“What?” I said again, making the last time I’d said it sound friendly.
Protz bent his head at the transport behind him. “Yesterday I told you that Tau was opening one of its mining and research facilities for the FTA’s inspection. I thought you might want to see for yourself that our contract laborers work under completely safe conditions.”
I hesitated, glancing at Kissindre. She didn’t look happy. Slowly I got to my feet. “I need this,” I murmured. “I’ll get caught up. This is the last time—”
She grimaced and nodded. Then she looked down, so that I couldn’t see her expression. I glanced at the rest of the team, a dozen faces wearing a dozen different expressions. No understanding showed on any of them.
I thought about apologizing; didn’t. I tried not to listen to the sound of their voices talking behind my back as I walked away.
As I got on board the transport Protz was already explaining what we were going out to see: an actual interface, where they mined the reef matrix and processed the anomalies they discovered there. I tried to listen to what he was saying, tried not to feel as guilty taking my seat in the transport as I had turning my back on the team.
Wauno was at the controls, as usual. He looked about as glad to be there as I probably did. He raised his eyebrows as he saw me come aboard. I wondered what he meant by that.
I sat down beside Osuna and Givechy, the two Feds, trying to remember which of them was which as I engaged my safety restraints. The only obvious difference between them was their sex. Maybe they had personalities, but so far I hadn’t seen any proof of that.
They were wearing duty uniforms today: heavy, pragmatic boots, gray pants, bright orange jackets with one gray sleeve and one gold. At least the uniforms, with the FTA’s winged Earth logo on the breast, guaranteed they’d never be mistaken for combine lackeys. I stole glances at their datapatches until I was certain Osuna was the woman and Givechy was the man. Osuna would have been good-looking if she ever smiled. They stared back at me as if they had no idea what I was doing on board.
I nodded.
“I don’t understand,” Osuna said, sounding hostile. “I thought you were a technician or a student. Why are you here?” I remembered yesterday; probably she did too.
I glanced at Protz, who seemed to be obsessed with the view out the window beside him. I looked back and shrugged. “The same reason you are.”
“This isn’t your job. Your job is back there.” Givechy gestured at the reef disappearing behind us.
“Then I guess it’s personal,” I said.
“He’s a former contract laborer,” Protz muttered to the wall.
The two Feds looked at me with the kind of disbelief normally saved for somebody who’d had major cosmetic surgery—like adding a second head.
“Well, then,” Givechy murmured. “You must be an outstanding example of how well the Contract Labor system works. Where were you assigned?”
“The Federation Mines, on Cinder.” I let the words register: the Federation was their boss. “If someone hadn’t paid off my contract, I’d be dead of radiation poisoning now.”
“That’s not amusing,” Osuna snapped. Protz looked at us, finally.
“I know,” I said.
Both Feds looked at Protz, as if they wondered whether I was Tau’s way of paying them back for being here.
The look on Protz’s face was oil and water, unease and barely disguised pleasure all at once. It was the most complex emotion I’d seen him register since we’d met. It didn’t last long. He rearranged his face until it was as smooth as the surface of his brain.
“I hope you don’t think your experience somehow qualifies you to do our job or to interfere with it,” Givechy said to me finally.
“I’m not here to get in your way,” I said. “But I’ll be watching.”
The seatback ahead of me came alive as Protz displayed an information program on the transport’s interactive consoles. The two Feds put on headsets. They lost themselves in the virtual feed like they actually thought they’d learn something meaningful about what we were going to see.
I watched the program on flatscreen with half my attention, wondering whether the Feds were really as interested in this hype as they seemed to be or whether they were just avoiding further conversation. And I wondered what qualified the two of them to pass judgment on Tau and half a hundred other combines all across the Federation’s piece of the galaxy, each one with different economic concerns and technological bases, each one trying to cover up its particular lies.
I watched my own feed long enough to catch a repeat of the cloud-whale visuals I’d seen in my hotel room a few nights ago. After that it bled into pure hype. I tuned out. Below us the distance between sky and ground had filled with clouds without my noticing it. I wondered whether they were really clouds or something more. I wanted to ask Wauno about it, about how he knew what the differences were when he watched the cloud-whales. But I didn’t.
The trip took close to an hour, which at the speed the transport was moving meant we’d gone nearly a thousand klicks. Clouds hid most of the terrain we were passing over. We began to drop down through them finally, into a landscape that left my eyes struggling, familiar and alien all at once.
The world was greener here, with so much more color that I had to do a reality check on the sky to convince myself it wasn’t artificial. The contours of the land showed me where the reefs had been laid down—were still being laid down, if what I’d heard was true. We must have traveled north, because I didn’t think anything about Riverton had ever looked as lush and soft as this land did. My instincts told me this was where the Hydran people should be living; where probably they had lived, by choice, before they’d been driven to the ends of their earth by Tau.
There was no sign of a settlement anywhere, Hydran or human—nothing to keep the cloud-whales from their purpose, or Tau’s planners from theirs.
I saw the Tau interface now, in the middle of the green, rolling sea of the reefs. The main complex wasn’t even visible from the surface: none of the laboratories and processing plants; no wormholes riddling the matrix of thought-droppings, leading to whatever discoveries Tau’s high-tech prospectors had identified as most likely to fit the parameters of their highly specialized interests. There had never been a systematic, purely scientific study done on one of these reefs, one that wasn’t designed to produce the most profit in the fastest way possible.
I wondered how far our research team would get in conducting its study, between the restrictions Tau had already laid on us and whatever objections the Hydrans had to our intruding on their last piece of sacred ground. We’d been told the Hydran Council had given our project their approval, but after what I’d learned about the kidnapping, I wasn’t so sure that they actually spoke for the Hydran Community. I wondered how much we’d really accomplish before the Feds finished their investigation and left the planet, and Tau didn’t need us as a showpiece anymore.
We set down on an open landing field in the middle of the complex. On the way in I’d heard Wauno interacting with a security net; we’d passed through a midair no-man’s-land of invisible defenses as we’d dropped out of what seemed to be open sky into the deceptively open heart of the compound. Tau might be lax on safety measures for their workers, but they weren’t lax about protecting the operation from sabotage by corporate competitors.
As we got out of the transport, there was nothing visible except the installation and the sky. I shielded my eyes with my hands, squinting up at the blue, glaring dome over our heads. Clouds patterned the brightness, rippling and translucent, like water flowing over unseen stones. They reminded me of the images I’d seen on the threedy, but they were too amorphous, too formless against the glare, for me to be certain. “Are those clouds—?” I asked Wauno.
Wauno glanced down at the piece of equipment hanging around his neck. He passed it wordlessly to me.
I held it up to my eyes like I’d seen him do once, discovering a set of
lenses that fitted themselves to my face and adjusted to my vision as I moved my head. I focused on the displays superimposed over my view of the world, a view that had transformed as suddenly as my mood. I lifted my head to the sky—and saw them.
Everything else fell away, stopped, ceased to exist. The cloud-whales drifted overhead, their camouflage of water vapor stripped away by the lenses’ filters. I counted three, four, five individuals, each one a community of countless mite-sized creatures. They moved through the ocean of air like gods, their vast forms slowly shapeshifting through one fluid transformation after another, moving to the hidden music of their meditations, the counterpoint of the wind. Here and there a fragile veil of thought made visible drifted down like rain, or glinted like a brief, impossible star in the clear air.
Thinking of music, I remembered the Monument: remembered standing on a plateau at sunset, on the artificial world that was another incomprehensible gift of the Creators. I remembered the eroded arch of stone that humans called Goldengate, the haunting music the wind played through its fractured span.… I thought about music as the universal language, speaking truths that nothing could alter, and I wondered what the Creators had been trying to tell us, by making their music visible.
Someone jolted my arm—Protz. I looked down, pushing the lenses back on my forehead. The expression on his face was half impatient and half inspired. I realized that he was telling me to hand them over. I passed them to him, watched him pass them to one of the Feds. I glanced at Wauno. He was standing like I had, his hands shadowing his eyes as he stared up into the sky. His body was drawn like a bow with longing.
I wondered if the shields surrounding this complex existed partly to protect it from the mysteries falling out of the air, how dangerous Wauno’s work really was, and whether he’d ever been caught inside a rain of cloud-whale inspiration that might have killed him.
The Feds passed the glasses back and forth, and then back to Protz, nodding without comment. I wondered if they’d been left speechless or just unimpressed. I looked at their faces. Unimpressed.
Protz handed the lenses back to Wauno, ignoring my outstretched hand.
Wauno handed them to me again as Protz turned away. “Keep them,” he murmured. “I have another pair. They promised me I could take your team out to a watchpost when this is finished—” He jerked his head at the Feds. I realized he didn’t mean this visit, but the whole investigation. His look said he didn’t know what either of us was doing here, like this, when we could be out there somewhere, watching the cloud-whales drift by without interruption. I only nodded, and didn’t ask him what he thought the odds were that we’d get that opportunity. He headed back to the transport, maybe to get himself some more lenses.
A welcoming committee had emerged from the shining carapace of the research facility, dwarfed by it. I hadn’t realized how big it actually was until their arrival gave it perspective.
“Did they give you a choice about what interface you got to see?” I asked Osuna. This must be the closest reef-mining operation to Riverton. If Tau controlled what the Feds got to see, then it would be simple to show them a perfectly run installation.
“We were offered a choice of three,” she said, clipping off the words like paper. “They said this was the most convenient.”
“Did you ever wonder if it was too convenient?” I asked.
She looked away without answering.
The half-dozen people coming toward us wore the uniforms of Tau’s CorpSec, but as they got closer I could see from their data-patches that they were plant security guards.
As we started forward to meet them, I realized that I knew one of them: the one whose datapatches read CHIEF OF SECURITY. It was Burnell Natasa, the father of the kidnapped boy.
He wasn’t looking at me, at first, couldn’t have been expecting me, any more than I was expecting him. I watched him acknowledge Protz with brief resignation, watched him measure the two Feds with a longer stare that barely passed for noncommittal. And then he looked at me. His dark face froze. I saw him mutter under his breath; wondered whether he was calling up verification data on me or just swearing.
I looked at Protz, who didn’t seem to get it. He had to know about the kidnapping—he’d been at the Corporate Security station with the others when they’d come to get me. Maybe he’d never been told the identity of the victim. I looked at Natasa again, at the desperate questions in his eyes.
I shook my head, letting him know that whatever else happened, no one was going to hear more about it from me today. I understood my own situation well enough, even if I wasn’t sure about his.
Natasa and his security team went through the motions, mouthing speeches designed to reassure the Feds that everything about this installation was as meticulous as its security and was typical of all their operations. They led us in through a cathedral-vaulted causeway of geodesic arches, to a waiting tram.
Natasa dropped back, walking alongside me, as soon as he dared. “What are you doing here?” he muttered.
“Research,” I said. He was a full head taller than I was. I looked up at him, suddenly even more uncomfortable. “What are you doing here?” I was sure there hadn’t been any change in the kidnapping situation.
“My wife is here,” he said, as if that explained everything.
We got on board the tram that would carry us deeper into the installation. Like players in a virtual fantasy world, we shot down a long tunnel walled with mirrors that reflected our passage toward infinity. It was more than the showplace it seemed to be—I recognized the walls of a decontamination chamber. I wondered whether they were more concerned about decontaminating the ones who came in or the ones who went out of here. The last time I’d gone down a hall of mirrors like this one, they had lined the entrance to a black lab, and I’d been looking for illegal drugs, the kind that would give me back my Gift.
I stared out through the transparent hull, searching for my reflection; saw the featureless surface of a silver bullet reflecting back. I thought about what my last trip down a hall of mirrors had cost me. The debit reading on my databand had only been the beginning of what I’d paid to free my mind, even for a few days, from the prison I’d built for it myself.
We went on for what could have been another kilometer through sleek ceralloy-walled passages and chambers half a hundred meters high, skeletoned with beams of composite and fleshed by panes of transparent aluminum. I had to admit, if only to myself, that it impressed the hell out of me. I listened to Protz drone on about form and function with more interest, wondering whether any of this really had any bearing at all on the question of worker safety, let alone the kind of treatment Tau was dealing out to the Hydrans. I glanced over at Natasa more than once. He was never looking at me when I did.
Finally the tram whispered to a stop, letting us out into another security area. We passed through the lightshow of verifications and warnings, and an EM field so strong I felt it crackle like static through my thoughts, running its mindless fingers over my brain and triggering a reflex in my psi. I was still shaking out my head as we went on into the research area.
Another reception committee was waiting there for us; researchers and technicians this time, in pastel coveralls. I wasn’t surprised to see a face I recognized at the front of the crowd: Ling Natasa, the kidnapped child’s mother. I saw her freeze as she spotted me. Her eyes darted to her husband’s face for an explanation, or at least reassurance. She must have found something there that she needed: I saw her pull herself together in time to show the Feds an expression as secure as the research complex was supposed to be.
She moved through the introductions like she was on autopilot, clenched and pale. To my eyes she looked worse than her husband did. The only time she reacted visibly was when Protz pointed me out. “He was curious about our processing of the reef material,” he said. Nothing about how curious I was to see the way they treated their workers. And nothing about the kidnapping.
The same confusion was in her e
yes as she looked at me again. I shrugged, not able to think of a single word that would fit into this moment, wishing that I could reassure her, mind-to-mind—that somehow I could find a way to wipe that stricken look off her face and answer the questions she wasn’t free to ask me. But there was nothing I could do, except match her artificial smile.
She seemed to be in charge of the subcomplex of laboratories we were inspecting now and whatever projects were going on in them. Tau must have insisted that she put in an appearance; that keiretsu meant putting Tau’s interests first, no matter how she felt.
The series of labs seemed to go on forever. So did our tour of it. Everything looked right—it was a fucking temple of technology, and everything the Feds asked to see displayed or demonstrated seemed to show up or function for them in the ways they expected. They muttered constantly to each other, and to themselves, until I realized they must be using implanted memory systems to feed them the endless variations of specialized knowledge their jobs required.
But as I went on watching and listening, went on observing the same things they did, getting the same answers, something began to bother me. The Feds were cool, professional, analytical: perfect machines. Nothing more. No more than a mobile extension of their augmentation. I’d interacted with AI’s that had more personality than these two Feds did. I’d seen dead bodies with more personality.
They were a null set, without the concern or even the curiosity to ask the kinds of questions I was starting to need answers to in a bad way: Who were all the technicians I noticed who moved like they were on strange ground? Did they really work here, or had they been brought in to expand the regular staff during the inspection? Was it just coincidence that the matrix dispersal system had had a total safety upgrade so recently? Was Lab Plex 103 only inaccessible because they were decontaminating it after a high-risk experiment, or had something happened in there that Tau didn’t want the Feds to see?