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

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 &go,
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