Dreamhunter Duet: Dreamquake Part 20

"Oh-look at you," she said. She'd uncovered some more of him and thought he was beautiful, and that made her tearful too.

Sandy gave a gasp and grabbed her, and they fell down together onto the ground, which was still impossibly lumpy, even under all the blankets. They writhed around, trying to get comfortable, and to get at each other, clumsy and hasty.They slowed down and stared at each other, their eyes moving, and sometimes meeting, with bright, searching, softened looks.

Inside Laura's great excitement, there was a kind of peaceful expectation. She had felt big and powerful before, and she had felt small and lost. Being like this with Sandy seemed the best way to discover what size she really was, and where she belonged, both in her body and in time and s.p.a.ce.

He found himself in what he supposed was the garden of one of the farms in the valley. An ordinary garden, made glorious by his exhaustion and the glow of final things.

He had somehow lost his shoes, and the gra.s.s was tender on the soles of his bare feet. It was twilight, sometime in the half hour after sunset, when the sky still fumes with the sun's power but the earth is drowsy. The garden was giving off vapor, scents, ghosts of dewfall in the soft air.

He wasn't dreaming. No one could fall asleep while in flight, stumbling and singing, every breath a phrase of the song. And why bother to fall asleep before a thing you don't need to survive?

Ahead of him a path wound through rhododendrons. The bushes were not in flower, because it was summer. Because it was summer there had been a bonfire on the beach-three days ago, was it? Three days, when he still had his strength, and shortly before he'd lost all hope.

He became aware that someone was ahead of him. A woman was winding her way through the rhododendrons. He could see the pale streak of her skirt disappearing around the curve in the path.

He followed her onto the clearing of a lawn. Around the lawn's dusky green arena were citrus trees: lemons and limes, mandarins and k.u.mquats, glowing like lanterns among the glossy darkness of their leaves.

The woman glanced back and lingered, as though he were lagging behind and she must wait for him.

There was a gate before her. It had white-painted posts and a peaked roof, like the gate to a churchyard. Beyond the gate there was another green room.

The woman waited, and he caught up with her; then she went ahead, and he fixed his eyes on her hand, the hand held back to him. He would know it anywhere. It looked like his mother's.

She beckoned, trailed her arm like a rope he could catch. She walked on, caressing the petals of flowers, the quilted foliage of a humble hydrangea, a tibouchina, its purple flowers haloed with cerise.

There was too much color to take in. His prison-ruined eyes watered and made afterimages, a halo around every object. The woman's pale skirt reflected the colors, as though she stood in the light of a stained-gla.s.s window.

She stopped at the gate and waited. He could see a little of the garden beyond her-its piled flower-colors and flower-lights.

It seemed to him that the fierce currents of heat had been only momentarily calmed. The sun had gone, but something had electrified the atmosphere. Something impossible was about to happen to the twilight.

The woman who might be his mother smiled at him, as if to say, "Wait till you see this."

The sun had gone, and the birds had settled and roosted, shadows nestled into shadows. But suddenly they began again to make expectant noises, like dawn birdcalls.

The sun was coming back.

Because the sun was coming back, the day would return and take him through it again. Not his real yesterday but something better. Every hour would brighten back to noon, and then on toward morning. With every hour he would be cleaner and fresher and more full of the certainty that is health and youth. There was no hurry. It was the first time for everything. That was her promise, that was where she meant to take him-through the gate, into all that was sweet, and easeful, and good in the green fathoms of a garden.

Then the sun came back and covered them both, and carried them off to the first time for everything.

5.

AS DORAN WAS STILL IN HIS OFFICE, HIS BACK TO HIS OVAL WINDOW WITH ITS VIEW OF THE ISLE OF THE TEMPLE AND its three domes. Nearest was the green copper-clad dome at the top of the offices of the Dream Regulatory Body. In the middle distance was the scintillating skin of the Rainbow Opera. Farthest off the Temple shone, so pale that the sky seemed to show through it, as the bruise of a slight tumble will show on a petal of fallen plum blossom.

Doran had for some minutes been peering out from under a steeple made of his hands at a telegram on his otherwise clean and empty desktop. He looked as if he was developing a headache.

"Are you going to tell me what it says?" Maze Plasir was sitting across the desk from the Secretary and sipping wine.

"Laura Hame has finally signed in at Doorhandle in the intentions book. I've already had reports from St. Thomas's and Pike Street. I knew she was back in Founderston, dream-hunting, peddling Convalescent One with her friend the Mason boy."

"Why is her signing in worse than her continuing to hide?"

"She's mad," Doran said. "She escaped from the Depot-G.o.d knows how. She was threatened, deprived of liberty, and she simply comes back to Founderston and picks up where she left off late last winter. She's insane. Or she's very simple."

"I'd love to talk to her," said Plasir.

"Why?" Doran looked up, sharp.

"To sound her out. She's not simple, Cas, though she may be mad."

"Is she trying to draw me out somehow? Is this the advice they've give her?"

"They, Cas?"

"Them-my opponents."

"Do you mean 'Lazarus'?"

"I mean the Grand Patriarch," Doran said.

Plasir nodded. He twirled his gla.s.s, looked at the lozenge of light spinning in the wine. "How did the Hame girl escape?"

"Incompetence," Doran said. "My allies are incompetent."

"Not all," Plasir said, mildly.

Doran scowled. He thought of Rose Tiebold in the library at his summerhouse, tearful but cool underneath. Rose asking him about the surplus rails in the Awa Inlet. Rose after the riot, saying of her cousin, "She didn't sleep. We were talking."

"Courage isn't cleverness," he said, thinking aloud. "They can't outwit me." He opened one of his desk drawers and produced the rolled map of Founderston. He spread it open and peered at the circles that represented the penumbras of dreamhunters-dreamhunters loaded with Contentment. None of them were in place yet, but soon could be.

Plasir said, musing, "I remember how I would sometimes see people stop Tziga Hame in the street, to kiss his hands. Do people like Hame ever need to resort to anything as vulgar as cunning?"

Doran studied his map and thought of the fortress that was the Temple-how he hadn't been able to buy, or rent, any property in its vicinity, so couldn't get one of his dosed dreamhunters near it. "What I need is a Soporif," he said.

"Then we must acquire one, by all means," Plasir said, and sipped, then smacked his lips. "Perhaps we should separate Miss Hame from her friend the Mason boy. The reports from St. Thomas's seem to suggest he is one, like his uncle. What do you say to that, eh, Cas?"

6.

FTER THE DREAM LAURA AND SANDY WERE STILL IN ITS DEEPS, WAITING TO SLEEP AGAIN. THEY TALKED AND KISSED; they rested and slept and went back to The Gate. After a time, hard to measure how long with no night and day, they exhausted their food supply and their ability to sleep. They got up, groggy, and began stuffing their rubbish of wrappers and empty cans into their packs. Laura stepped off the muddled blankets, and Sandy began picking them up, one by one, to shake them. Together they folded each blanket. When the last one was lifted, Laura looked down on the bared earth. At that moment it seemed to her the most significant things that had ever happened to her-The Gate, and Sandy-had happened in this uncomfortable spot. She stood looking reverently at the ground, her face soft with serenity and bodily tiredness.

There was a circle carved in the dirt. Much of their discomfort had been because of this deeply scored mark. Laura frowned at it. "What's this?"

"Foreigner's West," Sandy said. He was busy fastening a belt around the bundle of blankets so they'd be easier to carry.

"Pardon?"

"You know how rangers have their own legends, like we dreamhunters do? Theirs are about exploration rather than dreams." Sandy got up. His knees creaked. "Rangers talk about the Foreigner as though he's a good story rather than a historical fact-a pioneering ranger who didn't make maps but left compa.s.s marks."

"I don't get it," Laura said.

"Does it matter? All it means for us, Laura, is that no one tries sleeping here because it's too uncomfortable. And since The Gate is on just this confined site, no one else has ever caught it. Your father said he only found it because he was always able to sense where healing dreams were. When he walked by Foreigner's West, he knew the dream was here."

Laura began to twist her hair. Her curls were matted at the back, she had been lying down for so long. "But this isn't a compa.s.s mark," she said. She spoke so softly Sandy had to lean forward to hear her. Finding himself near, he kissed her on her earlobe. He said, "The idea that these are compa.s.s marks is the only reason rangers suppose the pioneer was a foreigner. French. They think the marks stand for north and west in French. The dream Quake is right on top of Foreigner's North. Foreigner's North is an N carved in the ground. 'Nord.' This is an O, for 'Ouest.'"

Sandy went on with what he was doing, lengthening one shoulder strap of Laura's pack so that he could carry it for her. It took him a moment to notice how still and silent she had become. He looked up at her.

"It's a Nown," Laura said. "The Place is a Nown." Her voice was almost inaudible.

Sandy tried to figure out why she had chosen this moment to correct his grammar. He reviewed what he'd been telling her and couldn't recall having mentioned the Place at all.

Laura still stood as if entranced. The color had drained out of her face.

Sandy put his hand under her elbow. He was afraid that she was about faint. But she didn't sway or crumple, she simply stood frozen in place.

Nerves made Sandy giggle. He said, "Love, you are looking like Lot's wife, white and fixed to the spot."

Laura could hear Sandy only as a murmur through a wall, one of those sounds that wakes you-a late-night conversation, or m.u.f.fled crying. She was lost in the past.

She remembered the day she had made Nown. He had stood up out of the dry streambed and shown her his true face, a face she had longed to see. He had gotten onto his knees before her and made his pledge and introduction: "Laura Hame, I am your servant." She had been exhausted after making him and had slept for a time. When she woke up, she had lain admiring him. He'd stood, surveying the gra.s.slands Inland, engrossed. When she'd asked him what he was doing, he had answered, "Listening." When she'd asked what he was listening to, he'd said, "I can hear now." And she had stupidly, wooden-headedly, imagined that, just as she'd made a more handsome sandman, she had also managed to make one with better hearing. He had even repeated himself in an effort to explain what must have bewildered him. "I can hear now," he'd said. "I am here with myself."

I can hear Now. I am here with myself.

They were all his selves-the Nowns, and speechless Nows. He'd come alive again and discovered he was standing inside himself-another self-a speechless Now, a Nown who hadn't had its final letter added, the letter that, in the spell, "gives speech." He'd tried to tell her, but she hadn't heard him. She hadn't heard his name when he used it. "Now" was only a word, and Sandy had just heard her say that "the Place" was a noun. It was an easy mistake, an obvious mistake. One word for another: "noun" for "Nown."

And to invent some surveying French ranger to explain an N and an O carved on the ground was an irresistible mistake. Because whatever logic such mistakes lacked, they still made some kind of daft sense.

What was the alternative? That someone had walked in a long loop around miles and miles of ground, singing "The Measures" and stopping occasionally to inscribe the letters of the spell: N O W. Someone had brought the land itself to life and tried to make a slave of it.

Sandy found himself holding Laura up. She was overcome, by exhaustion or the elixirlike power of the dream, or with trepidation about how far they had gone. Sandy couldn't tell exactly what it was that had thrown her into a state of shock. He didn't know what he could do to help.

She clung to him. Her skin was cold, and she was s.h.i.+vering. Sandy coaxed her to sit back down, and she all but collapsed on him. But then she was asking questions again, and her voice sounded rational. "The N on the site of Quake-is it in one piece?" she asked.

"Never mind that now," Sandy said, soothing.

"Please tell me."

"No, it isn't. The letter is cracked straight across. There really was a quake there at some point."

"It's free then," Laura thought. "Its first N has been erased, as I erased Nown's in the early hours of St. Lazarus's Day. It's its own. And I've always felt it was talking to me because it was, or was trying to. It knows me. The dreams are set in the future, so it must once have known me. My father's sandman was the eighth Nown, mine is the ninth. The Place must be a later one."

Then she thought of the angry demands from the bad telegrams: "Rise up and shake them all off! Rise up and crush them!" She didn't understand it at all. What did it want?

"Laura, please stop crying," Sandy begged.

She held her breath, hiccuped, struggled.

Agonized, Sandy burst out, "You should be happy!" But he was asking too much for himself, and that scared him. "Because of The Gate," he added. "How can you be unhappy with that inside you?"

Laura shook her head, choked. "This is just a reaction. Don't mind me."

He put an arm around her waist. "Can you walk? Let's go home. Let's go do your father some good, and start making our fortunes."

Laura nodded. She let him help her up. They stepped out of the circle and went slowly away from that place.

7.

IVE DAYS BEFORE FOUNDERSTON'S PRESENTATION BALL, THE DIRECTOR OF THE CITY'S LARGEST SANATORIUM, FALlow Hill, was shocked by the sudden visit of a man he'd thought was dead. Called to his office, the director found Tziga Hame sitting in front of his desk.

For nearly twenty years Hame had had a contract with Fallow Hill. When the dreamhunter disappeared, it had been a great loss to the sanatorium. The director was surprised and delighted to see Hame. Then, looking harder, he wondered whether the man had come seeking treatment. In the minute it took the director to process these impressions, he noticed his office was full of Hame's relatives. He shook hands with all of them, then sat down to hear what Hame had to say about his injuries.

Hame and his sister-in-law were sitting. Grace Tiebold's husband, her daughter, and Hame's daughter stood at the back of the room, with a dreamhunter unknown to the director, a young man with tired eyes and several days' stubble on his jaw.

The director leaned forward and focused on Hame, or tried to, because his eyes kept wandering, and he found himself counting them, one, two, three, four-four dreamhunters in the room. He imagined he could feel them, like storm pressure, an inaudible roar coming off them, and an invisible fire raging around them.

"As you know," Tziga Hame began, "it isn't often that any dreamhunter catches anything new. The almanac gains perhaps fifteen to twenty dreams in any year, and most aren't of any great consequence."

The director nodded, then was distracted by Rose Tiebold, who was making a quizzical face, touching her own chin, then pointing at her cousin's, miming a question about the grazes on Laura Hame's cheeks and chin and top lip. The marks were nothing much, gorse p.r.i.c.kle scuffs. Laura Hame touched her own face, looked away from her cousin, and kept her fingers pressed against her mouth. The young man glanced at her; then his hand found hers, and the director saw them move their arms to conceal their entwined fingers behind their backs.

Tziga Hame was saying, "If we go straight to the Body with this, it will be cla.s.sed as 'a dream for the public good.' But I think it should be tested before it's cla.s.sified. I think it needs expert witnesses. You and your doctors are experts on dreams, long-term illness, and palliative care."

The director sat up straight. "Good G.o.d!" he said. He had realized that it was the dream he could feel, in the room, an endless cascade of high emotion. He looked into all the dreamhunters' faces. He should be able to see it.

"My daughter, Laura, and Alexander Mason here have a dream the like of which has never been felt," Tziga said.

Grace Tiebold coughed. She covered her mouth with her gloved hand.

The director said to her, "You've sampled it already?"

"Yes. We both have," Hame said. "And I'd very much like to have it again. So, if you could include my board in their six-night contract?"