Sand half frowned, but he didn’t say anything more.
“Miya was like a part of our family,” Ling Natasa said. “Why would she do something like this—?” She looked at Perrymeade this time, her eyes begging him to make sense of something that was beyond her comprehension. He shook his head.
“We’ve heard rumors—” Burnell Natasa glanced over his shoulder at the visitors waiting in the next room. “Everyone’s heard about—rituals the Hydrans have,” he said bitterly. “That they steal our children and use them—”
“Jeezu!” I pushed up out of my seat. I caught Sand’s warning gesture; sat down again. His gaze pinned me there. “It’s not true,” I said, glaring at him, at all of them, even though it could have been, for all I knew about how Hydrans lived. But my gut told me only a human could do a thing like that, or even imagine it.
“How do you know?” Burnell Natasa said. “If you’re not one of them.”
I stared at him, at his uniform.
“Cat is a xenologist,” Perrymeade answered. “He works with Kissindre.… You know how much time I’ve spent with the Hydrans, Burnell. I’m sure he’s right.”
Natasa shook his head. “Borosage said he has cases on record—”
“District Administrator Borosage has many years of experience dealing with Hydrans, but I think we all know that he also has certain … limitations.” Perrymeade mouthed the words as if they were hot, glancing at Sand. “But Corporate Security’s concern about the involvement of Hydran dissidents in your son’s kidnapping isn’t unjustified, considering the situation within the Tau keiretsu.…”
“Did this Miya ever mention anything about the inspectors or the FTA?” I asked. “Were you involved in anything that the Hydrans might not have liked—something she might have picked out of your thoughts?”
“No.” They both said it so quickly that it seemed to echo. Their eyes met, and then they both looked at me. “Is he a telepath—?” the husband asked Perrymeade. Perrymeade shook his head with no hesitation; Kissindre must have told him that I’d lost my psi. Maybe that was why he’d brought me here: Because I was safe. There was a reason why most humans didn’t want a mind reader anywhere near them. Everyone had things they wanted to hide, and a telepath didn’t just eavesdrop on conversations—he could listen in on your most intimate secrets.
The Natasas must be a matched pair of saints if they were willing to share their home with a Hydran. Or else they loved that crippled child more than the keiretsu … more than their work, their privacy, themselves.
But then I saw the look they exchanged as my question registered, the looks that went on changing the other faces in the room, always turning them grimmer. And I knew that whatever these people were, they weren’t innocent. I could almost feel their hidden panic. There had to be secrets—big ones, bad ones, filling the silence around me. Right then I would have given a year of my life to have one bloodred drug patch riding behind my ear, the kind that could lay open the scar tissue blinding my Gift and let me see, for an hour, for even ten minutes—for however long it took.
But I didn’t, and I couldn’t. And maybe it didn’t matter anyway. It wasn’t my problem, any of it, except the missing child—and that was only because my guilt said I’d been to blame. I’d do whatever Perrymeade and Sand told me to do, knowing it wouldn’t help anything; do it because then they’d leave me alone and my conscience would leave me alone, and I could get back to doing things that were important to me.
I looked up again, directly into Ling Natasa’s gaze. Memory stabbed me behind the eyes, the way it had last night. But this time the pain was genuine. Reality had reached into this expensive, perfect room, into two comfortable, protected lives, and destroyed all their illusions in one irreversible moment. There was no escape for anyone from grief and pain, from fear that wore the face of a lost child, helpless, crippled, afraid, in the hands of strangers, aliens.… Her husband put his arms around her again. This time when he looked at me, I still saw it, the grief and the fear.
“I’ll do what I can,” I murmured, hating how it sounded; wanting, needing to have something better to say. “I know how you feel,” I said finally. I looked away as the disbelief in their eyes turned the empty words back on me.
Perrymeade and Sand were already on their feet, looking eager to be gone now that they’d gotten what they’d come for. I followed them through the empty good-byes and out of the building, more eager to leave than they were.
When we were out in the open plaza again, I raised my head for long enough to see what expressions Perrymeade and Sand were wearing. “What do you want me to do?” I asked, hoping they had more of an idea than I did.
Perrymeade glanced at me, as if he wondered why I wasn’t angry anymore. “Some of the leaders of the Hydran community have agreed to see me, to discuss the situation and what might be done about it.” He sounded as if he didn’t want to say that much. “I want you to come with me to meet them.” I wondered what was wrong with everyone here, whether they were all that paranoid about keeping an appearance of control, or whether Tau’s ax was always that ready to fall on someone’s neck.
I sat down on a bench. “Maybe you ought to tell me more about it,” I said. “I’m not a mind reader.” I took out a camph and stuck it between my teeth.
Their mouths quirked. I sat watching them stand, uncomfortable, against the backdrop of Tau Riverton’s deceptive order.
“You don’t want the Feds to know this is happening, do you?” I asked.
“No.” Sand looked back at me with his unblinking eyes. “What we’re doing is damage control, at this point. We want this matter settled cleanly and quietly—immediately.”
That explained why there hadn’t been anything on the news about the kidnapping. “Why did the Hydran woman take the boy? You said she was working with terrorists?”
“The Hydran Aboriginal Resistance Movement,” he said. “A radical group. They’ve sent us a list of demands for the boy’s release.”
“‘HARM’?” I said, realizing what the letters spelled. “They call themselves ‘HARM’—?”
“We do,” Perrymeade murmured, rubbing his neck. “They don’t use the term ‘Hydran.’ The Hydrans prefer to call themselves simply ‘the Community.’”
The Human Federation had called them “Hydrans” because we’d first encountered them in the Beta Hydrae system. But the real meaning of the name cut far deeper: in human mythology, the Hydra had been a monster with a hundred heads. “What kind of demands are they making?”
“The usual,” Perrymeade said, sounding tired. “More autonomy … but also more integration, more job opportunities, more of Tau’s money; reparations for the entire planet, which they claim we stole from them. They want the Federation’s attention turned on them while the FTA’s inspection team is here.”
“That sounds fair to me,” I said. I rolled the camph between my fingers, focusing on the bitter cold/heat inside my mouth.
Perrymeade raised his eyebrows and sighed. “I’m sure it does to them too. It even does to me, when I try to see it their way. But it isn’t that simple. It wasn’t Tau that took control of this world away from them—or Draco, for that matter.” He glanced at Sand as he said it. “If they had more autonomy at this point, what good would it do them? They’ve come to rely on Tau as their support system just as much as Tau’s human citizens … possibly more. The Hydrans have no real technological or economic base; they lost their interstellar network long before we got here. Where would they be without us?”
I put the camph back between my lips so that I didn’t have to answer.
“If they think the FTA will see it differently, they’re wrong.” He shook his head. “They don’t want to believe that—I don’t even want to believe that—but that’s how it is. The real problem isn’t simply that their eyes look ab—” he broke off as I looked up at him, “strange … that their eyes seem strange to us,” he muttered, “or the color of their skin, or that they don’t eat meat. None o
f that matters anymore.” His hand tightened. “Hydrans are different. They have the ability to intrude profoundly on another person’s life, to violate a person’s privacy at any given moment—” His eyes, which had been looking at me without seeing me, suddenly registered my face, my eyes again. “It’s not that easy,” he said, looking away. “It’s not easy at all. Maybe it’s impossible.”
“Tell me about it,” I said, and swallowed the butt end of the camph. “So if the Feds won’t do anything to force Tau to change its policies, why is Tau afraid to let them find out what happened?”
“It wouldn’t look good,” Sand said. “Obviously we don’t want it to appear that some group of radicals is functioning, unchecked, as the major influence in the Hydran Homeland. It isn’t good for Tau’s image—or for the Hydrans’ either—if the FTA sees social chaos over there.” He jerked his head in the direction of the river. “The kind of attention that it will attract from the FTA will not be the sort that HARM intends, believe me.”
I listened, squinting at him in the reflected glare of too many windows in too many towers, grimacing as my mind cut through the self-serving bullshit to the truth: They were right. Humans would never feel safe enough to share real power with Hydrans. And the FTA was just as human as Tau, when it came to that.
“I see what you mean,” I said, getting up again. I looked toward the plex where the missing child’s parents were going through a kind of hell that cut across all the artificial barriers of race and money, that proved the only universal truth was pain. “But what do you think I can do to change that?”
Perrymeade’s body language eased, as if he finally understood what he saw in my face, or thought he did. But still he hesitated before he said, “We’ve told the Hydran Council everything that Sand has explained to you. But they still claim to know nothing. I can’t believe that. You share a … heritage with them, but you’ve lived among humans. You have a better chance of making them understand what they’re risking by harboring these dissidents.…”
What they were risking. I touched my head. I could tell the Hydrans what they had to lose … but who knew if they’d even give me a chance. All they had to do was look at me; all they had to do was try to touch my mind. I glanced at Perrymeade and Sand. There was no point in trying to explain anything to them; they wouldn’t give a damn anyway.
“I have a question, before you go,” Sand said, turning to me. “Why aren’t you a functional telepath? Perrymeade said you used to be a telepath, but now you’re not. How do you get rid of a thing like that?”
I looked straight in through his dim, dead eyes. “You have to kill someone.”
He started. I wondered how long it had been since someone had surprised him. I wondered exactly what it was about what I’d said that had.
“You killed someone?” Perrymeade echoed.
“That’s what I said, isn’t it?” I glanced at him. “When I was seventeen. I blew him away with a tightbeam handgun. It was self-defense. But it doesn’t matter if you’re a psion and someone’s brain goes nova inside you. If I was really Hydran, it would’ve killed me. But I wasn’t Hydran enough. All it did was fuck up my head. So now I’m only human.”
Perrymeade’s face went a little slacker. I watched him pull it together again with a negotiator’s reflex.
Neither of them said anything more, until finally a mod came spiraling down out of the heights and Sand said, “Good-bye.”
FIVE
A PRIVATE CORPORATE mod took us over to Freaktown. No wandering through its streets on foot for a Tau vip, even one whose job was to pretend that he understood its people as well as he did his own. As we passed over the river I looked down, seeing the lone bridge, one tenuous filament connecting two peoples and the different ways they looked at the same universe. I thought about Miya: how she’d been chosen, trained, to help a human child the way no human could. How she had helped him.…
And then she’d betrayed him. I wondered whether I was seeing too incomplete an image to make sense of the truth, or whether Hydrans really were that alien, so alien I’d never understand how their minds worked.
The mod came down again somewhere deep in the heart of Freaktown. We stepped out into the enclosed courtyard of a sprawling structure Perrymeade told me was the Community Hall. Community meant Hydran, to Hydrans. Community … communing, communication, to live in a commune … to have a common destiny, history, mind.… My own mind played with the word like a dog gnawing a bone, finding meanings layered inside meanings, wondering whether any of them were ones the Hydrans had intended.
Here in the courtyard, sealed off from the decaying streets, there were actually a few shrubs and trees; a few of the colors of life, only a little dusty and overgrown. I looked down. A garden of brightly tiled mosaic spread outward from where I stood. Dim with age and dust, it still made my eyes strobe.
Off to my left a stream barely the width of my open hand wove a silver thread through the dry shrubbery. Half hidden in the bushes I could see a velvet patch of mossgrass, so green and perfect that I started toward it without thinking.
I stepped across the stream onto the waiting patch of green … and found the knee-high sculpture of a Hydran woman sitting cross-legged on a mandala of tile. Her inset eyes of green stone met mine, as if she had been expecting me to be expecting this.
No one in the courtyard could see what I was seeing now. No one who didn’t step across the stream would ever see it. I smiled.
I looked up as someone emerged from the shadows at the far side of the courtyard: a Hydran, striding toward the others as if he was only human, as though he didn’t have a better way to get from one place to another. He was one of the guests from the reception last night. My memory offered up his name: Hanjen.
He stopped almost in midstride as he saw me. The look on his face was the same look my own face still wore: pure astonishment.
I stepped back across the stream into the courtyard. He stood perfectly still, watching as I rejoined Perrymeade by the mod.
At last he made a small bow and said something in a language that must have been Hydran.
“What did he say?” I murmured to Perrymeade.
“I don’t know,” Perrymeade said. “Some sort of greeting. I don’t know what it means.”
“You don’t speak their language?” It wasn’t that difficult to learn a language by accessing. And someone at his level in a corporate government had enough bioware to let him run a translator program, if accessing was too much trouble for him. “Why not?”
He shrugged and looked away from me. “They all understand ours.”
I didn’t say anything; I just went on looking at him.
“Besides,” he murmured, as if I’d said what I was thinking, or maybe because I hadn’t, “the Hydrans claim all language is only second best. So there’s really no difference.”
“Yes, there is,” I said. I looked away again, listening for something else: trying to tell whether Hanjen reached out to me with his mind, trying to be open. Waiting for a whisper, a touch, anything at all; desperate for any contact, for proof that I wasn’t a walking dead man, or the last one alive in a world of ghosts.
But there was nothing. I watched the Hydran’s face. Emotion moved across it like ripples over a pond surface. I didn’t know what the emotions were because I couldn’t feel them, couldn’t prove that he was real, any more than I could prove that I wasn’t utterly alone here.
“Mez Perrymeade,” he said, glancing away from me as if I didn’t exist. “We have been expecting you. But why have you brought this one,” meaning me, “with you?” The words were singsong but almost uninflected, not giving anything away.
“Mez Hanjen,” Perrymeade said, trying to hold himself as still as the Hydran did. He looked like he was trying to hold back water. “I asked him to come.”
“No,” I said, forcing myself to meet Hanjen’s stare. “You asked me to come. Last night, at the party.” We were all speaking Standard, now. I wondered whether anyone from
Tau had ever bothered to learn the Hydrans’ language. I wondered suddenly why Hydrans even had one, needed one, when they could communicate mind-to-mind. The data on Hydran culture that was freely accessible on the Net was so spotty I hadn’t been able to learn even that much about them.
Hanjen made a small bow to me. “That is true. However, I hardly expected, under the circumstances…” He broke off, looking toward the spot where I’d discovered the hidden statue. He shook his head, glancing at me again as he began to turn away.
He stopped suddenly and turned back, making eye contact with us. “Excuse me,” he murmured. “I meant to say, ‘Please follow me, the members of the Council are waiting.’”
“Are they all like that?” I muttered as we started after him.
Perrymeade shrugged and grimaced as Hanjen disappeared into patterns of light and shadow.
For a second I thought Hanjen had disappeared entirely, teleported himself, making some point by leaving us behind. My chest hurt as I wondered whether I’d been the reason. But when I stepped into the shadows beyond the courtyard I saw him moving ahead of me through a lightplay of organic forms—trees and shrubs, columns and arches built on the same fluid lines. There wasn’t a right angle anywhere; wherever I looked, my eyes had trouble telling life from art.
Hanjen led us without a word, not looking back, along a sheltered walkway. The path wandered like a stream through a maze of vine-hung arbors; the arbors became a series of chambers, their ceilings and walls as random as the walls of caves. In some of the chambers every inch of wall was covered with patterned tiles; some had ceilings inlaid with geometries of age-darkened wood. There were flower-forms and leaf-forms spreading like vines up any pillar or wall that wasn’t decorated with mosaics. My mind could barely take it in as we passed through one room and then another. Perrymeade had called this the Community Hall, but the words didn’t begin to describe it. I wondered what it really was, how old, what meaning it must have held for the ones who had originally constructed it.