Infinite Dreams

  “It’s not the legs. Absence thereof. She explained that carefully, at some length. It’s not the legs at all.”

  “Look, if you don’t wanna …”

  “It’s not that I can’t get a job and we had to move to Ybor City and she has to carry a gun to go shopping.”

  Bennet grunted and straightened a stack of towels.

  Leonard fumbled through his clothes and got a cigarette, lit it.

  “Shouldn’t smoke those things in here.”

  “Just leaving.” He draped a gray robe around his shoulders. “Help me with this thing, OK?”

  Bennet helped him put on the robe and set him in a wheelchair. “Can’t smoke in Therapy, either.”

  Leonard put the clothes on his lap and turned the chair 180° on one wheel, hypertrophied biceps bulging. “So let’s not go straight to Therapy. I need some fresh air.”

  “You’ll stiffen up.”

  He rolled to the door and opened it. “No, it’s warm. Plenty warm.”

  They were the only people on the porch. Bennet took a cigarette and pointed it at one of the palm trees.

  “You know how old that one is?”

  “She said it was because of the piano.”

  “Yeah, you shouldn’t of sold the piano.”

  “Couldn’t work the pedals right.”

  “Someday you—”

  “I wasn’t going to sell it anyhow; I was going to trade even for classical guitar or lute if I could find somebody.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I went to all the skills transfer agencies. Every one, here and St. Pete. Even one in Sarasota, specializes in music. Couldn’t find a guitar player who was any good. Not in Bach. If I can’t play Bach I’d rather just listen.”

  “You coulda gotten one that was otherwise good. Learn Bach on your own.”

  “Bennet, hell, that’d be years. I never learned that much new on the piano, either. Don’t have the facility.”

  “You bought the piano in the first place?”

  He nodded. “One of the first skill transfers in Florida. Old Gainsville conservatory man. He thought he was going to die and wanted one last fling. Paid him fifty grand, that was real money back in ’90.”

  “Still is.”

  “They cured his cancer and a year later he commmitted suicide.” He threw his cigarette over the edge and watched it fall three stories.

  “It’s exactly as old as I am. Fifty-one years, the gardener told me,” Bennet said. “I guess that’s pretty old for a tree.”

  “Palm tree, anyhow.” Leonard lit another and they smoked in silence.

  “I wouldn’t have sold it except my car went bad. Turbine blades crystallized while I was stuck in traffic. Had to get a new engine, new drive train. Try to get around this town without a car.”

  “It’s worth your life,” Bennet agreed.

  Leonard snapped the new cigarette away. “Might as well get going.”

  He was always tired after therapy but he always hobbled down to the gate and across to the little tavern, drank a beer standing up and walked back to the parking lot. He’d found out that if he didn’t walk about a mile after therapy he would hardly be able to get out of bed the next morning, for the stiffness.

  He went home and was surprised to find his wife there.

  “Good afternoon, Scottie.” He walked in unsteadily, carrying two bags of groceries.

  “Let me help.”

  “No.” He set the groceries down on the dinette table and began to take out things to go into the refrigerator.

  “Aren’t you going to ask me what the hell I’m doing here?”

  He didn’t look at her. “No. I’m very calm today.” He took the frozen foods over first, elbowed the door open. “Therapy today.”

  “Did it go well?”

  “Besides, it’s as much your house as mine.”

  “Until January. But I don’t feel that way.”

  “It went pretty well.” He shuffled things around in the refrigerator to make room for a scrawny chicken, the only luxury he had purchased.

  “You got the car fixed.”

  “All it took was money.”

  “Have you tried to sell the baby grand?”

  “No.”

  Carefully: “Does that mean you might buy back the talent some day?”

  “With what?”

  “Well, you—”

  “I need the money to live on and the piano’s yours to sell or keep or bronze or whatever the hell you want to do with it.”

  “You don’t like to have it around because—”

  “I don’t give a flying… I don’t care whether it stays or goes. I kind of like it. It’s a fun thing to dust. It keeps the place from blowing away in a high wind. It has a certain—”

  “Leonard!”

  “Don’t shout.”

  “It’s not mine; I bought it for you.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I did.”

  “You did lots of things for me. I’m grateful. Now.” He shut the refrigerator door and leaned on it, drumming fingers, looking at the wall. “I’ll ask. What the hell are you doing here?”

  “I came back,” she said evenly, “to try to talk some sense into you.”

  “Wonderful.”

  “Henry Beaumont said you told him you were thinking of selling your mathematics, too.”

  “That’s right. After the money goes. It’s not doing me any good.”

  “You worked nine years for that degree. Long years, remember? I was with you most of them.”

  “Five, to be accurate. Five years for the Ph.D. First the Bachelors and—”

  “If you sell your mathematics you lose it all the way back to grade school.”

  “That’s true. Tell me something else old.”

  “Don’t be difficult. Look at me.” He didn’t. “Daddy will—”

  “That’s really old. I don’t want to hear it.”

  “Still trying to be a hero. Your courage is an inspiration to us all.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake.” He sat down at the kitchen table with his back to her. “You were the one who wanted out. Not me.”

  “Len, if you could see yourself, what you’ve turned into …”

  Any time somebody starts out a sentence with your name, Leonard thought, they’re trying to sell you something.

  “Daddy said this morning that if you’d go to see Dr. Verden—”

  “The imprint man he goes to.”

  “The best overlay therapist in the state, Len.”

  Early attempts at overlay therapy were called “personality imprinting.” The name had a bad connotation.

  “The principle’s the same no matter how good he is.” He looked straight at her for the first time. “I may be a worthless self-pitying bastard, but I am me. I stay me.”

  “That sounds pretty—”

  “Pretty stupid from a man who’s just sold one slice of his brain and talks about selling another. Right?”

  “Close.”

  “Wrong. There’s a basic difference between skill transfer and overlay ther—”

  “No, there isn’t, they’re exactly the—”

  “Because,” almost shouting, “I can shed skills when and as I feel I no longer have use for them, where your imprint witch doctor just looks up in some god-damn book and finds a pers—”

  “You’re wrong and you know it. Otherwise—”

  “No, Scottie. You’ve let your father sell you Tranquility Base. These—” “Daddy’s been seeing Dr. Verden for fifteen years!”

  “And see what it’s gotten him?”

  He wasn’t looking at her any longer but he could see the old familiar counting gesture. “Money. Prestige. Self-fulfillment—”

  “And whose self is he fulfilling? Every time I see the old guy I expect him to be Sinbad the Sailor or Jack Kennedy or some goddamn thing. Fifty years ago they would have locked him up and thrown away the combination.”

  “You act as if he’s—”

&
nbsp; “He is! Certifiably.”

  He heard the door open—“We’ll see about that!”—and slide shut and he reflected that that was one improvement over their house in Bel Aire. You can’t slam an electric door.

  Leonard woke up stiff the next day in spite of his having exercised. He would have allowed himself an extra hour in bed but today he despised the pathetic image of a naked legless cripple lying there helplessly. He decided against the struggle of showering, taped the pads to his stumps, strapped on the prosthetics and pulled on a pair of baggy trousers.

  It was intolerably muggy, so he threw economy aside and switched on the airco. While his coffee was heating, he unwrapped the latest ASM Journal and set it with a thick pad of paper and a pencil next to the chair that sat under the air-conditioning duct. The microwave cooker buzzed; he got his coffee and sat down with the first article.

  The doorbell rang when he was on the second article and second cup of coffee. He almost didn’t answer it. It was never good news. It rang again, insistently, so he got up and opened the door.

  It was a small, bland-looking black man with a leather portfolio under his arm. Salesman, Leonard thought tiredly.

  “Leonard Shays?” Leonard just looked at him.

  “How do you do. I’m Dr. Felix Verden, you may—”

  He pushed the button but Verden had a foot against the door jamb. The door slid halfway closed, then opened again.

  “Mrs. Dorothy Scott Shays is your next of kin.”

  “Not any more, she isn’t.”

  “I sympathize with your feelings, Dr. Shays, but legally she is still your closest relative. May I come in?”

  “We have nothing to talk about.”

  He opened the portfolio. “I have a court order here authorizing me—”

  Leonard teetered forward and grabbed a fistful of the man’s shirt. A man in uniform stepped from where he’d been hidden, next to the wall beside the door, and showed Leonard his stunner wand.

  “All right. Let me get my book.”

  Dr. Verden’s office was comfortable and a few decades out of date. Pale oak panelling and furniture crafted of a similar wood, combined with blued steel and fake black leather. A slight hospital odor seeped in.

  “You know the therapy will be much more effective if you cooperate.”

  “I don’t want it to be effective. I’ll go along with the court and surrender my body to you for treatment. Just my body. The rest is going to fight you all the way.”

  “You may wind up even worse than before.”

  “By your lights. Maybe better, by mine.”

  He ignored that by rustling papers loudly. “You’re familiar with the process.”

  “More familiar than I want to be. It’s like a skill transfer, but instead of subtracting or adding a certain ability, you work on a more basic level. Personality.”

  “That’s correct. We excise or graft certain basic behavioral traits, give the patient a better set of responses to life problems.”

  “A different set of responses.”

  “All right.”

  “It’s ghoulish.”

  “No it isn’t. It’s just an accelerated growing-up process.”

  “It’s playing God, making a man over in your own image. Or whatever image is stylish or rec—”

  “You think I haven’t heard all this before, Leonard?”

  “I’m sure you have. I’m sure you ignore it. You must be able to see that it’s different, being on the receiving end, rather than—”

  “I’ve been on the receiving end, Leonard, you should know that. I had to go through a complete overlay before I could get licensed. I’m glad I did.”

  “You’re a better person for it.”

  “Of course.”

  “That could be just part of the overlay, you know. They could have turned you into a slavering idiot and at the same time convinced you that it was an improvement.”

  “They wouldn’t be allowed to. Overlay therapy is even more closely monitored than skill transfer. And you should know how many controls there are on that.”

  “You’re not going to convince me and I’m not going to convince you. Why don’t we just get on with it?”

  “Excellent idea.” He stood. “Come this way.”

  Dr. Verden led him into a small white room that smelled of antiseptic. It held a complicated-looking bed on wheels and a plain-featured young female nurse who stood up when they came in.

  “Will you need help getting undressed?” Leonard said he didn’t and Dr. Verden dismissed the nurse and gave Leonard an open-backed smock, then left.

  Verden and the nurse came back in a few minutes after Leonard had changed. He was sitting on the bed feeling very vulnerable, his prosthetics an articulated jumble on the floor. He was wondering again what had happened to his original foot and leg.

  The nurse had a bright pleasant voice. “Now please just lie down facing this way, Mr. Shays, on your stomach.”

  “Doctor Shays,” Verden corrected her.

  Leonard was going to say it didn’t matter, but then that didn’t matter either.

  The woman offered him a glass of water and two pills and he wondered why she hadn’t done so while he was still upright. “There will be some pain, Dr. Shays,” she said, still with an encouraging smile.

  “I know,” he said, not moving to take the pills.

  “They won’t turn you into a zombi,” Dr. Verden said. “You’ll still be able to resist.”

  “Not as well, I think.”

  Verden snorted. “That’s right. Which only means you’ll go through the process a dozen times instead of two or three.”

  “I know.”

  “And if you could resist it perfectly, you could keep going back every other day for the rest of your life. Nobody ever has, though.”

  Leonard made no comment, wriggled into a slightly more comfortable position.

  “You have no idea the amount of discomfort you’re condemning yourself to.”

  “Don’t threaten, doctor; it’s unbecoming.”

  Verden began to strap him in. “I’m not threatening,” he said mildly. “I’m counseling. I am your agent, after all, working in your own best—”

  “That’s not what I got from the court order,” Leonard said. “Ouch! You don’t have to be so rough about it. I’m not going anywhere.”

  “We have to make you perfectly stationary. Biometric reference points.”

  Resisting personality overlay is not conceptually difficult. Every literate person knows the technique and most illiterates as well: first the best-selling novel, Paindreamer, then dozens of imitative efforts, described it; then a couple of sensational flix, and finally the afternoon cube saga, Stay Out of My Mind!

  The person strapped on the table need not concern himself with the processes (inductive-surgical/molecular-biological/cybernetic) going on, any more than he has to think about the way his brain is working in order to attack a regular problem. Because when the therapist attempts to change some facet of the patient’s personality, the action manifests itself to the patient in terms of a dream-problem. More often, a nightmare.

  The dream is very realistic and offers two or three alternatives to the dreamer. If he chooses the right one, his own will reinforces the aim of the therapist, and helps make permanent the desired cellular changes.

  If he chooses the wrong alternative—the illogical or painful one—he is reinforcing his brain cells’ tendency to revert to their original configuration, like a crumpled-up piece of paper struggling to be square again.

  Sometimes the dreams have a metaphorical connection with the problem the therapist is attacking. More often they do not:

  Leonard is sitting in the home of some good friends, a young couple who have just had their first child.

  “It’s just fantastic,” says the young woman, handing Leonard a cold beer, “the way he’s growing. You won’t believe it.”

  Leonard sips the cold beer while the woman goes to get the child and the p
art of him aware that this is just a dream marvels at the solidity of the illusion.

  “Here,” she says, offering the baby to Leonard, laughing brightly. “He’s such a rascal.”

  The baby is about a meter long but his head is no larger than Leonard’s thumb.

  “He’s always doing that,” says the husband from across the room. “He’s a regular comedian. Squeeze his chest and watch what happens!”

  Leonard squeezes the baby’s chest and, sure enough, the head grows and the body shrinks until the baby is of normal proportions. He squeezes harder and the head swells larger and dangles over onto the shrunken torso, a giant embryo out of situ.

  The husband is laughing so hard that tears come to his eyes.

  A line of worry creases the young woman’s forehead. “Don’t squeeze too hard—please Leonard, don’t, you’ll hurt—”

  The baby’s head explodes, red-dripping shot with gray and blue slime, all over Leonard’s chest and lap.

  “What did you go and do that for?”

  Leonard has both his legs and they are clad in mottled green jungle fatigues. He is cautiously leading his squad down the Street of Redemption in Beirut, in the slums, in the steambath of a summer afternoon. They crab down the rubble-strewn sidewalk, hugging the wall. Another squad, Lieutenant Shanker’s, is across the street from them and slightly behind.

  They come to number 43.

  God, no.

  “This is the place, Lieutenant,” Leonard shouts across the street.

  “Fine, Shays. You want to go in first? Or shall we take it from this angle?”

  “If I … uh … if I go in first I’ll lose my leg.”

  “Well hell,” says the lieutenant affably. “We don’t want that to happen. Hold on just a—”

  “Never mind.” Leonard unsnaps a microton grenade from his harness and lofts it through the open door. Everybody flattens out for the explosion. Before the dust settles, Leonard steps through the door. With the corner of his eye he sees the dusty black bulk of the oneshot generator. A bright flash and singing pain as he walks two steps on his shinbones and falls, pain fading.

  Leonard is fishing from a rowboat at the mouth of the Crystal River, with one of his best friends, Norm Provoost, the game warden.

  He threads a shrimp onto the hook and casts. Immediately he gets a strike, a light one; sets the hook and reels in the fish.