Tom O'Bedlam Part 7

He studied her face like it was a prospectus for an oceanfront development scheme. She looked like a pudding, bland and jiggly. She looked sincere as h.e.l.l. Sweet wide smile, gentle blue-green eyes. Ferguson didn't see how she could be capable of lying. Not this one. The others, sure, but not this one.

"Sometimes even during the day," she went on. "I close my eyes a minute, still awake, and I get pictures under my eyelids."

"You do? Daytimes?"

"This very day. The jellyfish people, middle of the morning."

"After you were picked, then."

"That's right. It's still fresh."

"Go on. Tell me what you saw."

"You know we aren't supposed to tell each other -"

"Tell me," he said.

He wondered if he had ever slept with her. Probably not: she was eighty, a hundred pounds overweight, not his type at all. His recorder didn't have any information on the subject, but that didn't mean it hadn't happened, only that he hadn't bothered to feed the data about it into the recorder, and now it was too late to know. He could haveshtupped her ten times last month and neither of them would have any way of knowing it now.

Things came and went. That time last month when Mariela had visited - she had been like a stranger to him, he didn't really know her at all. Or want to. His own wife. If he hadn't put it on the recorder he wouldn't even know she'd been here.

Uncomfortably April said, "Dr. Lewis told me I must absolutely not reveal my dream content except during the interrogatory sessions, that it would contaminate the data."

"You always do whatever you're told?"

"I'm here to be healed, Ed."

"You give me a pain, April. You and that sea wind that blows all the time."

"Let's walk a little," she said.

They were at the edge of the woods, going along the trail through the redwood forest just east of the Center. It was the free-time part of the afternoon. The wind, cool and strong, was coming in off the ocean like a fist, the way it always did this time of day.

Every afternoon they gave you an hour or two of free time. No therapy in the afternoon; they wanted you to go out and stroll in the forest, or play skill games in the rec room, or just futz around with your fellow inmates.

Ferguson would rather have been with Alleluia right now. But he didn't know where she was, and somehow April had found him. She had a way of doing that, somehow, during free-time.

"You're really obsessed with the s.p.a.ce dreams, aren't you?" she asked.

"Isn't everybody?"

"But you keep asking all the time, what are they like, what are they like."

"It's because I don't get them myself."

"You will," she said softly. "It just isn't your turn, yet. But your turn will come."

Yeah, he thought. When? This had been going on, what, two weeks now? Three? Hard to keep track of time in this place. After you had had a little picking, each day started to flow seamlessly into the one before, the one after. But the dreams, everyone was having them, the inmates and at least one of the staff technicians, that queer Lansford, and maybe even a few of the doctors. Everyone but him. That was the thing of it: everyone but him. It was almost like they were all getting together behind his back to fake up a gigantic mountain of bulls.h.i.+t to pile on top of him, this s.p.a.ce-dream stuff.

"I know your turn will come," she said. "Oh, Ed, the dreams are so beautiful!"

"I wouldn't know," he said. "Let's go this way. Into the woods." She giggled nervously. Almost a whinny.

Ferguson didn't think he'd slept with her. So far as his ring-recorder indicated, Alleluia was the only one since he'd been here. Women April's size had never been his thing, though he could certainly see the potential prettiness deep down inside all that flesh, the buried cheekbones, the nice nose and lips. About thirty-five, came from L.A. like him, very screwed up like everybody here. What bothered him more than the fat was the way her head worked, so ready to believe all sorts of fantastic things. That we all had lived lots of lives and could get in touch with our previous selves, and that some people really were able to read minds, and that G.o.ds and spirits and maybe even witches and elves were real and existed all around us, and so on. It made no sense to him, all her goofy beliefs. The real world hadn't treated her very well so she lived in a bunch of imaginary ones. She had showed him pictures of herself dressed up in costumes, medieval clothes, even one in a suit of armor, a fat lady knight ready to go off to the Crusades. Jesus. No wonder she loved the s.p.a.ce dreams.

But he had to know if this c.r.a.p was really happening.

It was quiet here in the forest. Wind in the treetops, nothing else. Good clean redwood smell. He was starting to like it here a little.

"Why don't you believe we really have the dreams?" she asked.

Ferguson looked at her. "Two things," he said. "One is that all my life I been dealing with people who experience things I don't experience. The ones who go to church, the ones who hang tinsel on their Christmas trees, the ones who think that prayers are answered. Those people havea.s.surances. You know what I mean? I never had an a.s.surance of any d.a.m.n thing, except that I had to make my own luck because there was no one out there going to make it for me. You follow me? Sometimes I'd like to pray too, just like everybody else, only I know there's no use in it. So I feel myself sitting outside what a lot of people know for certain. And when these sort of weird dreams come along, and everyone says how beautiful, how wonderful, and I don't get them you know how I feel? Go on, tell me I'm paranoid. Maybe I am, or I wouldn't be in a place like this, but I never could believe in anything I couldn't touch with my own hands, and I'm not touching these dreams."

"You said there were two things, Ed."

"The other one is, you know I was supposed to go to jail?" He wondered why he was telling her so much about himself. There might be some way she could use this stuff to hurt him. No, he thought, not her. Sweet April. "Convicted of fraud is what I was.

Selling trips to the planet Betelgeuse Five is what I was doing. We'd promise to send you I forget how many light-years, fifteen, fifty, not in the actual flesh but just your mind, by a process of metem - metem -"

"Metempsychosis?" April said.

"That's it, yeah. People signed up in droves. I'm surprised you weren't on our list. Christ, maybe you were. Everybody wanting to go, but of course it was just bulls.h.i.+t, we were going to have trouble with the process and refund all the deposits later on, but meanwhile we were making interest on the cash, you see? Plenty of it, millions. And then they got us. Me. I took the fall, some of the others got off. But what eats me, April, is now the scam is coming true, in reverse, G.o.dd.a.m.n Betelgeuse Five is metempsychosing toEarth. That's what's so unbelievable to me, that suddenly people's minds are in tune with other stars, the very thing I was peddling. I knew I was phony.

But this -"

"No, it's real, Ed."

"How do I know? How do Iknow? Sometimes I think the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds are just fooling me.

Making it all up just to mess up my head." They were deep in the forest now. Just the two of them. Is that really what I believe, he asked himself? That it's like a conspiracy?

Even Lacy, back in San Francisco, seeing the big golden thing with horns: Alleluia had seen the same thing. Could Lacy possibly be in on the deal too? No, how could Lacy have managed to tell her dream to Alleluia? She didn't even know that Alleluia existed.

Even he had to admit that it was crazy to doubt the dreams. But all the same he did doubt. "Tell me about what you saw this morning," he said. "The jellyfish people."

"I'm not supposed to discuss -"

"Jesus," he said. They were all alone, n.o.body around but the chipmunks. He smiled and came close to her. For an instant she gave him a worried, frightened look. "You could be very attractive, you know?" Ferguson told her, and drew her up against him. She was wearing a blue cashmere pullover, fuzzy, soft. He slipped his hand up under it and felt her breast, bare within, so big that he couldn't cover the whole of it with his outspread fingers. She closed her eyes and began to sigh. He found her nipple and rubbed his thumb against it slowly, and in an instant it was hard as a pebble. She pushed the lower half of her body against him again and again and made little sighing sounds.

Then he took his hand away.

"Don't stop," she said.

"I want to know. I need to know. Tell me what you saw."

"Ed -"

He smiled. He put his mouth over hers and slid his tongue between her lips, and touched her breast again, outside the sweater. "Tell me."

With a sigh she said, "All right. Don't stop and I'll tell you. The sky on this world I dreamed is all lit up, it's a million billion stars surrounding the planet, so there's daytime all the time, brilliant daytime. And these beings float through the atmosphere. They're gigantic, and they look something like enormous jellyfish, transparent, with dangling stuff, very intricate. Oh, Ed, I shouldn't be telling you this!"

He ma.s.saged her stiff nipple. "You're doing terrific. Keep going."

"Each ent.i.ty is a colony of beings, like. There's the dark brain in the middle, and then there are the coiling dangling things that hunt for food, and the ones with little oar-legs that propel the colony, and the ones that - that do the reproductive things, and - and, oh, I don't know, there must be fifty other kinds, all bound together, writhing cl.u.s.ters and tangles of them, each one with a sort of mind of its own, but all connected to the main mind. And on the outside of the whole thing are the perceptors that function in all this dazzling light like eyes, but they aren't really eyes because they're all over every bit of the outside -"

He said, "Did it look the same the other time you saw it?"

"I don't know, Ed. They picked me, remember? I lost it then. But I think it must have been the same, because it's a real projection of a real world, so how can it be different each time?"

He didn't know about real projection of a real world. But her description was the same, for sure. She was using some of the exact phrases she had the other day, two, three, four days ago, when she had first told remember what she had said that day any more than she could, but he had it all down on his recorder. And that was what she had said and he had transcribed, writhing cl.u.s.ters and tangles and a dark brain inside the transparent body.

"You mustn't say I told you, Ed."

"No. Of course not."

"Hold me again, won't you please?"

He nodded. Her face came up toward his, eyes bright and misty, lips parted, tongue-tip visible. Poor fat broad. Probably wishes she could leave her body behind and jump to that other world tomorrow and live like a jellyfish-being with dangling cl.u.s.ters of stuff.

Happily ever after.

"Oh, Ed - Ed -"

G.o.dd.a.m.n, he thought. There's no hiding from it: they all do have these dreams, everybody but me, sharing the same dreams, Christ only knows how. The b.a.s.t.a.r.ds, the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds. Everybody but me. He asked himself what use he could make out of all this.

There had to be a use. All his life he had turned to his own use the fact that he missed out on a lot of things that other people experienced. All right, this too. Maybe they'll have some special need for somebody who's immune to the dreams and I can trade that for an end to the G.o.dd.a.m.n daily mindpicking, or something. Maybe.

April pressed herself close, pistoning her hips against him.

"Yeah," he said softly. A deal was a deal. She had told him what he wanted to know; now he had to come through for her. He slipped his hand under her sweater again.

5 ELSZABETsaid, "Output Dreamlist," and the data wall in her office lit up like a stock- exchange ticker display.

1) Green World Six reports Single green sun, heavy green atmosphere, crystalline humanoid inhabitants.

2) Nine Suns Three reports Nine suns, various colors, in sky simultaneously; large extraterrestrial figure frequently visible.

3) Double Star One Seven reports Large red sun, variable blue one; extraterrestrial being, horned, a.s.sociated with white stone slab.

4) Double Star Two Two reports One yellow star, one white one, both much larger than our sun. Matter streaming from both stars forming veil around whole system emitting intense red aura in sky of planet.

5) Sphere of Light Six reports Planet positioned within globular star cl.u.s.ter so populous that constant brilliant light encloses it on all sides. Inhabited by complex medusoid/colonial atmosphere-dwelling creatures.

6) Blue Giant Two reports Enormous blue star giving off fierce output of energy. Planetary landscape molten, bubbling. Ethereal inhabitants not clearly visualized.

"Data entry," Elszabet said.

She began to post the morning's haul of dream reports.

April Cranshaw, Blue Giant.

TomasMenendez, Green World.

FatherChristie, Double Star Two.

Poor Father Christie. He took the dreams worse than any of the others, always interpreting each one as G.o.d's personal message to him. He still hated to give them up.

Every morning she had to go through the same struggle with him, usually needing to double-pick him to get him clean. Maybe if we weren't picking him, she thought, the dreams would lose some of their transcendental power for him, and he'd be easier about the whole thing. On the other hand, if he weren't getting picked he'd have to contend with the notion that G.o.d had come to him in half a dozen different bizarre alien guises over the past few weeks. And most likely he'd be in deep schiz by now, far beyond retrieval, if he had access to more than one dream at a time. Better that he should think each one was his first.

Elszabet continued with the day's entries. Philippa Bruce, Sphere of Light AlleluiaCX1133, Nine Suns.

She felt something that seemed like a headache beginning to invade her, just the ghost of it, a tickling little throb around her temples. Strange. She never got headaches.

Hardly ever. Time of the month, maybe? No, she thought. After-effects of getting punched by Nick Double Rainbow? But that was over a week ago. General tension and stress, then? All this puzzling over weird dreams? Whatever, the sensation was getting a little worse. Pressure behind her eyes, unfamiliar, nasty. She touched the neutralizer node on her watch and gave herself a buzz of alpha sound. First time she'd done that in ages. The pressure eased off a little.

Going onward.Teddy Lansford, Nine Suns.

A knock at the door. Elszabet frowned and glanced at the view-screen. She saw Dan Robinson outside, lounging amiably against the frame of the door.

"You spare a minute?" he asked. "Got something new for you."

She let him in. He had to stoop crossing the threshold. Robinson was an elongated man, basketball-player physique, all arms and legs. He practically filled the little room.

Elszabet's office was nothing more than a small bare functional cubicle, floor of rough gray planks, tiny window, orange glow-light floating overhead. Not even a desk or a computer terminal, just a couple of chairs facing the floor-to-ceiling data wall. She liked it that way.

Robinson peered at the data wall. The Teddy Lansford entry was still showing. He nodded toward it.

"That's his fourth one, isn't it?"

"Third," Elszabet said.

"Third. Even so, why does he get the dreams and not the rest of us? It doesn't figure, that only one staff member should get the dreams."

"Teddy's the only one willing to admit it, maybe," she said. She didn't amplify the statement. Naresh Patel's lone Green World dream was still a confidential matter between him and Elszabet, and would stay that way as long as Patel wanted it that way.

"You suspect that other staff people are hiding them?" Robinson asked. His eyes were suddenly very wide, very white in his chocolate toned face. "You think I am, maybe?"

"Are you?"

"You serious?"

"Well, are you?" she asked, a little too sharply. She wondered why she was being so sharp with him. He was wondering too, obviously. "Hey. Come off it, Elszabet."

The headache was back. She felt the pressure again, stronger than before, a heavy throbbing at the temples. She shook her head, trying to clear it.

"Sorry," she said. "I didn't mean to imply -"