Dreamfall (65 page)

And then she made a small, strangled noise. “No ...” she whispered,
looking at Hanjen in disbelief, looking back at me as his nod confirmed the
truth. “No,
no
—!” She lunged at him. Her fingers dug into his clothes,
clawed at his flesh, like they were lies she could tear away.

Hanjen stood passively, grimacing with pain but not making a
move to protect himself, until at last she clung to him, strengthless,
hopeless. She didn’t resist as I pulled her away from him, into my anns. We
held each other for a long time.

Finally I felt someone’s hands separate us, with gentle insistence.

Miya looked up at Hanjen, her eyes bleak. “Leave us alone,”
she said bitterly, out loud. “Why can’t you—?”

“Miya ...” he murrnured. “The treaty is our last chance for
survival as a people. The Way I have walked all my life was leading me to
this—the Way that we both shared for so long. I know now that
Bian
was meant to walk it with us. If it had not been for him ...” He looked at me. “I
swear by the Allsoul ... I did all I could to stop this.” He looked down. “But
I couldn’t stop it. Not if it meant losing everything ....”

Miya’s head jerked once, a nod, and I knew that she believed
him, even though she didn’t answer him, even if she’d never forgive him any
more than I would.

“We must ... take care of your sister,” he munnured. “Before
the Humans return and try to take her body away.” I realized there was no sign
of Borosage’s body. The Corpses must have taken his body away already.

“What do you need to do now?” Perrymeade asked him awkwardly.
“Is there anything I can do to help—?” He didn’t make the same offer to Miya or
to me. He didn’t even meet our eyes. Maybe as far as he was concerned we were
beyond help.

“We will take her back across the river, to rejoin the earth,”
Hanjen said, the formality of the words barely keeping them intelligible.

“I’ll affange for Wauno to take you back—”

“We have no need for that,” Hanjen said gently. “But thank
you, Janos.” He bowed, a sign of honor and respect; one that wasn’t meaningless
this time. “You have become the advocate—and true friend—that you were meant to
be.”

“That I always should have been,” Perrymeade murmured,
glancing down. “That I always wanted to be, really.” He looked up again, at us
all.

I turned my back on him.

“I want to go with you,” I said softly to Miya. “Let me come
with you.” I looked away from Miya and Hanjen, at Naoh’s motionless body.

“Cat—” Perrymeade began, and looking at him I saw the fear
in his eyes that I meant to go for good. That my grief and anger, or Miya’s,
might knock the scales out of precarious balance again, now that they had
finally been set to weigh fairly between Hydrans and Humans.

“Shut up,” I said, glaring at him. “I need a chance to say
goodbye. You have to give me that much ... that much time. I won’t make trouble—”
glancing at Hanjen, at Miya. “I’ll do what you want. But all of you owe me that
much. And none of you can say I don’t keep
my
promises.”

Perrymeade took a deep breath, and nodded.

Hanjen nodded too, with a solemn lack of expression that
could have meant anything or nothing. Only Miya really looked at me, with her
mouth quivering and her eyes full of unshed tears. Hanjen mindspoke with Miya
for a long time, keeping it private even from me. Her gaze broke, finally; she
stared at the floor, and her tears dripped onto the spotless carpet as she said
aloud to Perrymeade, “We will return tomorrow.

Perrymeade watched silently as Hanjen and Miya gathered themselves
for the difficult jump. I felt Miya’s grip close on my arm, on my mind.
Perrymeade and the room did a fade to black.

Suddenly we were standing on the river shore, with the shadowed
reefs rising up around us. I shook the echoes of the Aerie out of my head;
looked at Miya, realizing that we’d returned to the
shue
we’d once gone to with Grandmother, seeking answers that already lay inside us
....

Miya and Hanjen kneeled down on the stones of the shore beside
Naoh’s body, gazing at it in perfect stillness, like they were praying; but the
only sound I could hear was the sound of the river flowing.

I took the few hard Human steps to Miya’s side, kneeled
down, and touched her.

She didn’t startle, didn’t move, except to reach up and take
my hand. The circuit of contact between us opened, and I felt the words flow
into my head, filling my thoughts with a song of completion, of
sorrow/regret/longing,
and finally relief that one more journey on the spiral Way had ended, and a
lost soul had returned to its starting point, to begin yet another journey ....

The talons of my own fresh loss closed on my heart, crushing
my hope, my senses, my concentration ... I let go of Miya’s hand before the
recoil of my thoughts poisoned her prayers. Alone in my mind, alone in the
dark, there was nothing but the silence of broken promises.

I opened my eyes to the daylight and looked away along the
shore. I wondered whether we were going to make the journey by boat into the
hidden heart of the reefs ... wondered how the Hydrans buried their dead. All I’d
seen were artifacts inside the holy place—no trace of their owners.
No trace.

I looked up at the reefs, down at Naoh’s body, at Miya and
Hanjen. I took Miya’s hand again, and this time I let go of myself, let their
prayers filI my head like the voiceless song of angels or of ancestors. This
time I found the courage to listen, letting the prayer touch me, the mourning
have its weight.

The dreamfall of Miya’s memories fell silently, softly,
inside me, until I didn’t know anymore whether I was looking at her or looking
at myself, until the death mask that I secretly saw whenever I looked in the
mirror became the mirror, the shadows became light, and I saw my face in hers
and hers in mine again, and knew there was a reason to go on living.

(Namaste,) Hanjen munnured. Miya echoed it, and I echoed it:
(We are one.)
The prayers for the dead were finished, and in the
stillness that followed, my thoughts suddenly ignited with a burst of psi
energy that blacked out my vision from the inside.

When my sight cleared, Miya and Hanjen were still kneeling
on the stones, and the space between them was empty. Naoh was gone.

Before I could ask
where
—? the answer filled my eyes.
Into the reefs.
To join her ancestors’ cast-off flesh and the
cloud-whales’ cast-off dreams; a tradition that must have had meaning for
generations beyond remembering.

Miya looked up at last. Her eyes were clear again,
rain-washed bright—until they met mine.

And as she went on looking at me, at what lay behind my own
eyes, I suddenly realized that she could have stopped her sister. She’d
protected herself, and me, from the recoil of Naoh’s death wish. But she could
have done more. She could have stopped it, as surely as she could have stopped
her sister from stepping off a cliff.

But she hadn’t.

I didn’t ask her why. I knew, as surely as I knew that she’d
had a choice and made it.

She touched my cheek, and her eyes filled with tears again.
I raised my hand, surprised to feel wetness on my face, tracks of stinging heat
in the cold wind. I wondered how long they’d been there.

(Namaste,) she thought, and her tears fell harder as I took
her in my arrns.

Hanjen stayed where he was, kneeling on the empty shore. He
watched us just long enough to let me sense his guilt, his grief, his shame,
his
anger/frustration
at fate—the emotions that wouldn’t even grant me
the satisfaction of hating him for what he’d done. He looked down again,
tracing designs in the pebbles. I didn’t know whether it was some final ritual
act, or whether he was just trying to grant us a privacy his presence made
impossible.

It didn’t matter, any more than it mattered whether he understood
what we were feeling. All that mattered now was that tomorrow I’d be gone from
Refuge, more completely than Naoh, and right now I didn’t know how I was going
to bear it.

(Namaste,) I thought, but the tears went on running down my
face, because it was nothing but a lie.

I
looked
our the transport’s wide window
as we left Tau River-ton, watching the panorama of the reefs—the sheer-walled
karst-form peaks, the shining thread of the river—as the view widened and fell
away. I remembered seeing that same view as we’d arrived from Firstfall. My
mind had been a blank slate then; it had been a striking view, nothing more. It
seemed impossible to me now that I could have been so naive, so blind, only
weeks ago.

(Cat—) Miya’s presence stirred in my mind.

(Miya ...) I thought, still holding her inside me the way I’d
held her for the last time this morning in the open square by the waiting
transport while they all watched: Hanjen and Perrymeade, Sand and Natasa.
Kissindre held Wauno’s arm in a death grip, anchoring herself, like she was
afraid the same unseen force that was tearing me loose from Refuge might
suddenly lay its hands on her.

Joby had been there too, in Miya’s arms, in mine, and there’d
been tears on his face as I kissed his forehead and told him goodbye. And he’d
wanted to know
why?
and he’d wanted to know
when would I come back?
and
I couldn’t think of an answer to either of those things that he would have
understood.

Instead I handed him the cloud-watcher’s lenses that Wauno
had given to me, and told him to watch the sky, because soon the an lirr would
come back to Riverton, his home. And he’d asked me,
Then will you come back
too
—
?
and I couldn’t answer that, any more than I could ask Miya the
only thing I’d wanted to ask her all through the sleepless hours of last night:
Come with me
—
?

Because she wouldn’t; because she couldn’t .... Because no
matter how much we needed each other—to heal, to make ourselves whole—Joby
needed her more than I did, and we both knew it.

“You didn’t ask her to come with you?” Wauno said finally,
breaking the silence he’d kept ever since the transport had lifted from the
square.

I shook my head. I realized that the thought must actually
have reached his mind, and I didn’t even care.

“Why not?” he asked softly, almost diffidently.

I looked over at him, surprised, because it wasn’t like him
to ask that kind of question. “Joby,” I said, finally, and looked away again.

He grimaced, like he realized he should have known that without
having to ask. After a while, he said, “What you did here—what you started—will
be good for everybody. Someday even Tau will be able to see that.”

“Hell will freeze over first,” I said, frowning at the empty
sky. “No good deed ever goes unpunished.’

He shook his head. “The system will forget about you personally
a long time before that. Most people have short memories. Wait a little, till
things shake out here. Then you can come back—”

“‘The Net doesn’t forget,” I said. “Ever.” I’d trip some
flag in Tau’s security programming if I ever tried to set foot on Refuge again;
even I knew that much about the system.

(The system—) The thought echoed in my head.

Like a ghost in the machine.
(Miya—?) I thought,
remembering suddenly what she knew—what I’d taught her. If the restrictions on
Hydrans using technology were lifted, like the treaty promised, someday she
might find a way to make even a thinking machine forget ....

I breathed on an ember of hope, trying to keep it alive in
the wasteland of my thoughts. My telepathic link with Miya was starting to fray
as the distance between us grew; with every breath, I lost another shining
filament of contact, until at last she disappeared into the static hissing of
blood rushing through my arteries and veins: the sound of solitary confinement,
the life sentence my body had given to my brain.

Wauno didn’t say anything more, or if he did I didn’t hear
him. I watched the land below change and change again, sifting through the
static in my head for any last trace of Miya, any stray thought, drinking the
bittersweet dregs of longing.

By now the land below me looked totally unfamiliar. I could
already have been on another world as I felt Miya’s last straining fingertip of
thought slip from mine and vanish into the trackless silence where all Humans
lived forever.

I went on staring out at the day, at the surface of Refuge
flowing past beneath us, still searching for some ray of the light no eye could
see.

Wauno nudged me, finally, and I realized that he’d been
trying to get my attention. I looked at him, feeling a kind of disbelief, like
I’d actually forgotten he existed. He pressed cloud-spotting lenses into my
hands and pointed. “Look. They’re coming back.”

I held the lenses up to my eyes, and saw the an lirr. They
moved across the face of the sun, their formless bodies haloed with sundogs,
colors bleeding through the spectrum across their ever-changing faces. I
watched the surreal silver rain of their cast-off dreams.

I wondered then whether the truth the Creators had meant for
us—both Hydrans and Humans—to understand, every time we looked up, had been the
opposite of the message they’d left us in the Monument. The Monument was
sterile, changeless perfection; a shrine to universal law. The cloud-whales’
endless metamorphosis said that nothing was fixed in our individual lives, that
every moment our fates changed, at any moment they could change again ....

That the things that made us what we were, that made our
lives worth living, were always intangible and insubstantial, at least by Human
standards ... that if we didn’t realize that, too often our lives wound up
nothing but a refuse heap of half-glimpsed futures, half-formed relationships,
broken hearts and dreams. That in the end, our lives were all dreamfall. The
best we could hope for was that someday, somewhere, some random cast-off dream
of ours might ease someone else’s pain, or live on in someone else’s memory
....