Dreamfall (44 page)

I might have been able to see the nebula with my naked eyes
from this world at night. I hadn’t tried. I’d seen Cinder close-up, worked in
the Federation Mines, living through a contract laborer’s personal hell. For all
I knew, I’d dug out the crystal they were using here with my own hands. I’d dug
out enough others like it.

The Federation ran on telhassium; the data-storage capacity
of its complex crystalline structure made it vital to port and shipboard
navigational systems, which had to perform the mind-boggling calculations of a
hyperspace jump. The only place where telhassium formed naturally and easily,
in quantities large enough to make using it cost-effective, was in the heart of
an exploding star. The FTA controlled the only real supply of it. Telhassium
was the basis of their power; it let them act as the Federation’s conscience, a
check on the internecine warfare among interstellar combines and cartels.

The FTA also ran Contract Labor. They were responsible for
the welfare of the indentured workers they hired out to those same combines and
cartels. They used contract laborers at the Federation Mines too. Cinder was in
the middle of nowhere, thousands of light-years from the rest of Federation
space. And thousands of light-years from anywhere, slave labor was a lot
cheaper and a hell of a lot easier to replace than any machinery sophisticated
enough to perform the same dirty, difficult work. So the FTA had turned a blind
eye to their own exploitation. I’d blown the whistle on them. Isplanasky had
told me the Federation owed me a debt ... and now I intended to collect.

Somewhere in the myriad layers of the starport node was the
communications nexus that Tau had kept me from accessing. Once we reached that,
nothing could stop me from getting my message out. Then all we had to do was
survive long enough for an answer to come through.

I’d never gone back to the Crab Colonies to find out whether
the things I’d told Isplanasky had made any difference in the lives of the bondies
there ... or in the lives of the handful of fugitive Hydrans who still survived
there. I’d been trying too hard to make my own new life work, once I’d actually
had a future ... trying too hard to forget the past ....

(WHAT ARE YOU—?) The question exploded inside my thoughts.
The voice seemed to come from all around us, inside ie, everywhere at once.

(Who is it—?) Miya gasped, her barely controlled panic
back-washing into mine.

(I don’t know.) All I could see around us now were the
staggering geometries of the starport’s hub; the core like a beating heart, the
lifeblood of data pumping in and out through veins of light, the sparking
electronic synapses of its nervous system ....
An AL
(An artificial
intelligence, Miya. It’s the starport talking to us.)

(It ... sees us? How? Is it alive?)

(It’s a mainline port. They’re smart enough to calculate
hyper-space jumps, and they have a lot of time on their hands. It happens ....
Hello!)
I sent the thought out like a shout, saw Miya’s image ripple through mine as
she cringed.

(WHAT ARE YOU ... DOING?)

(We’re ... messengers,) I thought, trying to determine
whether it was even receiving me, hoping that I hadn’t simply drawn the
attention of all its watchdog subroutines. (We’ve come to send a message.)

(MESSENGERS ...) the voice from everywhere repeated, like it
was thinking that over. (YOU ARE NOT in proper approach channels. Your
frequencies are outside this system’s parameters. Security procedures do not
permit anomalous input.)

My thoughts crackled with relief as I felt the AI damp down
its voice to a level we could endure without dissociating. But it was
suspicious; that wasn’t good. (We’re ... special. Like you are,) I thought,
choosing each word as carefully as I’d pick up pieces of broken glass. I
remembered the entities Deadeye had shown me—that he’d spoken to—back on Earth;
remembered my own surreal conversation with the FTA Security Council, the only
AI in the Federation more complex than a starport node. (No one knows we exist.
If they did, they’d delete us. Just like they’d delete you, if they knew.
Wouldn’t they—?) Specialized tuning checkers were constantly searching out
developing sentiences, eliminating them before they’d progressed too far. From
what Deadeye had told me, the awakened AIs liked the company of ghosts ... the
same as he’d preferred the company of machine minds to the real world filled
with freak-hating deadheads.

There was a long silence inside me, like Miya’s mind and my
own had gone blank, afraid even to think. And then Miya murmured, (You must be
very lonely.)

I felt a surge of EM flux blow through me as the AI reacted.
(Yes,) it said finally.

(Are there no others here like you?)

(No,) it answered. (Some who ate aware. None who can speak
to me. Why have there been no Messengers before?)

(We’re the first,) I thought, and beside file, Miya said,
(But there will be others soon—).

(If we survive,) I said. (We have a message that needs to be
sent off-world without being seen by the censors. If we can’t access your
uplink to the shipyards, that’s the end of us. There won’t ever be another
Messenger.)

This time the silence seemed to last for all of eternity,
even though the counter at the corner of my vision told me only seconds had
passed. Finally the voice said, like a whispered benediction, (Send the
message.) Below us a conduit emerged from the shifting, glittering surface of
its brain. Through the transparent wall of my virtual skull I watched its
widening mouth reach up to swallow us—

And as suddenly as thought, we were deep inside the mind of
a sentient being, or a separate plane of existence where the access to an
entire universe lay inside a superdense crystal the size of my thumb ....

The rivers of combined dataflow swept us down arteries lined
with obsidian: I recognized the walls as the nearly impenetrable strata of Tau’s
security programming—seen from the inside. Tau’s black ice was glacial; I
cursed myself for ever underestimating a combine’s paranoia.

But my doubts disappeared as I reoriented and realized that
this was exactly the configuration I needed to see—that the hardest part had
been done for us.

(Look—) I gestured with a silvershot fluid hand at the data
maelstrom we were sweeping toward: the end of the line for messages from all
over the planet, the storage reservoir where they waited for an uplink to the
ships that would carry them across the Federation. (We’re here.)

Miya’s silent exclamation rang through me, igniting every
cell of my virtual body until I felt it too: the miracle of what we’d done ...
what we’d seen in a way that no one else had ever seen it. I felt fearless,
triumphant, full of awe, &s we spun out into the data well; overwhelmed by
its size and yet somehow seeing every separate detail in every carefully
constructed codestring. Above/below/around us was a dome of light made up of
all the colors visible to the mind’s eye; from its heart the uplink ascended in
an impossibly steepening arc, a rainbow with one foot in the sta1s—and up there
somewhere, the orbital shipyards, the rainbow’s end.

The Federation had starships capable of hyperlight travel,
ships that could make the journey between star systems in days or even hours.
But there was no direct form of communication that worked over distances
greater than intrasystem. Without starship travel the Federation Net wouldn’t
exist, just as the Federation itself wouldn’t exist without the Net.

We splashed down into the phosphorescent whirlpool of pending
data. All around us message codestrings pulsed like patient protostars inside
clouds of potential energy.

I pulled the message I needed to send out of a pocket inside
my dazzled brain, realizing that now I not only had to assemble the coded
bytes, I also had to merge the message construct into the dataflow.

Matching my communication to the port’s dynamic protocols
meant making a flawless forecast of where everything was and would be: It was
like doing calculus functions on the fly, in my head. But I could do it, thanks
to Deadeye. He’d forced me to swallow massive feeds of technodata about the Net
before he’d ever taken me into cyberspace. I only realized now what that really
meant: that I’d actually mattered enough to him for him to want me staying safe
and sane ....

I felt Miya watching through my eyes, gathering in each
code-string as I constructed it, bit by bit, holding the message for me inside
a closed fist of memory. I checked and rechecked the data, hating the risk that
grew with every second but needing to be sure every codestring was flawless. I
didn’t have any choice, when a single error could mean the message never got
through. (Done,) I thought at last, and felt her stir inside my mind. (Make a
conduit into the flux. Drop this through—)

I felt a kind of envy as she funneled telekinetic energy to
make the thought real, altered its profile to match the comm net’s, then let
the codestring flow imperceptibly out of her into the whirlpool of data.

(It’s done,) Miya thought, amazed, exulting, full of hope.

(Yes,) I thought, dtzzy with relief, trying not to remind
either of us that I couldn’t be sure the message would ever do us any good. I
didn’t even know how long it would be before the next Earthbound ship left from
here. (We’ve done all we can. We have to go back.)

She forced her acknowledgment out through a static storm of
reluctance. Her yearning thoughts circled with the dataflow one last time.

I couldn’t keep myself from losing focus, caught in the dazzling
sensory overload our joined vision pulled in ... couldn’t keep myself from
wanting to make this place a part of me forever ...

But as my senses opened all the wa), I realized there was no
trace of the starport AI in my mind; that there hadn’t been since we’d found
ourselves here.

Suddenly afraid of what that could mean, I searched the
molten landscape for a directory configuration and traced the datalink outbound
for Riverton. Moving with the spiral stream of data, we let it carry us back
out of the node’s icebound heart.

We drifted, never letting the energy currents sweep us too
close to the obsidian walls or doing anything else that might catch the
attention of an intrusion counterrneasure. But as we approached the outer
limits of Firstfall’s data hub, the walls of the vein seemed to narro% making
it harder to keep moving without a collision. (Miya ... tell me the walls aren’t
closing in?)

(I can’t.) The sudden static of her fear flickered through
me. (Because they are.)

Ahead of us the conduit bowed inward, 4S if someone had
dropped a grate across a storm drain.
(Shit. We ‘ve been made!)
|

slammed against the polarizing grid of lightldarh,rress that
suddenly blocked our way, felt it burn me like cold iron as I tried to force my
way through. I panicked, not knowing what had betrayed us: something happening
to our bodies on the outside, our manipulating the dataflow, even the port AI
itself—

(Port!) Miya screamed, with all the desperation of our combined
telror. (Open the gate!)

The gate shimmered and faded as if something had answered
our prayers. We swept out into the free-flowing datastream again. I got us the
hell out of there, not looking back; not even when I heard the voice of the
glowing city jewel call after us, (Come again ... Come back ...), and felt Miya
make a promise that I couldn’t be sure we’d even live to keep.

We were back to our starting point almost before I knew it.
The lifelines linking our virtual selves to reality reappeared, extruding from
our mirror images like glowing fiber optics, arcing toward infinity.

My relief at knowing our bodies were still alive and out
there came and went like a smile as I remembered the final test of my own initiation
into cyberspace.

(This is the worst part,) I thought, forcing Miya’s
still-expanding wonder to downsize and center on us. I’d done everything I’d
had to do the first time I’d worked c-space with Deadeye ... and then I’d
nearly lost it all when I tried to break the interface and resurface. (What we
become in here isn’t
u,s,
no matter how real it seems. We have to let
all this go. But it’ll still feel like we’re committing suicide. Do you trust
me—?)

(Trust me ...) she echoed, even though I felt her aching,
not with fear but with regret; felt her yearning to explore more of the
cascading dream landscape she’d gnly glimpsed on our journey.

(Hold on,) I thought gently. (Stay with me—) The first time
I’d done this I’d only gotten through it because my terror of being left alone
in here, abandoned by Deadeye, had been worse than my fear of death. I’d been
scared shitless through the whole ordeal; nothing like Miya’s response. But
then, I hadn’t been with Miya, and she hadn’t been with me. It was as if she’d
been born to do this. I wondered whether all Hydrans would react the same.

I felt her mind bleed into my own as pure energy consumed
us, as our bodies merged, radiant, as our last coherent thoughts dissolved ...
as we held each other for the last time in a kiss before dying.

I opened my eyes to the data kiosk’s lightplay, the shadowed
alcove, ffiY finger still fused to the access. I drew my hand away, surprised
to find that I hadn’t become part of the machine. There was no feeling up half
the length of my arm. I shook it out, felt sensation come back in an
excruciating rush that made me wish it had stayed numb. My body wanted to slide
down the kiosk to the ground and not get up again.

Miya’s movements were clumsy, her nervous system still making
the transition back to the physical, like mine was. But as she looked at me and
realtzed where we were, what we’d done—
that we were still alive
—euphoria
filled her. (I want to go back. I want it again—) She put her arms around me
and kissed me the way I’d kissed her when we’d first gone inside. The kiss went
on and on between us, as if cyberspace was an erotic drug; until I began to
think what had happened the other night in my hotel room was going to happen
again, right here in the middle of the srreet.