“You have followed the Way to safety,” Naoh said, aloud, glancing at the others as she spoke. As her gaze came back to Miya, what looked like relief finally showed on her face.
“Thank Bian,” Miya said. Her voice was too even, too controlled. “What is that you’re wearing?” She gestured, and I saw something I halfway recognized hanging from a strap around Naoh’s neck.
Naoh glanced down at it, up again. “A gas mask,” she said.
I glanced away at the others around us, only realizing now that most of them had on the same thing. I swore under my breath.
“So you did believe me—?” Miya demanded. “When I told you they would use the gas? You said it was a lie!”
Naoh shrugged. “It made sense. I thought we should be prepared.”
“But you went ahead with the rally. You didn’t warn the Community. You let our people be hurt, killed, taken by Corporate Security—”
“It had to be done,” Naoh said calmly. “You know that it did.”
“I know that’s what you believe—” Miya said. Her voice thickened; she took a deep breath. “Where was my gas mask, then, Naoh?”
“We didn’t have enough for everyone. Even within our group, we had to draw lots,” Naoh snapped, “as you can see. Most people escaped anyway. But you would have had a mask if you hadn’t left me when you did, for him.” She jerked her hand at me, and suddenly I wondered whether she meant at the rally or for good.
“He came back to us. I said he would,” Miya answered.
Naoh’s mouth twisted. “Back to you, anyway.”
Miya frowned.
“That’s not true,” I said, realizing now that Naoh had been letting me hear this for a reason. “You know how I feel about Tau. You know I believe they have to be stopped. You can prove it, if you want to—” I broke off, holding her gaze while I tried to think of what to say next, how to say it in a way that wouldn’t make her turn on me again. If there was a chance in hell of salvaging anything from this disaster, the only hope I had of finding it was to stay close to Miya and Joby, and that meant staying with the Satoh.
“He was right about what would happen, Naoh,” Miya said. Her voice was steady again. “Right about Tau. He saw the Way clearly. He showed me—”
“You have no precognition,” Naoh said to me. “You’re just a telepath—not even that.” She dismissed my Gift with a wave of her hand.
“But I know how Humans think,” I said.
She frowned. “You were the one who proved to me that we would succeed—”
“What? What are you talking about?”
“You said that it was possible to use the Gift to break into the Humans’ computer net. If that was true, then there had to be ways to keep the Humans from using their other technology against us.”
“Except you knew they’d use the gas,” I said.
“I didn’t know that,” she answered coldly. “I saw that they might … but the Way showed me that even if that did happen, we would still win in the end. Even Humans have used nonviolent protest to force their enemies out of their homeland. Miya told me of the Human leader Gandhi—”
“Gandhi?” I repeated, incredulous.
“He forced a Human government to free his people without violence. The Allsoul answered his prayers—”
“God had nothing to do with it,” I snapped. “Gandhi got lucky, that’s all.” The bitter pill of Earth history I’d swallowed whole spat up the story from somewhere deep in my memory. “He was dealing with an empire that was falling apart. Humans had just gone through a genocidal world war. The colonial government didn’t want to look like genocides, so they backed off. And that was Humans against Humans! If Gandhi had tried nonviolent protest on Tau, he’d have been dead meat. So would all his followers. Just like we were today. Tau doesn’t care; Tau doesn’t have to.” I got to my feet, pacing in front of her. “If there’s a universal justice balancing the scales for you, where was it today?” I waved a hand at the sullen survivors. “I didn’t see any miracles happen, did you?”
“You have no right to question my vision!” She pointed at my head. “The Way has many turnings! We gathered for a peaceful protest. The Humans attacked us without provocation. When the reports go out over the Net, everyone will know that. We will be saved in the end.”
“Damn it, you can’t be that naive!” My voice rose with my anger. “Combines control everything about their communications. It’s lies, damn lies, and corporate hype. There are no Indy News hypers here to report the truth; what happened today will never reach the Net. I couldn’t even send a personal message. Any proof of what happened to us is already buried in CorpSec’s files.”
“That isn’t true,” Naoh protested. Everyone’s eyes were on us now. “This is too big. There were too many witnesses—Human witnesses. The FTA will hear of it. And then it will all still happen as I said!” Her voice shook.
How is that going to bring back the dead—? Miya’s hand tightened over my arm before I could say it. I felt her in my head, begging me to stop: (She knows! Naoh knows what she’s done—)
I choked back the furious words, grateful that Naoh couldn’t read my mind, as Miya made me realize what Naoh must be feeling when she looked from face to face around this room. She must know that no more Satoh were coming back; that she’d sacrificed God only knew how many other innocent lives for a kind of justice that didn’t exist on this side of death … and probably not even on the other. Her holy vision was bleeding to death before our eyes, her illusion of control lay smashed like an empty jug.
And yet I still believed in the things she believed in. I knew that the things she wanted for our people, the things she’d made Miya and all the rest willing to die for, were just and true.
I rubbed my face, wiping away all expression, realizing that I had to stop pushing before I was the one who pushed Naoh over the edge. Any murder a Hydran committed became a murder-suicide: I didn’t want to be responsible for what happened when murder and suicide were exactly what someone wanted. “Have you got a way to monitor the news?” I asked. “Does anyone over here have a netlink—a headset, or even a threedy?”
“There are a few information kiosks,” Miya said. She glanced at Naoh and back at me again, letting me feel her relief. “We can watch Tau’s programming there.” She got up, crossing the room to pick up Joby as he woke and began to make inarticulate cries.
“Then maybe someone ought to do that,” I said as Miya soothed Joby and brought him back to my side. “Cat,” he said, reaching out to me, and I smiled as Miya settled him into my arms.
I glanced at Naoh, saw her watching the three of us together. Her eyes were unreadable, the pupils narrowed to slits. I looked away.
“Daeh and Remu are already at the kiosk behind the shelter,” Naoh murmured, “waiting for news. They will let us know if they see something.”
I nodded, wondering how long they were going to keep that vigil. No news was bad news, but any response at all from Tau was worse. Feeling helpless, hating the feeling, I asked, “Are the news kiosks tied into Tau’s comm net?”
“I suppose,” Miya said. Everyone else around her looked blank. They’d never even had databands; they must all be as computer illiterate as I’d been for most of my life. But maybe that was about to change … maybe I could change it. “Why?” she asked.
“Because if we can pry open a cyberspace window, maybe we can bypass their censors long enough to get a message off-world that would make a difference—”
“What kind of a difference?” Naoh demanded. Her voice hovered just this side of suspicion.
“In whether any of us have a reason to go on living,” I said. “Or even a choice about it.” She frowned, but she was listening. “The Gift lets you access properties of the quantum field to manipulate both matter and energy. That includes the electromagnetic spectrum. The Net—where all the Human Federation’s data is stored and processed—occupies part of the EM spectrum. A psion who knows how can access the Net matrix …
even change it.”
“Then show us!” she said, her eyes coming alive. “Show us now. With that we can take their power for ourselves, use it to destroy them from the inside—”
I looked away, suddenly afraid of what was in her eyes. “It’s not that simple. It isn’t simple at all. Tau’s internal security programs can flatline an intruder—and that kills you just as dead as any real-world weapon. You can get lost inside the Net; if you do, your body sits and waits for you until it starves to death. I might know enough to insert a message into their off-world uplink, even without my databand. I’m not even sure I can do that from a public access.” I looked at Miya again. “I need you to come with me. I need your help.”
“Why?” Naoh asked, the sharpness back in her voice.
“Because I can’t do what I need to do on my own. And she’s the only one of you who can get far enough into my head to follow me.” I went on looking at Miya. “I need you.”
She glanced at Joby, up at me again. She was the only one here aside from me who knew enough about Human technology to have any understanding of what this could mean. She nodded, with a strange light in her eyes. “I’ll take you there.” She lifted Joby from my arms, touching me as she did, and handed him to a woman named Ladu. I realized that she never gave him to Naoh. She put her hand on my arm again as she glanced at Naoh. I wasn’t sure whether she was helping herself focus or making a point. All I knew, as her sister looked back at us, was that whatever Naoh was feeling, it wasn’t good.
The whirlpool of spacial dislocation sucked me down into Miya’s mind and away from there.
TWENTY
THE TWO NERVOUS Satoh waiting in the shadows beneath a building’s overhang actually jumped—and nearly jumped us—as we appeared on the street beside them. They shook their heads, backing off, their fear fading to relief as Miya silently explained why we were here.
Except for the four of us, the street was completely empty. Across from where we stood was the information kiosk, a reminder of Tau’s inescapable presence in the composite-and-alloy flesh. The kiosk’s fused surface, with ghost-images floating through it, looked starkly alien against the ancient, pitted walls.
I noticed that somehow someone had found a way to scrawl “FUCK TAU” in Standard on the kiosk’s impervious base and make it stick. I stopped long enough to stare in admiration, wondering how they’d managed that. Somewhere I’d heard that clothing wasn’t universal among intelligent beings, but ornamentation was—the need to stand out, to be special. I wondered whether that included writing on walls.
I looked back at the two Satoh waiting uneasily beside Miya. “I need you to watch our backs,” I said, gesturing at the street. They glanced at Miya and then nodded, drifting away through the shadows.
I waited until they’d gone as far as they were going to before I crossed the open space to the kiosk.
Miya followed me. “You don’t want them to know what you’re doing,” she said. It wasn’t really a question. She searched my face, uncertain—because, I realized, I was uncertain.
I nodded, trying to center my attention on the displays. The vidscreen was still spewing mindless corporate hype, as if nothing desperate or terrible or criminally insane had happened today, as if every moment was only a replay of the same perfect moment in the best of all possible worlds.… “Welcome to reality,” I whispered to it. I tightened my hands, limbering my fingers above the glowing displays.
Miya was staring, hypnotized, her face reflecting the empty face of the Tau news report. She glanced up as I spoke, and I realized she thought the words had been meant for her.
I shook my head, half answering both her spoken and unspoken questions. I looked down at the array of options again, the familiar touchboard and half a dozen accesses. Seeing what I needed to see: a fully operational port. Tau must have placed these in Freaktown for the convenience of visiting Riverton citizens, since none of this was likely to mean anything, or do anything, for Hydrans who didn’t have databands.
“Talk to me,” Miya said, jarring me out of my meditation on the interfaces between worlds. “Why are you afraid to go on with this?”
“Am I?” I said, surprised.
She nodded.
I took a deep breath. “Because maybe it won’t work.… Because if it does work, what Naoh said will be true: If I teach this to you, and you teach it to the Satoh, you will be able to destroy Tau from the inside. And even after what they’ve done—”
“You’re still partly Human,” she finished gently. “And you don’t want innocent people hurt because of you.”
I nodded, looking down.
“Neither do I, Bian,” she said. (Neither do I, nasheirtah.) Placing it softly in my mind, where her presence could remind me of why I was here in the first place, and why she was here inside me, only her, out of all the ones who’d tried.
“I know,” I murmured, with eyes only for her. (I know. But, Naoh …) “Miya, promise me that when we get back you’ll stay linked to me. Naoh can’t affect me the way she does the others. Let me be your reality check.”
She nodded, her thoughts clouded with the memory of her sister’s betrayal. She shut her eyes; when she opened them again, they were clear of all emotion. “Now, show me—” She gestured at the kiosk.
I looked back at the displays, trying to find the words to explain what we had to do, wishing it was easier for me to just show her, the way it should have been. “Has your psi ever picked up any electromagnetic spillage over in Riverton—the energy flux around a piece of equipment, or maybe from a security field?”
She nodded again. I let her reach deeper as she searched my mind for images that would clarify the words. Even when she’d worked for Tau—needed to know their technology in order to use it—she hadn’t been given more than minimal access to the most basic equipment.
I thought about Deadeye, who’d taught these secrets to me, trying to remember the exact words and images he’d used to teach me … remembering the abuse he’d heaped on me with his mouth that was worse than his festering artificial eyeball: his first line of defense against the psi-hating deadheads who’d have crucified him for what he knew. It had kept away everybody but me, because the Gift had let me see past all that.
“The point is that psions are born with the biological hardware already in our heads. Humans make it illegal for us to get implants, to keep us from getting our share of their tech and the profits. But we never even needed their stupid implants. Because we can access the QM spectrum directly; we don’t need artificial conduits to interface with the Net.” I laughed once. It sounded cold and bitter, like the wind.
Her pupils widened as the possibilities began to register. “How did you learn all this?”
I looked down at Deadeye’s handmade sweater, layered over a Hydran tunic under a stranger’s worn coat. I touched it, remembering. “Someone trusted me.”
She glanced at the displays in front of us. She was silent for a long moment before she looked back at me again. “How do you make it happen?”
“We use an open window and slip into the system. Once we’re inside we’re like ghosts. We’re not interfacing electronically: The security programs are designed to watch for electronic tampering. Most of them are too narrow-focus to register us. Tau doesn’t have any real on-world competition, so I don’t figure its internal security will be very tight. The hard part will be inserting our data and routing it where it needs to go.”
She rubbed her neck, smearing dirt and sweat. “How do we start?”
“I can’t tell you.” (I have to show you. Stay with me, help me focus, or I can’t—) I felt her strengthen the mindlink between us until it was like monofilament.
I studied the displays around the droning threedy report. Without a databand, I couldn’t even open a window to bring the port’s basic functions on-line. I pressed my fingertip to a jack coupling, and felt a dim buzz feed inward through my nerve endings. (Our minds have got to go down there. Can you use your teek to form a condu
it?)
I felt her hesitate, concentrating; felt my arm and then my hand begin to tingle with cold fire. For a second I thought I saw aura shimmer around me, not with my normal vision but with my Third Eye, my Sixth Sense, the nameless receptors that sometimes picked up the energy signature of Human-made systems like this one. I felt all my senses jump as her telekinesis pried open an access, mating my body’s electrical system with the machine’s.
Relief followed my surprise as the feedback didn’t kill us. At least she knew enough about Human tech to know what an electric shock could do. (Perfect,) I thought, letting her feel my smile. (Now we have to retune to the frequencies coming through from the other side. It’s outside the normal psi spectrum. Like this.…) I let her feel my own senses begin to readjust. (Once we’re inside, don’t let go of me or we’ll both be in there forever. It’s another universe, and I don’t know the neighborhood any better than you do.)
(Then how will we know where to go?) she asked.
(Virtual reality … like the instructional sims Tau used to train you. Your brain creates the imagery as it tries to interpret the neural stimuli.…) It didn’t sound very reassuring, even to me. (I can navigate us where we have to go,) I said, pushing on before she had time to point that out, (but I can’t change anything, touch anything, in there. I need telekinesis to do that—you’ll have to lend me yours.)
(I’m ready,) she thought. I felt her wonder becoming hunger as powerful as my need for the Gift she shared with me.
(Trust me—?) I thought as I continued the slow retuning of my thoughts, reaching beyond the range where I felt her clearly, into a new frequency where no biological intelligence had ever been intended to operate.
(Trust me …) she answered, her mind folding around me, compressing us both down, down into the singularity of the machine. Constructing a conduit, deconstructing the barriers between matter and energy, she poured the clarified fluid of our combined thoughts through the synapses of my body, turning my nervous system into a bioware jack.
We arced across the access she’d opened and into the nervous system of the Net. Cyberspace manifested around us like we’d been startled awake from a dream. I looked down at my body, saw a glowing energy being with bones made of white light … saw her joined to me body-to-body, two separate beings of thought merged in a lover’s union more intimate than anything my mind had ever dreamed of.