I lay on the bed without moving for a long time. After a while the room thought I’d gone to sleep, and turned off the lights. I barely noticed, lost in the dark streets of memory, colliding again and again with the image of a woman’s anguished face, her voice begging me to help her. They want to take my child.… But it hadn’t been her child. Political, they’d said. Radicals, dissidents. She’d been taking care of the child—a boy, they said it was a boy, couldn’t have been more than three or four. Why had she said that—why that, why to me…? She didn’t know me, couldn’t know what those words would do, couldn’t know what had happened once, long ago, far away, to a woman like her, with a child like me … the darkness, the screams, and then the blinding end of everything. The darkness … falling and falling into the darkness.
FOUR
I WOKE UP again sprawled across the same perfect bed in the same perfect hotel room, just the way I’d left consciousness last night. My new clothes looked like I’d been mugged in them. I felt like I’d been mugged in them.
Sunrise was pouring through the window, which had been a wall last night, and the room was telling me courteously and endlessly to get my butt out of bed. I shook my hair out of my eyes and checked the time. “Jeezu!” I muttered. In another five minutes the team was due to leave for the research base Tau had set up on the Hydran Homeland.
I rolled out of bed, realizing as I tried to stand up how hung-over I was. I stripped off my reception clothes, swearing at every bruise I uncovered. Even naked, there was no escape from the bitter memory of last night. I hurled the wad of clothing across the room. Then I pulled on the worn tunic and denim pants, the heavy jacket and boots that were the only kind of clothing I’d owned, or needed, until yesterday. There was nothing I could do about the scabs on my face or the dirt in my hair. I knotted a kerchief around my head and hoped no one looked at me.
I started out of the room, still feeling queasy, stepped back inside long enough to stick on a detox patch and empty a handful of crushed crackers out of the pocket of my formal jacket. I stuffed the crackers into my mouth and took the lift down.
I got out into the greenbelt square in front of the hotel on the heels of Mapes, the team’s multisense spectroscopist. The rest of the team members were already there, eager to get their first view of the reefs. I pulled on my gloves and nodded good morning, not too obviously out of breath. A couple of the others looked at me twice, at the skid marks of last night all over my face. But they didn’t ask.
“Morning,” I said as Kissindre came up to me, dressed like I was now.
I saw her falter as she stopped by me. “Are you all right?” she asked, keeping it between the two of us, like the look she gave me as she touched my arm.
I didn’t flinch away. “Sure,” I said. “Corporate Security used to beat me up all the time.”
Her breath caught, and I realized, too late, that she thought I meant something by it.
“Just kidding,” I murmured, but she didn’t believe me. “I’m fine. Did they get the kidnapper?”
Her gaze flickered. “No. Cat … that Hydran woman—was there more to what happened than you told Sand last night?”
I wondered who’d told her to ask me that. “No.”
“Why did you leave the reception, then? Was it Ezra?”
“Give me more credit,” I said. I looked away, frowning, because her eyes wouldn’t leave me alone. “The Hydrans.”
She stood a moment without saying anything. Finally, carefully, she asked, “You mean, because you’re half Hydran…?”
I shook my head.
“Then—”
“Leave it alone, Kissindre.”
She glanced down, with the look on her face that only I seemed to cause.
“It’s not important,” I said, feeling like a bastard. “It’s over. I just want to forget about it.”
She nodded, but I saw her doubt, the unanswered questions.
“How was your visit with your uncle?” Only asking because I had to say something, anything else.
She shrugged, pushing the corners of her mouth up. “Fine.” For a minute I almost believed it, because she almost believed it. But then her face fell, as if the weight of the lie was too much. “Their neighbors really don’t know he’s the Alien Affairs Commissioner.” She stared up into the sky, as if she’d discovered something incredible in the empty heights. “They really don’t know.” Her fists clenched inside her coat pockets, straining at the heavy cloth. “They don’t.”
I let my breath out; it sounded like a laugh, instead of the anger that was half choking me.
“Kiss—” Ezra Ditreksen came up beside her, putting his arm around her. “Missed you.…” He leaned over and kissed her on the mouth.
I looked away, figuring he was making a point. I searched my pockets for a camph, remembering that he hadn’t been with her at the Corporate Security station last night. Maybe after the way he’d made Perrymeade look at the reception, he hadn’t been invited.
“What happened to you?” he said, to me this time. “Did you get in a fight, for God’s sake?”
I stuck the camph in my mouth, letting him have a good look at the bruises and the split lip. That he had to ask meant that he didn’t actually know what had happened to me last night, that none of the others did. Suddenly I felt a lot better. “I fell down,” I said.
He grimaced, disgusted, while all the expression disappeared from Kissindre’s face. “I told you he was drunk,” he muttered.
“Ezra,” she said, frowning. It seemed to be the only thing she ever said to him, at least in my presence.
“You’re lucky you didn’t get into trouble with Corporate Security, going off like that,” Ezra said to me. “Aside from the fact that you insulted our hosts.”
I moved away, before I did something he’d regret for longer than I would.
A vibration that was both more and less than noise filled the air above me. I glanced up with the others, to see a transport dropping down out of the early morning sky. It settled onto the smooth surface of the landing terrace; its metallic skin flooded with logos in Tau’s combine colors, endless safety warnings, and a diarrhea of instructions.
The hatch opened and Protz stepped out, wearing thermal clothing. I saw other figures waiting behind him in the shadowed interior. I wondered whether any of them were Hydran, since the whole reason for our team’s existence was to study the cloud-reefs the Hydrans considered sacred ground. I wondered whether anyone had asked the Hydrans what they thought of our mucking around in their religious traditions. Probably not.
I watched as the others exited one by one. They were all human. I wasn’t sure whether I was disappointed or relieved. The two FTA inspectors I’d seen at the party were here—a woman named Osuna and a man named Givechy. Neither of them looked like they expected to enjoy this much. Protz looked nervous. I wondered if he was afraid I’d spill my guts about last night. He didn’t meet my eyes.
The last person out of the transport didn’t look like he belonged with the rest. He could have been a hitchhiker, except for the Tau logos on his coat. He was tall and lean, probably in his late twenties, with black hair and dark eyes. His face was long and skeptical-looking, weathered to a kind of nutmeg color that reminded me of faces I’d seen in Freaktown, although I was sure he was all human.
Protz began to make introductions. That seemed to be his entire reason for existing. He introduced the stranger as Luc Wauno, a cloud-spotter for Tau. I looked at Wauno again with more interest: what he did was observe and record the movements of the cloud-whales … except for today, when his job seemed to be playing guide for us.
Wauno nodded, if he made any response at all, to each person he met. He looked like he’d rather be in the middle of nowhere staring at the sky. The only time he opened his mouth or even cracked a smile was when Protz introduced him to Kissindre. I saw him say a couple of words to her; noticed his teeth were crooked. You didn’t see that much.
When Protz got to me, Wauno m
et my stare, and I could see his interest. “Hydran?” he asked me.
And because there was nothing behind the words, no insult, I nodded. “Half.”
His deepset eyes flicked over the people around us. “Then I guess you’re not a Refugee.”
“Not lately,” I said.
He studied my face again, checking out the damage. His hand rose to the small beaded pouch that hung from a cord around his neck. “Don’t let them make you into one,” he murmured. He shook his head and turned away as Protz closed in on us, frowning.
Wauno started back toward the transport. I followed with the others. Kissindre got the seat beside his, up front where the view was the best. Ezra took the seat next to mine, looking resentful and sullen, even though as usual I didn’t see any reason for it.
Wauno leaned back in his seat and plugged his fingers into the control panel. I hadn’t noticed anything unusual about his hands, only his teeth; even his augmentation had been sanitized by Tau. The transport took us up, leaving the plaza and the city behind like an afterthought.
I took a deep breath, looking ahead as we dropped off the edge of Tau’s world, following the river over the falls and on along its snake-dancing course into the eroded landscape of the reefs, the heart of the Hydran reservation. The “Homeland,” Tau called it, as if one part of this world could belong more to the Hydrans, by right, than another.
I forced myself to stop thinking about Tau, forced myself to stop replaying memories of last night and focus on the new day. I was about to experience something incredible, something that ought to put all our lives into some kind of perspective.
The cloud-whales, the aliens responsible for the existence of the reefs, had been a part of this world longer than either humans or Hydrans. They were colony-creatures, each individual made up of countless separate motes functioning together like the cells of a brain. They absorbed energy directly from sunlight, substance from the molecules of the air.
They spent their entire existence in the sky, condensing the atmospheric water vapor until they were shrouded in fog. To someone looking up with only human eyes, they were impossible to tell from the real thing. And looking down, if they did, nothing that humans or Hydrans had ever done here on this world seemed to concern them.
Nothing about their own existence was permanent; their forms mutated endlessly with the restless motion of the atmosphere … their thoughts flowed and changed, each one unique, shimmering, and random. But like the hidden order inside the chaos of a fractal pattern, there were moments of genius hidden in their whimsies.
And their thoughts were unique in another way—they had physical substance. As solid and tangible as human thoughts were insubstantial, the cloud-whales’ cast-off musings fell from the sky, a literal fall of dreams. The dreamfall accreted in areas where the cloud-whales gathered, drawn by something about the landscape, the weather conditions, fluctuations in the planet’s magnetosphere. Over time the excrement of their thoughts, their cast-off mental doodlings, formed strange landscapes like the one that was passing below us now. After centuries, or millennia, the reefs had become strata hundreds of kilometers long and hundreds of meters thick, rich with potential knowledge.
A “wild library” was what Tau’s researchers called it, in the background data I’d accessed. The research team called it “cloud shit” when they thought no one was listening. The untouched reef formation we’d come to study—like the ones Tau was already exploiting—was an amino acid stew of recombinant products just waiting to be plucked out of the matrix and sent to labs hungry for progress, all for the greater profit of Draco.
Draco, through its subsidiary holdings, was a major player in nanotechnology research, but the nanotech field had been stagnant for years. Billions had been spent on research and resources by some of the most powerful combines in the Federation, but their successes had been limited at best, and the few useful tools and products they had developed were equally limited, no more than mindless, semifunctional industrial “helpers.”
Proteins, especially enzymes, were nature’s own nanotech, and the reefs were riddled with protoid matter so complex and bizarre that for the most part nobody had ever seen anything like it. Tau sent their most promising discoveries to specialized labs throughout Draco’s interstellar hegemony, where researchers analyzed the structures and tried to reproduce the folding. Draco found a way to synthesize the ones that had potential; or if no technology existed that was sophisticated enough to reproduce a find, they demanded more of the raw product from Tau’s mining operations.
But the same matrix that had produced bio-based “machines” stronger than diamond, and the hybrid enzymatic nanodrones that made ceralloy production possible, was booby-trapped with unpredictable dangers.
There were fragments of thought that did nothing but good; far more that were totally incomprehensible. And then there were the ones you could only describe as insane. The reef matrix kept them inert, potential, harmless.
But complex proteins degraded rapidly when they were removed from their stabilizing matrix; and there were “soft spots,” vacuoles inside the reef itself where the matrix had begun to decay. The decaying material could cause anything from a bad smell to a kiloton explosion. There were a thousand different biohazard disasters just waiting for careless excavators.…
The databox my brain had been marinating in folded shut and shunted back into long-term memory, suddenly leaving my thoughts empty.
I let them stay that way. My mind sidestepped into a silence where no one else existed, where nothing existed for me but the reef along the river course below us, layer on layer of monolithic dreamscape. In the deepest part of my mind something stirred, and I knew why the Hydrans called these places sacred ground.… I knew it. I knew it.…
Something jolted me, and suddenly it was all gone.
I started upright in my seat, crowded between bodies in the transport’s humming womb.
Ditreksen jabbed me again with his elbow. “Answer her, for God’s sake,” he said. “Or were you talking in your sleep?”
I leaned away from him, frowning.
“Yes,” Kissindre murmured, but she wasn’t looking at either of us. “That’s exactly what it’s like … how did you describe it—?” I realized she was talking to me. Except that I hadn’t said anything.
Something I’d been thinking had slipped out. Just for a second, lost in awe, my mind had dropped its guard long enough for one stray image to escape. I swore under my breath, because it had happened without me even realizing it—the only way it ever happened, anymore. The harder I tried to control my telepathy, the less control I had. As soon as I believed in it, it would be gone.
“I forget,” I muttered. Wauno glanced back over his shoulder at us, away again. I risked a look at the rest of the passengers: Protz, the Feds. None of them were looking at me. At least the image hadn’t strayed far.
I slouched down and closed my eyes, closing everyone out. Their curiosity, their arrogance, their resentment, and their pity couldn’t touch me, as long as I didn’t let them in.…
I heard Kissindre shift in her seat, her attention drifting away again. She began talking to Protz, asking him questions about how to access Tau’s data on the reefs: where to find it, why there wasn’t more of it. He muttered something that sounded apologetic and bureaucratic.
“If you really want to know more about the reefs, you should talk to the Hydrans,” Wauno said.
I opened one eye.
Protz made a snort that could have been a laugh. “There’s no point to that. Anyway, it’s out of the question.”
Kissindre leaned toward Wauno. “Is there someone you know that we could talk with?”
Wauno nodded. “There’s an oyasin. She knows more about the reefs than—”
“Now, just a minute,” Protz hissed. “You’re talking about that old witch—that shaman, or whatever she calls herself? We suspect her of supporting HARM! You aren’t seriously suggesting that members of this research team
go into the Homeland and look her up?” He glanced at the two Feds sitting in the rear of the transport, as if he didn’t want this conversation going any further.
“Nobody’s ever proved anything against her,” Wauno said.
“At best she’s nothing but a con artist. She’ll tell you anything you want to hear.” Protz glared at the back of Wauno’s head. “And since she can read your mind, she knows what you want to hear.” He looked back at Kissindre, pointing his finger. “And then she’ll want you to pay for it, just like the rest of them. For God’s sake—” he muttered, lowering his voice even more as he looked at Wauno again, “how can you even mention her with a straight face? And why are you encouraging outsiders to involve themselves with Hydrans, given the current … situation?”
Wauno looked out at the sky and didn’t answer.
I shut my eyes and kept them shut.
I stayed like that for the rest of the flight, letting the conversations drone on around me until finally I did doze off.
I wasn’t sure how long I’d slept by the time we reached the initial survey site. The transport let us out on a spit of beach caught in the river’s meander below the reef-face. Everything we’d need to begin preliminary data collection was already there, in dome tents laid out with all the precision of Tau Riverton, as painless as anesthesia.
Workers were still moving around the site doing the setup. They all wore the same heavy maroon coveralls; they looked up at us as we entered the camp, with nothing much in their eyes but dull resentment. I wondered what they had to feel resentful about.
And there were more Tau vips waiting for us. That didn’t seem to bother anyone except me, until Kissindre’s uncle stepped out of the cluster of bodies. Sand was with him.
Perrymeade gestured at me. I glanced at Kissindre, saw the surprise on her face, and then the confusion as he shook his head, signaling her to stay where she was.
“What now—?” Ezra muttered behind me.