Dreamfall (51 page)

“God,” I breathed, and for a while neither of us said
anything more. Joby’s laughter and the skreeling of the taku echoed from the
next room. At last I said, “Miya?” She raised her head. “Why don’t you hate Humans?”

She looked at me for a long moment with her head bent to one
side. (Why don’t you?) she said.

More days passed. Joby walked and laughed and sang to the
taku that followed him everywhere like a migration of sentient toys.

His speech, and his thoughts, grew clearer and more complex
every day. Just his smile could blind us to the shadow of death that bounded
our existence.

Every morning I woke up surprised to discover we’d survived
another day. As I lay beside Miya and Joby, sharing their warmth, I knew this
was as close to having a family as I’d ever come. And I knew there was nothing
more I wanted from life, except that Tau would never find us.

But I knew Tau’s CorpSec would have orbital surveillance
searching for us, programmed to scan for anomalies like three heat sources in
an abandoned monastery, a mix of Hydran and Human genecodes. They’d find us
sooner or later. Miya knew it too: knew that every moment we stole from fate
was another victory, for us and for the lost little boy who might never have
another day of freedom, no matter what happened, once our time together here
ran out.

Miya made a trip to Freaktown every few days to pick up food
and other supplies, and to pick up news. Day after day there was no sign that
our message had reached Isplanasky; that it had ever even gotten off-world.
Naoh and the Satoh were in hiding; Miya didn’t dare spend enough time in town
to find out where.

Tau added new embargoes to their sanctions against the Hydrans
every day that their demands weren’t met. Even Tau couldn’t justify wiping
Freaktown off the map with a retaliatory strike, but they could bleed the
Community for information until they bled it to death. There was nothing we
could do to stop that, change it, now, even if we gave ourselves up. Naoh had
seen to that. An hourglass full of days was all she’d left us, and the choice
of living a lifetime before it ran out.

Miya and I ate and slept and roamed the monastery’s maze of
halls with Joby skipping at our heels, trailing a flying circus of taku. Miya
taught me all she knew about the history of our people, in between games we
made up for Joby to strengthen his growing control. Sometimes the games made me
laugh so hard Miya glanced up with a look that said I seemed newer to real
child’s play than Joby was.

When the monastery’s walls began to close in, Miya took us
on teleport pilgrimages into the interior of the Homeland. I’d thought nothing
existed there anymore, since the cloud-whales had abandoned the reefs and taken
the rain with them. But the bones of the past lay everywhere. She took us to a
dozen different sites where time-eaten remains of Hydran civilization lay abandoned
to the wind.

Some of the things we found there were mysteries to our eyes
and minds, things even Miya didn’t know the purpose of—tiered towers that rose
like prayers step-by-step toward heaven; dozens of hive-shaped kiosks of
unknown material, each a meter high, laid out in a wedge in the middle of
nowhere. Some were things any Human would have recognrzed—the remains of towns,
of homes, of what could only have been research or production centers based on
a technology as long forgotten as the structures themselves. Now they were all
just ruins, echoing husks filled with broken artifacts.

Sometimes while Miya and Joby slept, I sat alone in the monastery’s
dusty rooms sorting through salvage we’d carried back. I daydreamed about
taking the artifacts back to the team, studying them in some well-equipped Tau
lab .... And then I’d remember again why that had become impossible. I’d never
see any of the team again, never even see Hanjen, the only Hydran I knew who
might still be able to tell me something about how the Community’s tech had
functioned.

But out of everything we carried back, the thing that
haunted me the most was an idea. It had come to me as I stood in a ruined
building in the heart of a dead city. Maybe the place had been a government
center, like the Community Hall in Freaktown. It could as easily have been
something more frivolous or something more bizane. All that remained now was a
skeleton, an empty cage constructed of God-knew-what. Arcane organic forms
flowed upward, defying gravity, reaching toward the sky—the home of the an
lirr—with finger-spires tipped in something that shone like gold in the sun.
The building’s interior was hollow now, whatever it had been once. Patterns of
light and darkness falling through eyeless window openings illuminated the
patterned floor, giving rt a third dimension. Arcs circled within circles,
diamond spines were framed in ovals, webs of delicate tracery spun across
expanses of open space three stories above our heads.

Everywhere there were startling views of the sky, like
whoever entered this place had been meant to look up often and remember.
Everywhere I looked, the sky was as perfectly clear and cerulean as the walls
of our room in the monastery. Not a single cloud was visible. When the an lirr
abandoned the Homeland, they’d taken the lifeblood of the land with them, just
as their going had sucked dry the spirits of its people.

As I stood looking up at blue infinity, the universe hidden
behind it, I thought about the Hydrans who’d left Refuge and the an lirr for
the stars, spreading the Gift and the Community thin across the light-years. I
wondered whether there was any connection between losing touch with the an
lirr—losing something so vital to their spiritual identity—and their decline as
an interstellar civilization ....

(Miya—) I called, and she turned to look at me from across
the glowing floor. (What if the an lirr came back to the Homeland?)

She looked at me for a long time; I felt her turning the
question over and over in her mind without finding an answer. She shook her
head at last, calling Joby to her with a thought. “It’s time to go,” she said,
and that was all she said, before she carried us away.

Whenever we could we made love, exploring each other’s bodies
inside and out. And knowing there should be no secrets, no need for them noq
still a part of me was always on guard, shielding Miya from my past—the dark
needs, the darker fears, the poisoned memories hidden like deadly anomalies in
the dream-reefs of our joinings.

Because sometimes in the heat of lovemaking she had cried
out, not with pleasure but with pain—my pain, as my pleasure slipped across
some unwatched border into the night country, and a nameless stranger’s
perversion tore her unprotected heart like shrapnel.

And as the days passed—as their inevitable end grew closer,
and so did we—I began to wake from the dreaming safety of our sleep at night
thinking I was in another place and time, sweating the blood of nightmares.
Waking up in her anns, I’d find her comforting me like a child; I’d see the
incomprehension in her eyes as I drifted back down into sleep without
explanation.

Until one night I woke, sitting bolt upright in the faint
moonlight, and realized Miya had wakened me. She lay beside me, with silent
sobs wracking her body, her fists in a death grip on the blankets she’d pressed
to her mouth to muffle the sound.

(Miya ... ?) I could barely feel her in my mind, like she
was trying to muffle her thoughts the same way. But I found the images of Joby,
of me, of herself, distorted with pain ....
All of us dead
—
worse, all
of us alive but alone, in the hands of the Humans ..
.. I pulled her into my
arms, finally understanding that all the while I’d struggled to keep her free
of my prison of fear, she was locked in the next cell.

It took all my strength to turn the key that waited—that had
always waited—in the lock of the final door. I opened myself to her.

Raw emotion arced across the space between us to complete
the joining—
love*death*loss
—like none of those emotions had ever existed
separately inside her, even in dreams.

The feedback smashed through my unguarded mind like a shock
wave, fragmenting me, her, everything but the unbreakable bond between us, and
the last recognizable thought I had was that neither of us would ever take a
sane breath again ....

A sound—a child’s wail of fsrrsr—leached me. A single coherent
emotion—Miya’s—took form around it. I felt her respond, recapturing the spilled
blood of her thoughts as her mind struggled to answer Joby’s cry.

I barely refocused my own thoughts in time to catch her trailing
lifeline. We rose through fathoms of memory, reclaiming our souls and our
wills, breaching the surface of sanity at last.

I fell forward onto the tangled bedding as I came back into
my other five senses; Miya rolled away from me toward Joby. Joby lay in a fetal
knot beside het making the high keening cry I’d heard him make the first time I
saw him, but with a seffated edge of pain I’d never heard before. Miya held him
in her anns, surrounding him with her touch, her contact flowing into his mind
like life-giving oxygen to wake its higher centers, its voluntary controls.

I watched her comfort him, reorient him, bring him back into
the world just as his cry had brought her back. Without him, without the bond
between the two of them, the two of us might have stayed locked in a psychotic
klin
until our bodies wasted away and died. I wiped my hand across my mouth, trembling.

At last Joby had grown quiet enough that she could settle
him down to sleep again beside her. She covered him with blankets, covered his
face with apologetic kisses as he drifted off, smiling.

Her tears began to fall again, in silence, welling from her
eyes like springwater. She didn’t turn back to look at me.

I sat in the moon-shadowed darkness watching her, watching
Joby, while my heartbeat gradually slowed. I kept my mind clenched shut, afraid
to touch either of them: afraid of the past, afraid of the future, afraid of
causing them more pain. Afraid ...

She looked up at me then, finally, and even though she was
still weeping her eyes were fearless; the hand she held out to me was as steady
as faith.

My body shrank back in a mindless reflex. I shook my head,
not meeting her gaze as I pulled on my clothes. I got up from the bed and left
the room.

I moved through the monastery’s halls without a light,
wishing that I could lose myself in the maze of passageways, stumble into some
other dimension and disappear.

I glanced up as I passed through a chamber I’d crossed
nearly every day without seeing anything new. But this time the moonlight threw
a wall into unexpected relief, revealing an opening I’d never seen, in what I’d
taken to be a featureless surface.

I changed trajectory, snaked a path between pillars to the
hidden doorway. The corridor beyond was no more than five meters long. At the
end of it I found a prayer platform like the ones I’d seen in Freaktown, except
that this one was open to the sky, within the energy field that protected the
entire monastery from the weather. But this one was hidden, special ...
linpoche.

I stood on the platform looking out into the night. Above me
were the stars, the night’s blackness, the face of the moon scumbled with
elusive shapes. The images I saw there seemed to change from one moment to the
next, transforming my perceptions again and again, until at last even my mood
began to transform.

I leaned on the edge of the low wall that ringed the
platform, searching my pockets for the mouth harp I’d somehow managed to hotd
on to through everything that had happened to me. I put it to my lips and
breathed into it, hearing the smoky, plangent notes that it hadn’t made in too
long. But always the same ones; always the same ones missing, so that any song
I tried to play was incomplete.

I lowered it again, disappointed, like the inarticulate part
of my brain that belonged to music and moods had expected even my attempt to
play a song would be transformed.

(You have to become a part of it.) Miya’s voice filled my
mind as she appeared on the platform beside me. I felt her begin to say
something more and then stop, falling silent with awe as she realrzed where we
were. (Linpoche—) she thought. She looked back at me, the night reflected in
her eyes. I saw her mouth quiver.

She looked away again at the face of the moon, and for a
long rnoment her emotions were closed to me. At last she thought, carefully,
(With any instrument, to make music is ... to be namaste.)

I shook my head, looking down at the harp. (But it doesn’t
have everything I need to play my music.) I held it out, keeping my o\ryn
thoughts perfectly transparent on the opaque surface of my mind.

(Then make them yourself,) she said. Something appeared in
her hand: one of the flutes used to greet the an lirr. She ran through its
scale of notes. There were gaps in the liquid progression of sound, but when
she began a song the missing notes were somehow all there.

(How?) I thought. (Your Gift—?)

She shook her head. She played the song more slowly, letting
me see how she used her fingers to partially block an opening, hear how she
modulated her breath to alter pitch—making what was there work for her, to give
her what she needed.

I raised the mouth harp to my lips and blew into it. I
cupped my hands, changing its sound by the way I shifted my fingers, hearing
notes slide past that I’d never produced before. I lowered it again, slowly, as
my throat closed so that I couldn’t go on playing. I studied the cool gleam of
its moonlit metal surface resting in my hand. At last I put it back into my
coat pocket and looked up as something drew my thoughts, my eyes, like a
lodestone ...

(Miya ....)

She kissed me, her fingers digging into my back, pressing herself
against me as if she could dissolve into my body and make us one
physically—doubling our strength, so that nothing could hurt us, or come
between us, ever again.