Dreamfall Read online

  “Evening, sir,” the second Corpse said to me with a tight, polite nod. Their faces looked hard and disinterested; their faces didn’t match their manners. I wondered what subliminal messages their helmet monitors were feeding them, reminding them always to be courteous, to say “please” and “thank you” when they rousted a citizen, or they’d see another black mark on their record, a debit from their pay. “You have business over on the Hydran side?”

  “No,” I muttered. “Just … sightseeing.”

  He frowned, as though I’d said something embarrassing or something that didn’t make sense. The other guard laughed, a soft snort, as if he was trying not to. “Not from around here,” the first one muttered. It wasn’t really a question.

  The second one sighed. “It’s my duty, sir, to point out to you that your blood alcohol level is high, indicating possible impaired judgment. No offense, sir.” His voice was as flat as a recording. Flatter. “Also, sir, I’m required to show you this information.” He pointed at the displays. “Please read the disclaimer. It states that you accept full responsibility for anything that happens to you on the other side of the river. That’s the Homeland over there. It’s not Tau’s jurisdiction; it’s not Tau’s responsibility. We don’t guarantee your safety.” He looked hard at me, to see if I was tracking what he’d said … looked harder at me as he suddenly got a good look at my eyes: the grass-green irises, with the long slit pupils like a cat’s.

  He looked at my whole face, then, and started to frown. He glanced at the information display from my databand on the wall behind him—undeniable proof, to both of us, that I was a full citizen of the Human Federation. He looked back at my face again; his frown didn’t go away. But he only said, “Curfew is at ten. Crossing closes for the night … if you want to come back.” He was already turning his back on me as he finished it. He muttered something to the other guard as I went on my way. I didn’t hear what it was.

  There were only a few people moving across the bridge on foot. I tried not to look at the ones I passed, the ones who passed me. They kept their eyes to themselves. One or two small private ground vehicles went by, so unexpected that I had to dodge out of their way. The canyon below the bridge’s span was full of shadows; far below, light danced on the hidden water surface.

  By the time I’d reached the far end of the bridge I only had eyes for what lay ahead. All I could make out were vague shapes and random patterns of light, but every step seemed harder to take than the last.

  I let my concentration fall inward, trying to force something to happen in my mind; trying to focus, to listen, to reach out and speak in the secret language that a thousand other minds must be speaking, must be hearing, just beyond the bridge’s end.

  But it was no use. They were psions, telepaths—and I wasn’t. Trying only proved again what I already knew: That what was gone was gone. That what was past help should have been past grief by now; long past this sick hunger—

  I was trembling, the way I’d trembled at the reception under the stares of the three Hydrans. I told myself that I was cold, standing here with the night coming on, at the end of winter on an alien world where I was a total stranger. That my body’s reaction wasn’t because I felt so terrified that I wanted to puke, wanted to do anything but go on.

  Because I couldn’t do anything but go on. I started forward again—knowing I wouldn’t sleep nights, wouldn’t eat, would never be able to concentrate on the work I’d come here to do, unless I let myself do this.

  I stepped off the far end of the bridge, on Hydran ground at last. Once this entire planet had been Hydran ground; until we’d come and taken it away from them. This was their homeworld, their Earth; they’d made this world the center of a civilization that had spanned light-years the way the Human Federation did now.

  Their civilization had already passed its peak and been in decline when the Federation made first contact. We’d been glad enough then to finally have proof that we weren’t alone in the galaxy, more than glad that the first “aliens” we encountered looked more like humans than some humans looked like to each other.

  Genemapping studies had proved that the resemblance wasn’t just a coincidence of cosmic proportions: humans and Hydrans seemed to be the two halves of a long-divided whole, who might both owe our very existence to an incomprehensible bioengineering experiment. That we might be just one more of the Creators’ enigmatic calling cards. Hydrans and humans … the haves and the have-nots, separated by one thing: psionic ability.

  Hydrans were born able to access the quantum field, the bizarre subatomic universe of quarks and neutrinos hidden at the heart of the deceptive order we called Reality. The quantum-mechanical spectrum could have been turtles all the way down, for all the sense it made to ordinary human beings; even though human brains only seemed to make sense if they functioned by quantum rules. The average person could barely take quantum electrodynamics seriously, let alone imagine a way of collapsing the probability wave to manipulate the QM field.

  But a psion could tap the QM field instinctively, manipulate improbabilities to the point where using the Gift directly affected the tangible, visible world that they shared with “normal” psi-blind humans. The macrocosmic entrainment of quantum effects allowed a psion to do things humans had believed were impossible before we met the Hydrans. That one crucial difference had been the Hydrans’ strength. And it had been their fatal weakness when they finally encountered us.

  In the beginning, the Human Federation and the Hydrans had coexisted in peace. It had seemed only natural, when two “alien” races meeting in the depths of space discovered they were similar down to the level of their DNA. It had seemed only natural that there would be cooperation, friendship … intermarriage. Mixed-race marriages began to produce mixed-blood children, spilling Hydran psi genes into the sterile waters of the human genepool like droplets of dye, staining it a new color.

  But the peaceful coexistence of first contact hadn’t lasted. The more often the Human Federation encountered Hydrans living on exactly the kind of worlds that interstellar combines wanted for exploitation, the less they wanted to acknowledge that Hydrans had a prior claim to them.

  Relations went downhill from there, went downhill faster as the combines discovered that when they tried to push the Hydrans off their worlds, the Hydrans wouldn’t push back.

  Because of what they were, the things they could have done with unchecked psi powers, the Hydrans had evolved in ways that made them virtually nonviolent. If you could kill with a thought—reach into a chest and stop a heart, cause an embolism in the brain, break bones without touching them—there had to be some way to prevent it.

  Because of what they were, the things they could have done with unchecked psi powers, the Hydrans had evolved in ways that made them virtually nonviolent. If you could kill with a thought—reach into a chest and stop a heart, cause an embolism in the brain, break bones without touching them—there had to be some way to prevent it.

  There was. If a Hydran killed someone, the backlash took out all the defenses in the killer’s own mind. Any murder became a murder-suicide. Natural selection had done them a favor … until they met the Federation.

  Because humans had virtually no psi ability, they’d never had any real problem with killing. They swept the Hydrans up like birds in a net, killing them fast in hostile takeovers; killing them slowly by pushing the survivors onto “homelands” that made them outcasts on their own world, or “relocating” them to places like Oldcity, where I’d been born. There were still humans born with mixed blood, but most of the blood had been mixed long ago, before humans and Hydrans had begun to hate the sight of each other.

  Those humans who still carried a few Hydran genes in their DNA pool were treated as less than human, especially if they showed any psi ability, which most of them did. Without support, without training in how to use their Gift, psions were “freaks” to pureblood humans, who made sure they sank to the bottom of the labor pool and stayed there, igno
red when they weren’t actively persecuted.

  If you looked very Hydran, if your mother happened to have been Hydran—if you were a halfbreed, a product of miscegenation so fresh that most people you met had been alive when it happened—it was worse. I knew, because I was one.

  I’d spent most of my life in Oldcity, Quarro’s buried slum, doing things that never got into most people’s nightmares just to stay alive. And I couldn’t even use the Gift I’d been born with, the telepathy that would have let me know who to trust, how to protect myself, maybe even let me understand why the things that always seemed to be happening to me kept happening.

  In time, with a lot of luck and a lot of pain, I’d gotten out of Oldcity. I’d learned to read, and then to access; I’d learned about the heritage I’d lost with my mother’s death, so long ago that I couldn’t even remember her face.

  And now, after too many years, too many light-years, I was finally standing on Hydran ground.

  There was nothing, no one guarding this end of the bridge. I looked back over my shoulder at the lighted span. It seemed impossibly long and fragile, surreally bright. I saw the guard-post at the other end. And I wondered suddenly what the hell made them think they could keep a people who could teleport—send themselves through a spacetime blip to somewhere else in the blink of an eye—from going anywhere they wanted to. But then I remembered that you couldn’t teleport to a place you’d never been.

  Or maybe the guards were intended to keep the humans where they belonged.

  A pair of humans passed me, wearing Tau business dress. The way they moved said that they were in a hurry to get onto the bridge and away. Ahead of me the street was darker than the bridge had been; there was no artificial lighting. It was probably getting hard for Tau citizens, with their human eyes, to find their way.

  It surprised me that the Hydrans hadn’t made things easier for night-blind humans. But then, maybe that was what the guard had been trying to tell me—maybe no human in his right mind visited Freaktown after dark.

  I started down the nearest street. Even in the darkness I could make out every detail of the buildings that fronted on it. None were more than three or four stories tall, but they merged like segments of a hive, with no clear sign of where one ended and the next began. The architecture was all organic curves; the walls were made of a material I couldn’t identify, that felt like ceralloy. Almost everywhere the smooth, impervious surfaces had been covered with murals of colored tile, which must have been set into the matrix before it had hardened.

  I couldn’t have pictured anything less like the isolated geometry of the human city across the river if I’d tried. I wondered whether the Hydrans had built their city intentionally to answer Tau Riverton. But then I remembered that the Hydran city, like the Hydrans, had been here first. It was the human city that was the insult, the act of defiance.

  I went on, following the winding course of the streets deeper into Freaktown, trying to lose my sense of alienation in the growing darkness. A few more ground vehicles passed me. Their passage through the ancient streets echoed from every exposed surface; their windows were always dark. There didn’t seem to be any mods at all in the air above this side of the river.

  The more my eyes adjusted to the night and the strangeness of everything I saw, the more I began to notice places where the patterns on the walls were damaged or crumbling. I saw the fallen tiles that lay in talus slopes of dust and rubbish; barricades of abandoned junk; bodies slumped against walls or stretched out in the shadows, sleeping it off.

  The dirt, the derelicts, the way the buildings fronted on the street, began to make me think of Oldcity, Quarro’s hidden underbelly, where the roof of the world was only ten meters high, and walls closed you in wherever you turned. I wondered why the resemblance hadn’t hit me right away. Maybe because I’d lived too long in Oldcity; because it was what I was used to. Maybe that was all.

  Or maybe I hadn’t wanted to see Hydrans as anything less than perfect, to discover anything that forced me to admit they were flawed, embarrassing, too human … too much like I was.

  I tried to stop looking at the broken walls. The people passing me were all Hydran now. Almost all of them wore human-style clothes that must have come from across the river. Most of the clothing looked like it had been worn for years before it had ever touched Hydran skin.

  It surprised me that there were so few people on the streets, so few buildings showing lights or signs of life. I didn’t see any children. I wondered if they all went to bed with the sun, or whether there was something I was missing. Most of the adults had hair as pale as mine; most of them had skin that was the color of spice: ginger-gold, nutmeg-brown, cinnamon. The colors were as varied as the colors of human skin, but not really any color I’d ever seen on human flesh, even mine. They all seemed to move with a kind of uncanny grace that I almost never saw in humans.

  Refuge was supposed to be their homeworld: their Earth, the place their civilization had started out from. According to Tau’s data, the Hydrans living in Freaktown and on the surrounding reservation were Refuge’s entire surviving population. The remnants of cultures and races from all parts of the planet had been swept up and dumped, like so much dust, here on this “Homeland”—the one piece of ground left to them by Tau/Draco … the piece that must have had the least exploitable resources.

  It made me uneasy even to think that the handful of people I’d seen on the street tonight might actually be a representative sample of their numbers.

  People looked back at me, half curious if they noticed I was looking at them. Some of them went on staring after I’d passed. I could feel their eyes on me, but I couldn’t feel their minds. I couldn’t tell why they were staring, whether it was the way I moved or my face or the fact that when they touched my mind they met a wall.

  No one spoke to me, asked me the obvious questions, muttered behind my back. They didn’t make any sound at all. You walked down a street in a human city and you heard conversation, arguments, laughter. Here I felt like a deaf-mute; here there was only silence, broken by an occasional shapeless far-off sound that seemed to echo forever, like there was no distance.

  I’d heard once that when Hydrans were with their own kind they didn’t talk much; they didn’t need to. They had their telepathy: They could reach out to each other with their minds, prove each other’s reality, know each other’s moods, know that all around them were living, breathing people just like them. They knew all that without speaking, without needing to look at each other constantly.

  Humans didn’t. Humans had to bridge that unbridgeable gap with speech, and so they were always talking, proving that they weren’t as alone in the universe as they were inside their own minds.

  Most of the buildings along the street had doors or windows at street level. Most of those were shuttered, private; a few were wide open, like they were inviting everybody inside. Occasionally I saw the phantom outline of an opening that had been walled up. In other places the access was only a rough hole knocked in the wall, shattering a perfect line, the wholeness of a mosaic pattern. I wondered why anyone would do that.

  I thought about the humans coming across the river, who couldn’t mind their own business or walk through walls. I wondered whether the sealed-up walls, the crude doorways, were a kind of subtle message to their visitors or whether they were just another sign of social disintegration.

  Most of the doorways looked like they opened on shops of one sort or another. There were occasional signs, some in Standard, some in a language I didn’t know, some of them lit up. I even saw one that was holographic, shimmering in the violet gloom like a hallucination. I began to think that the signs were like the holes in the wall: Freaktown spelling it out for the humans, the psionic have-nots, the deadheads.…

  I wandered the streets for nearly an hour, without anyone challenging me or even acknowledging me. At last, numb with cold but more or less sober, I stopped in front of what looked like an eatery. No one had harassed me so far
. I told myself that it would be all right to go inside, to sit down with them and eat what they ate, to pretend for an hour that I actually belonged somewhere.

  I stepped inside, ducking my head because the ragged doorway was low by human standards. I was only medium height, but not many of the Hydrans I’d passed in the street were as tall as I was. I felt a breath of forced air kiss my face as I moved through it, keeping the warmth and the cooking smells inside, the cold evening out. I wondered whether it was human tech from across the river or a telekinetic field generated by someone inside.

  I stopped just inside the doorway, glad to feel warm again as I inhaled the smells. They were strange and strong, making me realize how hungry I was. A dozen people were scattered around the room at low tables; singly, in couples, even a family with a child. The parents and child looked up together, suddenly wary. I stood there a little longer, my eyes moving from face to face, not able to stop looking at the strange beauty of their features. Finally I crossed the room and sat down at an empty table, as far from anyone else as possible.

  I searched for a menu, suddenly wondering whether you couldn’t even get something to eat here if you couldn’t read minds.

  “Can I help you?”

  I jumped. Someone was standing at my elbow, looking down at me. I wasn’t sure whether he’d come up behind me without my knowing it or whether he’d teleported here to my side. My Gift wouldn’t tell me, any more than it would tell me who he was or what he wanted from me. I took a long look at him and decided he must be the owner.

  “Can I help you?” he asked again, in Standard, and the soft, lilting way he formed the words hardened just a little.

  I realized that everyone in the room was looking at me now. The looks weren’t friendly. “Some food—?” The words sounded flat and foreign as they came out of my mouth.

  His face closed as if I’d insulted him, as if he was controlling himself with an effort. “I don’t know who you are,” he said very quietly. “I don’t care what you are. But I’m telling you now, either stop what you’re doing or get out.”