Read Online Dreamfall by Joan D. Vinge - Free Book Online

member of the human
staff in the face.
    The door read my databand and let me in. It closed again behind
me, sealing me in, so that I was safe at last in a room that looked exactly
like every other room in this hotel. I wondered whether the rest of the team
had gotten back from the reception. It didn’t really matter, because I barely
knew any of them except Ezra, and I didn’t like Ezra.
    I collapsed on the bed, asked the housekeeping system for
ice and a first-aid kit. A flow-mural was seeping across the far wall: hypnotic
forms in oozing black, the kind of art that could make you wake up in the
morning wanting to slash your wrists without knowing why. I called on the
threedy, blotting it out.
    I asked for the Independent News. They didn’t carry it here.
I watched the replay of the Tau Late News flicker on instead, half listened
through a rogue’s gallery of people who’d been caught smuggling Poffi,
littering, or leaving a public toilet without washing their hands.
    There should have been something about the kidnapping. There
wasn’t. There was a short, empty piece on the arrival of the research team,
though, with scenes of the party at the Aerie. It closed with a view of the
cloud-reefs and a long shot of the cloud-whales themselves.
    I reached for a headset and requested every visual the
system had on file of the reefs and the cloud-whales. The room disappeared
around me as the mask fitted itself against my face. I canceled the sound,
because I already knew anything a Tau voicefeed would have told me. For a few
minutes at least I could be somewhere I wanted to be: feeling the touch of the
wind, looking out across view after view as each one carried me deeper into the
mystery my senses called beauty ....
    Until at last the feed of images—the reef formations laid
out on the green earth like offerings for the eye of God, the cloud-whales
blown like sunlit smoke across an azure sky—bled away into neural static. I lay
still until the final phantom image had burned itself out of my nerve endings.
    When the visions were gone, the memories of tonight were
still waiting.
    I told myself fiercely to remember why I was here; remember
that Kissindre Perrymeade had wanted me on her crew because I could do this
kind of interpretive work better than anyone else. I hadn’t come to Refuge to
get myself arrested over in Freaktown, to humiliate myself or her, to make Tau
regret they had asked us here to perform a task that for once wouldn’t be
strictly for their profit ....
    I blew through the menu of other programming, trying to find
something that would keep me from thinking, something that would stop the fist
of my anger from bruising the walls of my chest—anger that I couldn’t forget
and couldn’t share and couldn’t make go away. Something to relieve my tension
so that I could sleep, so that I could face all those human faces tomorrow—all
those eyes with their round, perfectly normal pupils—and not tell them to go to
hell.
    There was nothing on the vid menu now but public service
programming, production documentaries, and a random selection of the mindrot
interactives I could have spent hours lost in, and been perfectly happy, not so
long ago .... Except that here the interactives began with a red censor logo,
telling me they’d had the good parts cut out of them.
    I jerked off the headset and threw it on the floor. The
headset retracted into its slot at the bedside, drawn up by some invisible
hand. It clicked into place in the smooth line of the console, as if it was
making some kind of point about my personal habits. I ordered the wallscreen to
blank and called on the music menu. It was just as stale. I lay back again on
the bed that was exactly warm and exactly comfortable enough, sucked on ice as
I stared at the white, featureless ceiling.
    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