Dreamfall (3 page)

Everyone and everything around me slipped out of focus, except
for the three Hydrans looking at us expectantly from across the room. Suddenly
I felt as if the drinks and the tranks and the camphs had all kicked in at
once.

The Hydrans stood together, looking toward us. They’d stood that
way the entire time, close to each other, as if there was strength in numbers.
But I was alone; there was no one like me in this crowd, or in any other crowd
I’d ever been a part of. Perrymeade led me to them, stopped me in front of
them, as if I was a drone circulating with a platter of mind-benders.

The Hydrans wore clothing that would have looked perfectly
appropriate on anyone else in the room—just as well cut, just as expensive,
although they didn’t show any combine colors. But my eyes registered something
missing, the thing I always checked for on another human;
Databands.
None
of them had a databand. They were nonpersons. Hydrans didn’t exist to the
Federation Net that affected every detail of a human citizen’s existence from
birth to death.

Perrymeade made introductions. The part of my brain that I’d
trained to remember any input recorded their names, but I didn’t hear a word he
said.

There were two men and one woman. One of the men was older
than the others, his face weathered by exposure, like he’d spent a lot of time
outdoors. The younger man looked soft, as if he’d never made much of an effort
at anything, or ever had to. The woman had a sharpness about her; I couldn’t
tell if it was intelligence or hostility.

I stood studying them, the angles and planes of their faces.
Everything was where it should be in a human face. The differences were subtle,
more subtle than the differences between random faces plucked out of the human
genepool. But they weren’t human differences.

These faces were still alien—the colors, the forms, the
almost fragile bone structure. The eyes were entirely green, the color of
emeralds, of grass ... of mine. The Hydrans looked into my eyes—seeing only the
irises as green as grass, but pupils that were long and slitted like a cat’s,
like theirs. My face was too human to belong to one of them, but still subtly
alien ....

I felt myself starting to sweat, knowing that they were
passing judgment on me with more than just their eyes. There was a sixth sense
they’d all been born with—that I’d been born with too. Only I’d lost it. It was
gone, and any second now their eyes would turn cold; any second they’d turn
away—

I was actually starting to tremble, standing there in my
formal clothes; shaking like I was back on some Oldcity street corner, needing a
fix. Perrymeade went on speaking as if he hadn’t noticed. I watched the Hydrans’
faces turn quizzical. They traded half frowns and curious looks, along with a
silent mind-to-mind exchange that once I could have shared in. I thought I felt
a whisper of mental contact touch my thoughts as softly as a kiss ... felt the
psionic Gift I’d been born with cower down in a darkness so complete that I
couldn’t be sure I’d felt anything,

“Are you—?” the woman broke off, as if she was searching for
a word. She touched her head with a nutmeg-colored hand. Disbelief filled her
face, and I could guess what word she was looking for. I watched the
expressions on the faces of the two men change, the younger one’s to what
looked like disgust, the older one’s to something I didn’t even recognize.

Perrymeade broke off, went on speaking again, like someone
refusing to acknowledge that we were all sinking into quicksand. He droned on
about how my presence on the research team meant there would be someone “more
sensitive to Hydran cultural interests—”

“And ate you?” The older man looked directly at me. My eidetic
memory coughed up his name: Hanjen. A member of the Hydran Council. Perrymeade
had called him an “ombudsman’, which seemed to mean some kind of negotiator.
Hanjen cocked his head== as if he was listening for the answer I couldn’t
give—or for something else that I hadn’t given, could never give him.

“Then I suggest,” he murmured, as if I’d shaken my head—or
maybe I had, “that you come and ... talk to us about it.”

I turned away before anyone could say anything more or do
anything to stop me. I pushed my way through the crowd and headed for the door.

I stood in the cold wind and the deepening twilight on the
riverside promenade, wondering again why they’d called this world Refuge. The
city lay behind rile, its distant sounds of life reminding me that sooner or
later I’d have to turn back and acknowledge its presence: Tau Riverton, the
orderly, soulless grid of a combine ‘clave, a glorified barracks for Tau’s
citizen/shareholders, whose leaders were still eating and drinking and lying to
each other at the party I’d just bolted from.

Ahead of me a single bridge arced across the sheer-walled canyon
that separated Tau Riverton from the city on the other side. The canyon was
deep and wide, carved out by what must once have been a multikiloton waterflow.
Now there was only one thin strand of brass-colored river snaking along the
canyon floor, a hundred meters below.

I looked up again at the bridge span, its length brightening
with unnatural light as the dusk deepened. At its far end lay not just—Hydran.
Another
town but another world, or what was left of it.
Hydran.
Alien.
This was as close as the preprogrammed systems of the aircab I’d
hired would take me—or anyone—to what lay across the river:
Freaktown.

From here I couldn’t tell anything about the town on the
other side, half a kilometer away through the violet dusk. I stole glances at
it as I drifted along the light-echoed, nearly empty concourse toward the end
of the plateau. Ghost voices murmured in my ears as my databand triggered every
tight-beam broadcast I passed through. They whispered to me that there was a
fifty-credit fine for spitting on the sidewalk, & hundred-credit fine for
littering, fines up to a thousand credits and including a jail term if I
defaced any property. There were subliminal visuals to go with the message,
flickering across my vision like heat lightning.

I’d never spent time in a combine ‘clave before. I wondered
how its citizens kept from going insane, when everywhere they turned they got
feedback like this. Maybe they simply learned to stop seeing, stop listening. I
was pretty damn sure they learned to stop spitting on the sidewalk.

What was left of the river poured like dregs from a spilled
bottle over the barely visible precipice up ahead. Up on the heights, poised
like some bird of prey, was the Aerie. I could see its streamlined gargoyle
form, the fluid composite and transparent ceralloy of its body straining out
over the edge of the world like a death wish, silhouetted against the bruised
mauves and golds of the sunset sky.

I remembered how I’d left it; thought about the drinks I’d
had up there tonight, that maybe I’d had too many, too close together. I
thought about the trank patches I’d put on even before I got to the party.

I reached up and peeled the used, useless patches off my
neck. I dug in my pockets for a camph; stuck the last one I had into my mouth
and bit down, because it didn’t matter now if having another one was a bad
idea. As the camph numbed my tongue I sighed, waiting for it to take out all my
nerve endings the same way, one by one.
Waiting ..
.. It didn’t help.
Tonight nothing did. Nothing could.

There was only one thing that could give me what l needed tonight,
and I wasn’t going to find that in Tau Riverton. And with every heartbeat I
spent not looking across the river, my need grew stronger.

Damn you!.
I shook my head, not even certain who I
meant. I leaned against an advertising kiosk, letting the shifting colors of
its display holos bleed on me. The voices murmuring in my ears changed as I
changed position, urging me to
go here, buy this,
reminding me that
there was a fine for loitering, a fine for defacing a display unit. The colors
turned the clothing I’d bought this afternoon into something as surreal as my
memories of tonight’s reception.

I looked back across the river again, pushing my hands into
my pockets. The season was supposed to be spring, but Riverton was located far
south, near Refuge’s forty-fifth parallel, in the middle of what seemed to be
high desert. The night air was cold, and getting colder. The cold made my hands
ache. They’d been frostbitten more than once, back in Oldcity. Quarro’s spring
had been cold too. I watched my breath steam as I exhaled; condensation touched
my face with dank cloud-fingers.

I began to walk again, back the way I’d come, telling myself
I was only moving to keep warm. But I was moving toward the bridge, the only
point of intersection that existed for two peoples living on the same planet but
in separate worlds.

This time I got close enough to see the access clearly: The
arched gateway, the details of the structure. The guards. Two armed men,
wearing corporate Security uniforms, Tau’s colors showing all over them.

I stopped as their heads turned toward me. Suddenly I was angry,
not even sure why ... whether it was what those uniformed bodies said about the
access between their world and the one on the other side, or just the fact that
they were corpses, and it would be a long time before the sight of a CorpSec
uniform didn’t make my guts knot up.

I made myself move toward them with my empty hands at my
sides, wearing neat, respectable clothes and a databand.

They watched me come, their faces expressionless, until I
was only a few steps from them under the gateway arch. It was warm under the
arch.

My databand triggered the pillars on either side of me; they
came alive with mindnumbing displays of data: maps, diagrams, warnings, lists
of regulations. I saw my own image centered in one of the displays, a scan of
my entire body showing that I was unarmed, solvent ... and not quite sober.

I stared at the double image of my face, the file-match side
by side with the realtime image, looking at them the way I knew the guards
would look at them. Seeing my hair, so pale in the artificial light that it was
almost blue. I’d let it grow until it reached my shoulders, pinned it back with
a clip at the base of my neck, the way most students of the Floating University
had worn theirs. The gold stud through the hole in my ear tonight was about as
conservative as I could make it, like my clothes. The light turned my skin an
odd shadow-color, but it was no odder than the colors the guards’ skins had
turned in the light. I glanced down, away, hoping they wouldn’t look at my eyes.

One of the corpses studied the display while the other one
studied me. The first one nodded to the second and shrugged. “In order,” he
said.

“Evening, sir,” the second Corpse said to me with a tight,
polite nod. Their faces looked hard and disinterested; their faces didn’t match
their manners. I wondered what subliminal messages their helmet monitors were
feeding them, reminding them always to be courteous, to say “please” and “thank
you” when they rousted a citizen, or they’d see another black mark on their
record, a debit from their pay. “You have business over on the Hydran side?”

“No,” I muttered. “Just ... sightseeing.”

He frowned, as though I’d said something embarrassing or
something that didn’t make sense. The other guard laughed, a soft snort, as if
he was trying not to. “Not from around here,” the first one muttered. It wasn’t
really a question.

The second one sighed. “It’s my duty, sir, to point out to
you that your blood alcohol level is high, indicating possible impaired
judgment. No offense, sir.” His voice was as flat as a recording. Flatter. “Also,
sir, I’m required to show you this information.” He pointed at the displays. “Please
read the disclaimer. It states that you accept full responsibility for anything
that happens to you on the other side of the river. That’s the Homeland over
there. It’s not Tau’s jurisdiction; it’s not Tau’s responsibility. We don’t
guarantee your safety.” He looked hard at me, to see if I was tracking what he’d
said ... looked harder at me as he suddenly got a good look at my eyes: the
grass-green irises, with the long slit pupils like a cat’s.

He looked at my whole face, then, and started to frown. He
glanced at the information display from my databand on the wall behind
him—undeniable proof, to both of us, that I was a full citizen of the Human
Federation. He looked back at my face again; his frown didn’t go away. But he
only said, “Curfew is at ten. Crossing closes for the night ... if you want to
come back.” He was already turning his back on me as he finished it. He
muttered something to the other guard as I went on my way. I didn’t hear what
it was.

There were only a few people moving across the bridge on
foot. I tried not to look at the ones I passed, the ones who passed me. They
kept their eyes to themselves. one or two small private ground vehicles went
by, so unexpected that I had to dodge out of their way. The canyon below the
bridge’s span was full of shadows; far below, light danced on the hidden water
surface.

By the time I’d reached the far end of the bridge I only had
eyes for what lay ahead. All I could make out were vague shapes and random
patterns of light, but every step seemed harder to take than the last.

I let my concentration fall inward, trying to force
something to happen in my mind; trying to focus, to listen, to reach out and
speak in the secret language that a thousand other minds must be speaking, must
be hearing, just beyond the bridge’s end.

But it was no use. They were psions, telepaths—and I wasn’t.
Trying
only proved again what I already knew: That what was gone was gone.
That what was past help should have been past grief by now; long past this sick
hunger—

I was trembling, the way I’d trembled at the reception under
the stares of the three Hydrans. I told myself that I was cold, standing here
with the night coming on, at the end of winter on an alien world where I was a
total stranger. That my body’s reaction wasn’t because I felt so terrified that
I wanted to puke, wanted to do anything but go on.