Winterlong by Elizabeth Hand Read Free Book Online Page A

next to me, his pale gray skin, his eyes: my beautiful brother in the dark.
    After this session Dr. Harrow’s red eyes met mine when I first came to, but she left quickly, advising me not to leave my chamber until she summoned me later. I fell soundly asleep until late afternoon, when the rush of autumn rain against the high casements finally woke me. For a long time I lay in bed staring up at a long fine crack that traversed the ceiling. To me it appeared like the arm of some ghastly tree overtaking the room. It finally drove me downstairs, despite Dr. Harrow’s warning to stay in the Home Room.
    I paced the long glass-roofed corridor that led to the pre-Columbian annex, brooding. I almost wished that Justice would see me and stop me, send me to my room, and arrange for my medication to be changed or schedule me for tests that might reduce this strange unease. But today the Aides would be meeting with Margalis Tast’annin and his staff. HEL ’s senior personnel would be in their private quarters upstairs having tea, and the other empaths would be playing at furtive pastimes where they could not be easily monitored. I paused to pluck a hibiscus blossom from a terracotta vase and arranged it behind one ear. Then I went on, until I reached the ancient elevator with its folding arabesques.
    The second floor was off limits to empaths, but Anna had memorized a dead patient’s release code and she and I occasionally crept up here to tap sleeping research subjects. No Aides patrolled these rooms. Servers checked the monitors and recorded all responses. Their creaking wheels and the monotonous click of their datachambers were the only sounds that stirred the drowsy air. At the end of each twelve-hour shift, doctors would flit in and out of the bedrooms, unhooking oneironauts and helping them stumble to other rooms where they could fall into yet another, though dreamless, sleep. I tapped the pirated code into the first security server I saw, then waited for it to read my retina imprint and finally grant the access code that slid open the false paneled wall.
    Here stretched the sleeplabs: chambers swathed in yellowed challis and moth-eaten linens, huge canopied beds where masked oneironauts (most of them unfortunate survivors of the previous Ascendant autocracy, or captives taken during the Archipelago Conflict) turned and sighed as their monitors clicked in draped alcoves. The oneironauts’ skin shone glassy white. Beneath the masks their eyes were bruised a tender green from enforced somnolence. I held my breath as long as I could: the air seethed with dreams. I hurried down the hall to a room with door ajar and an arched window columned with white drapes. A woman I did not recognize sprawled across a cherry four-poster. Her demure homespun shift, yolk-yellow and embroidered with a five-digit number, was curiously at odds with the mask that rakishly covered her eyes. I slipped inside, locking the door behind me. Then I turned to the bed.
    The research subject’s hair formed a dark filigree against the disheveled linen sheets. I bowed to kiss her on the mouth, waiting to be certain she would not wake. Then I dipped my tongue between her lips and drew back, closing my eyes to unravel strands of desire and clouded abandon, pixie fancies. All faded in a moment: dreams, after all, are dreams. I reached to remove the wires connecting her to the monitors, adjusted the settings, and hooked her into the NET . I did the same for myself with extra wires, relaying through the BEAM to the transmitter. I smoothed the sheets, lay beside her, and closed my eyes.
    A silvery dome shot with sunlight. Clouds mist the dome with a scent of filters and stale air. In the distance I hear the click of solex panels rotating as the NASNA station moves silently through the atmosphere. Turning, I can see a line of stunted gray-green trees planted in a straight line. We walk there, the oneironaut’s will bending so easily to mine that I scarcely sense her: