Polhemas glared at Siebeling then and back at me. “I don’t like your attitude.”
I opened my mouth, saw Jule stiffen. I closed it again; watched the sculpture clattering on Siebeling’s desk. “The matter isn’t closed. I may still close this place down before it is.” Polhemas gestured his men into line and went out into the Oldcity night.
“He knew about the commendations,” Jule said finally. “There was no surprise in his mind ... he knew all about us before he came here. But it didn’t matter to him.”
Siebeling grunted in disgust.
I looked up at the time again, and didn’t say anything.
The third day was business as usual; I went through the motions, counting the hours until the Center closed and the Haven opened. But then Jule was beside me, her face drawn with a strange tension, as if she were holding her breath. “Cat, there’s someone here to see you.”
I followed her out to the front reception area, holding my own breath; somehow knowing without knowing who it was I’d see there.
The Dreamweaver stood near the entrance, melting into the dark-beamed wall while the Center’s regulars circled past, some of them not even seeing her, some of them staring and edging away as though they were seeing a crazy woman. My skin prickled. One of the telepaths across the room started to moan; Hebrett pulled him through into another room and closed the door. Jule’s face was rigid when I glanced at her.
But I didn’t feel anything except hope swelling inside me; didn’t see anything but a tiny frightened woman holding herself together with her arms. She wore a loose cowled smock and pants, rich cloth, all in brown. Her hair that had been a haze of spun gold was buried under a heavy beaded net. Only her face, the color of burnished brass, showed her alienness. Her eyes were waiting for mine, as green as emeralds.
We stood face to face at last, and suddenly my mouth was too dry for words. I nodded.
“This is Cat,” Jule said, because something had to be said. She caught my eye, asked me, begged me with her look to Go away, take her away, far away from here please—
“What are you doing here?” I got the words out at last.
The Dreamweaver kept her eyes on my face, hugging herself, as if it was all she could do to hold herself here. “You didn’t come. Twice.”
I felt myself blush, hot and sudden. “I—I couldn’t. I wanted to, but I couldn’t. I would’ve come tonight.”
She blinked, her arms wrapping her harder. “Truly?”
I nodded again. Jule turned and walked away too quickly. “That’s why you came here? How did you know—how did you find me?”
“You told me. Every night I heard you. Showing your self to me, showing this place. Saying, ‘Come, come please’—”
“You heard.” I swallowed a hard knot of joy. “I—listen—I mean, do you want to go somewhere? Somewhere we can— talk?” But talking is so hard, useless, when two minds can share the space of one and you only have to know. “Somewhere else, quiet, away from here.” I waved a hand, wishing that somehow I could make the whole Center disappear.
“Yes.” Her face eased and turned eager to be gone all at once.
“Is there a place—?’’
“Yes,” almost impatiently. She led me outside and along the street to a cab caller. One of the upside bubbles was drifting toward us over the crowds almost before the silence started to make me feel like a fool. We got in, she said, “Hanging Gardens” into the speaker. I felt something I couldn’t name, that almost choked me. We were going up—out of Oldcity, into Quarro. I’d never been upside in all the time I’d worked at the Center—hardly been more than a kilometer from the place itself, even here in Oldcity. I swallowed and swallowed again, as the cab carried us in toward Godshouse Circle and then rode an invisible updraft into the light of day, the real world. The air brightened around us as the shadowed, twisted underside of the city fell behind and below. The air got sweeter, clearing the stench of a thousand different pollutants out of my lungs. I only knew them now by the fact that they were gone. The corporate crown of Quarro shone around us, the silvered, gilded, blued towers mirroring endlessly flowing images of more reflecting more and somewhere the sky caught up in it, bluer-on-blue and cloud-softened. I thought about the first time I’d seen the city I’d spent my whole life inside of, out the window of a Corpse flyer, under arrest . . . not even two years ago.
The cab set us down again almost before I’d finished the thought; the Hanging Gardens were above Godshouse Circle, like the rim of a well whose waters had gone bad. We climbed out; the cab docked me for the whole fare, and I realized that she wasn’t even wearing a data bracelet. If I hadn’t had mine on no cab would have taken us up from Oldcity.
The gardens rose and dropped away on all sides of us; manmade tiers of living land growing, flowering, spreading, shading. Islands in the sky, worlds-in-a-bottle, each of them a living miniature of a homeworld somewhere in the Federation. I followed the Dreamweaver along the curving walkways that spiralled through the air between one suspended island and another. The spring breeze was sharp and biting, the arch of sky above us was bruised with purple clouds. There weren’t many other walkers on the paths.
Her silence began to get on my nerves until I remembered that a Hydran didn’t need the useless small talk humans needed to bridge the emptiness between them. Words were an emphasis, or an afterthought—the contact was already, always, there. Knowing she didn’t need the words when I did didn’t make it easier. But she seemed to be moving toward something, not just moving for its own sake, and so I kept my words and my thoughts to myself.
We came out at last in a garden where the green of tendrils and crescent leaves was shot with veins of silver, the wind making them shimmer, fade, brighten as though reality was something always just beyond the limit of my eyes. I looked back at the Dreamweaver, seeing that she’d reached the right place at last. The right place . . . because there was something of this place in her, about her, something not-quite-seen.
“Your homeworld,” I said. My own voice startled me. “A piece of it. Koss Tefirah,” squinting at the plaque beneath a silver-skinned treeshrub.
She nodded. She sat down on a low bench sculptured out of stone, touching the crystal-flecked surface with copper-gold hands.
I stood a minute longer watching her, thinking about how small she looked, how fragile, cupped in the hands of stone; how much like a child or a flower or a piece of down carried on the wind. Nothing like Jule, who was tall, taller than I was, thin but with a man’s kind of lean strength…And yet everything like Jule on the inside, lighting my darkness and making me see hope again. Sharing a strength with me that she couldn’t afford to give, but gave anyway because I needed it... even when her own need, her own fear, were more than she could live with.
I jerked out of the thought, not knowing where it had come from—from what Jule had said or from something lying deep in my own mind. The Dreamweaver looked at me, her green eyes shifting like the green on every side. I looked down into them, seeing the same healing strength that had held Jule together when the world was pulling her apart. Seeing the strength that had been my mother’s once, too, and the eyes…And seeing those things, knowing someone like this should never have to use that kind of strength just to keep herself sane, I knew that I would do anything for her, anything at all— My knees got weak and I sat down on the bench, keeping just out of reach, hers or mine, I wasn’t sure. I looked away across the floating glade in a half-blind glance; seeing the swaying boneless treeshrubs and the flowering vines that softened the hard underside of the next tier above us. The air was sweet and musky with the scent of them, like the scent of a woman’s skin—I swallowed, wondering if it was her doing this to me, or the place, or if I’d just gone a little crazy hiding from life down in my Oldcity room. “How— how long’ve you been gone? From Koss Tefirah, I mean?” still not looking at her. Oh God, can she hear me? Stop it stop it you damn fool—