I glanced at Grandmother. She watched me, her face unreadable, as usual. I bowed to her; she bowed to me. I followed Hanjen.
“What did she mean about Naoh?” I asked. “She said something about a ‘nerve storm.’ I don’t understand what that means.”
“A sort of sickness…” he murmured. “It destroys one’s … perspective, one’s self—” His hand gestured at the empty air, as if he couldn’t find the words he needed to make it plain to me.
“You mean she’s crazy,” I said in Standard.
He shrugged. “We could not say that,” he murmured, and I wasn’t sure whether it was a criticism or just a comment. “There was a time, in our society, when such a person was protected. If their thoughts became too … unstable, the Community would gather and join with them until they were healed.”
“Who decided when someone was—sick enough to need that?” I asked.
He looked at me as if I’d asked something incomprehensible. “Everyone knew,” he said. “We were a Community. We were…” He sighed, looking away. “Too often now a sick mind goes unhealed … unnoticed.” His voice hardened. “They draw in others who are susceptible, who carry the seeds of the same … soul-rot. They feed on one another’s distorted thoughts. I have seen whole groups starved to death together—locked into a joining that shut out the entire world, even their need to eat or sleep, until they were unable to save themselves.”
“And no one—noticed?” I said, disbelief rising like bile in my throat. “How is that possible?” Humans seemed to ignore another person’s need as easily as breathing, because they never had to feel it unless they wanted to. But Hydrans—
He shrugged. “We call ourselves the Community. But we have not been one since the Humans came. We are like the cloud-reefs … mined out. This, here”—he gestured in the direction of Freaktown—”is the rubbish heap of history, all that is left of what we were.” He turned, his gaze scanning the distance in another direction. “When the FTA has gone, when your research group has finished its work, they will take this final reef.”
“You know that—?” I said.
He grimaced. “They don’t admit it, even to themselves. But I see the thought, always just below the surface in their minds. They promised us that this one piece of sacred ground would be untouched. But they are lying to themselves, just as they have always lied to us.”
I stood staring at the ruins of the monastery. The number of survivors and rescuers had diminished already. As I watched, another group of silhouetted forms disappeared. “What now?” I asked finally, looking back at Hanjen.
“I must speak with Janos Perrymeade.” His face turned grim, or maybe grimmer. “He has sent me three messages already. I do not know how to answer him. Not after this—” He glanced toward the ruins, away again. “Are there words for such things, in your language? You know those people—” not your people, “better than I ever will. How does a Human speak to … his enemy?”
I shook my head, looking down. “How do you contact Perrymeade, if you need to?” I looked up again. Freaktown wasn’t even tied into Tau Riverton’s communications net, as far as I knew, let alone the Federation Net. And somehow I didn’t think Perrymeade communicated telepathically.
“He gave me a port that I can use. It’s at my home.”
I nodded, surprised. “Is it still functioning?”
He looked surprised, now. “Yes. There was a message from him just hours ago. I didn’t answer it, because the Council could not agree on what kind of response to give. And then, this—”
“You’d better start answering him, right now,” I said. “You can’t wait for the Council to decide. You’re the only one of them who has any idea what the Humans really want. And you’re right. I do know more about them.…” Realizing as I said it how much more I knew about Tau, and Draco, and keiretsu … wondering whether any of it would be enough to do any good. “Take me with you.”
I’d been lost inside my own thoughts; suddenly I was lost inside something larger, deeper, darker, as Hanjen’s mind picked me up like an afterthought, and teleported—
SEVENTEEN
WE WERE BACK in Freaktown: the alienness of the walls and furniture was beginning to seem ordinary to me. I stumbled to the nearest thing that would hold me up—a curving bench padded with mats—and sat on it. Jags of bright color showed in the deep earth tones of the woven mats.
Hanjen leaned against the edge of a carved wooden cabinet, as if he could barely stand—like it had been more exhausting for him to transport my dead weight than it had ever seemed to be for Miya. I remembered that the strength of a Hydran’s Gift—or a Human psion’s—had nothing to do with physical strength or size.
He glanced at me; looked away again, as if contact with my eyes was painful. Or maybe it had been the contact with my mind that made him look away. I let my own eyes wander the floor, the walls—anything, anywhere, as long as it was inanimate.
This was Hanjen’s home. I couldn’t tell how large it was from where I sat. But compared to the monastery, and the rooms I’d shared with Miya and the Satoh, this room was plush—filled with furniture, rugs, hangings, carved wooden lintels. The floors showed the elaborate mosaic patterns that seemed to have been almost an obsession with the original builders of this city. I wondered if they’d actually set each shard of ceramic or glass by hand—or if they’d set them without ever touching one. My mind imagined a freeform cloud of colored fragments moving through the air, like the cloud-whales drifting across the sky; pictured them suddenly falling into place with the precision of thought.
“This is nice,” I murmured. Most of the furniture looked old. Looking at the pieces more carefully, I noticed the scars of time marring the beautiful workmanship of almost every age-darkened table and chest.
Hanjen cocked his head at me like he thought that was a peculiar comment, but he only nodded. “Everything here is something I discovered in an abandoned building or something that had been put out on the street. I have tried to salvage what I can of the past. Perhaps someday it will mean something to someone besides me. I hope, by the time I die…” He broke off and left me to silence, to wondering where his thoughts had gone.
I let my eyes search the room again, scanning artifacts and works of art until I found the one thing that didn’t belong here: a computer port. It sat in a shadowed alcove, as though he’d tried to make that symbol of his association with the Humans as unobtrusive as possible. But still it stood out, an alien thing, its message function light blinking in the gloom like an unnaturally green eye.
Hanjen followed my stare, shedding his coat almost absentmindedly. It was cold enough in the room that I kept mine on. He made a sound that was half a sigh, half a grunt of resignation, as he crossed the room to call on the access. The messages left by Perrymeade flowed across its screen; were repeated by a disembodied voice in the air—a Human voice.
Hanjen stood in front of its empty, waiting screen and didn’t speak or touch it. He looked at me. “I should have the Council’s backing—”
I shook my head. “You know you’re the only one of them who’s got the courage. Someone’s got to act, now—”
He turned back to the screen, his face hardening, and input the call-code.
Perrymeade appeared in the electronic window the instant Hanjen finished. He must have been waiting for an answer, maybe for hours. I searched the background around his image, trying to tell where he was, whether he was alone. What little detail I could make out looked like a private home, not an office. “Hanjen,” he said, as if he’d been holding his breath all that time. “Thank God. I’ve been trying to reach you. Borosage—”
“I know what he has done,” Hanjen said flatly. “He has destroyed a holy place and killed innocent people … children.…” His voice slipped out of control.
Perrymeade’s hand covered his face, as if he’d been blind-sided by his worst fears. “God! I tried to warn you, Hanjen.… Dammit, why didn’t you answer my first call—?”
<
br /> I couldn’t see Hanjen’s face, but his whole body recoiled. “Are you blaming us for this atrocity? Humans did this—only Humans are to blame!”
Perrymeade’s gaze turned cold. “Hydran radicals kidnapped a child! Tau will not allow itself to be manipulated by terrorists—”
“Perrymeade,” I said, taking the chance of moving into his line of sight. “Don’t you get it yet?”
“Cat?” he said, and I saw his disbelief. “What the hell are you doing?” I wondered if he had any idea what had happened to me since he’d dropped me off at the hotel.
“Doing what I was ordered to do. Your job.”
He didn’t look surprised at the bitterness in my voice, but he looked confused. “Have you spoken to Miya?”
I nodded. “But she’s not listening anymore. And neither am I.”
“I don’t understand,” he said. I was sure, by the look on his face, that Borosage had cut him entirely out of the loop.
“I almost had her convinced that it made sense to give Joby back. But every time she started to believe me, Tau tried to kill us. Borosage is out of control, dammit! He’s forcing an incident, so he’ll have an excuse to kill more Hydrans. Tau’s Board has backed off him because they think that’ll save them, and Draco’s backed off Tau. I can’t talk to anybody on the Human side but you. If you sit there and let this happen, it’ll drag you down with it—” I broke off, searching his face for a reaction, for some kind of understanding. I didn’t find what I needed to see. “Even if it doesn’t, if I were you I’d never look in a mirror again.”
He looked down, as if suddenly he couldn’t face his image in my eyes or Hanjen’s. His attention flickered offscreen, distracted by something I couldn’t see. He looked back at us, at me, finally. “Someone wants to talk to you,” he said. He moved aside, making room for another floating head.
I stiffened, expecting Borosage or one of his Corpses, expecting threats—expecting anything but the face that I suddenly saw there in front of me. “Kissindre?”
She nodded. She looked as though she had as much trouble believing we were facing each other this way as I did. “Cat…?” she said, faltering. “What are you doing?”
“Why don’t you ask your uncle?” I said.
She glanced offscreen at him, back at me again. “He told me … about Miya, and the—and HARM, and the Board meeting.” She grimaced, as if the blow had left a bruise. “What are you trying to do?” She asked it again, not sounding angry, but only bewildered.
“I don’t know.…” I shook my head, rubbing my eyes, because suddenly looking at her face was like staring into the sun … like trying to do something impossible. “Kissindre … this is so fucked up. I don’t know how it got like this. It just happened too fast.”
“Cat, come back to Riverton. This is crazy. Come back now, before it goes too far, and you can’t ever … Before you get hurt. My uncle can straighten it out. I need you on the field crew—”
“I can’t.” I shook my head. “I can’t come back.”
“But—” She broke off. “Is it … it’s not because of … us?”
“No.” I looked down, knowing that was partly a lie. But even the lie was nothing compared to the truth. “It’s gone way beyond the two of us. It’s Borosage, it’s all of Tau—what they’re doing to the Hydrans. For God’s sake, they dropped a plasma burst on a monastery full of children! Your uncle couldn’t help me if he wanted to. But he can stop this.… You hear me, Perrymeade?” He had to be listening, even if I couldn’t see him. “Tau’s Board won’t control Borosage, and Draco’s out of the picture. You’ve got to stop this yourself. Get those Feds back here, and let them know what’s happening before everything goes to hell and takes you with it.”
Kissindre was looking away from me now, looking at her uncle. “Kissindre?” I said, and waited until she looked back at me. “You have to make him understand. It’s about keiretsu: He thinks he’s protecting you and his family. But you’re not going to have a research project—he’s not going to have a job, a home, or a world, if you can’t make him listen. All he’ll have will be a lot of deaths on his conscience. Maybe—maybe—if he acts before it’s too late, some of that won’t happen. But if he doesn’t it will. It will, damn it!”
“What makes you believe you’re such an expert on keiretsu, son?” Perrymeade stepped back into the picture behind Kissindre, his expression professionally empty again. “You spent most of your life nameless and creditless on the streets of a Free Trade Zone.”
My hands tightened. “I believe in ‘know your enemy,’” I said.
Something filled his face: desperation, anger, it didn’t matter what he was feeling. I knew that look … the blind stubbornness of somebody whose whole mental house of cards would collapse if he said the wrong thing or even let himself think it. “None of that is going to happen.”
Bleak-eyed, he looked past me at Hanjen. “And nothing else will happen to your people if Joby is returned unharmed by tomorrow night. Because you wouldn’t help us find his kidnappers, we … Administrator Borosage was forced to … retaliate, causing innocent people to suffer.” He took a deep breath. “We want results. Only you can give them to us. You have one day’s time to get my—to get the boy back. That’s all the time I can guarantee you.”
I saw Kissindre look at her uncle like he’d been replaced by a total stranger. “Uncle Janos? I don’t believe this!” She looked back at the screen, at me. “Cat, listen—”
Perrymeade cut the connection, and the screen went blank.
I looked down, my fists still knotted at my sides. “Damn you,” I muttered, not sure who I meant. I looked back at Hanjen, finally.
He was sitting at the table with his head in his hands, like the weight of his responsibility, of everything that had happened, had become too heavy to bear.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. I felt his grief and anger like an echo multiplying inside my own, not even able to feel the elation that should have come with any sense of him at all.
“No. I am the one who should apologize,” he said, still resting his head in his hands. There was no accusation in his eyes as he looked up at me. “There was nothing you could have done to change anything.” He glanced away at the empty screen. “There is nothing he can do to stop it, either. He is as powerless as I am to control the situation.”
I frowned. “Then why did we just do this?”
“Because you felt so strongly that we should.” He sat back in his chair with a shrug. “‘Your Way or my Way,’ we say. ‘It is different for everyone.… Who knows which is more true.’ “
But I’m not even a precog. I swore under my breath.
“Perrymeade’s niece—she was more to you than just your team leader. And you were—”
“That’s over,” I muttered. “All of that is over.”
He looked at me strangely, as if what I was feeling now was incomprehensible … or maybe just unreachable.
“What about Miya?” I asked, turning his stare back on him. “And Naoh? What are they to you?” Remembering that he had worked with Perrymeade to get Miya the training that let her help Joby. He must have been the one to choose her. And the way he’d reacted when he saw them, the way they’d reacted toward him, at the monastery, hadn’t been the way strangers treated each other.
“They are my foster daughters,” he murmured. “I raised them … tried to raise them … after their parents were—”
“Murdered,” I said, before he could backtrack. “How did it happen?”
“I—” He broke off, struggling with something deeper than memory, the emotion naked on his face.
Seeing him lose that much control scared me, because it told me how close to the edge even he was getting. I wondered if my face—not Human enough, not Hydran enough, with no psi to give him feedback—was what kept making him look away from me.
When his face and voice were under control again, he said, “Their parents were my closest friends, like family. They were detained, a
long with some others, after a demonstration years ago, when the girls were small. After they were released and sent back here, there was an illness—some called it a plague—that spread through the Community. Many people became sick; the ones who had been detained were the first. Some of the sick ones died—including my friends. Those who recovered were sterile.”
“Shit,” I breathed. “Miya … and Naoh—?” I got up, crossed the room to sit at the table beside him.
He nodded, his mouth crushed into a line. “The illness struck only the Community, not the Humans. Some people said the Humans caused it.”
I shook my head, more in disbelief than denial. “Is that … Do you know for certain—?”
“I have never seen proof of it.” He meant seen proof of it in a Human mind. “I know some who believe they have. The Humans say they don’t know where the plague came from; that the cloud-whales created it, or it was something from the sacred ground.…”
The reefs. “I don’t know. The Humans synthesized a vaccine, but not until many of us had died—or become sterile.”
I wondered whether that was why I’d seen so few children in Freaktown, why his voice had broken when he’d spoken the word to Perrymeade … why he lived alone, with no sign of ever having had any family except, once, Miya and her sister. I didn’t ask; couldn’t. “Did you know—about the Satoh, about Naoh, and what Miya was planning?”
“No,” he said, almost angrily. “Not until tonight. I had not seen Naoh in a long time. She became bitter—she was always bitter—” He broke off. “Miya was very young when their parents died; perhaps she doesn’t remember, the way Naoh does. But—” His gaze turned distant. “Naoh always saw the Way as a straight line.… Miya saw it as a spiral. She told me once that the Way is meant to lead to wisdom, not to happiness.”
“Oblivion,” I muttered. “That’s where Naoh’s Way is leading them. She’s like quicksand, and she’s sucking Miya down with the rest of them.”