None of those things seemed to bother Givechy or Osuna. Nothing much even seemed to occur independently to them. They went where they were led and they didn’t push any limits. I wondered whether they’d ever even noticed what species they were.
We’d been viewing what seemed to be endless repetitions of the same facility for a long time now, and no one seemed to be getting restless except me. “What about your bondies?” I asked Ling Natasa finally, because no one else had asked it. “You use contract labor. I saw some workers yesterday, at the reefs. Do you use them here?”
She turned back, with a look that said she’d almost managed to forget about me. “Yes,” she murmured. She looked wary, like she kept expecting me to ask something else. “We use a fair amount of contract labor in our excavation and extraction operations.”
“Are we going to see that next?” I asked. I glanced at the Feds. “I expect the FTA wants to see how you treat their property.” If I’d been a mind reader then, I might have regretted it. But I wasn’t, and she only nodded. She was the only one looking at me whose stare wouldn’t have registered fatal on a rad meter, and only because her real concerns were somewhere else entirely.
We left the experimental labs and took a tube to another part of the complex. On the way I listened to her voice, more expressionless than any tape, describing the steps in the process of turning the “wild library” of the cloud-reefs into something useful and reproducible for Tau to license out.
Every standard day the operation excavated several thousand metric tons of reef matrix. That raw material was analyzed, separated, and processed down to a few cubic centimeters of material that Tau hoped would give them something unique to human experience.
“How do you make any profit?” I asked Protz. “With installations like this, and all these workers, for so little result—”
Protz sent me another radioactive glance. “On the contrary. One discovery like the hybrid enzyme that gave us ceralloy technology makes everything we do here worth the effort. Our research is not merely profitable—it benefits all of humanity.” He smiled, looking away from me at the Feds. Their expressions didn’t change. He went on smiling anyway.
I glanced at Ling Natasa, thinking that whenever I’d heard a combine talk about the good of humanity, humanity didn’t seem to extend beyond their own keiretsu. And thinking about it, I began to wonder again about the questions that no one had asked here today … not even me. Protz had said to ask him anything. I wasn’t naive enough to think he meant it, but maybe I’d been naive to think anyone else would listen if I did.
Another tram ride emptied us out into an underground chamber, the largest space I’d seen yet. This place made my whole head sing; I realized we must be somewhere in the heart of the reef. Another group of what appeared to be technicians were waiting, ready to put us into protective gear. I recognized the field generator someone strapped around my waist, a standard form of the upgraded suit I’d worn to go reef-diving. Everyone I saw anywhere in the chamber was wearing one. “They all move like they’re underwater,” I said to Ling Natasa. “Why do they look like that?”
“It’s a force field,” she said, raising her voice so that the two Feds could hear her. “This is a particularly fragile area in the matrix.”
I realized that the white noise singing in my head wasn’t just the presence of the reefs: the entire area was contained inside a force bubble; accident insurance, so that if the workers hit something unexpected, they wouldn’t blow up the entire complex. “How many of the workers here are contract labor?”
“Most of them, I think,” she said. “The rest are supervisors—our technicians and engineers.”
“Why so many contract laborers?” I asked. “Why not more Tau citizens? Is it too dangerous? And why no Hydrans—?”
“Why don’t you let us ask the questions?” Givechy moved between us, forcing me to back off.
Ling Natasa looked at him, at me, back at him. “Our own citizens are generally too well educated to do menial work,” she said evenly, and went on looking at him, but answering me. “And Tau policy does not permit Hydran workers in our research and development facilities, because there are—” she faltered, and glanced at me, “—security concerns wherever psions are employed.”
Protz cleared his throat. She glanced at him, and I saw a spark of panic show in her eyes. But the Feds only nodded and didn’t ask anything more. Osuna looked back at me for too long. I kept my mouth shut, this time.
We went on through the mining operations zone on foot. I wondered whether somebody was deliberately trying to wear out the FTA’s inspectors, take the edge off their attention, make them give up and turn back sooner. If they were it wasn’t happening. The Feds went on like drones—as tireless and as lacking in curiosity. I told myself that they could be querying their augmentation, recording data, analyzing it, using bioware I couldn’t sense or see. But maybe they weren’t. I wondered why the guardrails of the catwalks we climbed looked newer than the metal under my feet. I wondered whether they’d really hold my weight if I stumbled and fell against them. I wondered whether everyone in this place would be wearing a protective field, or even have one, if our backs were turned.
I remembered the Federation Mines, out in the Crab Colonies. The Mines provided the Human Federation with all the telhassium it needed for its starships and starport hubs. They’d used contract labor there to dig the ore, because it was a dangerous, dirty job, forty-five hundred light-years from anywhere, on the core of a burned-out star. It was simple economics: out there human lives were worth a lot less than cutting-edge technology.
The FTA ran the Federation Mines, and the FTA policed it, and when I’d worked there the bondies didn’t wear protective fields or even so much as a breathing mask to protect them from the radioactive dust that turned their lungs to shit. Forty-five percent of the laborers who were sent to the Mines didn’t survive their work contract.
I dropped back as the group moved on, drifting toward one of the laborers who’d been herded aside to let us pass. “Do you always wear the field belts?” I asked. “Or is this equipment just for show?”
He looked at me at first as if he didn’t believe I was actually speaking to him, and then he looked harder at me. I realized he was looking at my eyes. Hydran eyes. “Get away from me, freak,” he muttered.
Someone caught my arm, pulling me around: one of the security guards assigned to keep us together and moving. “Stay away from the workers,” he said, “unless maybe you’d like to join them.”
“What did you say—?” I whispered, feeling the bottom drop out of my thoughts.
“He said, ‘Excuse me, sir, but for security reasons we ask that you stay with the rest of the group.’” Burnell Natasa stepped up beside us, giving his man a look. He led me away, tight-lipped, and made sure I rejoined the others. He stayed close to my side after that, not giving me a chance to lag behind. For a space of heartbeats I was grateful, like I’d just been dragged back from the edge of a hundred-meter drop.
My gratitude didn’t last long. “This is a farce,” I said. “This isn’t how things actually are here.”
“What the hell do you want?” he asked, barely audible.
“The truth,” I said.
He glared at me. “Nobody wants the truth.”
“I do.”
“Then maybe you’d better get over it,” he said sourly, and looked away again. “Before you hurt anyone else.”
I looked down. “I’m sorry I couldn’t help your son,” I murmured. “The Hydrans wouldn’t talk to me—”
“Why not?” he asked, with the sharpness of surprise this time, or pain.
“Because I’m a freak,” I said.
He frowned, and I wasn’t sure whether it was frustration or simply incomprehension.
“I’m sorry—” I muttered again, my memory opening doors I didn’t want to step through.
He didn’t say anything, looking ahead to where his wife was using a multiple-display wall to demonstrate s
ome biochemical process. “She shouldn’t be here,” he said, not to me but to himself.
“What about you—?” I asked.
He looked at me. “No,” he said.
“Did Tau make you do this?”
He didn’t answer.
The rest of the tour was white noise. Artificial monomole sky, desolate ranges of machinery for deconstructing the matrix of the reefs, the entire human-made subterranean world of the interface.… Nothing I saw or heard could stop the cancerous fear that at a word from Tau I could be made invisible—that I could disappear into that faceless mass of bondies. And this time there would be no Jule taMing to find me and save me. My paranoia grew until there was no coherent emotion left inside me except the need for this to be over.
I didn’t ask any more questions. No one asked me why.
EIGHT
BY THE TIME Wauno dropped me off at the location where the team was collecting preliminary data, the workday was nearly over. I waded through the random motion of bodies and started doing my job. Whispers and stares followed me. I wondered whether the others had been talking behind my back all day.
As we finished securing equipment for the night, Wauno’s transport came down out of the violet air again, limned in gold as it landed on the river shore.
I finished sealing a container and straightened up, inhaling the transport’s faint reek of ozone. The hatch opened. I headed toward it with the others.
The team members made desultory talk on the way back to Riverton. I didn’t join in, too drained by another day I didn’t want to think about. Kissindre sat near Wauno, as usual, deep in conversation about the reefs and the cloud-whales. What I overheard him telling her made more sense than all the Tau data I’d downloaded into my brain. I wondered again how he’d learned all that; just tracking clouds wasn’t enough. As we left the transport for the hotel I almost asked, but I didn’t have the energy.
But as I was heading out he called my name. I looked back, and he said, “You free tonight?”
I hesitated, wondering why he wanted to know. “Yeah,” I said finally. He gestured me back. I pushed past Kelly, and past Ezra Ditreksen, who’d come aboard looking for Kissindre.
“You’re invited to dinner,” Wauno said as I leaned against the control panel next to him. “There’s somebody who wants to meet you … somebody you should meet, if you really want to know more about the reefs.”
I barely kept the surprise off of my face. “Where?” I asked. I’d thought I was going to ask who?
“Freaktown.”
Something squeezed my lungs shut. “Shit.” I shook my head, turning away.
“It won’t be like that.” His voice pulled me back.
“Like what?” I said, looking at him.
“Like what Tau did to you.”
I went on staring at him. “Why—?” I asked finally.
He looked blank. Then he nodded, like he finally understood what I’d asked him. “Because I thought someone owed you an apology.”
“Why do you feel that’s your responsibility?”
He touched the frayed pouch that hung on a thong around his neck. He shrugged. “I guess … this.” He lifted the bag up, looked at it. I realized that he always wore it, the way he always wore his lenses: like they’d become a part of his body.
The pouch was made from animal hide. It was old, so old that what must have been fur once was worn away completely in places. Ragged fringe decorated it, and broken patterns of tiny colored beads.
“What is that?” I asked softly.
“A relic. An … heirloom. My ancestors called it a medicine pouch. Not like for drug patches,” he said. “Spirit medicine. Talismans. Supposed to keep you safe.” He half smiled, his mouth pinched with irony. “That’s all I know. Everyone who could tell me more is dead.”
“Where’s it from?”
“Earth,” he said, fingering the broken fringe. “Nordamerica. A long time ago.”
“You born there?”
He shook his head. “My ancestors have been gone for a long time.”
He hadn’t said “gone from there.” He’d said “gone.” I looked down at the pouch as he let it drop against his chest.
“What’s happened to the Hydrans…” He shrugged. “Same thing. I guess that’s why I keep needing to see what’s across the river. The same reason you do, maybe.”
I rubbed my face, rubbing away scabs and expression. “I can’t,” I said. “The Hydrans threw me out. They think I’m the living dead.”
“Not this one.” He shook his head. “This one’s different.”
I realized that I believe him, maybe because I needed to so much.
“What do you say?” he asked.
I didn’t say anything for a long moment. Then I asked, as if it didn’t matter, “Just you and me?”
He hesitated. “And her.” He nodded toward Kissindre, standing with Ezra in the back of the transport, inventorying equipment. “Will she go?” There was something not quite casual in the way he looked at her, like he was trying not to think about her.
My mouth twitched. “Yeah. I expect so.” I called her name, and she came forward, her look still registering inventories as she shut down her cyberlinks and brought her full attention back to us. “Wauno knows a Hydran who wants to talk about the reefs. He says we’re invited to dinner. You ready to cross the river?”
“Tonight?” she said, looking at Wauno.
He nodded.
Her face came alive. “I was born ready.” She grinned. “Is this your informant—?”
He shrugged. “I guess you could call her that. I usually call her Grandmother.”
She raised her eyebrows.
“It’s a term of respect and affection,” he said, straight-faced. “For an elder.”
Her mouth relaxed until she was smiling again. “I absolutely want to go. I think I speak for both of us—” She glanced at me.
“Of course you do,” Ezra said, materializing behind her. His expression slid as he caught her talking to Wauno and me. “But what are we speaking about?”
Kissindre turned to look at him and missed the annoyance that was suddenly on Wauno’s face. I saw her hesitate, weighing the fact that Ezra hadn’t been invited against his reaction if she didn’t tell him. “We have a chance to … to meet with an informant who knows about the reefs.” She glanced at Wauno, back at Ezra. “Across the river.” One word she never used was “Freaktown.”
Ezra stiffened, not hiding his reaction fast enough. “Is this something your uncle arranged?” he asked.
“No.” She folded her arms, as if she didn’t see the point of the question. “This is someone Wauno knows.”
He looked at Wauno. “Are you sure this is safe—what with the unrest and all? After all, that kidnapping—”
“It’s safe,” Wauno said.
“Well, we should let your uncle know—” Ezra turned back.
“And it’s a private party,” Wauno said. “He’s not invited. If you don’t like that, stay here.”
Ditreksen frowned. If Wauno had been trying to lose him, he’d guessed wrong. “If you’re determined to go,” he said to Kissindre, “then I’m certainly going with you.”
She forced a smile, and he took it at face value.
Wauno’s jaw tightened. But then he shrugged and settled behind the controls again. He took us back across the river as the evening deepened into night. Kissindre sat up front beside him. They spent the time discussing the cloud-whales, the reefs, and how their existence had influenced Hydran culture.
I sat back, listening. Ezra sat across from me; I felt him glancing at me like a thief would, stealing my concentration, until finally I had to look at him.
“Is it true you used to be a contract laborer?” he said.
I glanced forward at Kissindre, realizing she was the only person who could have told him that. I looked back at him. “What about it?” I said.
“I always wondered how you and I ended up in the same place.??
?
“I had to kill someone,” I said. “How about you—?”
He grunted in disgust and looked away.
“Did Kissindre tell you that her grandfather was a bondie?”
His face mottled. “You liar.”
“It’s true.” Kissindre looked back over her shoulder at us. “He was, Ezra.”
“You never told me—”
“Why?” she asked. “Does it make a difference to you?”
He didn’t answer.
Wauno glanced back once, and away. There was dead silence in the transport’s cabin for the rest of the flight.
I looked down at Freaktown, its random streets, its patterns of light only a dim echo of the bright geometries of Tau Riverton. Looking down on the two sides of the river from up here, cloud-high, I thought about the differences between them and about how, in spite of the differences, from up here those patterns of light laid out on the darkness were only echoes of the same need.
Wauno didn’t circle down to land in the maze of Freaktown streets the way I’d expected him to. We flew on over it, not losing altitude until we were almost beyond sight of both sides of the river. Ditreksen kept moving restlessly in his seat. He murmured something to Kissindre as we began our descent over a candle flame of light in the utter blackness. She ran her finger across her lips and didn’t answer him.
As we descended I realized that the light was coming from a structure the size of a low urban stack, a solitary island in the night sea.
Wauno set us down in the shadowland beyond its bright entrance. I could see someone silhouetted against the light, but I couldn’t tell anything about whoever waited there.
The hatch opened. Wauno signaled us out of our seats. He picked up a box that he’d stowed behind his own seat and started out with it.
“Aren’t those our supplies—?” Kissindre asked. She gave him a look that didn’t want to accuse him but wouldn’t let it pass.
He shrugged. “It’s traditional to bring a gift of food when you visit. You can always get more,” he said, lowering his voice, emphasis on the you. “All you have to do is ask.”
Her mouth thinned. She looked past him out the hatchway, looked back, and nodded.