Dreamfall (28 page)

“So the Natasas are the whistle-blows15—?”

“No!” She shook her head. “They wouldn’t dare. Ling knew
Joby would be born with a neural defect. The doctors couldn’t repair it, but
they said any future fetus would probably be stillborn. Tau promised her that if
she didn’t file a grievance they’d give her child the very best help available.
But if she did, Joby would have nothing—they’d all have nothing. They wouldn’t
be part of the keiretsu anymore.”

My hands tightened.
Nobody’s innocent.
The parents
had been hiding something big. So had Tau. “Then all the complaints against Tau
are true, I’d bet my life on it—” I broke off, r”iliring what I was saying:
That if Tau had any idea how much Miya knew—and they probably did—she’d bet her
own life by taking Joby. That if they ever realized I knew all this, I’d be as
good aq dead myself.

“Miya,” r said, facing her again, “I want to help you. I’ll
contact Isplanasky. But he’s on Earth; it’s going to take time for anything he
can do to affect Tau, or your situation. Tau’s dangerous. Don’t back them into
a corner. They’ll crush you, if that’s what it takes for them to survive. What
you’ve done puts everyone on this side of the river in danger, not just you and
HARM. You underslsnd—J”

Miya nodded, without questions or even much surprise.

Naoh stood listening, but she didn’t react. I was sure she’d
heard everything, but I couldn’t be certain whether she understood what I was
saying. The other HARM members were a1 silent behind her. I couldn’t tell
whether they were following this at all; didn’t know what might be going on
between them and Naoh that I couldn’t hear. But at least they’d stopped
*-making jokes about my ancestry.

I looked back at Miya. “What about Joby?” I said slowly, uncertainly.
“If you’ll trust me to take him back—”

“You go back alone. Now,” Naoh said flatly. “The child stays
here until we’ve gotten what we need.”
End of conversation.

Miya glanced at her sister as if she was about to protest.

“Send him back,” Naoh ordered.

Miya nodded. As she turned to me again, her face looked colorless
in the lamplight.

Exhaustion came down on me like a hammer, not just physical but
mental.
Send him back.
Like a piece of freight. ‘All right,” I said. “Send
me back.”

“I’ll take you back,” Miya said, almost gently, oS if she
hadn’t heard me, or maybe because she had. “It’s too late to leave you down at
the riverside. Where are you staying?” I told her. She nodded. “Think of Your
room.”

I hesitated. “I can’t teleport,” I muttered. “I never could.
You Can’1—”

“.But you know where everything is,” she said with a confidence
I couldn’t feel and didn’t share. “You always know where you are, with a
certain part of your mind. You were born knowing it, because you have the Gift.”

Then I understood: The thing humans liked to call a “sixth
sense” was a part of any psion’s wetware, just like the eidetic memory. A
prlotr knew exactly where he was and where he’d been, in the same way as some
creatures that humans liked to think of as less intelligent. Birds, fish, and
herds of animals migrated hundreds or thousands of kilometers—farther than any
prion could teleport. But for a psion, simply remembering what a ptu6 looked
like wasn’t enough. A teleporter had to
feel
its location in space,
sense varying densities, re-create the three-dimensional coordinates to within
fractions of a millimeter—or he might jump home only to end up buried in the
floor.

“,you’re sure I can do that?” I repeated. I’d never
consciously used that sense, even when I could control my psi.

“,Trust yourself,” she said. “Trust me too.”

“I can’t seem to do anything else,” r murmured, showing her
a half smile as she glanced back at me. She blinked and looked down. I looked
down too, centering my thoughts; tried to picture my hotel room, all that it
wasn’t, everything that it was, in a way that meant something. Her hand touched
my shoulder and her eyes met mine. I felt the contact of her thoughts, gentle
and alien; felt it set off alarms in my brain as she reached into my head for a
signpost, a clue. panic began to fragment my thoughts. I rougtrt it down; her
confidence steadied me as I pictured
the room, the hotel, the view out
across the city at night ...

I felt something give way as it all changed—

I wns standing in my hotel room, staring out the window at
the night and the city. I staggered as the view registered, feeling like a
sleepwalker. Three solid walls, a solid ceiling and floor closed me in. I saw
the featureless door of my room, the bed that always looked like no one ever
slept in it ...
Miya.

“Son of a bitch.” I wondered why everything that happened to
me since I’d come to this world seemed like part of a dream. “I did it.”

She nodded, breathing hard but wearing the smile I remembered
from a moment before, in a different place.

I tealized she was making a point, one that even I knew when
I wasn’t hating myself. Too many humans who worked with psi had tried to make
the same point to me, but coming from her it didn’t sting. I smiled, su{prising
myself. “We did .... Thank you.’t

She shrugged slightly. I wondered whether that was a Hydran
gesture or a human one. “Save your thanks until you share what you’ve learned
with the FTA. You may not want to thank me then.” Her body was like a wild
thing’s, poised to disappear at the first sense of someone else’s presence. But
her eyes stayed on my face, lingering like a caress.

I felt a hot-ice burn climb my spine as she went on looking
at me. I bit my tongue, wishing I could be sure of what I thought was in her
eyes, wishing like hell I could read her mind ....

“I should go.” She looked toward the window, looked back at me,
her fingers playing with the seal of her jacket.

“I ... wait,” r munnured. “you don’t have to go. It’s safe
enough. Rest a while ... you must be tired.” I lapsed back into Standard, tired
of the effort of speaking Hydran.

She hesitated, looking at me like she thought I’d read her
mind and she wished she could change it. But she nodded and sat down in one of
the room’s featureless chairs, rubbing her eyes. she raised her head abruptly
as I shifted my weight. I stayed where I was, wanting to sit down but not
wanting to spook her. “So ate you,” she said finallY.

“What?” I asked.

“Tired,” she murmured, shadows filling the hollows of her
face.

I nodded, feeling my smile come back. I thought about the reasons
I suddenly feli like smiling and about how all of them had to do with her. I
sat down in the other chair. “someone I knew said once, ‘In the land of the
blind, the one-eyed man is stoned to death.’”

Her face turned qurzzical.

“He was talking about human psions trying to live with the
rest of humanity. But it nts a lot of situations. It fits the one we’re in now ...
caught between worlds.” Guessing now just barely certain enough to saY it.

Her smile disappeared. Her gaze dropped.

“.you didn’t get involved with that program Perrymeade set
up so that HARM could put an agent on this side of the river.” It wasn’t reallY
a question.

“No,” she said. This time even her voice wasn’t steady. “I
thought ...” She took a breath and tried again. “I
believed
that it
could be a start, the way Hanjen promised ... that it would lead to real
opportunities for our people if the Humans could see me succeed. Hanjen had
such hoPes—”

“Hanjen? From the Council?”

She nodded. “He’s the only one still trying to do what’s
right for all our people. But he’s outnumbered ... and he’s afraid to admit it.”

“How did he choose you for the therapist training?”

“He ...” She broke off. “He was a friend of our parents—Naoh’s
and mine. Before they died”‘

“.He and Perrymeade have more in common than they know,” I murmured,
thinking of Kissindre.

“Like we do ....”

I looked up.

She glanced away. Getting up from her seat, she moved toward
the window.

“Miya?” r said, suddenly afraid she might disappear ... Miya—I—”
I broke off, losing my nerve. I pushed my hands into my pockets, searching
desperately for a thought. I pulled out the picture ball Soral and Tiene had
been playing games with, back in that Freaktown room. I looked at rt,, feeling
something like disbelief.

Once before I’d seen a thing like that, a Hydran thing.
Once before I’d taken it without a thought ... es tf it had been mine by right.
I remembered how right it had felt to my hands, warm and alive. How once
the pictures inside it had changed whenever I’d willed them to. The ball hddn’t
been mine then, just like this one wasn’t mine now. This one still held the
image of a
taku
—because I couldn’t make the magic anymore that would
turn it into something else. “Sorry,” I muttered. I held it out to her. “Son1r.’t

She looked at the globe lying in my palm, at my fingers
trying not to close over it. “Keep it.” Her gaze seemed to penetrate my flesh,
as if I were as transparent as the wishing ball.

I slipped the ball back into my pocket. It filled the empry
space like it belonged there. “Where do these come from? Do you make them?”

“No,” she said. Her hands folded over her coat sleeves. “It’s
a relic. we don’t make anything like that anymore.”

I thought about Soral and Tiene using that fragment of their
lost heritage like some piece of cheap flash. I wondered why they’d done that.
Lagra,
Miya had said. Showing off. Dishonoring the Gift. “I had one of these,
once.”

“From your famtly?”

“No.” I put my hand into my pocket again, picturing the
image of a
taku
inside the ball. “Miya, what does
mebtaku
mean?
your sister called me that. I don’t know what it means.”

Her fingers began another restless migration up her sleeves.
“Nothing.” She shook her head. “Just a stupid ttting she said because she didn’t
know you. She won’t do it again.”

“What does it mean?”

She looked at me, finally. “There’s an old story ... about a
mebber
who longed to be a
taku
—to fly, to commune with the
an
lirr.
The
mebbel
went to the Humans and begged them to change it, so
that it could become like a
taku.
And the Humans gave it artificial
wings, and they put things into its head so that it could hear what the
taku
hear .... But it wasn’t a
taku,
and the
taku
despised it. It
was no longer a
mebbet,
etther, and the other
meb’ bet
wouldn’t
take it back. ‘You are nothing,’ they said. And it was alone to the end of its
days, and died of a broken heart.” Now she wasn’t looking at me anymore.

“Oh.” I sat on the low cabinet in front of the window,
feeling the blood that had drained out of my face come back in a hot rush.

“Naoh was wrong,” she said, almost angrily, &S if she
blamed herself for having told me. “Now that she knows you, she won’t do it
again. Now that you’re helping us ....” She turned away. “I have to go,” she
murmured. “I shouldn’t have stayed here like this. I have to go.” She began to
center herself, getting ready to disappear.

“Miya—” I said, filled with sudden, hopeless need.

She looked up again.

“Touch me,” I whispered, the words barely audible. “Here, I
mean,” touching my head. “I mean, just Once, for a ... just for a—”

She stood there, motionless. Her eyes slid out of focus, as
if she’d slipped both into her own thoughts and out of reach. My mind stayed empty.

“Forget it.” I turned away, seeing the empty bed waiting for
me. Feeling pathetic.

(I will never forget you,) she said, and each silent word
formed with the perfect clarity of music inside my head.

I turned back.
(Oh, God,)
hardly daring to think it.
(Are you really here—?) I touched my forehead again.

She nodded, holding me still with her gaze. Slowly she
raised her hands. Her I,ngertips brushed my temples as gently as a thought; I
felt them tremble. I took her hands in mine, not knowing why touching me made
her tremble, only wanting, needing—

A rush of psi energy entered me like a succubus, stealing my
breath away
as
my flesh against her flesh completed some
forbidden circuit and took out all of my mind’s defenses ... the impenetrable
walls, the minefields of pain, the razobwire guilt that had held me prisoner
for so long. My fears immolated, swept away like windborne sparks, like they
were no more than delusions.

I kissed her then—and we were surrounded by avra, haloed in
colors beyond naming. I closed my eyes, still seeing colors, letting my fingers
find the smoothness of her skin, the cloud-drift of her hair, the fragile
vessel of flesh and blood that somehow contained miracles. (Thank you ...) I
thought, (oh, God, thank you ...) and then there was nothing coherent left in
my mind.

Our helpless hands and hungry mouths got more intimate;
chain reactions of sensation turned flesh to light and tendrils of psi energy
to filaments of diamond. The collision of irresistible force and immovable
object fused our half-lives into the singularity with two hearts and one mind
that only psions knew and called a joining.

Molten music sang through the circuits of my brain, overflowed
my synapses, downloading into my nervous system with a pleasure that was almost
unbearable: I heard the sound of her hidden name
(her true name, that could
only be spoken mind-to-mind),
catalyzed by my own
(a name given to me with
love, not on the streets),
the true name that I’d thought would lie hidden
inside me until I died.

I covered her mouth with mine, kissing her down to her soul,
until I couldn’t separate the feel of her body against me from my own. I let my
pleasure, wonder, hunger
pour through the conduit into her mind. There
would be no secrets between us no’w, not even the shadow of a lie ... only the
gravitational attraction of two bodies, heat== fusion ....