Dreamfall (43 page)

I shook—y head, half answering both her spoken and unspoken
questions. I looked down at the array of options again, the familiar touchboard
and half a dozen accesses. Seeing what I needed to see: a fully operational
port. Tau must have placed these in Freaktown for the convenience of visiting
Riverton citizens, since none of this was likely to mean anything, or do
anything, for Hydrans who didn’t have databands.

“Talk to me,” Miya said, janing me out of my meditation on
the interfaces between worlds. “Why are you afraid to go on with this?”

“Am I?” I said, surPrised.

She nodded.

I took a deep breath. “Because maybe it won’t work .... Because
if it does work, what Naoh said will be true: If I teach this to you, and you
teach it to the Satoh, you will be able to destroy Tau from the inside. And
even aftet what they’ve done—”

“.you’re still partly Human,” she finished gently. ‘And you
don’t want innocent people hurt because of you.”

I nodded, looking down.

“Neither do I, Bian,” she said. (Neither do I, nasheirtah.)
Placing it softly in my mind, where her presence could remind me of why I was
here in the first place, and why she was here inside rrle, only her, out of all
the ones who’d tried.

“,I know,” I murmured, with eyes only for her. (I know.
Bt,tt,
Naoh
...) “Miya, promise me that when we get back you’ll stay linked to me.
Naoh can’t affect me the way she does the others. Let me be your realitY check.”

She nodded, her thoughts clouded with the tnemory of her sister’s
betrayal. She shut her eyes; when she opened them again, they were clear of all
emotion. “Now, show us—” She gestured at the kiosk.

I looked back at the displays, trying to find the words to explain
what we had to do, wishing it was easier for me to just
show
her, the
way it should have been. “Has your psi ever picked up any electromagnetic
spillage over in Riverton—the energy flux around a piece of equipment, or maybe
from a security field?”

She nodded again. I let her reach deeper as she searched my
mind for images that would clarify the words. Even when she’d worked for
Tau—needed to know their technology in order to use it—she hadn’t been given
more than minimal access to the most basic equipment.

I thought about DeadeYe, who’d taught these secrets to me,
trying to remember the exact words and images he’d used to teach me ...
remembering the abuse he’d heaPed on me with his mouth that was worse than his
festering artificial eyeball: his first line of defense against the psi-hating
deadheads who’d have crucified him for what he knew. It had kept away everybody
but me, because the Gift had let me see past all that.

“The point is that psions are born with the biological
hardware already in our heads. Humans make it illegal for us to get implants,
to keep us from getting our share of their tech and the profits. But we never
even needed their stupid implants. Because we can access the QM spectrum
directlyl we don’t need artificial conduits to interface with the Net.” I
laughed once. It sounded cold and bitter, like the wind.

Her pupils widened as the possibilities began to register. “How
did you learn all this?”

I looked down at Deadeye’s handmade sweater, layered over a
Hydran tunic under a stranger’s worn coat. I touched it, remembering. “someone
trusted me.”

She glanced at the displays in front of us. She was silent
for a long moment before she looked back at me again. “How do you make it
happen?”

“We use an open window and slip into the system. Once we’re
inside we’re like ghosts. We’re not interfacing electronically: The security
programs are designed to watch for electronic tampering. Most of them are too
narrow-focus to register us. Tau doesn’t have any real on-world competition, so
I don’t figure its internal security will be very tight. The hard part will be
inserting our data and routing it where it needs to go.”

She rubbed her neck, smearing dirt and sweat. “How do we
start?”

“I can’t tell you.” (I have to show you. Stay with me, help
me focus, or I can’t—) I felt her strengthen the mindlink between us until it
was like monofilament.

I studied the displays around the droning threedy report.
Without a databand, I couldn’t even open a window to bring the port’s basic
functions on-line. I pressed my fingertip to a jack coupliog, and felt a dim
buzz feed inward through my nerve endings. (Our minds have got to go down
there. Can you use your teek to form a conduit?)

I felt her hesitate, concentrating; felt my ann and then my
hand begin to tingle with cold fire. For a second I thought I saw aura shimmer
around me, not with my norrnal vision but with my

286 I Joan D== Vinge

Third Eye, my Sixth Sense, the nameless receptors that sometimes
picked up the energy signature of Human-made systems like this one. I felt all
my senses jump as her telekinesis pried open an access, mating my body’s
electrical system with the machine’s.

Relief followed my surprise as the feedback didn’t kill us.
At least she knew enough about Human tech to know what an electric shock could
do. (perfect,) I thought, letting her feel my smile. (Now we have to retune to
the frequencies coming through from the other side. It’s outside the normal psi
spectrum. Like this .... ) I let her feel my own senses begin to readjust.
(once we’re inside, don’t let go of me or we’ll both be in there forever. It’s
another universe, and I don’t know the neighborhood any better than you do.)

(Then how will we know where to go?) she asked.

(Virtual reality ... like the instructional sims Tau used to
train you. your brain creates the imagery as it tries to interpret the neural
stimuli ....) It didn’t sound very reassuring, even to me. (I can navigate us
where we have to go,) I said, pushing on before she had time to point that out,
(but I can’t change anything, touch anything, in there. I need telekinesis to
do that—you’ll have to lend me yours.)

(I’m ready,) she thought. I felt her wonder becoming hunger
as powerful as my need for the Gift she shared with me.

(Trust me—?) I thought as I continued the slow retuning of
my thoughts, reaching beyond the range where I felt her clearly, into a new
frequency where no biological intelligence had ever been intended to oPerate.

(Trust me ...) she answered, her mind folding around lre, compressing
us both down, down into the singularity of the machine. Constructing a conduit,
deconstructing the barriers between matter and energy, she poured the clarified
fluid of our combined thoughts through the synapses of my body, turning my
nervous system into a biowate jack.

We arced across the access she’d opened and into the nervous
system of the Net. Cyberspace manifested around us like we’d been startled
awake from a dream. I looked down at my body, saw a glowing energy being with
bones made of white light ...

saw her joined to me body-to-body, two separate beings of
thought merged in a lover’s union more intimate than anything my mind had ever
dreamed of.

(I see us,) she thought. (Are we ... real?)

(Real enough ...) I thought, merging with her shimmering
ghost until I could touch her fluid-glass lips with mine, feel the circuit of
energy close between us, waves of ecstasy igniting my phantom senses. I broke
away, dazzled; went on looking at
us, her, me,
with my awe glowing.

The first time I’d made this trip into cyberspace, I’d been
linked to Deadeye. We’d begun our journey like this, linked symbolically, but
just barely, joined only at the fingertips. He hadn’t had the kind of psi Gift
Miya had ... his mind hadn’t been one I’d wanted to get more intimate with.

I’d experimented on my own since then, till I was sure the
Net’s electronic presence wasn’t anthropomorphic enough to trigger my
self-destructive defenses. If I was careful I could ghost-dance inside the
programming of just about any system I accessed with my databand.

The laws of the Federation made it illegal for a psion to
wear implanted bioware, even so much as a neural jack or a commlink: just one
more thing that made it hard for a psion to find a decent job, one more way the
deadheads had of punishing a freak simply for being born. If I’d ever been
caught Netfishing without bioware, a total brainburn would have been the
kindest thing CorpSec could have done to me. Deadeye had trusted me with his
life when he’d trusted me with this secret.

And now I was trusting Miya with my life and with Deadeye’s
secret. But as our fluid images merged, all the reluctance bled out of me.
Always before when I’d explored some new precinct of the Net, I’d been afraid.
I’d been afraid with Deadeye, because I hadn’t known what the hell I was doing,
hadn’t even been sure that he wasn’t insane.

Going in alone had given me some faith in myself, and a feel
for how to map the ever-changing glacial drift of data storage, the electronic
meltwater of information flowing around and through me. I’d listened as the
semisentient cores of the gigantic corpor?rte AIs whispered their secret
longings to a ghost walking through the walls of their citadels .... But every
journey had been like walking through a graveyard. There’d been sweat soaking
my clothes and the bitter taste of fear in my mouth every time I’d come back
into my physical body.

But this time was different. I was sharing inner space with
Miya in a way that I never could with Deadeye. I felt her boundless awe
unfolding as she gazed up/down/around/through our shining image at a universe
beyond her imagining. Her wonder filled me, showing me the shifting information
landscape with new eyes as we began our inward journey.

I willed a digital readout into life at the corner of my
virtual vision—a trick I’d evolved to help me remember how long I’d been out of
my body. I started us moving, watching through the back of my crystal skull as
the silken link to outside reality attenuated and finally disappeared in
backtrail interference. I tried not to think about what would happen to us if
Tau’s Corpses reached our unprotected bodies and snapped that invisible
lifeline before we’d come back through the mirror again.

Instead I tried to define for Miya what we were sensing: the
shadow-lines of the datastream we were adrift in; the half-sensed prickle of
messenger drones swept through us like dust by the electron wind; the bright,
piercing blurs of photons. We passed through the ice dam of Tau’s censorship
programming like it was blown fog, and the datastream from the kiosk swept us
away to its source.

Around us the virtual terrain looked like nothing I’d ever
seen before: because I’d never seen an information vacuum—a land of night, with
only a fragile spiderweb of data strung across its dark expanses; a reflection
of the desert of technological deprivation that was the Hydran world outside.
But ahead of us, no more than an electronic eyeblink beyond, were the bright
lights of the big city—Tau Riverton’s data core.

We swept into it at the speed of thought. Inside Riverton’s
hive of EM activity, I slowed our seeming motior, wary now fighting the giddiness
of Miya’s yearning to explore. I knew from her responses that she was getting
it far faster and far better than I ever had. Maybe a teleport’s sense let her
feel the parameters of cyberspace in a way I’d never be able to do. I wanted to
teach her and learn from her ... wanted to lose my fear and share her hunger
for exploring this new world, be free to know the kind of nerve-burning thrill
I’d never felt on any of my solitary trips into inner space.

But out realtime bodies were too exposed. I couldn’t do more
than touch the bases of information orienteering, teach her to see them like I
saw them. (There’s Corporate Security headquarters—) I thought, as it rose in
my cyber-sight like a dark/bright spine. The deceptively open constructs of Tau’s
business activities and support systems spiraled around us like glowing
creatures from the depths of an alien sea. The dagger of paranora at their
heart could only be CorpSec, the place where layers of black ice surrounded Tau’s
best-kept secrets.

I felt her stir inside me. (Can we get through it—?)

(Yes, if we’re damn careful. Their guard dogs can’t see us
or hear us as long as we stay outside their bandwidth. But if we create any
disturbance, they’ll notice; and they are smart enough to home in on us if they
even suspect we exist.) I pulled her back as she began to drift toward it.
(No!) I thought, suddenly reaLizing what she wanted to do. (We don’t have
time.)

(But we could help the ones they took today—)

(Dammit—) I wanted what she wanted, now, with a pain that
fed on her empathy. But as she began to split off from our twinned phantom, I
stopped her. (We have to stay with this! If the Corpses nail us, in here or out
there, we’re dead. We’ll never have another chance—)

She stopped struggling against me, against fate. (Go otr,
then.) She spun her answer from strands of resignation and resolve, and
suddenly there was no resistance trying to pull me apart inside.

I plunged us into the arterial flood of data that would
carry us beyond the boundaries of Tau Riverton’s nexus to the starport node at
Firstfall, where everything that was meant to go off-world had to end up.
Riding the flow we let it sweep us halfway around the planet at light-speed.

The starport’s data node shone like a secret sun as we approached
Tau Firstfall, the largest combine ‘clave on Refuge. I hadn’t seen more than a
glimpse of the actual city when I’d arrived. The shuttle had landed before
dawn, and my memory of the real-world Firstfall, its night artificially
re-creating day, felt more like a simulation.

We phased through shimmering veils of data storage the way

I’d moved through the cloud-reefs; all walls were without substance,
when we were without substance. But the alternate universe of Firstfall’s
starport, which seemed limitless to our senses, was embedded in the matrix of a
single crystal of telhassium no bigger than my thumb. The telhassium came from
a fragment of exploded star called Cinder. Cinder was all that was left of a
sun that had gone supernova centuries ago, whose cloud of expanding gases
Humans called the Crab Nebula.