“So you still think we’re fools,” Naoh said bitterly.
“Yes,” I said, thinking about how much pain this kidnapping had caused already; how much more pain there was going to be before the aftershocks stopped coming. I looked away at the other HARM members standing in the room, at the anger and hunger in their young/old faces, knowing what they must be feeling right now, knowing I ought to feel the same way. But I only felt empty.
“Mebtaku,” Naoh muttered, looking at me. I couldn’t translate it.
Miya spun around to glare at her. “Show him the Way, Naoh,” she said fiercely. She glanced at me. “More of the Way is hidden than we can say in words.”
“There’s no point. The an lirr will come back sooner than this one will find the Way.” Naoh made a sharp motion with her hand, that probably went with Get him out of here. Behind her the others shifted restlessly; their expressions were a chorus of suspicion and resentment.
“Before you throw me back,” I said, “maybe you ought to ask what else I know.” I turned to Miya. “You’re right. I helped you the other night because I wanted to. And I want to help you now. I know what Tau’s trying to do to the Hydrans here—the same thing the Federation’s been trying to do to every Hydran, every psion—” I broke off again. “I didn’t mean that. I meant…”
“Humans,” Naoh said, as Miya gave me an odd look, “are a disease without a cure. None of them are any good.”
“You know, I keep trying to believe that,” I said softly. “But I keep meeting the wrong ones. Ones who keep changing my mind.”
“You can say that,” Naoh muttered. “You have Human blood.”
“That doesn’t count for anything across the river.” I shook my head. “That doesn’t change the truth, either. If you believe all humans are the same and they’re all scum, how does that make you any different than they are—?”
They were all silent this time. I wondered whether they were talking it over mind-to-mind, or whether I’d actually shut them up. I sat down suddenly on the bench near Miya, buckling under the weight of too many hours awake. I felt her eyes on me. I looked back at her. Even prepared for what I’d find, I couldn’t look away.
Finding my voice again, I said, “I know someone who can help you. A vip in the FTA, back on Earth.…”
Naoh laughed in disbelief. “How would you know someone like that?”
“I worked as a bodyguard for Lady Elnear taMing.” I held Miya’s gaze. “She’s on the Federation’s Security Council.”
Miya nodded, her surprise showing. Maybe she hadn’t heard of the Lady, but she knew enough to know that the Security Council made policy for the entire Federation.
“Natan Isplanasky is a friend of hers; he oversees the FTA’s Contract Labor Services, as much as anyone can. He can order an investigation—”
“Why would he help us?” Miya asked. “Contract Labor doesn’t hire us out for money.”
“I think he’d help you because justice matters to him.”
Naoh made a rude noise.
“I was a contract laborer,” I said slowly. “At the Federation’s telhassium mines, on Cinder. The bondies there were as expendable as dirt. If someone hadn’t paid my bond…” I was seeing Jule taMing’s face suddenly, instead of Miya’s. I blinked the room back into focus. “When I met Isplanasky, all I wanted was the chance to spit on him. But when I saw what was in his mind.…” They both stared at me, then, but they didn’t interrupt. “The fact that the Feds treated their bondies worse than most combines did mattered to him. I was nothing, an ex-street rat, a freak; but what I’d been through mattered to him. He spends most of his life jacked into the Net—he was the closest thing to God I’ll probably ever see, but even he couldn’t know everything that went wrong in his universe.”
“Did he make things right, then?” Miya asked.
I shrugged. “I know he made a start. Like you said—you can’t get to justice without the truth to lead you there.” I looked up again, half smiling. “Besides, he owes me more than one lousy beer. Tell me what he needs to know.”
Miya was silent again, looking at the others. I watched their faces, their hands, the subtle clues to their interaction. At last she turned back to me. “We can tell you. We can show you … if you have Hydran eyes.”
I wondered whether she meant that literally or figuratively. I nodded.
Miya got up and led the way out of the room. The two men who’d been in the room all along came with us. As we walked together down a dim hallway, they finally told me their names: Soral and Tiene. When they looked at my eyes this time, the only thing their own eyes registered was curiosity.
The hall ended at a timeworn spiral staircase. “Watch your step,” Miya said to me, as if she wasn’t sure whether I could see in the dark. I wondered why Hydrans even bothered with stairs. Then I remembered Hanjen, walking out from town to visit Grandmother: Respecting his body, as well as his mind.
We started upward, not down. I didn’t ask why. The narrow stairwell was dark, even to my eyes. I heard the surreal echoes of life going on invisibly somewhere beyond the walls: hollow banging, clattering, rattles; somewhere a thin, high whistling. I couldn’t make out voices, if there were any; couldn’t make sense of the random sounds. The Hydrans ahead ahead of me climbed without speaking or looking back. The stairwell’s spiral became tighter; I watched my footing more carefully, following them up through the funnel of silence.
Finally we stepped through a doorway into the clear night air. I took a deep breath. We were standing on a platform at the top of a tower above the building’s domed roof. The building beneath us was identical to a hundred others I could see, looking out over the town. Most of them were domed and spired like this one; something I hadn’t realized when I was wandering through the streets down below.
I turned back, saw Miya’s face silvered by the rising crescent of Refuge’s moon. I stared at her a moment too long, again; looked away as she caught me.
I studied the surface of the pillar beside me, one of half a dozen that supported a smaller, transparent dome over our heads. My fingers traced its cool frescoes, disturbing a layer of velvet dust. I couldn’t tell what material the pillars were made of or what the designs on their surface meant. A slender metal tube dangled from a cord against the post beside me.
“This is called a sh’an. It’s for … an,” Miya said softly behind me, hesitating as if there was no human word that would say exactly what she meant. The Hydran word registered in my mind as meditation/prayer/dreams. “For when the an lirr—the cloud-whales—would come to share their an with us. Often it rained then, or snowed, and so the sh’an is covered.” She moved away; a cold wind filled the space between us as she looked out at the night. “But they don’t come anymore. It almost never rains or snows.”
I looked out across the rooftops, away into the distance where the dregs of the river emptied into the darkened land of the cloud-reefs, the hidden world of the Homeland. “Why don’t they come anymore?”
She shrugged, resting against the edge of the platform’s low wall. “From what I’ve … heard, Tau manipulates Refuge’s magnetosphere to draw the cloud-whales to areas where they have more ‘productive’ dreams.” She shook her head. “But the oyasin says they left us because they no longer know us, because we don’t follow the Way…”
“The oyasin? ‘Grandmother’—?”
She faced me without surprise. “Yes.”
I grimaced.
“What?” she asked.
“Protz,” I said. “I didn’t want to believe it.”
“That an oyasin shares our goals—?”
I shook my head. “That Protz could be right about something.”
She actually smiled.
“How involved is she?”
“She teaches us to see the Way clearly. She teaches us our heritage. She doesn’t judge us for the kinds of things we have to do to save our people. Nothing else.”
“She didn’t tell you to kidnap Joby, then.”
“Of course not.” A flicker of irritation showed in her eyes. “That isn’t her Way … it’s ours.” Her hand tightened into a fist, but the gesture wasn’t a threat. I thought of the truth-swearing pledge in Oldcity handtalk.
“They say you can tell when a combine vip is lying,” I said. “His lips move.”
She glanced away instead of smiling this time. I wondered whether they said the same thing about all humans on this side of the river.
“Do you believe the cloud-whales would return here if they were given a choice?”
She looked up at me again. This time I’d surprised her. “I don’t know.…” She reached for the metal tube hanging against the column. She raised it to her lips, almost reverently, and I realized that it was a flute. She began to play it. The music was like the motion of clouds across the sky.
“Is that how you call them?” I asked, my mind falling away into memories of other music on other worlds under other skies.
She shook her head again, gently replacing the flute against the column.
I glanced down at my feet, somewhere in the shadows. When I looked up again, the bat-thing was sitting on her shoulder. She stroked it absently with her hand. I wasn’t sure where it had come from.
I watched it, wary. “One of those tried to put my eye out,” I said.
She looked surprised again; the surprise faded. “Some people train taku to attack anyone they sense … closedness in.”
“Why?” I asked, too sharply.
“Someone with guarded thoughts might plan to hurt them,” she said, almost reluctantly, almost as if she could feel the guilt that burned my face. “But taku are gentle.…”
I looked back as she turned her head to nuzzle the bat-thing. It rubbed its furred forehead against her, making soft clutterings and squeaks. “It shows what we’ve come to, that anyone even thought of doing something that unnatural.” I watched her try to urge the bat-thing off her shoulder toward me. It clung to her awkwardly, stubbornly, clutching her heavy coat with taloned fingers.
I wasn’t sure whether to be embarrassed or relieved. “You said it senses people? It’s telepathic?”
“Yes.” Again the surprised look, as if a part of her kept forgetting that I wouldn’t know those things and couldn’t find them out for myself. I didn’t know whether that made me feel better or just alien. “They’re like the mebbet, which are native here. But the mebbet can’t fly, and they aren’t telepathic. The taku are the only telepathic creatures on Refuge, besides us and the cloud-whales. The cloud-whales created them.”
My breath caught. “You actually believe the cloud-whales did that?”
“We know it. There weren’t any taku on Refuge until about a thousand years ago.”
I shook my head. “Meditation is the mother of invention.…” I wondered whether random chance had created them, like the half-finished face I’d seen in the reef … or whether the cloud-whales had been lonely, or thought that the Hydrans were. “Wait a minute. You said the cloud-whales are telepathic—?” Nothing I’d seen in the data even hinted at that.
But it fit with what Wauno had claimed: that the Hydrans experienced a kind of thought-residue existing in the reefs. I realized suddenly that my own response to the reef—the way my psi had seemed to come alive inside the matrix—might not have been a fluke after all. “Then why—”
“Is this how the halfbreed is supposed to learn what we’ve lost?” Naoh appeared out of thin air beside me.
“Jeezu!” I stumbled back; felt my face flush as Naoh looked at me.
“Mebtaku,” she said. The bat-thing—the taku—fluttered around her face. I wondered what mebtaku meant, whether it had anything to do with them. I couldn’t tell whether the bat-thing was glad to see her or was threatening her. She brushed it away. It came back, and then suddenly it was gone, like she’d wished it out of existence. Miya frowned, but if anything more passed between them, they didn’t share it with me.
“I’ve seen what Freaktown looks like,” I said. “And I’ve talked to Hanjen—”
“Hanjen!” Naoh made a disgusted noise. “He might as well be Human.”
“The oyasin trusts him,” I said. And then I said, “She trusts me too.”
Naoh glanced at her sister, as if Miya had silently seconded it. Naoh’s hands jerked; she shook her head. “Hanjen is a fool!” she said to me; but she didn’t say anything about Grandmother. “He will spend his life spitting into the wind, or else he will try to push the Humans too hard once, and they will break him, just like Navu—” She broke off. “I hate words,” she murmured, looking away.
For once I understood her perfectly. Words were nothing but empty noise: nothing but traps. “So do I,” I murmured. “But they’re all I’ve got.”
“Mebtaku,” she muttered again, and the one thing I was sure of was that it wasn’t a compliment.
I searched my freshly laid memories once more for a definition. I couldn’t find one. “Who’s Navu?” I asked.
Something that might have been pain showed in Naoh’s eyes. She signaled at Miya to keep quiet.
“You wanted him to understand how our people suffer.” Miya’s face hardened. “Then let him see Navu.”
Naoh’s gaze broke first, for the first time since I’d begun to watch them interact. At last she made what I took for a shrug.
And then I had my answer, as lightning struck my brain—
ELEVEN
SUDDENLY I WAS out in the street, staggering with surprise. Miya and Naoh were standing beside me. The free-form walls told me that we were still in Freaktown. Other Hydrans moved around and past us, but none were the ones who’d been with us before. I swore under my breath, knowing Naoh had done it this way—transporting us without warning—intentionally.
Naoh was already striding toward the entrance of a building. I followed with Miya. Miya was tense and silent beside me, keeping her gaze on her sister’s back. Neither of them seemed concerned about being recognized. I wondered whether HARM had so little support in the Community that it wasn’t a risk … or whether they had so much. I kept my head down, not wanting anyone to look at me; wishing for once that I could make my flesh and bones as invisible as my thoughts.
In Freaktown it was hard to tell where one building began and another ended; but as we went inside, I saw that this one was large by any standard. Hallways fanned out in all directions from a central hub by the entrance. The place reminded me of a transit station: a trickle of people circulated through its space, sat on benches, dozed on mats, even now, in the middle of the night. Some of them were obviously sick; some of them were bloody from injuries. The near silence was still the most alien thing about the place.
“What is this—?” I murmured.
“A hospital,” Miya said.
I stopped moving. “I thought it was a transit station.” But even a transit station should have had accesses or data kiosks visible.
“There aren’t any transit stations here,” she said.
I glanced at her, wondering whether the irony was intentional.
“I never saw a hospital that looked like this.” This place made Oldcity’s decaying med center look state of the art. This was like something from Prespace Earth, so primitive that it was actually unrecognizable.
Her expression said that she knew exactly what I was thinking. She’d been trained as a therapist across the river. She must have seen for herself what a modern corporate medical facility was like.
“This place isn’t a hole because you prefer it that way, is it?” Not a question.
Her gaze glanced off my face. “You mean,” she said bitterly, “because, with our alien mental powers, we can cure all diseases or injuries and don’t need intrusive Human methods of diagnosis and treatment—?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“No.” She shook her head, pressing her fingers to her temples. “This is not the way we want it to be.” She turned slowly, looking at the room the way I had, with eyes that knew better. “We hav
e to eat or we starve to death. We have to exercise our bodies or they waste away. Just like Humans. If you cut us, we bleed—”
Three total strangers appeared out of thin air in the space beside her and moved past us like we weren’t even there: a man and a woman, both supporting a younger man, or restraining him, inside a telekinetic field they’d spun around him. Neither one of them touched him directly; his naked chest was a mass of dripping red, as if he’d been flayed. I wondered how the hell a Hydran could possibly do something like that to someone else.…
He stared at me staring back at him; blood began to leak from his nose as I watched. His eyes were all pupil, night-black. He mouthed curses without any sound. The two Hydrans holding on to him were white-lipped with shared pain, and their eyes were full of tears. And suddenly I understood. He’d done it to himself. Someone called to them from one of the hallways, and they disappeared again.
I sucked in a ragged breath.
“We live, and we die…” Miya went on, as if her breathing hadn’t stopped like mine had. “Sometimes we hurt ourselves just to stop the pain.”
“Just like humans,” I whispered.
“Humans are luckier,” she murmured. “They can tear at each other. We can only tear at ourselves.”
I bit my lip until it hurt, and didn’t answer.
We stood together staring at the empty hallway, the nearly silent room. At last Miya shook herself out, like she’d been hit by a physical blow. “It is … it is true that we have methods of healing Humans don’t,” she said, forcing the words out, picking up the conversational thread, anchoring us in the present. “We do some things differently. We sense things.… There are ways we could heal a Human. The body isn’t just a biochemical system; it’s also a bioelectric system—”
I laid my hand against the metal pipe that climbed the wall beside us, winced as a static spark leaped across the gap to my fingertips. “I know,” I said.
“But humans aren’t constantly aware of it. We are.…” Her glance traveled the room again. I knew she saw auras of energy whenever she saw another person, not simply a face, a body. Probably she could even see where they’d been injured or how sick they were. “Tau’s doctors, their med techs, barely know half the body’s potential. They can’t even imagine how much they miss, because they can’t feel, and they won’t listen—” She swallowed frustration like bile.