I heard the whine of equipment shutting down as the workers stopped, without being ordered to, and turned to look at me. The foreman frowned, thought about ordering them back to work, then thought better of it. She crossed the floor to us. “What the hell do you mean, a volatile pocket—?” It was the thing the work crews were most afraid of: hitting some unfinished thought that would turn out to have an unstable molecular structure. There were too few divers, spread too thin, to do a thorough job of exploring every millimeter of reef-face. “You can’t predict—” No one could, not even the divers or their techs, with absolute certainty. No one Human.
“I can,” I said, making her look at my eyes.
She swore, turned to the guard. “A freak? They let a freak in here—?”
The guard shrugged. “Natasa wants him now.”
“What do you know about this—?” the foreman asked me. She gestured at the reef behind her. It was more of an accusation than a question.
“I’m a diver—”
“That doesn’t mean you can see through walls, freak,” she snapped.
I shrugged; grimaced as it hurt my chest. “Go ahead then,” I muttered. “Don’t check it out. Just let me get away from here before you blow yourselves up.” I started on, making the guard scramble to catch up.
“Hey!” the crew chief shouted, but I didn’t look back.
We reached another tram stop. As we waited there, I listened for an explosion behind us. It didn’t come. I didn’t know if I was glad or sorry.
The tram let us out in another area of the complex I’d never seen: one that looked too pleasant, too open. Everything I saw told me any bondie who got this far would regret he’d seen it.
Natasa’s office was just as open, just as unprotected. Maybe nobody believed a real problem would ever get this far. I wondered whether the forest of potted plants along the wall was real or just a good-looking sim, like the virtual view through the window behind his desk. It wasn’t a view of this world.
“You want him in binders, sir?” the guard asked, pulling my attention back to Natasa.
Natasa shook his head, looking at me with unreadable eyes.
His hands lay empty and motionless on the surface of his desk. All I could tell from his expression was that he didn’t think I was any threat.
The guard left the office, leaving us there alone. I stared at Natasa, and he stared at me, and all I could think about was pain: the pain in my chest, the pain in my memories, pain overflowing until it seemed to fill all the world … and more pain coming, now that we were finally face-to-face. He lifted his hand and made a gesture I didn’t understand; I kept expecting to see him pull a weapon.
Someone stepped through the wall of greenery—holo; it was only a holo—and into the room. Natasa’s wife, Joby’s mother. She was alone, wearing lab clothing.
I backed up a step as I recognized her, almost lost my balance as it made my vision strobe.
They both looked at me like they thought I was about to bolt. I stood with my knees locked, staring back at them. Ling Natasa took a seat near her husband, glancing at him then with a half frown that could have meant anything. Perrymeade would have told Natasa to make sure I paid. Somehow I hadn’t thought his wife would want to watch. Or help. No matter how hard I tried, I never seemed to underestimate Human behavior completely enough.
I went on standing, waiting, damned if I’d be the first one to speak. My hands tightened over the loose cloth of my pants legs.
“Sit down, Cat,” Ling Natasa said, finally, when her husband still didn’t say anything. I stood numbly. “We just want to ask you some questions.”
I glanced away, saw two seats like cupped hands in a corner. I backed up slowly, sat in one, trying not to stumble, not to take my eyes off them, not to show any sign of weakness. Sweat tracked down the side of my face. I wiped it away, pushed my filthy hair out of my eyes. I stank; I wondered if they could smell me from across the room.
“We want to talk to you about our son,” Burnell Natasa said finally. He touched something on his desk/terminal. An image of Joby appeared, floating above the desktop. I looked away from it. “What did you do to him, you and Miya—?” There was no anger in his voice. “He was … all right. And then—” He glanced at his wife. There’d been enough left of what the reefs had given Joby that she’d seen it too, even as she’d seen it disappear.
“Is … anything left?” I asked, finally. “Is he any better?”
Ling Natasa nodded, her lips pressed into a line. “Enough,” she murmured. “Enough so that we know, enough so that he knows—” She broke off suddenly.
I slumped back in the seat, my eyes blurring out of focus. I stared at the image of some other world’s blue-green seas and sky beyond the virtual window behind the desk. I wondered whether its seasons changed; if their fantasy world had seasons.
“How did you make it happen?” She asked it this time, and the real world of sorrow and pain was suddenly surrounding us again, and I was drowning in it.
“You said it was something about that place, the reefs—” Burnell Natasa’s voice prodded me when I still didn’t say anything. “Answer her, damn it!” He started up from his seat.
His wife gestured sharply, shaking her head. He dropped back into his chair. “Are you afraid to tell us?” she asked me. “Why?”
I thought about something I could have said, and then something else, and something else. Finally I just held up my wrist.
Burnell Natasa frowned, staring at the bond tag until comprehension came into his eyes. His wife didn’t even look surprised. “This is off the record,” he murmured, glancing away.
“Yeah, right,” I said, and saw his face harden again.
“It’s our son,” Ling Natasa said.
It’s my freedom. But I didn’t say it, and she went on, “We know you helped him … how well you cared for him. We know that you must … love him … too.” She cleared her throat. “We’ve lost Miya. You’re all the hope he has left.”
I covered my face with my hand, feeling sick and giddy as the adrenaline rush of my fear subsided. “I told you everything I knew,” I mumbled. “Something about the reefs out there, on the Homeland … it cleared out the static, or completed damaged circuits in his brain. I don’t know how. It freed my psi, and … and his.” I let my hand drop, looked up at them as the silence stretched.
“Joby’s not a psion,” Ling Natasa murmured. “There’s no Hydran blood—”
“It was the accident,” I said. “Before he was born.… The reefs did it to him. A mutation.”
She blanched.
“That’s impossible—” Burnell Natasa snapped.
“No, it’s not,” she said faintly.
“You only have to tweak a couple of genes in the right DNA codestrings to make the difference between a”—a freak and a deadhead—“a Hydran and a Human,” I said. “I’m a half-breed. If it wasn’t true, I wouldn’t be here.”
He stared at me like I’d suddenly started speaking a different language. I ran the words back through my head, to make sure I hadn’t said them in Hydran.
They looked at each other while the implications settled on them as silently and inevitably as dreamfall.
Slowly, almost painfully, Ling Natasa reached out to take her husband’s hand. She looked back at me. “The accident … the reefs … damaged Joby before he was born. And now you’re telling me the reefs have a way to … to heal him?” She shook her head as she asked, as though she didn’t want to hear the answer. “It sounds like you’re talking about—God.…”
“No,” I said softly. “I’m talking about something alien. Tau thinks you can just go in there and take the reefs apart, read what you find there like binary code … but Humans didn’t make it. Humans don’t understand it. A work gang nearly blew itself up today because they missed a volatile pocket—”
“When?” Ling Natasa demanded.
“On my way here.”
They glanced at each other again. “How co
uld you know that?” she asked.
I told her. “How many ‘accidents’ are there in a place like this, from year to year? How many people die?” I didn’t get an answer. I didn’t need one; I saw the truth in their faces. “The Feds are sending another inspection team to Refuge—”
Their faces froze like they already knew. “They aren’t coming to this installation again,” Ling Natasa said, too quickly. “They’re not even stopping here.”
“You could still contact them. You know what Tau’s negligence did to you … to Joby.” I struggled to keep the desperation out of my voice. “Keiretsu is supposed to mean family. Family is … is about real people protecting each other, about your loyalty to the ones you love, not your duty to some ideology. Governments change their policies like you change the security codes. Relationships between people have to mean more than that. Don’t they?”
Burnell Natasa shook his head. “No. Tau takes care of us—they take care of Joby. If we turn on them, we’ll have nothing. No matter what happened to Tau, we’d lose. We can’t.” He glanced at his wife again. Her hands were clenched in her lap so hard that the knuckles were white, but she didn’t say anything. The seconds dripped like tears.
“Then are you going to tell Tau about the monastery—that the untouched reefs on the Hydran Homeland are hiding some kind of miracle cure?”
“It’s our duty,” Ling Natasa said tonelessly. “And … maybe that—miracle is our only hope for Joby.”
“What if Tau destroys the thing you’re looking for? They don’t understand half of what they find as it is. They would’ve ripped that reef apart a century ago if they did.”
“What other choice do we have?” Burnell Natasa asked sourly.
I wondered whether it was actually that hard to imagine or whether his mind was really as much of a cypher as it seemed to me. “You could try working with the Hydrans, instead of raping their world. They knew what that place does … that’s why they built a monastery there.”
Ling Natasa opened her mouth, but nothing came out of it. She closed it again, her face colorless. She held the holo of Joby gently in her hands. Her husband shook his head, gazing at the image. Never happen, their faces said, filling with grief and resignation. Impossible. As impossible as that their son had actually walked and talked freely. As impossible as that he’d ever do it again.
Tau had no trouble seeing the Hydrans as less than Human—dangerous and inscrutable—because they were so much like Humans that the differences were obvious. The cloud-whales, and the by-products of their sentience, were so far off the scale of Human experience that Humans had no reference point to use in judging them. Tau’s researchers were like blind men, each of them touching a different part of the unknown, none of them able to grasp the full implications of what they held in their hands.
The room was hot, or maybe it was the fever burning inside me. I wiped my face, trying to concentrate. “I told you … everything.…” The words sounded slow and thick, and in the middle of the sentence I forgot what I was trying to say. I shook my head.
“Are you all right?” Ling Natasa asked. Small lines formed between her eyebrows as she frowned.
I laughed, sure that must be some kind of twisted joke. “I told you everything I know,” I repeated, trying to get all the way through the sentence this time. “I have to get back to work. They’re waiting for me.” Hardly daring to hope this could be the end of it. I still wasn’t sure why they weren’t treating me the way Perrymeade had. They had as much right to. Maybe they’d just been waiting until I’d told them what they wanted to know. I began to get up, not really believing I’d reach the door before someone stopped me.
I never even made it to my feet. My legs buckled as I put weight on them and suddenly I was down on my knees. I pulled myself up again, feeling a kind of disbelief.
Ling Natasa was in front of me when I turned around, raising her hand. I tried to dodge, but Burnell Natasa’s hand gripped my arm hard, holding me there.
She lifted her hand to my face, and I flinched. But she only touched my forehead. Her palm was cool and dry. She pulled her hand away again as if I’d burned her. I jerked like a trapped animal as she pulled open my stained coveralls with the steady matter-of-factness of a researcher, or maybe the mother of a damaged child. Her husband’s hold on me tightened until I swore, not sure where I hurt more, as she bared the wound. I heard him mutter something that sounded like a curse, heard her indrawn breath.
“Don’t,” I mumbled, feeling my bare flesh crawl. “Oh, shit—” Not sure whether the sight of the wound or what I was afraid she was going to do next made me say it.
Ling Natasa drew my coveralls together over the wound again, hiding it. Burnell Natasa gave me a rough shake, still holding on to my arm. “Damn it,” he said, like he thought I was losing it, “we’re not trying to hurt you—” hurting me anyway.
“Then why’m I here?” I said thickly.
They didn’t answer that. “Did you get that burn here at the installation?” he demanded.
I shook my head. “Borosage.…” I felt more than saw them look at each other, with something in the look passing between them that they didn’t bother to explain to me.
“Get him to the infirmary,” Ling Natasa murmured to her husband. “Before he goes into septic shock.” She glanced at me again. I almost thought there was apology in her eyes, but maybe it was only loss, and not even meant for me. She disappeared through the virtual green, and I didn’t see her again.
TWENTY-EIGHT
BURNELL NATASA ESCORTED me to the infirmary himself. He had to hold me up more than once along the way, because my knees kept giving out.
The med techs stared as he brought me in, like the end of the world would have been easier for them to believe than the sight of the Chief of Security dropping off a sick bondie.
“See that his injury is properly treated,” was all Natasa said. He left me in a chair.
They treated my burn without comment, without any surprise. Maybe they saw a lot of them. I lay back and let it happen, thinking about things I could have said to Natasa before he left, not sure if I was glad or sorry that I hadn’t said anything.
I was still dozing, half awake under the regeneration lamp, when two crew bosses came into the infirmary. They headed directly toward me. I pushed up onto my elbows and watched them, suddenly wary. One of them was the foreman of the crew I’d warned earlier about the volatile pocket. The other one was Feng, my own crew boss.
“Him—?” Feng asked, gesturing at me.
“Yeah, that’s the one.” The other foreman nodded. “The freak. How’d you get a freak on your crew?”
I stiffened, wondering whether somehow I’d been wrong about the volatile pocket. Which meant that I could be in trouble all over again.
“He’s new. Maybe it’s an experiment. Nobody tells me anything.” Feng shrugged, glancing at me without really seeing me. He wasn’t a sadist, but he wasn’t a nice guy, either. I didn’t like the thought of being on his shit list. “Ixpa says he’s good with the field suit.” Ixpa was the head phase-field technician. Feng looked directly at me, finally. “Did you tell Rosenblum, here, they were going to hit a volatile pocket this shift?”
I nodded.
“We checked it out. You were right,” Rosenblum said. “How did you know that?”
“I sensed it.” I lay down again, weak with sudden relief. “I can sense the reefs—” I broke off, seeing how they looked at me and then looked at each other. It hadn’t sounded strange to me until I saw how strange it sounded to them.
“What are you doing here?” Rosenblum asked me, finally. I figured she meant at the installation, not in the infirmary.
“Penance,” I said.
Feng’s face hardened. “I don’t like smartasses any better than I like freaks. Answer her.”
“I don’t know,” I muttered, looking down. I couldn’t even think of a way to explain the truth to two Humans already looking at me the way these two were.
They stood a minute longer, scratching an ear, shifting from foot to foot. Then Rosenblum shrugged. “Doesn’t matter, anyway. From now on, you’re our canary in the mine shaft, kid. You do special rounds every day; you go from one excavation face to another. You ‘feel’ them, or whatever the hell it is you do. You make sure they’re safe to work on.”
I wondered what the hell a canary was; if it was anything like a mebtaku. “Okay,” I said. The more people there were here who had an interest in keeping me alive, the better.
“You think the vips will clear that?” Feng said skeptically. “Letting a freak wander all over the complex?”
“He’s our freak,” Rosenblum said, and laughed. She tapped the bond tag on my wrist. “Besides, Natasa already ordered it.”
“The Chief of Security—?”
Rosenblum shook her head. “His wife. She came and asked me about what the freak did today.”
Feng whistled between his teeth. “When’s this one getting out of here?” he called to a med tech.
“Tonight,” someone answered.
“You can start your rounds tomorrow, then,” Feng said to me. “I’ll get it set up.” He turned away, his attention already back on Rosenblum. Neither of them asked what was wrong with me. Maybe they’d heard; maybe they didn’t care. They headed for the door and went out. Neither one of them had thanked me for saving lives today.
But maybe Ling Natasa had.
* * *
After that I spent my days going from excavation site to excavation site, wading into newly exposed reef-face to listen, feel, sense the alien moods of the dreamfall; second-guessing the spectrographic and biochem analyses, the dozens of different readings each team had taken on its own. Once in a while I walked into a pocket of something bad; once in a while I discovered something good, something so off-center that the equipment hadn’t been able to interpret it. Nothing big—nothing as obvious as the thing I’d caught on the way to Natasa’s office.
No one seemed to mind, as long as it meant they were a little safer. I was glad to learn that anomalies big enough to blow an entire work team to hell didn’t get ignored often, even by overworked, undermanned crews under constant pressure to produce profit miracles.