I reached the mod and let myself in, sealing the doors behind me. “Take me back,” I told it.
“I’m sorry,” its voice came back at me like the voices of the Hydrans, flat and impassive. “I am still waiting for Mez Perrymeade.”
“Send him another mod. Take me back now!”
“I’m sorry. I am still waiting—”
I swore and slammed my booted foot against the control panel.
A display came alive suddenly, with Sand’s head floating in it. “What is it?”
“Get me out of here,” I said.
“Why?” he asked. “Didn’t it go well?”
“No,” I said, my voice raw. “It was a fucking disaster.”
“What did you do”—he frowned—”to offend them?”
“I didn’t die.” I pushed back in the seat, hugging myself. “I listened to you, you son of a bitch, but you didn’t listen to me. Get me out of here.” I looked away from his image in the display.
“I don’t understand this,” he said.
“You never will.” I kicked the panel again, and Sand’s face disappeared. The mod came alive around me and carried me out of the courtyard.
SIX
IT WAS MIDAFTERNOON by the time Wauno picked me up at the hotel and brought me back to the survey site beside the river. I didn’t say anything on the way there. He returned the favor.
I walked into camp, my head singing with the sound of the river, the solid crunch of gravel under my boots. Everything looked the way I remembered it, except that the shifting boundaries of shadow had changed. Everything sounded the same, smelled and felt the same. My mind tried to tell me that I should feel some kind of relief that the ordeal was over. I was back on safe ground, back where I belonged, with people I knew and trusted. I wanted to believe that, as much as I’d wanted to believe it last night when those same people had come to save me from Tau’s Corporate Security. Safe.…
But I knew as I crossed the gravel into the shadow of the reef that I’d never really believe that. I’m safe was only a lie that everyone told to themselves in order to stay sane. I belong was only a lie that I told to myself. Since I’d left Oldcity, years ago now, I hadn’t stayed anywhere long enough to feel like I belonged there. It wasn’t any different here. Everywhere I looked I saw strangers’ faces, walked streets I didn’t know the names of, slept in unfamiliar rooms alone in empty beds.
And I knew that as much as I’d hated my life back in Oldcity, sometimes, in the middle of the night, some sick part of me missed it. I’d remember its walls closing me in like a mother’s arms; how simple it was to know that the sky was only a roof over my head, thirty meters high, and not infinite. And those were the times when I ached to be nothing but an ignorant, fucked-up freak again, back in a place where I understood the rules.
“Cat—” Kissindre’s voice reached me over the noise and motion of the camp like a lifeline dragging me out of quicksand. She came striding toward me, her coat flapping.
She stopped as I stopped in front of her, as we suddenly collided with the inevitable, invisible barrier between us. I watched her swallow words—probably Are you all right? because she hadn’t wanted to have to ask me that again before even a day had passed.
“I’m back,” was all I said.
“Good,” she murmured, but I saw concern in her eyes. Concern for her family and the kidnapped boy; concern that she didn’t know how to ask me the questions she needed to ask but couldn’t.
“I wasn’t any help,” I muttered, looking down. “Your uncle’s still with the Hydrans.”
“Oh,” she said. The word was empty and noncommittal. She started to turn away, looked back, hesitating long enough to make it an invitation. We moved on through the site, walking together.
When we’d gone a short way she pointed out some kind of tech equipment being set up. “They’ve brought in the field-suit system. Ezra’s helping them get it online. You got back just in time for a demonstration.”
I let my gaze follow her pointing hand, glad to let my thoughts go with it. It was a relief to focus on something that had nothing to do with me personally. The maroon-coveralled workers were standing around the displacement-field equipment now. I remembered the looks I’d seen on their faces before, the dull resentment. I looked at them again as we got closer. A few of them had their sleeves pushed up, as if they’d been sweating in spite of the cold.
I stopped as I spotted the red band ringing a worker’s wrist, and then another one, and another. Bond tags: what you wore instead of a databand if you were contract labor. My hand went to my wrist, to the databand that covered the scar a bond tag had left on me, proving to me again that I was really who I thought I was.
Protz and the other Tau vips were still there, along with the two Feds. A handful of techs stood waiting to demonstrate the sounding equipment. On the way here to Refuge I’d accessed files on the equipment they used to prospect inside the reefs, along with everything else Tau had forwarded to us. I’d drained the advance feed trying to get a real sense of what the reefs were like, to learn about Refuge and the Hydrans, about how they all fit together.
The best way to get a detailed picture of what lay inside a cloud-reef was to send in a human prospector wearing an upgraded version of a common displacement-field unit. The field suits let a diver move through solid matter like it was fluid, sending back readings until a technician on the outside registered something Tau wanted to explore further. The upgraded suits they used for exploring an environment this complex weren’t ordinary mining equipment: each suit was a spiderweb of monofilament woven with sensors and phase generators, a microtech version of the skin of a starship—and had probably cost Tau nearly as much.
No one from Tau had ever explored the few thousand hectares of matrix here on the Homeland. This was the last unexploited reef formation on the planet, which could only mean this formation had been the least interesting, from Tau’s standpoint. That made it the most interesting to us, and the most important to the Hydrans. Tau claimed that this last formation would always be inviolate. But always meant something different to a combine government than it did to the rest of the universe.
Yelina Prohas, the team’s microbiologist, and Ezra Ditreksen were standing with the Tau consultants and their equipment. I watched them nod and gesture, not able to hear what they were discussing over the noise of the camp. Another moment of stupefying numbness broke over me—the sense that nothing was real, that no one really existed, because I couldn’t hear them, feel them, touch them with my mind.
I forced myself to keep moving, concentrating on the pressure of the ground against my feet, the air I pulled into my lungs and pushed out again.
“We’re actually going into the reefs today?” I asked as I caught up with Kissindre. I hadn’t expected a bureaucracy like Tau to move that fast, even with the Feds looking over their shoulder.
Ezra glanced up at me as I stopped beside him, and shook his head. “They’re just here to familiarize us with the data retrieval system. One of the Tau workers will be going in. If we want to do any diving ourselves, we’ll have to certify on a field-suit simulator.”
“Saban!” the Tau tech in charge shouted over her shoulder at the knot of laborers I’d passed through to get here.
One of them dropped a crate of supplies. It hit the ground with a crunch and split open. He didn’t even seem to notice. He was staring at the tech, at the equipment, at us, and I watched panic glaze his face.
I grimaced, thinking this was all the team needed right now, all I needed to make my day … for some contract laborer to have a nervous breakdown in front of the Feds, in the middle of all our insanely expensive equipment.
The tech shouted the bondie’s name again like a curse. This time Saban came toward us, moving as if the tech had control of his brain. I watched him shuffle closer … coming to use a field suit because he had no control over his life: he was a slave, he was nothing but meat. But if he put on that gear he’d be dead meat just lik
e Goya, who’d been his friend until one of those suits had killed him, barely a month ago. The field generators would slip out of phase. That was what had killed Goya. And when Goya died he knew they’d call him next, and now they had—
And everything he knew, everything he felt, was screaming through my brain. “Jeezu, shit—!” I gasped, blinking. I slammed my mind shut, squeezing him out like water through a closing fist.
Ezra glanced at me; the others were watching the tech explain procedures. Ezra made a face, as if the look on my face just proved to him that I was crazy.
I turned away, still dazed, as Saban reached the place where we stood. Saban wasn’t looking at me, didn’t know what had just happened, couldn’t, any more than I could have found my way back inside his head. There was nothing left of my psi to prove that he was still terrified or even still alive.
I swore under my breath and forced my attention back to the others.
“Suit up,” the tech said to Saban. Saban looked down at the field-generating skinsuit and the sensor gear waiting in a container at his feet. He picked up the suit. He was probably no more than thirty, but he looked older, sucked dry. I wondered how long he’d been a bondie, what he’d looked like before that. As he began to pull the suit on, he looked up at the team where we stood in a half circle, watching. I didn’t have to be a mind reader to know what he thought of us, a bunch of Tau-kissing imported techies sending him to do our dirty work in a rig that he thought would kill him.
He looked at me.
And I was looking into the eyes of a roomful of strangers, all staring back at me: half a dozen human psions sitting on a bench like targets in a shooting gallery, a bunch of losers hoping for one last chance. I remembered how they’d watched my every move as I crossed the room to join them, filthy, exhausted, beaten. I remembered how the look in their eyes had told me I was nothing, not even human … not even to them.
Except for one woman, her hair like a midnight river, her eyes as gray as sorrow. Jule taMing. She’d looked into my eyes, the eyes of a wild animal, and seen a humanity that even I had believed was dead. And she’d said—
“I’ll go. Let me go.”
Everyone standing around me in the reef’s shadow turned to stare at me, their expressions caught somewhere between confusion and disbelief.
“What?” Ezra said.
I licked my lips, swallowed. “I want to do it.”
The Tau tech in charge of the equipment, whose datapatch read HAWKINS, shook her head. “Your team hasn’t qualified on a field suit. Can’t do it. It’s against safety regs.”
“I’m qualified,” I said.
Kissindre looked over her shoulder at me.
“No, he’s not,” Ezra said. “None of us has done the training sim.”
“I have,” I said, pushing past him.
“When—?” He caught my arm, jerking me around.
“On the way here,” I said, controlling the urge to sprain his wrist. “There was a virtual sim in the background databank we brought with us.”
“No one had the time.”
“I did.” I shrugged and smiled, twisting the knife as he realized what I was saying. I could memorize anything I accessed, or even read, perfectly, the first time. Being a psion wired your brain in a way that gave you an eidetic memory if you wanted one. When I’d signed up for the university, I hadn’t known how to access; for most of my life, I hadn’t even known how to read. And the law said psions weren’t allowed to have augmentation hardwired into their brains.
I’d needed a kind of miracle to make up for the years I’d lost on the streets. When I realized I’d been born with one, I learned to use it to survive in my new life. Getting this far hadn’t been easy for me, but some people thought it had.
Ezra let go of my arm, his mouth pinching. “Freak,” he muttered.
I stiffened. I’d smelled the word on his breath every time he spoke, but he’d never had the guts to say it to my face before. I straightened my sleeve and moved past him. “I’m qualified,” I said again, to the tech. “Check me out.”
Hawkins shot a look at Kissindre, raising her eyebrows. Kissindre looked once at me. I nodded. She nodded, then.
“It’s still not a good idea.” Hawkins glanced at the ring of onlookers, the Tau vips and the Feds, as if she was looking for someone who’d back her up and stop me. But no one gave her a sign. Either they didn’t know it was dangerous, or they couldn’t admit they did.
I took the field suit from Saban’s strengthless hands. The suit fluttered in my grip; it was like holding a shadow. Saban shook his head, his eyes dark and uncomprehending. He began to back away, slowly, like a man afraid of stepping on cracks.
I turned to Hawkins. “Has this equipment been completely checked out?” A displacement suit like this was cutting-edge technology, which meant that its potential rate of failure was about as high as its cost.
“What do you mean?” Hawkins said, resenting it, and me.
“Is it safe?”
“Why wouldn’t it be?” she snapped. “If you know what you’re doing.”
I couldn’t tell from the look on her face whether she was just nervous or actually worried that I might be right. I tried not to think about it. I stripped off my outer clothing and put on the helmet, fastened the sensor belt around my waist. Then I pulled the skinsuit on, felt it wrap itself around me like cobwebs, molding itself to the contours of my body. The feel of it made my flesh crawl, but I’d been expecting that. I stretched, felt it move with me.
The field suit had been programmed to allow a human prospector to walk through walls, or anyway move through the variable matrix of the reef as though it was made of water. There was hidden space inside the molecular structure of all but the densest materials, and the phase shift opened a passageway, shoehorning the molecules apart, creating a vacuole that a human being could exist inside of—as long as he kept moving. “Okay,” I said at last. “Let’s do it.”
Hawkins glanced up at me, back at her displays. “All right,” she said, resigned. “But make it short. This isn’t virtual, it’s real. Nobody’s charted this reef. You never know what you’re going to find in there.”
I nodded, glancing toward the foot of the hill. The steep, eroded slope was furred with mossy growths in green-black like tarnished metal, browns the color of dried blood, here or there a sudden flare-up of bright green-gold. I started toward it, checking out systems with a word as I moved, getting the feel of moving inside the suit’s cage of spun silk. Data readouts flickered in front of my eyes like moths; I had to fight the urge to brush them away.
Everything seemed to function the way my memory said it would, but Saban’s fear lay across my vision like an extra lens. I told myself the death of the other bondie had been a freak accident; even though Saban believed things like it happened to them too often. Tau wouldn’t dare let a man go reef-diving in faulty equipment in front of so many witnesses, in front of the Feds.…
At last, after what seemed like time spent in suspended animation, I was standing in front of the reef-face. I stopped, turning back for one final look at the others. They stood in three groups: the research team and the technicians in one, the observers in another, the bondies bunched in a third. I heard the tech speaking to me through my headset, verifying data. I let my mind shift into autopilot, let the training I’d force-fed it take over, giving her the right answers as the reefs loomed up and over me like a cresting wave. I held my breath as I sensed my body making contact, experiencing the first soft compression of the alien growth that layered the interface of reef and air. I murmured the words that activated the phase shifters and pushed my body through it.
I flowed into the reef-face with a sensation like sinking standing up as the reef and the motion and my physical boundaries became one fluid whole. I gasped, felt cool sweet air enter my lungs freely and easily until they were full again. I took another breath, and another, turned, maneuvering like a swimmer to look behind me. The world outside was gone, and I
was looking into a haze of shifting silver-grays, luminous gray-greens. I’d known there would be light—from the electromagnetic fluctuations around me, translated into the visible by my helmet sensors—but I hadn’t known exactly what I’d see.
There was no sound at all except the cautious rasp of my breath. Displays still flickered across my vision; I ordered them off. Let the technical data of the reef’s makeup read out on the tech’s displays for everyone else to see. Suddenly they weren’t the way I wanted to experience this, the way I wanted to remember it.
“How are you doing?” Hawkins’s voice blared suddenly from some other dimension.
“Okay,” I murmured, hating to speak at all. “About what I expected.” But it wasn’t. No simulation could be like the real thing, because the real thing, I suddenly realized, was never the same thing twice. “Don’t talk to me. I want to … concentrate.”
“Go slow, then,” she said.
“Yeah,” I whispered, the single word barely loud enough for my own ears, because anything more seemed like a shout. Even my heartbeat was too loud, fading in and out of my consciousness as I pushed deeper into the shimmering mystery that had swallowed me whole.
And slowly I began to realize that the silence around me wasn’t complete. The reefs whispered: hidden meanings and murmured secrets lay just beyond the boundaries of my perception. I watched light and color and density shift with my motion, as if I’d merged with it, nothing separate, the displacement field dissolving my sense of self until I became amorphous.
I began to move again, phasing forward into the unknown, my passage lit by the coruscating energy of the fields. The only sensation I felt now was a kind of pressure change, the difficulty of movement changing with my every move. The matrix I was phasing through caressed me, now gently like a mother, now with the urgent hunger of a lover. I passed through surfaces that were rough, rust-red, as stratified as a wall of brick but peppered with seeds of darkness, like the night sky turned inside out; I broke through suddenly into an empty whiteness and was left snow-blind in the formless heart of a blizzard. I swam upward through whiteness, burst out of it into a hollow vacuole filled with glowing fog, tumbled, suddenly weightless, until the field suit restabilized.