Dreamfall (22 page)

I thought about them together in Quarro, moving through a
world of light and privilege: how they’d met, shared, learned, slept together.
I thought about my life, moving on a parallel track with theirs, buried alive
in Quarro’s Oldcity.

“Aren’t you from Quarro?” she asked. “Ezra said—”

“No.” I got up from my seat, moved to the windodwall and
stood looking out.

When I looked back at her she was crying, the tears seeping
out through the fingers of the hand she’d pressed against her eyes to stop
them. “Damn
fuip
—”

I wondered what she was thinking now—what he’d said to her
when she told him to get out of her life; how ugly the words had been. I
wondered what she was feeling—
lost? angry?
I couldn’t tell. It made me
feel helpless, because I didn’t know what to do if I couldn’t tell.

She got up and started for the door.

I crossed the room before she got there. “I know how it
feels,” I said. I caught her gently by the shoulders and made her look at me.

“You do?” she said thickly, looking back at me like she actually
believed it might be true. And all the while I couldn’t even imagine what she’d
seen in him.

“No.” I let my hands drop. “How could I even imagine what
you feel?” I remembered holding someone else, far away, long ago:
Jule
taMing,
her long dark hair slipping down across her face as I held her ...
how I’d known what she’d suffered, known what she needed ... just like she’d
known everything about me. I turned away, shaking my head.

“It must be terrible,” Kissindre said softly.

“What?” I turned back, startled.

“To lose that. To lose something like the Gift.”

I stood staring at her, stupidly.

“My uncle told me.”

“God,” I muttered.

“Cat—” she said, and broke off.

I looked away, down, out at the night, anywhere but at her.
I’d known her for years now, worked beside her, studied with her, been her
friend—and nothing more. I’d always stopped short of crossing that line, never
tried to make our relationship anything more, because I’d thought she loved
Ezra. I’d thought the way she looked at me sometimes was nothing more than
curiosity.

I’d never had the courage to ask outright ... I’d never had
any way to know for sure. But all the time that I’d believed she wanted someone
else, I’d wanted to be in a place like this with her, alone with her, wanted it
so much some nights that I couldn’t sleep.

And now I only wanted her to leave.

“Talk to me,” she munnured. “In all the time we’ve worked together,
you’ve never talked about you.”

I turned back, finally. “You never asked,” I said.

This time she looked down. “Maybe I was afraid ....” I
thought about the way she’d always acted—reacted—around me. She wasn’t acting
that way now. “Ironic, isn’t it?”

“Why?” I asked. But I already knew the answer:
Because
she was a xenologist .... Because I was strange.

“Because I want you so much it makes my teeth hurt,” she
whispered, and her face turned scarlet. “I never wanted Ezra the way I want
you.”

I pulled her into my arms and kissed her, kissed her for a
long time, because I’d wanted to kiss her for such a long time, to hold her, to
know what it was like to be her lover.

We drifted back across the room to the bed. I followed her
down onto it, not letting her go as we went on kissing, tasting the strange
spices that breathed from our skin, feeling my hands slide over the warm
contours of her body as her shirt came undone. Her hands were on me, loosening my
shirt, my pants, touching my chest, touching me all over.

I kissed her throat, touched her breast, waiting for the
feedback of her senses, waiting for every sensation to double for us both as my
mind reached deep inside her to give her a kind of pleasure that Ezra never
could. Waiting. Reaching—

It wasn’t happening.
I couldn’t reach into her
thoughts, to answer her every desire ... I couldn’t even find her.

I remembered suddenly that the last time I’d been with a
woman I’d still been using the drugs that let me use my psi. But they’d been
gone for a long time. Now I didn’t know what to do next, didn’t know whether it
was the right thing, whether it would satisfy her, whether she wanted more, or
wanted me to stop—

I broke away from her, swearing under my breath as the truth
put out the fire of my need, turned my burning flesh to the cold, slack flesh
of a corpse. I pulled my shirt together to hide the gooseflesh crawling up my
naked body; to hide the signs of death from her, from myself.

66\tr/fu41
—?” Kissindre sat up,
blinking. “What is it?”

I didn’t answer, and she touched my face gently with her
hand.

“I can’t,” I whispered.

Her hand fell away. She sat on the side of the bed, looking
down, her fingers picking at the edges of her open shirt. I heard her try to
ask and lose her nerve.

“I can’t—feel you,” I said finally. “I don’t know what to
do.”

She took one of my hands in hers.

I looked up, seeing confusion in her clear blue eyes that
just stopped, the way all eyes stopped, because I couldn’t reach through them
into anyone’s mind. “I want you,” I said thickly, “but I can’t find you.” I
took a deep breath. “I can’t
feel
you.” I touched my head. “I can’t feel
anyone.”
I should have died. Maybe I had.

She moved her hands slowly, taking my hand with them until it
rested on the warm skin of her shoulder. “I’m right here,” she said gently. “I
know what to do. Just follow me ....” She bent her head; her lips burned
against the cold flesh of my palm. “That’s all you need, to be a human being.”

“I don’t know how.” I pulled my hand free. I pushed to my
feet;
not human enough, not Hydran enough.
I looked back at her,
stretched out on my bed: her shining hair, the curve of her breast. Trying to
want her the way I’d wanted her five minutes ago, trying to let my body answer
her, mindlessly, as if there was nothing between us but sex. Once I’d believed
that was all there was, sex between strangers. But not now. Now it was too
late. I looked away finally, because nothing at all was happening. “Maybe you’d
better go.”

I listened, keeping my eyes averted, as she got up slowly
from the bed. I heard her unsteady breathing as she pulled her clothes
together; I heard her start toward the door.

“Kissindre.” I forced myself to turn back, made rnyself
cross the room again before she could go out. “It only happened because you
matter too much to me—” I pulled her against me and kissed her agatn, let her
go as her body began to soften and yield. “It’s not your fault.” I touched her
hair. ‘And it’s not your problem. Please—just tell me you understand that ....”

She nodded, slowly. “Will ... will you be all right?”

Some sick part of me wanted to laugh, wanted to ask her,
Tonight,
or ever
—
?
I strangled it. “Yeah. I’ll be fine.”

She opened her mouth, shut her eyes, shook her head. She
went out of the room. The door closed behind her.

I stood for a long time wondering where she’d gone: whether
she was going back to Ezra,, or going to tell her uncle we were both miserable
little shits, or going to an empty room exactly like this ofle ....

I stopped staring at the empty surface of the door and turned
back to the bed. Its surface was just as smooth and featureless. Like nothing
had happened.

I went to the bed and lay down on it. I ordered the window
to opaque and called on the threedy, jerked the headset out of its cradle and
pushed it onto my face. With my clothes hanging open and my mind fused shut I
blew through the menu, searching for what I needed right then: something hot
and raw and meaningless; a virtual fuck.

Something that didn’t exist, here.

By the time I was absolutely sure of that, there was no
emotion at all left inside me. I reached up to pull off the headset, ready to
shut the access down.

But there was a message light blinking now at the corner of
my vision. The message was from Wauno: access to a Hydran language tutorial. I
pulled the program and dumped it into my brain in one long, masochistic feed.

I lay there awhile longer while the brain-smog of
data-strings stupefied my concentration until I could almost forget; almost let
the mnemonic buzz sing my mind to sleep. It was almost enough ....

But it wasn’t. I got up from the bed, fastened my pants, fastened
my shirt. I put on my coat and went out of the room.

I left the hotel, making sure I didn’t cross the path of
anybody I knew. I took an aircab down to the river’s edge, where the bridge
arced across the canyon to the Hydran town.

The bridge was dark, sealed off, closed for the night. I
pressed against the yielding, invisible barrier of the force field until a disembodied
voice activated, warning me that I was out past curfew, that my identity was
registering at Corporate Security headquarters.

I swore, backing off, turned, and strode away, following the
canyon’s rim, triggering the ghosts in every fucking lamppost and hype-kiosk
along the promenade. There was no one else visible for as far as I could see. I
sat down on a bench, finally, letting my head rest against its iron brocade, my
hands hanging strengthless in the space between my knees, as I waited for the
cab I’d called to come back and get me.

I still breathed the taste of strange spices with every
exhalation, still felt the rhythms and structure of a strange tongue
highlighting alien road maps in the circuits of my brain. I tried to remember
if I’d ever walked those roads before, in a long-ago time and place.

Eventually everything fell silent. All I could hear now was
the sound of the river, so faint and far below that I almost thought I was
hearing the echo of Hydran voices. Faces I’d seen across the river accreted in
my mind like dreamfall in the reefs ... all of the eyes, the hair, the
spice-colored skin morphing into one face:
Her face.
A Hydran woman with
a human child, alone in the night maze of Freaktown.

The cold wind touched my face almost gently, like an unexpected
lover. I sat up, opening my eyes, glancing around, because there had been
something almost familiar about the touch of the wind.

Someone was sitting with me on the bench. Miya.

Miya.
r reached out, my hands closing over her arms.
I felt her muscles harden under my grip; felt my own surprise as they proved
her body’s solidness.

She looked into my eyes, unafraid, and didn’t try to pull
free. I knew as well as she did that there was no way I could hold her if she
didn’t want to be there.

I let my hands drop. “Miya?” I whispered, and heard my voice
catch on the sound of her name.

The pupils of her eyes widened, narrowed again.
Surprise.
Surprise that I knew her name.

But not the kind of surprise I felt as I realized that she
could only have come here looking for me. “It’s not safe here.” The words
dropped off my tongue, surprising me again, because the last thing I expected
my gut response would be on seeing her was to want her safe.

I saw her pupils dilate again, as if it was the last thing
she’d expected too. Her gaze hovered on my face like a moth hypnotrzed by a
light. But she only shook her head and lifted her hands, letting the sleeves of
her hooded parka slide down:
No databand.

Invisible.
I glanced at my wrist. The databand was
still there, forcing me to remember what the Corpses had done to me because I
wore one ... because of her. “I’m not invisible,” I said, looking away as anger
gave me the strength to break her gaze. “Tau’s Security didn’t have any trouble
finding me.” I gestured at my bruises. “What the hell do you want?”

“I ...” Her hand rose again, hesitated in the art, fell
away. “I wanted to thank you.”

“For what?” I said sourly, totally lost to her logic.

She gazed at me without answering, until I began to think
she had no more idea of why than I did. Or maybe she was trying to decide what
to make of me, when the one thing that could have told her was missing. “I
couldn’t see any other way,” she murmured finally, and it still wasn’t an
answer. “I felt that I had to come,” she said, as if she could tell from my
face that I still wasn’t getting it. She spoke Standard, with no real accent.
She was dressed in pragmatic, sexless human clothes; if we hadn’t been
face-to-face, she could have passed for a human.

“Like you felt you had to slip me that databand, back in
Freaktown?”

She looked away, across the river. “Yes,” she said faintly.
She looked at me again, and I saw something in her eyes that was closer to
anguish, or even longing, than to guilt. I didn’t know what the hell to make of
it. “I needed to be certain ...” She broke off, her hands worrying the seal of
her jacket. “They said that you were all right. I had to see it for myself.”

I figured
they
must be HARM. “Did they tell you that
it took Draco’s Chief of Security to get me out of Borosage’s lockup—?”

“No,” she said, and frowned.

“Tau’s CorpSec thought I was one of the kidnappers. They
were going to torture me to get answers I didn’t know. Jeeze, they could have
killed me!”

She grimaced like I’d hit her and murmured something that
sounded like a curse. “I didn’t know .... That night, when I saw you—”

“You saw a freak.” I watched her confusion form like the fog
of my breath. “You know what I mean.” I jerked my head. “A halfbreed. You think
I don’t get the same reaction on this side of the river?”

This time her restless hand actually touched my sleeve ... “That’s
not what I meant. I meant that I realized how much our safety mattered to you.”
She searched my face for something that wasn’t there.