I stopped just inside the doorway while Grandmother went on to the table and settled into her place. She looked up at me, expectant, with the thread of smoke tendriling past her face. Her face was a mystery in the shifting light. I focused on it, went toward it, kneeled down where I’d been sitting before. She didn’t do or say anything, as if she didn’t register anything I felt or thought.
I had the feeling that if I didn’t start eating, she wouldn’t either. So I ate, filling the empty place in my thoughts with physical sensation, existing in the present, the way I’d learned to do on the streets, holding off the past and the future for as long as I could.
Grandmother ate with me, not saying anything. She didn’t use a spoon. But she chewed and swallowed, just like I did, savoring the taste and the texture of the food. I wondered whether the silence between us was her choice or whether she was simply respecting mine. I wondered whether for her this was like eating in an empty room.
I glanced away at the walls. There were no windows, not even any pictures to relieve the blank monotony of the place. I wondered whether she was too poor even to buy herself some cheap holostills, or whether the austerity was intentional. Maybe Hydrans never felt claustrophobic, the way humans did, because they knew they always had a way out.
I thought about the woman with the kidnapped child. I thought about Freaktown, and what I’d seen of it; I thought about Oldcity, as the flavors of the food and the memories worked on me. I thought about traps, how they were everywhere, waiting for everyone—different traps that were all really the same trap in the end. Life was a trap, and human or Hydran, you only got out of it one way.…
I went on eating; tried to make my restless body as still as the old woman watching me, tried to make my thoughts as empty as the walls.
But the longer I stared at the wall across from me, the more I began to notice the subtle tracery of cracks in its surface; how those cracks formed patterns, images that your mind could get lost in, that led you somehow into the silent calm of your own mind’s eye.…
I sat back finally and wiped my mouth, with one kind of hunger satisfied, at least.
Grandmother sat back too, and stopped eating. I wondered whether she’d stopped because I’d stopped, or whether she’d only kept eating because I’d still been hungry. Or whether we’d really both wanted to stop at the same time. I looked up at her. Her eyes were watching me like a cat’s.
Two Hydran children, a girl and a boy, came into the room. They moved so silently I didn’t hear them coming, but somehow their arrival didn’t startle me. They bowed to us as they gathered up utensils and carried away the trencher. They didn’t say anything, but I caught them looking at me as they went out. I heard them whispering in the hall.
I wondered why Grandmother hadn’t just sent the food away herself, the same way she’d put it on the table. I thought about that, about how the whole eating ritual had reeked of psi. If Grandmother had wanted to rub our faces in the fact that she had the Gift and we didn’t, that we were on Hydran ground now—outsiders, aliens—she couldn’t have made it any more obvious. I wondered whether that was exactly what she’d been doing.
“You have many questions,” she said, just as I decided to ask one.
I felt myself smile as I nodded. She could have read that right out of my thoughts, or just from the expression on my face. “Did you arrange this meal just to make the others leave?”
“Why do you say that?” She leaned forward, her head cocked a little to the side, like she was hard of hearing. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen her do that. I realized suddenly that it wasn’t my words she had trouble understanding.
“Just wondered,” I muttered.
Her face twitched, as if something I couldn’t see had brushed her cheek. Finally she said, “I follow the Way of Things. If one follows the Way, one discovers whatever one was meant to find.”
“Oh.” I settled back, hooking my arms around my knees. It sounded like the same pseudo-mysticism too many human religions preached along with loving their fellow sentient beings. As far as I could see, it was all hype and more than half hypocrisy. But a belief like that might mean something genuine to the Hydrans. They had precognition: sometimes they actually did get a glimpse of the future.
I thought about my last sight of Kissindre and Ezra; about what kind of scene there was going to be when I saw them again. “Does Wauno know you speak our language?”
“He speaks our language,” she said, like that explained everything. “Why don’t you ask me a real question?”
I laughed, and grimaced. “Why don’t you hate me?”
The calm waters of her expression rippled. She pressed her hand to her eyes, looked up at me again. “Why should I hate you?”
I shook my head. “I can’t use my psi. Hanjen … the Council threw me out, when they realized—”
“You don’t use your Gift because you choose not to,” she said.
“You don’t understand—”
“The Council has lost sight of the Way,” she went on, as if my speech was as opaque as my thoughts. “That happened long ago, before you were even born. They can no longer see anything clearly.… You suffered a terrible wound. You must hold the wound closed,” she said gently, “until it heals. You are a good person.”
I felt my face redden again. “You don’t understand! I killed someone—”
“So…” she said, as if she finally understood.
“I’ll go now.” I started to get up.
“You are a miracle,” she said, and bowed her head to me. “I am humbled in your presence.”
“I’m not a fucking miracle,” I said, choking on anger. “I’m just a fucking ‘breed.” I started for the door; stopped short as someone came through it. Hanjen.
He stopped too, staring at me the way I must have been staring at him. “What are you doing here?” he asked.
“Leaving,” I said. I tried to move past him but he blocked my way. He glanced toward Grandmother and said something sharp and querulous in Hydran. And then there was dead silence in the room. I watched their faces, the only thing that told me they were still communicating.
At last Hanjen turned back to me and made a deeper bow than I’d ever seen a Hydran give to a human. “Namaste,” he murmured. The change in his expression was so complete that I didn’t know what the hell to make of it. “Please forgive me,” he murmured. “I have behaved in a way that causes me shame.”
I frowned, not certain what he meant; shrugged, because it seemed to be an apology. And then I pushed on past him.
He caught my arm; let it go again as I looked at him. “Please, stay,” he said. “We need to finish what we came here to do.”
“What’s that?” I said, hearing the sullenness in my voice.
“Understand each other.” He faced me without expression.
“Sit down,” Grandmother said. “Sit down, Bian.”
I glanced behind me, wondering who she meant. She was looking at me. She gestured, like I was a stubborn child.
“My name’s Cat,” I said.
She shook her head, made patient sit down motions again.
I stayed where I was, frowning.
“Cat is your name among the Humans,” Hanjen said. “This is a Hydran name, for when you are with your mother’s people.”
I looked at him, speechless. I looked back at Grandmother finally, wondering why she hadn’t simply told me herself.… But it wasn’t her business to talk with humans; it was his. And she couldn’t simply let me into her mind. Maybe she was tired of talking. “What does Bian mean?” I asked.
“It means ‘hidden.’” Hanjen smiled.
“Is that a joke?” I asked, because I couldn’t tell what he was smiling about, and he wasn’t a friend of mine.
He looked blank. “No,” he said.
I moved past him, drawn back toward the table as if Grandmother had a magnetic field.
Hanjen followed, stood looking down at the empty tabletop. “I’ve missed d
inner,” he said.
Grandmother smiled and shook her head. The children who’d taken the trencher away appeared in the doorway behind us, coming at her silent call like they’d been conjured out of the air. They brought a dish to the table and set it down so carefully that the flame barely wavered.
Hanjen smiled too, and made one of those bows to the children, to her, before he sat down cross-legged. He started to eat, not using a spoon. He looked up at me—stopped, swallowing, as if he realized he couldn’t eat and communicate with a human at the same time. “Forgive me,” he mumbled. “It was a long walk. I am very hungry.”
“You walked here from Fre—from town?” I asked. He nodded. “Why?”
He took another mouthful of food. “Out of respect,” he said, like it was obvious.
“For what?” I pushed, annoyed.
“For myself,” he murmured, still eating. “For my body, my Gift—my beliefs.”
I shook my head.
“It is the Way.” He was beginning to sound impatient; I saw him glance at Grandmother, as if she’d said something, and swallow his irritation like a mouthful of stew. “The body and the mind deserve equal reverence; otherwise a person is not truly whole. The oyasin has been giving me instruction.”
“Oyasin?” I asked. Wauno had called her that before.
“It means ‘guide’—she is a guide to the Way and a holder of our beliefs and traditions.”
I looked at Grandmother. That fit what Wauno had said, but it didn’t fit the reverence in his voice as he said it. “You mean, a religious leader—?” I looked back at him.
“Not a ‘leader,’ in the sense that Humans use it. ‘Guide’ is closer. Ke is everywhere: it is the life force of the Allsoul, something you might call the ‘god-within-us.’ But there is only one Way that each of us finds.…” He glanced at Grandmother like he needed guidance right here, right now. “It is difficult to explain, in words.”
“The Way which can be told is not the eternal Way,” Grandmother said. I thought of how names were shared among the Community: the spoken names, the true ones.
Hanjen sighed. “Most of our people no longer believe that ke even exists. That is one reason I decided to seek the Way for myself, with the oyasin’s guidance.”
I sat down cross-legged midway between them. I watched him eat. “I’ve eaten this food before. A long time ago.”
He glanced up, first at Grandmother and then at me. “Is that so?” he said. “Where?”
“I think my mother made it.”
He stopped eating. “You lived here as a child?”
I shook my head. “On Ardattee. In Oldcity … a place the Federation uses to dump its garbage.”
He went on staring at me, as if he’d lost my meaning, fallen off my train of thought because there was nothing for him to hold on to.
“It’s a relocation dump. A few Hydrans ended up there after they’d been driven off of their own worlds. But there were more humans … the kind who don’t fit into a keiretsu like Tau.”
He blinked. “Where is your mother now?”
“Dead. For a long time.” I shook my head. “That’s all I know.”
“Your father? He was … Human?” He looked like a man being led blindfolded through a strange room.
He was finally getting an idea of how I felt. I shrugged. “I don’t know anything about him.” Whenever I thought about it, all that I came up with was the sort of thing I’d heard from the Corpses two nights ago: my mother was a whore, my father was a rapist. That was the only way my existence made any sense. I tried not to think about it any more than I had to. “It’s not a coincidence, your being here tonight, is it?”
He looked disoriented, like trying to follow my conversation was difficult enough without my changing the subject. Finally he said, “When I last saw the oyasin, I showed her our … meeting. And she showed me that I had not seen clearly. It was her feeling that if you and I met again, without the Council, we might understand each other better”
“That wouldn’t be hard,” I said.
He looked down. “The Council once had the best interests of our people in mind. But now there are too many of us with—limitations. Sometimes the Council members show too much self-interest; they always show a lack of perspective. We all want our society to become more open to the Humans, because we believe that is the only way we will ever prosper, under the circumstances—”
“By kissing Tau’s ass.”
His pupils narrowed, slowly widened again.
“Is that how you feel?”
“I think we must learn to live with the ones who have come to share our world—accept life on their terms—because that is how things are now. Denying what is obvious goes against the Way and is only wasted effort. We have to turn the energy of our anger to useful ends. Otherwise it will destroy us. It has destroyed too many of us already.” He glanced down.
I half smiled. “The Way tells you that when life gives you lemons, you make lemonade—?”
“Excuse me…?” He shook his head. “‘Lemons’?” he said. “You mean, ‘Humans’?”
“It’s a kind of fruit. Sour. You have to fix it up.”
He half smiled, this time.
“So the Council wants things to stay the way they are,” I said, still trying to get everything clear in my mind. “They believe that’s the only way to get something more from Tau?”
He nodded. “Or, at least, to not lose more. They are very conservative in their attitudes.”
“Is that what you believe too?” Asking it again.
He didn’t say anything for a few heartbeats, but he wasn’t mindspeaking Grandmother. I glanced at her: She was looking at him, but her face was unreadable. Finally he said, “I feel that working within the law is the only way to achieve real progress. Even to change the rules—one must do it carefully. So yes, I guess I am a conservative. HARM calls me an enemy of our people—a collaborator. And yet … sometimes I think I am a little sick of ‘lemonade.’” The shadow of a smile came back, but it didn’t touch his eyes.
“So you do think things ought to change; that they could be better?”
“Have you spent any time on this side of the river?” he asked.
I nodded.
“So have I,” he said. There was no trace of smile anywhere on his face now. “But few Humans have. The only ones who come here regularly come for what they can bleed out of us—which is little enough, anymore. We need so many things—we need access to the kinds of things Tau keeps to itself. Knowledge and resources that we no longer possess independently. That is not entirely the fault of the Humans—I am the first to admit our society was in decline before they ever reached this world. But now we don’t even have the opportunities—”
“That woman, Miya, the one who kidnapped the little boy. She was trained by Tau, wasn’t she? To do the kind of therapy she did for him. They let her work over there without monitoring her psi.”
His pupils narrowed again. I had the feeling that he was angry, or maybe he was just suspicious. I wished I knew which it was. “Yes,” he said. “There are many things the Gift could do for Humans, if only they had the … courage to trust us. Opportunity can flow both ways. It should; or anything we gain would only be charity. That would not solve our problem. Our problem is a lack of hope, more than a lack of things.”
The Council mistakes one for the other,” Grandmother said. “Their need is like an infection. But they are using the wrong cure. Too many things make everything worse.”
Hanjen nodded, looking resigned. “What we need is the chance to do as much as get.”
I remembered life on the streets of Oldcity, one empty aimless day/night flowing into another. I’d done a lot of drugs then, anytime I could hustle the credit, or even when I couldn’t, trying to fill the emptiness of my existence, the empty hole in my mind where something had been taken from me that I didn’t even know the name of. Trying to forget that there was nothing better to do, no hope for me of ever having anyth
ing better to do.
I sat staring at the trencher of food in front of me. “I know,” I murmured, finally. I watched Hanjen consider eating more; watched him look at me and stop.
“What about HARM?” I asked. “Where do they fit in?”
“They don’t,” he said flatly. “They have turned their backs on our traditions and abandoned the Way. They are wandering in the wilderness. By trying to ‘save’ us, they will end up destroying us.”
I glanced at Grandmother, remembering that Protz had claimed she had ties to the radicals. If that was true, it didn’t seem likely they’d turned their back on the traditions she believed in. “I expect they don’t see it that way,” I said to Hanjen, still watching Grandmother out of the corner of my eye. I wondered what she knew, wished I knew how to find out. She smiled at me, and I didn’t have any idea why.
I looked at Hanjen again. “Why can’t you … communicate with the radicals? If you believe that they’re doing more harm than good, can’t you show them why—open your mind up, and show them? Have you ever let them try to show you how they see the situation?”
He was perfectly still for a moment, traveling through the words in slow motion to get to my point. “Tell me something first,” he said finally. “Is it true you were forced to kill someone, and survived? And that is why you don’t use your Gift?”
Don’t. Not can’t.… Don’t. “Yeah,” I whispered.
“Then it is true that your part in the kidnapping was completely by chance? An accident?”
I nodded. “How did you find out?” He hadn’t known it at the Council meeting; none of them had.
He bent his head at Grandmother. “But she said I must ask you myself.”
She’d never seen me before tonight. I glanced at her, wondering how long she’d known about it.
“The Council was afraid, when they discovered what you were—” Hanjen broke off, looking like he’d just stepped in shit. He shook his head. “We were afraid that Tau had sent you to … cause trouble for us. To somehow tie the Council into the kidnapping. To tie us to the radicals. The fact that you were an—outsider, claiming to understand us, and yet you kept your mind completely closed.… When I felt everyone else’s suspicion, it became my own. It was very hard to understand all this, you see—” His hands fluttered; he probably didn’t look that helpless very often. Satisfaction took some of the sting out of my memory of the Council meeting, but not much.