Dreamfall (7 page)

Kissindre touched my arm. I jerked away, startled. She
pulled her hand back.

I lifted my hand, because I hadn’t meant it that way, hadn’t
wanted her to stop touching me. Suddenly I wanted to feel her arms around me,
her lips on my bruised mouth; not caring that it would hurt, not caring what
anyone thought. Just wanting to feel her against me, wanting her—

I took a deep breath, pulling myself together, and wiped my
mouth again with the back of my hand. I realized finally that Ezra hadn’t come
with the rest of them. And I realized that I was almost as glad not to see him
here as I was glad to be free. Realizing it pissed me off, but that didn’t make
it a lie. “No wonder the FTA is investigating Tau for rights violations,” I
muttered, looking hard at Kissindre’s uncle.

He looked away, grimacing, but Sand said, “There was nothing
illegal about what happened to you here.”

I stared at him. “What do you mean?”

“Under the Internal Security Act, anyone suspected of behavior
which threatens the corporate state can be detained, without any charges being
brought against them, for indefinite two-year periods.”

I almost asked if he was serious; didn’t. It didn’t take a
mind reader to see that he didn’t have that kind of sense of humor.

“It’s been a part of virtually every combine charter,” Perrymeade
said, as if he had to explain it, or excuse it, “since colonial days, on worlds
with ... an indigenous population.”

“That doesn’t make it right,” I said. I glanced at
Kissindre.

She tried to meet my eyes; ended up looking away like her uncle
had. She didn’t say anything. Nobody said anything.

“I think I’ll go back to the hotel now,” I said as they
stood there, staring at me like they’d been put on hold. “You coming?” I asked
Kissindre, finally.

“I—Uncle Janos invited me to stay with his family tonight.”
She glanced at him, back at me. “Why don’t you come home with us?”

“Yes, why don’t you? You’d be Very welcome,” Perrymeade
said. He looked directly at me for the first time since we’d come out of the
station, &S if he’d finally thought of a way to save face.

DKEAMF:ALL / 5l

“I don’t think so.” I shook my head. I didn’t have the
stomach for spending what was left of the night discussing race relations with
people who’d be fined a hundred fifty credits for failing to recycle. I
wondered what the fine was for failing to keep your guests out of trouble ...
or failing to treat them like human beings. “Thanks anyway,” I mumbled,
realizing that what had come out of my swollen mouth said more than I’d meant
it to.

“I really feel we need to discuss the ... situation here,
the circumstances—” Perrymeade broke off, gestured toward the mod that had come
drifting down at some silent command of his. Tau’s logo showed on its sleek,
curving side.

I shook my head. “Nothing to say.” I wasn’t sure whether I
meant them or me. The words sounded numb, the way my entire body felt now,
except for the inside of my mouth. I probed a torn cheek with my bitten tongue,
hurting myself.

“I’ll see you back to the hotel,
fllsn
—”
Protz said, coming alive for the first time since I’d seen him in the doorway
of the interrogation room. He put his hand on me like he expected me to disappear
again.

I broke his hold, too roughly; saw Sand give me a look.

“I probably don’t need to tell you,” Sand said to me, “that
we did not make any friends in there tonight.” He nodded at the Corporate
Security station behind us. I was surprised to find myself included in his
we.
“It was regrettable. But I would be ... conservative, if I were you, about
your future activities while you remain in Riverton.”

I nodded, frowning.

“Then let me get you a taxi—” Protz insisted, treading
water.

“I don’t need your help,” I said. I input the cab call on my
data-band, forcing them all to acknowledge that I had one, and the right to use
it.

“It’s after curfew,” Protz said. “Be certain you go directly
to the hotel—”

“Fuck off,” I muttered, and he stiffened.

“Tomorrow we go out to the reefs.” Kissindre moved in between
us, forcing me to look at her. I wasn’t sure if that was a promise, or just a
reminder because she thought I wasn’t tracking.

I nodded again, looked up into the night, searching the
light-washed darkness for my transportation. They all waited around me until
the taxi arrived. I got in, not able to stop Protz from giving it instructions
before the door sealed. I slumped down in the seat and put my feet up as the
mod lifted, finally able to drop my guard, finally leaving it all behind.

I looked out and down as the taxi carried me over the silent
city. I thought about the good citizens of Riverton, all in their beds and
sleeping because they’d been told to be, or pretending they were. I thought
about Oldcity, where I’d spent most of my life ... how it only really came
alive at night. How I’d lived for the night, lived off it, survived because of
it. Night was when the tourists and the rich marks from upside in Quarro came
slumming, looking for things they couldn’t get in a place like Tau Riverton.
Oldcity existed because Quarro was a Federal Trade District, neutral ground. No
single combine ran anything, or everything. You’d always find an Oldcity
somewhere inside a place like Quarro.

There was no Oldcity here; no room for deviance in a combine
‘clave. Everything was safe and sane; clean, polite, healthy, and prosperous. Under
control. There was no unpunished crime down there in those streets, no illegal
drugs. No thieves or whores or refugees, no orphans raped in alleys, no one
coughing their guts up in public from a disease most people had forgotten the
name of. No freaks.

The cab told me to get my feet off the upholstery. I put my
feet down, feeling the memory of Oldcity like the pain of a festered wound.
They wanted everyone to believe that life in this place was better than in a
place like Quarro. That people were. But the rot was just better concealed. I
rubbed my raw weeping face with my blistered hand, looking out at the bright
darkness of the night.

The mod let me off at the hotel entrance and reminded me not
to forget anything. “Not a chance,” I said. I went in through the vaulted lobby
filled with trees and flowering shrubs that looked a lot healthier than I did,
let the lift carry me up inside the tower, walked the last few meters to my own
door, all without having to look a single overly solicitous member of the human
staff in the face.

The door read my databand and let me in. It closed again behind
me, sealing me in, so that I was safe at last in a room that looked exactly
like every other room in this hotel. I wondered whether the rest of the team
had gotten back from the reception. It didn’t really matter, because I barely
knew any of them except Ezra, and I didn’t like Ezra.

I collapsed on the bed, asked the housekeeping system for
ice and a first-aid kit. A flow-mural was seeping across the far wall: hypnotic
forms in oozing black, the kind of art that could make you wake up in the
morning wanting to slash your wrists without knowing why. I called on the
threedy, blotting it out.

I asked for the Independent News. They didn’t carry it here.
I watched the replay of the Tau Late News flicker on instead, half listened
through a rogue’s gallery of people who’d been caught smuggling Poffi,
littering, or leaving a public toilet without washing their hands.

There should have been something about the kidnapping. There
wasn’t. There was a short, empty piece on the arrival of the research team,
though, with scenes of the party at the Aerie. It closed with a view of the
cloud-reefs and a long shot of the cloud-whales themselves.

I reached for a headset and requested every visual the
system had on file of the reefs and the cloud-whales. The room disappeared
around me as the mask fitted itself against my face. I canceled the sound,
because I already knew anything a Tau voicefeed would have told me. For a few
minutes at least I could be somewhere I wanted to be: feeling the touch of the
wind, looking out across view after view as each one carried me deeper into the
mystery my senses called beauty ....

Until at last the feed of images—the reef formations laid
out on the green earth like offerings for the eye of God, the cloud-whales
blown like sunlit smoke across an azure sky—bled away into neural static. I lay
still until the final phantom image had burned itself out of my nerve endings.

When the visions were gone, the memories of tonight were
still waiting.

I told myself fiercely to remember why I was here; remember
that Kissindre Perrymeade had wanted me on her crew because I could do this
kind of interpretive work better than anyone else. I hadn’t come to Refuge to
get myself arrested over in Freaktown, to humiliate myself or her, to make Tau
regret they had asked us here to perform a task that for once wouldn’t be
strictly for their profit ....

I blew through the menu of other programming, trying to find
something that would keep me from thinking, something that would stop the fist
of my anger from bruising the walls of my chest—anger that I couldn’t forget
and couldn’t share and couldn’t make go away. Something to relieve my tension
so that I could sleep, so that I could face all those human faces tomorrow—all
those eyes with their round, perfectly normal pupils—and not tell them to go to
hell.

There was nothing on the vid menu now but public service
programming, production documentaries, and a random selection of the mindrot
interactives I could have spent hours lost in, and been perfectly happy, not so
long ago .... Except that here the interactives began with a red censor logo,
telling me they’d had the good parts cut out of them.

I jerked off the headset and threw it on the floor. The
headset retracted into its slot at the bedside, drawn up by some invisible
hand. It clicked into place in the smooth line of the console, as if it was
making some kind of point about my personal habits. I ordered the wallscreen to
blank and called on the music menu. It was just as stale. I lay back again on
the bed that was exactly warm and exactly comfortable enough, sucked on ice as
I stared at the white, featureless ceiling.

I lay on the bed without moving for a long time. After a
while the room thought I’d gone to sleep, and turned off the lights. I barely
noticed, lost in the dark streets of memory, colliding again and again with the
image of a woman’s anguished face, her voice begging me to help her.
They
want to take my child ...
. But it hadn’t been her child.
Political,
they’d
said.
Radicals, dissidents.
She’d been taking care of the child—
a
boy, they said it was a boy, couldn’t have been more than three or four.
Why
had she said that—why that, why to me ... ? She didn’t know me==couldn’t know
what those words would do, couldn’t know what had happened once, long &go,
far away, to a woman like her, with a child like me ... the darkness, the
screams, and then the blinding end of everything. The darkness ... falling and
falling into the darkness.

I woke up again sprawled across the same perfect bed in the
same perfect hotel room, just the way I’d left consciousness last night. My new
clothes looked like I’d been mugged in them. I felt like I’d been mugged in
them.

Sunrise was pouring through the window, which had been a
wall last night, and the room was telling me courteously and endlessly to get
my butt out of bed. I shook my hair out of my eyes and checked the time. “Jeezu!”
I muttered. In another five minutes the team was due to leave for the research
base Tau had set up on the Hydran Homeland.

I rolled out of bed, realizing as I tried to stand up how
hung-over I was. I stripped off my reception clothes, swearing at every bruise
I uncovered. Even naked, there was no escape from the bitter memory of last
night. I hurled the wad of clothing across the room. Then I pulled on the worn tunic
and denim pants, the heavy jacket and boots that were the only kind of clothing
I’d owned, or needed, until yesterday. There was nothing I could do about the
scabs on my face or the dirt in my hair. I knotted a kerchief around my head
and hoped no one looked at me.

I started out of the room, still feeling queasy, stepped
back inside long enough to stick on a detox patch and empty a handful of
crushed crackers out of the pocket of my formal jacket. I stuffed the crackers
into my mouth and took the lift down.

I got out into the greenbelt square in front of the hotel on
the heels of Mapes, the team’s multisense spectroscopist. The rest of the team
members were already there, eager to get their first view of the reefs. I
pulled on my gloves and nodded good morning, not too obviously out of breath. A
couple of the others looked at me twice, at the skid marks of last night all
over my face. But they didn’t ask.

“Morning,” I said as Kissindre came up to me, dressed like I
was now.

I saw her falter as she stopped by me. ‘Are you all right?”
she asked, keeping it between the two of us, like the look she gave me as she
touched my arm.

I didn’t flinch away. “Sure,” I said. “Corporate Security
used to beat me up all the time.”

Her breath caught, and I realized, too late, that she
thought I meant something by it.

“Just kidding,” I murmured, but she didn’t believe me. “I’m
fine. Did they get the kidnapper?”

Her gaze flickered. “No. Cat ... that Hydran woman—was there
more to what happened than you told Sand last night?”

I wondered who’d told her to ask me that. “No.”

“Why did you leave the reception, then? Was it Ezra?”

“Give me more credit,” I said. I looked away, frowning, because
her eyes wouldn’t leave me alone. “The Hydrans.”

She stood a moment without saying anything. Finally, carefully,
she asked, “You mean, because you’re half Hydran ...?”