“You all right in there?” Hawkins’s voice demanded, making me spasm.
“Fine. I’m fine,” I muttered as I swept upward through eddies of luminous gas.
“You want to come out now?” It didn’t really sound like a question.
“No.” I reached the far side of the vacuole, felt my motion turn into slow-motion as I sank into an area of concentrated matter. I forced my way deeper. “You getting good readings?” Managing to say something coherent, to remember that the hard data was supposed to matter to me.
“Good,” Hawkins said. “Real good. Good and clear.”
I’d already stopped listening, balanced precariously on what my mind insisted was a stairway. I called on the displays, made myself study them, proving to myself that it was only a density differential between bands of layered protoid ceramic and sapphire foam. I shut off the displays again and let myself climb, until suddenly I swept through another wall that rippled like flames.
“Aah—!” My own shout of surprise exploded in my ears.
“What is it?” The tech’s voice hit my senses almost as hard.
“A head. God, there’s half a head in here!”
“It’s all right,” Hawkins said, her voice easing. “It’s nothing … it’s not real. You find things like that in the reefs … they’re just aberrations. You’ve been in there long enough; come on out.”
“No…” I whispered, holding my glowing hands up, cupping the half-finished thought of a Hydran face—I could even see that it was Hydran, although the eyes were closed. It might have been sleeping, but there was something about it, as if it was caught in a moment of rapture. It shimmered and disappeared like a reflection in water as my hands closed on it. I let my hands fall away and watched it reappear. I shut my eyes as I pushed through it, moving deeper into the millennia of ancient dreams.
The touch of the matrix surrounding me began to seem like more than just simple undifferentiated pressure; I could sense the reef changing, as elusive as rainwater and rippling silk, as viscous as oil, honey, tar, as empty as vacuum, as random as my life.
The Hydrans believed the reefs were holy, miraculous; places of power. I wondered what they’d found here to make them believe that, when they could never experience the reefs the way I was doing now. And I wondered why experiencing them this way hadn’t had an effect on how human beings saw them.
I reached out, shifting myself around a pulsating sphere of light, felt something shiver through me like a plucked string—heard it, inside my head, as if I was an instrument and the reef was playing its song through every neuron in my body. I spiraled to a stop, listening, realizing that now every motion, every shift of phase, seemed to resonate inside me—not just colors and lights anymore, but all across the spectrum of my senses. I heard music when I breathed, I smelled fog and tasted the lightning-sharp tang of ozone. My senses were bursting open like shuttered doors, one by one, letting in the pure radiance of sensation.… My mind was an outstretched hand as the reef filled its emptiness.…
Somewhere a voice was calling me. The words stung like pebbles against the naked skin of my thoughts. I brushed them off with a muttered curse; felt them sting me again, harder, “—Answer me!”
I didn’t answer, because there were no words that could describe what was pouring in through all my senses now. My mind was a prism, diffracting input into a synesthesia of pleasure.…
There were no boundaries: no inside, no outside, only a rapture as sweet as the oxygen I was breathing. There was no need even to breathe; no room for breath inside me, only a pure hot flame of pleasure, consuming me until … I … I …
I couldn’t breathe. I dragged air as thick as fluid down into my lungs. All at once my chest felt as if something was crushing the life out of me.
Sound made my ears bleed light: a human voice was screaming at me, but I couldn’t remember whose it was, couldn’t make out the words—
“Can’t … breathe.” I heaved the words out like fist-sized stones, not knowing if anyone could understand them, if anyone else was even there to hear them.
“… bringing you back.…” The words were written in liquid fire across my vision. “… release your controls!”
I looked down, watched my hands fumble at my belt inside a golden aura, not sure whether anything was actually touching anything else, whether I even could, or even should. I felt my body shifted, moved, not able to tell if I was the one doing it. “Get me out…” I mumbled.
“… get you out…” the voice said, or maybe it was only an echo in my head. The blinding flavor of the sound was so bitter that it made my eyes tear.
I didn’t say anything else; didn’t hear anything else, taste or feel anything else except the pain every time I dragged in a breath of molten air. My whole body felt wet, as if death was oozing in through the bandages of the protective fields. Pressure, density, weight, the sudden wrenching shifts between solid mass and emptiness were all intensifying as a force beyond my control dragged my helpless body through the gauntlet. I felt the reef’s enfolding womb of sensation begin to metamorphose me into the stuff of its own mass, making us one forever.…
But the irresistible drag still kept me moving forward, caroming off densities of matter like a molecule escaping a boiling pot. It wrenched me around and shoved once more, flung me abruptly through the translucent agate of a solid wall into the absence of everything but light.
I crashed down onto solid ground as the glow of the displacement fields flickered out around me. Suddenly there was fresh air, free for the taking. I sucked it into my lungs between fits of coughing, sprawled back on the gravel, grateful for every agonized muscle twitching in my body.
“Cat—!”
“What happened?”
“—he breathing?”
Familiar shadows blocked the sky, and then I was lost inside a surreal forest of legs. Ezra Ditreksen pressed something over my face, forcing oxygen laced with stims down my throat. I struggled upright, coughing, shoving it away.
“Told you—!”
Someone was screaming, someone hysterical. Surprised that it wasn’t me, I caught the net of extended hands and hauled myself up, pushed through the barrier of bodies, half supported by them, as I tried to see who it was.
It was Saban, the worker whose place I’d taken … whose life I’d almost traded for my own. I saw him struggling against the barrier of workers who were trying to hold him back. One of the bondies hit him, hard, doubling him up. Shutting him up—they’d done it to shut him up. I watched the workers close ranks around him, the looks they gave the Tau vips, the Feds, me and the team members standing around me. I wondered who they’d been trying to protect—him, or themselves.
I looked away from them, searching for the tech who’d let me go into the reefs in a suit that hadn’t been properly maintained … who’d gotten me out again just in time. Hawkins shoved past Ezra and Chang just as Kissindre reached my side.
“Cat, for God’s sake—” Kissindre gasped, just as Hawkins pushed in front of me and said, “For God’s sake, what happened? Why the hell didn’t you come out when I told you to? You’re not—”
“You saying this was my fault?” I asked, looking straight into her eyes.
I saw her react as my long pupils registered on her. But then she looked away, at the Tau vips and the Feds closing in on us, and muttered, “No. I’m not saying that.”
She held some kind of instrument up in front of me; made me stand still while she took a reading. Her face eased. “You’re clean. You weren’t exposed to any toxins.”
I took a deep breath, remembering things Tau had encountered inside the reefs: enzymes that turned human lungs and guts to putrescent sludge; virals that triggered spontaneous, uncontrollable cell mutation. My shirt and pants were wet, stained with something alien, something that smelled like nothing I’d ever smelled before. I felt my flesh crawl. “Then I want to say two things. One is—thanks.”
She looked back at me, sharp-eyed but not an
gry anymore.
“The other is, how often do you lose a diver?”
“Malfunctions are rare,” she said. She raised her voice as she said it, glancing again at the tight-lipped faces of the Tau officials, the frowns on the faces of the Feds. “We’ve never had a fatality.”
“That’s not what I heard.” I glanced away at Saban, silent and barely visible now inside the group of other workers. “If it’s so safe, why do you use contract laborers and not your own people?”
Her mouth thinned. Protz said, “We wouldn’t send anybody into the reefs if the risk factor didn’t meet our safety standards.”
“I’m sure they’re real stringent,” I said, and Protz frowned. I looked back at the Feds. “Why don’t you ask those workers about fatalities?” I pointed toward the knot of bondies.
I felt a hand on my arm, and someone behind me said, “He didn’t mean that. He’s just shaken up. He shouldn’t have insisted on using the equipment. He doesn’t have enough experience, and he almost killed himself—” Ezra.
I turned around, breaking his grip. “The damn equipment failed! It wasn’t me.”
“Grow up,” he hissed. “Everything you’ve done since we got here has been the wrong thing. Take responsibility for your actions, for once.”
“Ezra.” Kissindre’s voice cut between us. “You are not in charge of this team.” She pushed in close to his face, lowering her voice, “It’s not your responsibility, or your right, to reprimand—”
“Well, if you won’t do it, someone has to,” he snapped.
Her face went red.
“Why do you always take his side?” Ezra gestured at me before she could open her mouth and answer him. “Are you going to let him ruin everything we have here—?” He waved his hand to include everything around us, but something in his face said that what he meant was only the distance between him and her.
“Ezra,” she said. Her face softened. “You don’t understand.”
“I think I do.” He turned and walked away, as if everyone around him—all the other team members, the techs and vips and inspectors watching us like voyeurs—had disappeared.
I turned back from watching him go, to see whether the Feds were making any move to talk with the bondies. They weren’t. “Why don’t you ask the workers who use this equipment all the time how safe it is? And how much choice they have about using it?”
“They’re contract laborers,” Protz said sharply. “They don’t understand the technology, and they don’t know anything about Tau’s safety procedures. We protect them in ways they don’t even realize.”
“Do they have the right to refuse to use those suits?” I asked. “What happens if they won’t?”
No one answered me.
“They haven’t got any rights.” I turned back to the two Feds. “The FTA runs Contract Labor. It’s your job to protect them—it’s your job to make sure Tau isn’t killing them. Do your job—”
“Cat.” Kissindre cut me off before the Feds could give me whatever answer they thought I had coming. “Don’t get political,” she said, and the casual tone didn’t match the look in her eyes. “It’s not what we’re here for.”
I looked at her; looked away again. “It’s what you’re here for!” I shouted past her.
The man, Givechy, nodded finally, grudgingly. “We’ll check it out,” he said, glancing at the woman, who nodded.
“Our workers are not being mistreated,” Protz said impatiently.
“Your slaves,” I muttered.
“They are not slaves!” Kissindre said, and her anger startled me. “Contract Labor builds worlds. It’s giving those men a chance—”
“What the hell do you know about it?” I said.
“My grandfather was a contract laborer.”
I looked back at her, caught naked by surprise.
“It gave him his start. He went on to make a good life for himself and his family.”
I looked down at my wrist, at my databand. “Yeah,” I whispered. “Well, all it got me was scars.”
Her mouth opened, closed again. A muscle twitched in her cheek.
“We’re making several of our research and production facilities available for your inspection,” Protz said. For a moment I thought he was talking to me. He was talking to the Feds. But then he met my stare, and added, “You’re welcome to accompany us, if that will prove to you that we’re not some sort of monsters.” There was more indignation than smugness in it, as if he was so blindly keiretsu that he couldn’t begin to comprehend why anyone would question how they did their business or ran their citizens’ lives.
“I’ve had a real shitty day,” I said. “I don’t need this.” I started to turn away.
“Tomorrow,” he said. “It’s tomorrow.”
I kept walking, head down, letting the beach disappear under my feet until I was beyond the human circle. The reefs rose up ahead of me; I walked toward them, remembering the feel of moving toward them in the suit … passing inside … the merging.…
And I wasn’t afraid. It surprised me to realize that. Something filled me that was almost disbelief … almost longing. It didn’t seem to mean anything that what I’d done had almost killed me. It only mattered that I’d experienced the rapture, become part of something indescribable, and yet so familiar.… Like a joining: the deepest, most intimate form of communion between psions; a thing that was almost impossible if the psions were human. But somehow the reefs had triggered my psi, made me respond … made me whole.
I was standing at the reef-face again, like I had before; but this time there was no suit performing the technomagic that let me walk through walls. I put out my hands, pressed them against the mossy, fibrous growth that defined the interface where the reef met the outside air, feeling it crumble, soft and yielding, even as the surface resisted me, turning me back. I pressed harder, putting my weight against it until my hands sank into the loamy surface. I stood that way, straining, listening …
“You really want to get back inside that much?” a voice asked, behind me.
I jerked around, startled.
Luc Wauno stood behind me, his head bent, his gaze moving from my face to the reef-face to my hands, no longer sunk wrist-deep in its surface.
I pinned my hands against my sides with the pressure of my arms; beginning to realize that I was getting numb with cold, standing there like I’d been hypnotized in my clammy, stinking shirtsleeves.
“I thought you left,” I said.
He shook his head. “I’ve got my orders too.”
I looked at him, and away.
“The Hydrans call these holy places.” He glanced up the steep, shadowed rise of the slope, his fingers touching the pouch that hung against his chest.
“I know,” I said.
He looked down again. “They say it’s a kind of ecstasy they feel, a kind of revelation about the visions of the cloud-whales. There’s a kind of mental residue—”
“I know.”
“Do you?” He half frowned, with what looked like curiosity. “I thought you couldn’t use your psi.”
I remembered the conversation I’d had with Sand and Perrymeade that he’d overheard. “I can’t control it. But I felt something, in there—”
“The tech said it was anoxia. Reef-rapture. It happens if a suit fails. You know your lips were blue when you came out of there?”
“I wasn’t hallucinating.”
He shrugged and didn’t say anything else. I figured he didn’t believe me.
“How often do the suits fail?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. Not my department. I cloud-watch. That’s all.”
“Right,” I said. “You just follow orders.” I started to walk away.
“Hey,” he called.
I stopped, looking back at him. But he only shrugged, as if he didn’t really have anything to say.
I turned away again and kept moving, putting the camp behind me, until I reached the river’s shore. I stood on the stones, watch
ing the river run. And I remembered another shore, on another world, remembered feeling the same sense of inexplicable loss as I watched the river disappear into time and the hidden distance.
SEVEN
THE NEXT DAY began like the one before should have. We’d been herded back to Riverton to spend the night, as if Tau was afraid to leave us unattended in the Homeland. But at sunrise Wauno was waiting to take us out again. This time Ezra stayed behind, accessing Tau’s databanks from the room he and Kissindre shared. That made everything easier, at least for me. Kissindre didn’t say much, except to ask Wauno a few questions about the reef site. I couldn’t tell whether she was brooding, worried about her family problems, or just exhausted. I was tired enough, but knowing that her family’s troubles, and Tau’s, weren’t my problem anymore made me feel better than I had since I’d come to Refuge.
The team spent its time at the research site doing experimental runs on the equipment, learning to interpret the data Tau technicians pulled out of the reefs and what the limits of their readings were. We only did external soundings. No one asked to go reef-diving after what had nearly happened to me; Kissindre had agreed to let the Tau workers handle it.
As we were eating our midday meal, Wauno’s transport landed again on the shore. He wasn’t due back until evening. Everyone looked up, looking surprised and then concerned. And then, one by one, they looked at me.
“What—?” I said, frowning.
“Nothing,” Chang muttered, and they looked away again at the transport.
It wasn’t Perrymeade or Sand getting out of the transport this time. It was only Protz. For a minute I thought everything might actually be all right.
He stopped in front of us where we all sat in stasis with food still halfway to our mouths. “I’m sorry to intrude.” He nodded to Kissindre, but his glance stayed on her about as long as a fly. “Cat?” He looked at me again, and Chang groaned under his breath.