Tom O'Bedlam Part 11

"No, not the dreams. Not yet," she said. "Do you mind if I hear the new cube?"

"No, no, of course, here. Here." He put the bonephones to her cheeks, pressing them on lightly, with a tender, almost loving touch. He tapped the k.n.o.b and she heard a deep male voice, so deep it sounded like the booming of a great bullfrog, or perhaps a crocodile, chanting something steady and repet.i.tive and vaguely African-sounding, a little barbaric, very powerful and disturbing. She heard the words that Menendez had been murmuring: Maguali-ga, Chungira. Then there was a lot of what might have been Portuguese, and the sound of drums and some high-pitched instrument, and the noises of a crowd repeating the chant.

"But what is it?" she asked.

"It is like a meeting, a holy prayer. There are G.o.ds. It is very beautiful." He took the bonephones from her as tenderly as he had put them on. "My wife, she will not this weekend, eh?"

"No, Tomas."

"Ah. Ah, it is too bad."

"Yes." Elszabet switched off the screen. "You might want to go down to the gymnasium. There's a dance group there now. You'd enjoy it."

"Perhaps a little while."

"All right. Do you happen to know where Ed Ferguson is?"

"Ferguson, no. I think he goes off walking in the woods."

"Alone?"

"Sometimes the big woman. Sometimes the artificial one. I forget the names." "April. Alleluia."

"One of them, yes." Menendez took Elszabet's hand carefully between his own. "You are a very kind woman," he said. "You will visit me tomorrow?"

"Of course," she said.

The strange discordant chanting still rang in her ears as she walked up the hallway to finish her rounds. Philippa, Alleluia, April. Alleluia wasn't there. All right, off in the woods with Ferguson: that was an old story. They deserved each other, she told herself, the cold-blooded swindler and the cold-blooded artificial being. Then she chided herself for lack of charity. Some h.e.l.l of a healer you are, thinking of your patients that way. But as quickly as she had a.s.sailed herself Elszabet let herself off the hook. You're ent.i.tled to be human, she thought. You aren't required to love everybody in the Center. Or even to like them. Just to see that they get the treatment they need.

She broke into a slow trot and then into a jog, heading back up the hill toward her office. The morning was lovely, clear and warm. It was that time of the year when one golden day followed another without variance or interruption; the summertime fog season was over, and as Nick Double Rainbow had so thoughtfully reminded her, the rainy season was still more than a month away.

I'll go to the beach this afternoon, Elszabet thought. Lie in the sun, try to make some sense out of things.

It bothered her enormously that these strangenesses were creeping into the Center: the shared dreams, puzzling not only because they were shared but also because of their bewildering content, all these to the staff: Teddy Lansford and Naresh Patel and just yesterday Dante Corelli, too, bewilderedly confessing a Nine Suns dream. Elszabet suspected that other staff members might be concealing s.p.a.ce dreams of their own, too, just as she had not yet been able to admit to anyone that she was now and then being invaded - while actually awake, no less - by strands of imagery that seemed to come out of the Green World dream. Everything was turning strange. Why? Why?

For Elszabet the Center was the one place in the world where she felt at peace, where the crazy turmoil outside was held at bay. That was why she had come here, to do her work and be of service and at the same time to escape the harshness and sorrows of that burned-out world beyond the Center's gates. There were times here when she almost managed to forget about what was going on out there, although the steady influx of Gelbard's syndrome victims, twitchy and hollow-eyed, constantly reminded her of that.

Still, the Center was a peaceful place. And yet, and yet, she knew that was foolishness, hoping she could ever escape the real world here. The real world was everywhere. And now the real world was getting unreal and the unreality was sliding through the gates like a fog.

As she approached her office Bill Waldstein came down the path from the GHQ building and said, "Where is everybody?"

"Who? Staff? Patients?" "Anyone. Place seems awfully quiet."

Elszabet shrugged. "Dante's got a big dance group going. I guess just about everyone must be over at the gym. Who are you looking for? Tomas and the Indian are in their room, Phillipa and April are in theirs, Ferguson's fooling around in the forest with Alleluia -"

Waldstein looked drawn and weary. "Is it true that Dante had a s.p.a.ce dream night before last?"

"You'd better ask her that," Elszabet said.

"She did, then. She did." He scuffed at the ground with his sandal. "Can we go into your office, Elszabet?"

"Of course. What's happening, Bill?"

He didn't speak until they were in the little room. Then, scrunching down against the data wall, he gave her a haggard look and said, "Confidential?"

"Absolutely."

"You remember when I was saying the s.p.a.ce dreams had to be frauds, that the patients were making them up just to bedevil us? I haven't really believed that for a while, I guess. But I certainly don't now."

"Oh?" she said.

"Now that I've had one too."

"You?"

"I had Double Star Three last night. The whole thing, all the bells and whistles, the orange sun high and the yellow one down by the horizon, the double shadows. Then the yellow one set and everything turned to flame."

Elszabet watched him closely. She thought he was going to burst into tears.

"Wait," he said. "There's more. I improved on it. When April had it last week there were no life-forms, right? I got life-forms. Blue sphere-shaped creatures with little squid tentacles at the top end. Isn't that cute? Strolling around in a sort of amphitheater like Aristotle and his disciples. Cute. Very cute."

"How do you feel?" Elszabet asked.

Waldstein shuddered. "Dirty inside the head. Like I have gritty sand all over the lining of my skull."

"Bill -" Compa.s.sion flooded her. This was the moment to tell him that he wasn't alone, that she had been feeling the Green World dream tickling at the edge of her mind, that she feared the same things he feared. She couldn't do it. It was a lousy thing, holding back on him when he was plainly in so much pain. But she couldn't do it. Letting him, anyone, know that her mind too was vulnerable to this stuff: no. No, she wouldn't.

Couldn't. She felt like a hypocrite. So be it. So be it. She remained outwardly cool, calm, the sensitive administrator hearing the confession of the troubled staff member.

Give him something, Elszabet thought.

"I can tell you that you aren't alone in this," she said after a moment.

"I know. Teddy Lansford. Dante. Also I think Naresh Patel, from something he let slip a few weeks ago. And probably more of us."

"Probably," she said.

"So it isn't just a psychotic phenomenon limited to the patients."

"It never was limited to the patients. Almost from the beginning it's been reaching staff members."

"Who are psychotic also, then? Early stages of Gelbard's, do you think?"

She shook her head. "A, stop throwing around loaded words like psychotic, okay? B, sharing a manifestation like this with victims of Gelbard's doesn't necessarily mean that you're coming down with Gelbard's yourself, only that something very peculiar is going on that tends to affect the patients more readily than the staff, but affects staff too. C -"

"I'm scared, Elszabet."

"So am I. C, what we have here is a phenomenon not confined to Nepenthe Center, as I intend to make clear at the staff meeting tomorrow."

Waldstein looked startled. "What do you mean?"

"Move back and watch the data wall," she said.

He ambled to his feet and turned around. She activated the wall. A map of the Pacific states appeared.

"These dreams," she said, "have also been reported at the mindpick centers in San Francisco, Monterey, and Eureka." She touched a key and the screen lit up at those three places. "I've been in touch with the directors there. Same seven visualizations, not necessarily all seven in each center. Primarily experienced by patients, lesser frequency among staff."

"But what -" "Hold on," she said. More lights appeared on the screen. "Dave Paolucci in San Francisco has been gathering reports of incidence of the s.p.a.ce dreams outside Northern California, and it looks like his new data are coming on line right this minute." Patterns of color blossomed at the lower end of the state. "Look at that," Elszabet said. "I've got to call him. I've got to get the details. Look there: a heavy concentration of dream reports in the San Diego area, you see? And some from Los Angeles. And up there too: what's that, Seattle, Vancouver? Oh, Christ, Bill, look at that! It's everywhere. It's a plague."

"Denver, too," Waldstein said, pointing.

"Yeah. Denver. Which is about as far east as we have reliable communication, but who knows what's going on beyond the Rockies? So it isn't just you, Bill. It's d.a.m.n near everybody that's dreaming these dreams."

"Somehow that doesn't make me feel much better," Waldstein said.

4.

FERGUSONsaid, "What I'd like to do, I'd like to get myself the h.e.l.l out of this place as fast as I can and start making some money out of all this nonsense."

"How would you do that?" Alleluia asked.

"h.e.l.l, wouldn't be much of a trick. The main side of the Center there's a gate, but on this side it's just the forest. You could slip off in the afternoon and find your way right through, just keep the sun at your back afternoons and in front of you mornings, maybe two or three days tops if you had your wits about you. Out to the old freeway and across to Ukiah, say -"

"No. I mean how would you make money out of it."

Ferguson smiled. They were lying in a quiet, mossy glade a twenty-minute stroll east of the Center, redwoods and sword ferns and a little brook. The ground was folded and tilted there in a way that would make it hard for anyone to blunder onto them. It was his favorite place. He had made sure to enter its location on his ring-recorder so he'd have no trouble finding it again, even though they might happen to pick the data from his mind every time after he had gone there. Some things you forgot, some you didn't: you never could be sure.

He said, "It's a cinch. The s.p.a.ce dreams, they aren't just happening to the patients here. I know that for a fact."

"You do?"

"I listen very carefully. You know the technician, Lansford? He's had them two or three times. I heard them talking, Waldstein, Robinson, Elszabet Lewis. I think maybe that little Hindu doctor has had them. And even Waldstein, is what I think. But the dreams are also happening outside the Center." "You know that?" Alleluia asked.

"I've got good reason to think so," Ferguson said. He ran his hand lightly up her thigh, stopping just short of the crotch. Her skin was smooth as silk. Smoother, maybe. It was half an hour since they had done it and he still felt sweaty, but not Alleluia. That was the thing about these artificial women - they were perfect, they never even worked up much of a sweat. "I have a friend in San Francisco, she told me about a dream weeks ago, same one you had once. You remember having that dream? With the horns, the block of white stone, the two suns?"

"I thought that you had that dream."

"Me? No. It was you. I never had any of the dreams, not one. The time I told you, it was that my friend had it, the one in San Francisco. If they're having them there, having them here, you can bet they're everywhere."

"So?"

He slipped his hand up to her breast. She stirred and wriggled against him. He liked that. He felt almost ready to go again. Just like a kid, he thought: always ready for an encore, even these days.

"You know what I was sent here for?" he asked.

"You told me, but they picked it."

"I had a scam going, offering to send people to other planets where they could make a new start, escape this mess on Earth, you know? Just give me a few thousand bucks and as soon as the process is perfected you'll be able to -"

Alleluia said, "You can still remember doing that?"

"It doesn't seem to go when they pick me."

"And you'll start your scam up again, is that it?"

"How can it miss? Everybody's presold. The dreams, they're like advertis.e.m.e.nts for the planets that I can supply, you see? There's the red-and-blue-sun world, there's the green- sky planet, there's the nine-suns planet - you see, I know them all, I have my ways, Allie. Seven of them, there are, seven dream-planets. You make your choice, you give me the money, I take care of things, I see to it that you're s.h.i.+pped to the right place. The dreams, I say, that's just the other planets sending out like travel posters to tell people how terrific they are. It can't miss, kid. I tell you: it can't miss."

"They'll catch you again," she said. "They caught you once, they'll catch you again. And this time they won't just toss you in Nepenthe Center."

"It won't happen, they catch me."

"No?" "Never. First thing is, I get out of the jurisdiction. I go up north, Oregon, Was.h.i.+ngton.

Then I use a dummy corporation - you know what that is? - and another dummy behind the dummy, a series of sh.e.l.ls, everything through nominees. With a mail drop in Portland, say, or maybe Spokane, and -"

"Ed?"

"Yeah?"

"I don't give a c.r.a.p, Ed. You know that?"

"Well, why should you? You don't give a c.r.a.p about anything, do you?"

"One thing."

"Yeah," he said. "One thing. Thank G.o.d for that. But I don't understand. What good's a s.e.x-drive in a synthetic? s.e.x was put in us originally so we'd reproduce, right? And you don't reproduce, not by s.e.x. Right? Right?"

"It's there for a reason," she said.

"It is?"

"It's to make us think we're human," Alleluia said. "So we don't get maladjusted and unhappy and try to take over the world. We could, you know. We're highly superior beings. Anything you can do, we can do fifty times better. If we didn't have s.e.xual feelings, we might think of ourselves as even more different than we are, some sort of master race, you know? But they give us s.e.x, it keeps us pacified, it keeps us in our place."

"Yeah," he said. "I can understand that." Ferguson leaned across, kissed the tip of each nipple, lightly kissed her lips. "It makes a lot of sense," he said. He had never spent this much time around a synthetic before, and he was learning a lot from doing it. Like most people, he had tended to keep his distance, regarding the synthetics as creepy, weird.

There weren't that many of them anyway, maybe half a million, something like that.

Less. He remembered when they were being made, thirty years ago or thereabouts, just before the Dust War. Intended for military use was what he remembered, perfect beings to fight a perfect war. A discontinued experiment of the good old days. But they weren't quite perfect, it seemed. They had a lot of genuine human quirks. Human enough to make them wind up in a therapy center the way this one had, apparently. Well, they were human enough to love to f.u.c.k, too. You take the pluses with the minuses, hope for the best. He cupped her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Softly he said, "When I leave here, you leave here with me, okay? I'll show you all my little tricks."

"I'll show you some of mine," she said.

5 THEroadway looped like a great gray snake across the water, rising high above the water here, leveling off there, pa.s.sing through a tunnel at one point, jumping up and becoming two huge suspension bridges later on. At the far end of it, white and glistening in the afternoon light, was San Francisco, tightly huddled on its little piece of the planet. Cool, cool air came flowing through the van's open windows.