missed nothing, as if I was
everywhere at once, like the an lirr.