Dreamfall (58 page)

Natasa returned with a phase suit, as good as his word. He
looked relieved to see me still waiting there, &s good as mine. I put the
suit on. He went with me as far as the wall of rubble, running interference for
me with anybody who tried to get in my way. As we stood in front of the fallen
debris he put his hand on my ann, making me turn back. He hesitated, then let
me go again without saying anything. He nodded toward the wall and backed away.

I took a deep breath, putting his expression and the world
it belonged to behind me as I faced the mass of debris. I ordered the suit
on-line, saw the displays materialtze in front of my eyes—a meaningless jumble
of random shapes. For a minute I thought I’d forgotten how to read.

No. It’s the suit.
My confidence caught on a jagged
shard of doubt as I realized even the suit’s internal systems were scrambled.
But Natasa claimed its ability to phase was intact, that only its link to the
support system was down. I hoped he knew what he was talking about.

I put out my hand, watched it shimmer as I phased it through
the surface of the rubble. Just touching the material of the reef sent an
electric surge up my arn, straight into my brain.

I glanced back a final time. The space behind me had gotten
unnaturally quiet. Every face I could see was looking at me, expectant,
waiting.

I entered the land of broken dreams.

The flesh and bone of organic and inorganic materials closed
around me. The silence here was genuine, not the silence of held breath; the
pressure was real, not the weight of someone else’s hopes or fears. I moved
deeper into the matrix, feeling my way slowly, because finding a path through
this jumble of chaos and order was different from any reef work I’d done. I’d
begun to take the wild unpredictability of the reef matrix for granted ...
begun to wear the field suit like a second skin. There was a kind of freedom to
never knowing what you’d find next, as pure in its way as the rapture that took
me sometimes when I encountered enigmas that spoke to me in a voice no one else
would ever hear.

But this time the way to the unknown was roadblocked by
baniers of shattered ceralloy and composite, barred with molysteel—inorganic
materials so dense that they were beyond the phase range of my suit,
impenetrable even for me. It was hard to believe they’d been fragmented by an
explosion no bigger than this one; that the explosion hadn’t turned the whole
complex into a smoking crater. Unless the construction materials used to build
the installation hadn’t been up to specs, had been flawed to begin with ... had
been one more suicidal mistake that Tau had taken for a good idea.

I worked my way up to a ftactured slab of ceiling, kicked
off like a swimmer into the shimmering jelly of pulverrzed cloud-reef until I’d
risen past it. I stopped moving again, drifting deeper into the matrix, letting
its silence and strength surround rle, shield me from the world I’d left
behind. The reef’s presence had been rattling agaLnst my brain like pebbles
against a windowpane since the moment I’d touched its face. Now, finally, I was
secure enough to open all the windows into my mind. I let my body go
slack—emptying my mind of every thought I’d carried with me into the matrix,
until there was only sensation ....

The silence was filled with light. I smelled music with
every breath; my eyes saw the transcendent radiance of unimaginable wavelengths
as all my senses flowed out into the matrix of the reef.

It would have been easy to lose my self then, let even the
itching sand-grain of someone else’s desperation that had driven me to this
fade away. With an effort of will I stopped the bleeding of my consciousness
and forced myself to remember who really counted on the outcome of what I did
here:

Joby ....
Joby would lose his mother if I lost my
way. The investigators Isplanasky had sent to dig out the rot beneath Tau’s lies
would never have the chance to tell anyone what they’d found. And I’d never
sleep again, if I thought my own prejudice and bitterness had kept me from
finding any survivors.

If there were any survivors. I cast the net of my psi out in
a slow scan, feeling my sense of control grow as I searched the metaphorical
darkened room for the faintest gleam of a Human thought. But this darkened room
was in a madhouse, where nothing met anything else at the expected angle, where
stairways of complex hydrocarbons led to impenetrable ceilings of ceralloy,
doorways opened onto nothingness or walls: a death trap of illusions for any
searcher who let his attention wander too far.

But as I worked my way deeper, old memories stirred, memories
of the time when I’d been a real telepath—
when I’d been good, one of the
best
—If anybody could find them, I could. If there were any survivors still
alive, they had to be here somewhere ... somgwhere ....
There.

I caught the quicksilver flash of a mind radiating pain. I
lunged after it as the contact slipped away, followed it back through a storm
wrack of alien sensation, not letting go because I couldn’t afford to lose it
now, not when I was so close—

There.
Contact charged my senses, sent my psi link
arcing from the core of my mind to another ... another ... alfother:
terror,
pain, grief
—

Three. Only three
—? How many people had gone in here?
A lot more than three. I didn’t know the feel of any of these minds, had never
been inside them, couldn’t tell whether they belonged to anyone I’d ever met
because there wasn’t a coherent thought in any of them. Raw emotion was
screaming through my brain, and all it told me was that they were running out
of time.

I didn’t try to contact them telepathically, knowing they’d
only panic. I clung to the fragile thread of thought that linked me to their
location, while my mind backtracked through the maze of jumbled reef strata to
complete the circuit, contacting a mind on the outside that would anchor me and
let me reel myself in.

I found Natasa, maybe because he was standing the closest,
maybe because he was the only one who’d wanted me to find him. I felt him
recoil as if the contact had been physical. Following the compass of his shock,
I retraced my path through the techno-organic maze until I fell through into
the open again.

Natasa caught me and steadied me as the suit deactivated. He
was still in my head, not by choice, breaking the reef’s spell, demanding
answerc
(—found them?)
he was asking. “You found them—?”

(Found them, found them, found ... )
I shook my head,
trying to clear out the echoes; held up my hands, nodding frantically, as I saw
the look on his face. I loosened my helmet and pulled it off. “survivors. Only
three.”

“Three?” he repeated. “Three? Dammit, twenty-seven people
went in there!”

I looked down, grimacing.

“My ... my wife—?”

“I don’t know,” I murmured. “I couldn’t ) ‘ I broke off,
feeling frustration crush his grief into anger. I cut the contact between us,
shutting him out of my mind. ‘Are you saying, if your wife is dead, then you
don’t care if anybody trapped in there survives?”

He blinked, and the kind of anger on his face changed. “No,”
he said. “No, of course not. How far in are they’”

“Just a minute,” someone said behind him. The officials who’d
been talking to Protz when I went in gathered around us. Protz was still with
them. “What about the FTA’s people? Are they all dead?”

I didn’t have to be a mind reader to know what they were
really asking. If the Feds had been killed in the explosion, it was going to
look bad for Tau ... but they might still be able to cover it up. If the Feds
were alive, there was no hope of burying any of their mistakes, not the big
ones, not the small ones. “I don’t know who survived,” I said, trying to keep
my voice even. “I only know there are people in there who are still alive.”

“How can you be certain?” one of the officials snapped.

“He knows,” Natasa said, his voice hardening with suspicion.
“He’s a telepath.” A crowd was gathering around us, more guards and workers
waiting for orders.

“He’s crippled, dammit!” Protz said. “He’s not a mind
reader.”

“He can read the reefs,” Ixpa said. I turned, surprised to
see her pushing through the crowd. “We never had anyone here who could do that
before him. Why the hell did you pull him out of there just as he detected that
anomaly?” There were muffnurs from the workers gathering around us, but I
couldn’t tell what their mood was. Ixpa looked away from Protz, like she didn’t
really expect an answer. “How do you want uS to proceed, sir?” She aimed the
question at Sandusky, including me with a nod of her head.

“We’re doing everything we can.” Sandusky gestured like he
was brushing aside smoke. “There’s no more we can do until the equipment is
back on-line.” He glanced over his shoulder at the crews still trying to clear
away debris with equipment that only did what they expected it to about a third
of the time. “That will take hours.”

“I don’t think you have hours, Sandusky,” I said.

He looked at me with no recognition, only a kind of
disbelief, like I’d forgotten what I was, to be speaking to him like that.

I turned back to Ixpa. “Can I take any equipment with me
when I’m wearing a Phase suit?”

“What kind?” she asked, looking dubious.

“Other phase suits—three of them.”

“Well... yeah,” she said. Understanding lit up her face ..’yeah,
I don’t see why not. You think you could actually reach them? Lead them ssf—J”

I shrugged. “I want to try.”

Ixpa signaled to one of the workers standing behind her. “Get
me some more phase suits.”

“Wait a minute: ‘ Sandusky said, frowning. “You can’t do
that.”

All around me surprised faces turned to stare at him. “Why
not?” Ixpa said. “It could work.”

Sandusky pursed his lips. He looked like he was barefoot on
a hot plate. “It’s too dangerous. I don’t want to risk losing another life in
ther—” He pointed at the rubble, trying to look like he really gave a shit if I
lived or died.

“I volunteered,” I said. “I’m willing to risk it. I can
reach them.”

“We don’t know if it’s our people who survived,” Ptotz protested.
“We only have this half-breed’s word that anyone is alive in there at all.”

Sandusky glanced at Protz,, his mouth working.

“Excuse me, sir,” Natasa said. “Is he saying that if the
survivors are Feds we should let them die, for the good of the keiretsu? That
just because we’re not sure who it is, we have to let them die—?”

The muttering around us got louder. “My wife is in there,
sir,” Natasa said. “I don’t know if she’s dead or alive. But it’s not keiretsu to
bury our own people just because they might be outsiders ... and the outsiders
might know too much. The keiretsu is family.”

Sandusky’s face reddened. He glanced at Protz again, looked
away as workers arrived carrying the phase suits Ixpa had sent for. Ixpa handed
me my helmet. I put it on. She passed me the other suits, one at a time.

“Carry them as close to your body as you can,” Ixpa said. “That
should keep them in synch with your own phase field.” She bent her head at the
waiting matrix.

I started forward, carrying the extra suits, watching
Sandusky and Ptotz from the corner of my eye. Their stares got darker as I
reached the broken reef-face. But without my noticing it, without Natasa’s
saying a word, a phalanx of guards and workers had formed around me, protecting
me from any interference:
Keiretsu.
I reached the barrier of broken
dreams and stepped through.

I let the reef flow into my mind again. It was easier this
time, because the anger I’d taken with me into the reef before was gone; easier
because I knew that I could do what I had to.

As I let myself feel the reef, I realized that the shining
trace of my contact with the survivors still existed, like a wormhole through
space. Relieved and a little awed, I followed it to its end without stopping.

I burst through the matrix wall into the tiny vacuole where
three survivors huddled under the acbidental shelter of a panel of unbroken
composite. I heard/felt the shock wave of their disbelief as they saw me emerge
from the reef, impossibly, in front of them. They cringed and cowered like I
was some manifestation of the disaster, come to finish what the explosion had
started.

“I’ve come to get you out of here,” I said, trying to choose
the words that would pull them back to sanity the fastest. I couldn’t tell how
my voice sounded to them, whether the words were even intelligible. I held the
suits up, letting them see what I had, while I searched their filthy, dazed
faces for one I knew.

Ling Natasa wasn’t there. I didn’t recognize any of them ...
but one of them wore what had been an FTA uniform.

“Thank God ....” The Fed staggered to his feet, clutching an
ann that was bent at an unnatural angle. His face was gray-white with pain
under the dirt and blood. “How?” he mumbled. “Where—?”

I smiled. “Isplanasky sent me.”

He gaped. The other two still crouched, staring at us like
they’d been put in stasis. “Come oil,” I said softly. “I’ve got phase suits for
you. I’ll lead You out.”

Isplanasky’s man took a suit and began to put it on, while I
got the woman wearing a vacant stare and a guard’s datapatches into the second
suit. Together we got the third survivor suited up—a bondie with a gouge in his
face that had probably taken out one of his eyes. He wasn’t any older than I
was. I tried not to look at his face; tried not to see what else they’d been
looking at all the while they’d been trapped here: a foot, an arm, protruding
from the avalanche of rubble. I was standing in a pool of blood that didn’t
seem to have come from any of them. I swallowed down nausea, forcing myself to
focus my psi for one last sweep, searching for any survivors I might have
missed. There weren’t any.