Dreamfall (56 page)

I told her. “How many ‘accidents’ are there in a place like
this, from year to yeat? How many people die?” I didn’t get an answer. I didn’t
need one; I saw the truth in their faces. “The Feds are sending another
inspection team to Refuge—”

Their faces froze like they already knew. ‘They aren’t
coming to this installation again,” Ling Natasa said, too quickly ... Th.y’r,
not even stopping here.”

“You could still contact them. You know what Tau’s negligence
did to you ... to Joby.” I struggled to keep the desperation out of my voice. “Keiretsu
is supposed to mean
family.
Family is ... is about real people
protecting each other, about your loyalty to the ones you love, not your duty
to some ideology. Governments change their policies like you change the
security codes. Relationships between people have to mean more than that. Don’t
they?”

DREAPIF’ALL / 569

Burnell Natasa shook his head. “No. Tau takes care of us—they
take care of Joby. If we turn on them, we’Il have nothing. No matter what
happened to Tau, we’d lose. We can’t.” He glanced at his wife again. Her hands
were clenched in her lap so hard that the knuckles were white, but she didn’t
say anything. The seconds dripped like tears.

“Then are you going to tell Tau about the monastery—that the
untouched reefs on the Hydran Homeland are hiding some kind of miracle cure?”

“It’s our duty,” Ling Natasa said tonelessly. ‘And ... maybe
that—miracle is our only hope for Joby.”

“What if Tau destroys the thing you’re looking for? They don’t
understand half of what they find as it is. They would’ve ripped that reef
apaft a century ago if they did.”

“What other choice do we have?” Burnell Natasa asked sourly.

I wondered whether it was actually that hard to imagine or
whether his mind was really as much of a cypher as it seemed to me. “You could
try working with the Hydrans, instead of raping their world. They knew what
that place does ... that’s why they built a monastery there.”

Ling Natasa opened her mouth, but nothing came out of it.
She closed it again, her face colorless. She held the holo of Joby gently in
her hands. Her husband shook his head, gazing at the image.
Never happen,
then
faces said, filling with grief and resignation.
Impossible.
As
impossible as that their son had actually walked and talked freely. As
impossible as that he’d ever do it again.

Tau had no trouble seeing the Hydrans as less than Human—dangerous
and inscrutable—because they were so much like Humans that the differences were
obvious. The cloud-whales, and the by-products of their sentience, were so far
off the scale of Human experience that Humans had no reference point to use in
judging them. Tau’s researchers were like blind men, each of them touching a
different part of the unknown, none of them able to grasp the full implications
of what they held in their hands.

The room was hot, or maybe it was the fever burning inside
me. I wiped my face, trying to concentrate. “I told you ... everything ....”
The words sounded slow and thick, and in the middle of the sentence I forgot
what I was trying to say. I shook my head.

“Are you all right?” Ling Natasa asked. Small lines formed between
her eyebrows as she frowned.

I laughed, sure that must be some kind of twisted joke. “I
told you everything I know,” I repeated, trying to get all the way through the
sentence this time. “I have to get back to work. They’re waiting for me.”
Hardly daring to hope this could be the end of it. I still wasn’t sure why they
weren’t ffeating me the way Perrymeade had. They had as much right to. Maybe
they’d just been waiting until I’d told them what they wanted to know. I began
to get up, not really believing I’d reach the door before someone stopped me.

I never even made it to my feet. My legs buckled as I put
weight on them and suddenly I was down on my knees. I pulled myself up again,
feeling a kind of disbelief.

Ling Natasa was in front of me when I turned aroutrd,
raising her hand. I tried to dodge, but Burnell Natasa’s hand gripped my arm
hard, holding me there.

She lifted her hand to my face, and I flinched. But she only
touched my forehead. Her palm was cool and dry. She pulled her hand away again
as if I’d burned her. I jerked like a trapped animal as she pulled open my
stained coveralls with the steady matter-of-factness of a researcher, or maybe
the mother of a damaged child. Her husband’s hold on me tightened until I
swore, not sure where I hurt more, as she bared the wound. I heard him mutter
something that sounded like a curse, heard her indrawn breath.

“Don’t,” I mumbled, feeling my bare flesh crawl. “Oh, shit—”
Not sure whether the sight of the wound or what I was afraid she was going to
do next made me say it.

Ling Natasa drew my coveralls together over the wound again,
hiding it. Burnell Natasa gave me a rough shake, still holding on to my arm. “Damn
it,” he said, like he thought I was losing it, “we’re not trying to hurt you—”
hurting me anyway.

“Then why’m I here?” I said thickly.

They didn’t answer that. “Did you get that burn here at the
installation?” he demanded.

I shook my head. “Borosage ....” I felt more than saw them
look at each other, with something in the look passing between them that they
didn’t bother to explain to me.

DKEAI{FALL / 37 |

“Get him to the infirmary,” Ling Natasa murrnured to her husband.
“Before he goes into septic shock.” She glanced at me again. I almost thought
there was apology in her eyes, but maybe it was only loss, and not even meant
for me. She disappeared through the virtual green, and I didn’t see her again.

Bunnnll natasa escorted me to the infirmary himself. He had
to hold me up more than once along the way, because my knees kept giving out.

The med techs stared as he brought me in, like the end of
the world would have been easier for them to believe than the sight of the
Chief of Security dropping off a sick bondie.

“See that his injury is properly treated,” was all Natasa
said. He left me in a chair.

They treated my burn without comment, without any surprise.
Maybe they saw a lot of them. I lay back and let it happen, thinking about
things I could have said to Natasa before he left, not sure if I was glad or
sorry that I hadn’t said anything.

I was still dozing, half awake under the regeneration lamp,
when two crew bosses came into the infirmary. They headed directly toward me. I
pushed up onto my elbows and watched them, suddenly wary. One of them was the
foreman of the crew I’d warned earlier about the volatile pocket. The other one
was Feng, my own crew boss.

“Him—?” Feng asked, gesturing at me.

“Yeah, that’s the one.” The other foreman nodded. “The
freak. How’d you get a freak on your crew?”

I stiffened, wondering whether somehow I’d been wrong about
the volatile pocket. Which meant that I could be in trouble all over again.

“He’s new. Maybe it’s an experiment. Nobody tells me anything.”
Feng shrugged, glancing at me without really seeing me. He wasn’t a sadist, but
he wasn’t a nice guy, either. I didn’t like the thought of being on his shit
list. “Ixpa says he’s good with the field suit.” Ixpa was the head phase-field
technician. Feng looked directly at me, finally. “Did you tell Rosenblum, here,
they were going to hit a volatile pocket this shift?”

I nodded.

“We checked it out. You were right,” Rosenblum said. “How
did you know that?”

“I sensed it.” I lay down again, weak with sudden relief. “I
can sense the reefs—” I broke off, seeing how they looked at me and then looked
at each other. It hadn’t sounded strange to me until I saw how strange it
sounded to them.

“What are you doing here?” Rosenblum asked me, finally. I
figured she meant at the installation, not in the infirmary.

o’Penance,” I said.

Feng’s face hardened. “I don’t like smartasses any better
than I like freaks. Answer her.”

“I don’t know,” I muttered, looking down. I couldn’t even
think of a way to explain the truth to two Humans already looking at me the way
these two were.

They stood a minute longer, scratching an ear, shifting from
foot to foot. Then Rosenblum shrugged. “Doesn’t matter, atryway. From now on,
you’re our canary in the mine shaft, kid. You do special rounds every duy; you
go from one excavation face to another. You ‘feel’ them, or whatever the hell
it is you do. You make sure they’re safe to work on.”

I wondered what the hell a canary was; if it was anything
like a mebtaku. “Okay,” I said. The more people there were here who had an
interest in keeping me alive, the better.

“You think the vips will clear that?” Feng said skeptically.
“Letting a freak wander all over the complex?”

“He’s our freak,” Rosenblum said, and laughed. She tapped
the bond tag on my wrist. “Besides, Natasa already ordered it.”

“The Chief of Security—t”

Rosenblum shook her head. “His wife. She came and asked me
about what the freak did today.”

Feng whistled between his teeth. “When’s this one getting
out of here?” he called to a med tech.

DKEAM F’ALL / 373

“Tonight,” someone answered.

“You can start your rounds tomorro% then,” Feng said to me. “I’ll
get it set up.” He turned away, his attention already back on Rosenblum.
Neither of them asked what was wrong with me. Maybe they’d heard; maybe they
didn’t care. They headed for the door and went out. Neither one of them had
thanked me for saving lives today.

But maybe Ling Natasa had.

After that I spent my days going from excavation site to excavation
site, wading into newly exposed reef-face to listen, feel, sense the alien
moods of the dreamfall; second-guessing the spectrographic and biochem
analyses, the dozens of different readings each team had taken on its own. Once
in a while I walked into a pocket of something bad; once in a while I
discovered something good, something so off-center that the equipment hadn’t
been able to interpret it. Nothing big—nothing as obvious as the thing I’d
caught on the way to Natasa’s office.

No one seemed to mind, as long as it meant they were a
little safer. I was glad to learn that anomalies big enough to blow an entire
work team to hell didn’t get ignored often, even by overworked, undeffnanned
crews under constant pressure to produce profit miracles.

I pulled a lot of extra shifts to keep up with the work
schedules. But I didn’t mind working extra shifts: it was more time spent in
the womb of the cloud-whales’ thoughts, the world I’d shared with Miya, the
world that only Hydrans could really experience .... It was less time I had to
spend with Humans, who saw the reefs as component parts, nothing more—chemical
byproducts to be broken down and used. They felt no sense of awe, no alien
presence—the true nature of the reefs was as intangible to them as they were
becoming to me. I spent all of every day with the reef whispering inside my
head, but when I stepped out again into the real world filled with Human faces
and Human minds, ffiy mind went stone dead and the filaments of my psi
shriveled up like something blighted by frost.

I ate because I had to and slept because I had to; beyond
that the world outside the reef slowly disappeared. I lay in my bunk, haunted
by the images I’d carried back from the day’s work, letting them bleed into
sweet memories of Miya—memories I didn’t let myself touch when I was sounding
the reefs, where concentration was everything. Dreamfall filled my head with an
alien sea that drowned the presence of Human voices.

The others stepped aside when I moved past them, looking at
me like they were the ones who saw a ghost. I only spoke when I had to, and
that wasn’t often, because they didn’t have anything that I needed anymore.
Everything I needed I found inside the reef.

Until the day when I was working Blue Team’s reef-face.
Moving through the changing densities and fragile interfaces more easily than I’d
ever navigated in cyberspace, I suddenly found a death trap. A thing that
tasted like acid, smelled like poison, felt like stepplng on my own grave ...

“Canary! Come out now.” The distorted, disembodied voice of
Ixpa, the tech I worked with, burst on my ears before I could even report the
anomaly.

I touched the speaker plate inside my helmet with my chin. “Wha1—’”
I said thickly, wondering if I was hearing things.

“Out,” she repeated.

“No. Found something. It’s big, it stinks. Got to go deeper—”

“Out, now, bondie!” someone said. Someone else: Ixpa never
called me anything but ‘Canary’, after Feng assigned me to her.
Her little
death bird,
she’d said when I’d asked, and grinned like that was supposed
to be funny.

I swore as a sudden power surge through my suit sent pain jagging
up my spine. It was the first punishing shock I’d gotten since the day I’d put
a suit on. “Shit! Ixpa—” I shouted.

Another shock answered me, strong enough to make my teeth
hurt. I swore again and let her reel me in.

I stumbled out of the reef-face into the blinding emptiness
of the complex, blinking. “Dammit,” I mumbled, searching for Ixpa’s face, her
uniform, in the group of what looked like officials waiting outside. “Why—?” I
broke off.

It wasn’t Ixpa standing there in a tech’s datapatches; it
was somebody I’d never seen before. And standing beside him was Protz, looking
frantic. I’d never imagined his face could look that animated. He was flanked
by guards, and Natasa wasn’t in sight. o’Get the suit off,” Protz said.

“What?” I shook my head.

“Now,” he said. The guards raised their weapons.

“Where’s Ixpa?” I asked the tech. “I found a volatile—”

“Shut up and take off the suit,” the tech said.

I shut up and took off the suit.

“Carefully, dammit!” Protz snapped. “Those cost a fortune.”
I put the suit in its container, carefully.