Dreamfall Read Free

that she could
have been the mind reader I wasn’t.
    I nodded at her, grateful, not for the first time. And went
on looking at her. I’d never seen her dressed like this, for a combine
showplace instead of fieldwork. She’d never seen me dressed like this, either.
I wondered how she liked it; if it made her feel the way I felt when I looked
at her.
    We’d been friends for most of the time I’d been getting
through my university studies. Friends and nothing more. As long as I’d known
her she’d had a habit named Ezra Ditreksen. He was a systems analyst, and from
what everyone said, he was damn good at it. He was also a real prick. They
argued more than most people talked; I never understood why she didn’t jettison
him. But then, I was hardly an expert on long-term relationships.
    Kissindre was the one who’d badgered me until I put into coherent
form the ideas I’d had about an artifact called the Monument. Its vanished
creators had left their distinctive bio-engineering signature scattered
throughout this arm of the galactic spiral, encrypted in the DNA of a handful
of other uncanny constructs, including Refuge’s cloud-whales.
    Kissindre was with her uncle, Janos Perrymeade. He was a vip
for Tau, like most of the warm bodies at this party. It had been his idea to
bring a research team here; he’d gotten the permission and the funding for us
to study the cloud-whales and the reefs. I looked at Kissindre and her uncle
standing side by side, seeing the same clearwater blue eyes, the same shining
brown hair. It made me want to like him, want to trust him, because they looked
so much alike. So far he hadn’t done anything to make me change my mind.
    Ezra Ditreksen materialized on the other side of her, 3t
ease inside his formal clothes, the way everyone here seemed to be except me.
His specialty wasn’t xenoarch; but the team needed a systems analyst, and the
fact that he was sleeping with the crew leader made him the logical choice.
When he saw me he frowned, something he did like breathing. Not seeing him
frown would have worried me.
    I let him claim my place in the conversation, not minding,
for once. It didn’t matter to me that he’d never liked me, didn’t bother me
that I didn’t know why. For a rich processing-patent heir from Ardattee, there
must be more reasons than he had brain cells. Maybe it was enough that he’d
seen Kissindre sketch my face once in the corner of her lightbox instead of
making her usual painstaking hand drawing of some artifact. I took another
drink off a passing tray. This time Protz frowned at me.
    I looked away from him, reorienting on the conversation.
Ditreksen was standing next to me, asking Perrymeade how he’d come to be Tau’s
Alien Affairs Commissioner. It seemed to be an innocent question, but there was
something in the way he asked it that made me look twice at him. I wasn’t
certain until I saw a muscle twitch in Perrymeade’s cheek. Not my
imagination.
    Perrymeade smiled an empty social smile, one that stopped at
his eyes, and said, “I fell into it, really ... An interest in xenology runs in
the family.” He glanced at Kissindre; his smile was real as he looked at her. “I
had some background in the field. The time came when Tau needed to fill the
Alien Affairs position, and so they tapped me.”
    “You’re the only agent?” I asked, wondering if there could actually
be that few Hydrans left on Refuge.
    He looked surprised. “No, certainly not. I am the one who
has direct contact with the Hydran Council, however. The Council communicates
with our agency on behalf of their people.”
    I looked away, made restless by a feeling I couldn’t name. I
searched the crowd for the three Hydrans; spotted them across the room, barely
visible inside a forest of human bodies.
    “I suppose the job must pay awfully we11,” Ezra murmured,
drawing out the words as if they were supposed to mean something more. “To make
the ... challenges of the work worthwhile.”
    I