第49节

od grades you've

been getting. Keep up the good work!" Karlstrom pressed the button

which caused the cylindrical compartment to rotate, carrying Roz back

into the adjoining office suite. The two execs rose from their chairs

to meet her.

CHAPTER NINE

'Roz?"

Steve woke with his kin-sister's name on his lips and his nostrils

filled with the soap-scented smell of her hair.

For a split second or so he was convinced she was in the darkened room

with him. Or had been, and had just left.

Slowly that certainty faded. It had been a dream, nothing more. He

shivered, quickly retrieved the padded quilt that had slipped off his

naked body and snuggled down beneath it.

It was amazing how the brain could create a mental landscape as real as

anything you could see with your eyes open, right down to the smallest

detail. It could bring you face to face with images of people you

could speak with, reach out and touch, draw to you and embrace. Not

only that, the dream state allowed you to savour the same emotions, the

same sensations as when you were wide awake: the taste and the moist

softness of their lips, the electric tingle of their skin under your

fingertips, the delicious all-enveloping warmth generated as your body

joined with theirs.

Did their sleeping minds, he wondered, share the same dream? Did they

merge with yours on one of the invisible planes of existence Mr Snow

had often referred to? In his dream, Steve had been with Clearwater.

They were back in the hut where she had visited him only hours before

he had made his escape from the M'Calls the Mute clan that had held him

captive during the summer of 2989. Clearwater's naked body had been

locked round his, but as she drew his mouth down on to hers he found

himself embracing Roz. And they were no longer in Cadillac's hut. He

and his kin-sister were lying naked under a quilt in his bunk-space in

the quarters allotted to the Brickman family at Roosevelt Field. The

room seemed much bigger than he remembered it, and so did the bunk. It

was then he realised that his kin-sister's breasts had shrunk back into

her body. Her skin was patterned like a Mute's and she was now no more

than ten years old.

As he drew back from her with mixed feelings of guilt and surprise he

became aware that Karlstrom, the head of AMEXICO, was sitting on the

end of the bed watching them with an amused smile. A man and woman

dressed in black and silver-blue jumpsuits suddenly appeared. The man

pulled the quilt from the bed. Steve tried to hold on to it but his

fingers wouldn't grip properly. His hands had become weak and

boneless. The woman exec picked up Roz, only now his kin-sister had

become a five-year-old.

They wrapped her in the quilt and took her away. By the time they

reached the door Roz was a little snub-nosed baby, eyes screwed up

tight, her toothless mouth wide open - screaming...

Had Roz been trying to get in touch with him? Was she trying to tell

him something, or was this another message from the furtive stranger

who haunted the dark recesses of his own brain?

Jumbled fragments of his dream drifted through his mind as he began to

doze off again. The world outside the shuttered log cabin lay quiet

and still. Inside, the only sound to break the silence was the

sonorous breathing of his sleeping companions- fourteen Mutes who lay

head to head on two neat rows of mattresses.

The cabin in which Steve was passing the night lay near the post-house

at All-bani, and he was here as a result of the deal he had struck with

the man in black - or someone who sounded very like him. Within four

days of leaving the post-house where he had met Clearwater, Steve had

acquired the papers and ID plaque of a roadrunner.

These were foot-messengers, the first her in the centrally-controlled

postal system which had been set up by the Toh-Yota Shogunate to keep