Free Dreamfall by Joan D. Vinge

her; noticed
his teeth were crooked. You didn’t see that much.
    When Protz got to me, Wauno met my stare, and I could see
his interest. “Hydran?” he asked me.
    And because there was nothing behind the words, no insult, I
nodded. “Half.”
    His deepset eyes flicked over the people around us. “Then I
guess you’re not a Refugee.”
    “Not lately,” I said.
    He studied my face again, checking out the damage. His hand
rose to the small beaded pouch that hung from a cord around his neck ... Don’t
let them make you into one,” he murmured. He shook his head and turned away as Protz
closed in on us, frowning.
    Wauno started back toward the transport. I followed with the
others. Kissindre got the seat beside his, up front where the view was the
best. Ezra took the seat next to mine, looking resentful and sullen, even
though as usual I didn’t see any reason for it.
    Wauno leaned back in his seat and plugged his fingers into
the control panel. I hadn’t noticed anything unusual about his hands, only his
teeth; even his augmentation had been sanitized by Tau. The transport took us
up, leaving the plaza and the city behind like an afterthought.
    I took a deep breath, looking ahead as we dropped off the
edge of Tau’s world, following the river over the falls and on along its
snake-dancing course into the eroded landscape of the reefs, the heart of the
Hydran reservation. The “Homeland,” Tau called it, as if one part of this world
could belong more to the Hydrans, by right, than another.
    I forced myself to stop thinking about Tau, forced myself to
stop replaying memories of last night and focus on the new day. I was about to
experience something incredible, something that ought to put all our lives into
some kind of perspective.
    The cloud-whales, the aliens responsible for the existence
of the reefs, had been a part of this world longer than either humans or
Hydrans. They were colony-creatures, each individual—made up of countless
separate motes functioning together like the cells of a brain. They absorbed
energy directly from sunlight, substance from the molecules of the air.
    They spent their entire existence in the sky, condensing the
atmospheric water vapor until they were shrouded in fog. To someone looking up
with only human eyes, they were impossible to tell from the real thing. And
looking down, if they did , nothing that humans or Hydrans
had ever done here on this world seemed to concern them.
    Nothing about their own existence was permanent; their forms
mutated endlessly with the restless motion of the atmosphere ... their thoughts
flowed and changed, each one unique, shimmering, and random. But like the
hidden order inside the chaos of a fractal pattern, there were moments of
genius hidden in their whimsies.
    And their thoughts were unique in another way—they had
physical substance. As solid and tangible as human thoughts were insubstantial,
the cloud-whales’ cast-off musings fell from the sky, a literal fall of dreams.
The dreamfall accreted in areas where the cloud-whales gathered, drawn by
something about the landscape, the weather conditions, fluctuations in the
planet’s magnetosphere. over time the excrement of their thoughts, their
cast-off mental doodlings, formed strange landscapes like the one that was
passing below us now. After centuries, or millennia, the reefs had become
strata hundreds of kilometers long and hundreds of meters thick, rich with
potential knowledge.
    A ‘wild library” was what Tau’s researchers called it, in
the background data I’d accessed. The research team called it “cloud shit” when
they thought no one was listening. The untouched reef formation we’d come to
study—like the ones Tau was already exploiting—was an amino acid stew of
recombinant products just waiting to be plucked out of the matrix and sent to
labs hungry for progress, all for the greater profit of Draco.
    Draco, through its subsidiary holdings, was a major player
in nanotechnology