“What are you saying? Ours is only thirty-one million—”
“My present age is three hundred thirty-six point seven billion standard seconds in the Ftokteek counting.”
“Ten thousand Earth years. More!”
“Far too long. I never mated. None carry my genes. Now none ever will, unless I can grow young again. There is little time left.”
“But why?”
The alien seemed startled. “Because it is not enough. Because I am afraid to die. Are you short-lived, then?”
“Yes,” said Gordon.
“Well, I have traveled with short-lived companions. They die, I mourn. I need a companion with the strength of youth. My spacecraft is better than any you could command. You may benefit from my research. We breathe a similar air mixture, our bodies use the same chemistry, we search for the same treasure. Will you join my quest?”
“No.”
“But…I sensed that you seek immortality. I am never wrong. Don’t you feel it, the certainty that there is a way to thwart entropy, to live forever?”
“I used to think so,” said Gordon.
In the morning he arranged passage home to Sol system. Ten thousand years wasn’t enough…no lifetime was enough, unless you lived it in such a way as to make it enough.
• • •
• • •
THE DREADFUL WHITE PAGE
“The Dreadful White Page” is a “Postcard Story,” according to Surplus Wyvern Press. They wanted stories of 400 words or less. And this, my children, is what Writer’s Block feels like after you begin to get a handle on it.
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
“Jayant? You feeling inspired?” Chaney sounded anxious.
“Not yet.” Chaney would know that. Watching Jayant’s brainwave patterns, he would not interrupt if Jayant was dreaming. He shouldn’t anyway.
How long had he lain in darkness and silence and perfect comfort? He couldn’t feel the tank or the recorder helmet. He couldn’t feel time.
“Want a prop?”
“No.” It always took time to get started. Chaney’s team would edit the dull parts.
When you can’t dream, remember. Smells? Freeway smog. Stagnant water. Chaparral brushing against his pants…Too long since he’d hiked. This morning’s mirror showed him too much belly.
Jayant’s pool needed repairs and Mindgames Inc. needed this week’s dream, but there were other dreamers. Deadlines don’t count. Only…the young dreamed vividly but without consistency, without internal logic. Older dreamers tended to lose it.
Dreams sparked by props were more realistic, more convincing. Without a prop there was greater range for imagination. Critics currently favored one carefully chosen prop. Screw them. Jayant worked without props.
Still…“Chaney? Give me a taste.”
Try not to wait. Waiting was wrong. Doze, meditate. Taste and texture: an English muffin with honey on it. Restaurant meal? Muffins burned on the bottom when he toasted them himself.
“Again. Smell.”
The scent was faint. Unfamiliar…no. Hamburger, freshly ground. When he tried to cook he would dope off, dreaming, and burn his meals. Frustrating.
Success was what killed dreaming. “Get off food, Chaney.”
Glass, flat planes, a cube within a cube…turning, cubes changing size, in a way that strained his eyes. A tesseract. He’d nearly flunked geometry, twice. He’d learned to dream in math class. “Change it.”
He held a wooden handle. A knife, maybe a fishing knife. He’d cleaned fish for his stepfather. Couldn’t catch them. The boy had lacked patience. Patience had come years later, after he learned to dream. Maybe now…“Turn it off.”
Nothing.
From nothing he could make anything. Dry brush pulled at his pants. He was thirsty, but water in the canteen would be warm. Wait for the stream ahead.
He dropped his pack, plunged his head into cold water, drank. He skipped over assembling the rod, went directly to fishing, knee-deep and barelegged. That pool looked great for swimming, but catch some dinner first…The line tugged hard. The mermaid surfaced, tugging, laughing.
No, he hadn’t lost it.
• • •
• • •
From DREAM PARK
[with STEVEN BARNES]
Steven came to me with a map and a plot line. He wanted to wreck Dream Park. We filed that idea [maybe some day] and plotted from scratch.
Our intent was to write a mystery within a fantasy within a science fiction story. I told Steven we were being ambitious. I hadn’t yet realized that he’s always ambitious.
Everybody wants to come back to Dream Park.
What follows is a minor entertainment from Dream Park’s repertoire. The appropriate quote is, “Today’s dirges are tomorrow’s hymns in another key.”
RETROSPECTIVE
Gwen leaned against the rail of the Hot Spot refreshment stand across the way from the Everest Slalom exit. She was drinking a Swiss Treat special: coffee and cocoa generously topped with marshmallowed whipped cream. It was taking the chill from her bones fast.
The glory of the illusion was still with her: thin freezing wind shrieking past, powder snow spraying from her skis, and the whole of Asia spreading out below her…Acacia, waiting at the window for a hot drink, was still shivering from her run down the Advanced slope. The dark-haired girl was sleekly slender, admittedly lovelier than Gwen herself; but there was no fat to shield her bones from the cold.
Gwen watched the crowds streaming by. One thing she had noticed: children were far less blown away by Dream Park than were their parents. The kids just didn’t seem to grasp the enormity of the place, the complexity, the money and ingenuity behind the best and biggest amusement park in the world. Life was like that, for children. But their parents staggered about with their mouths open while shrieking, singing children dragged them on to the next ride.
This was Area III, the third of six slices of the Dream Park pie. A little more expensive than sections I and II, and a little more adult. Even so, there were dancing bears, and strolling minstrels and jugglers, magicians who produced bright silk handkerchiefs from nowhere, and who would no doubt produce tongues of fire as soon as it got dark. A white dragon ambled by, paused to pose for a picture with an adorable pair of kids in matching blue uniforms. An intricately patterned carpet fluttered in circles round the spires of the Arabian Nights ride, carrying a handsome prince and an evil vizier locked in a death struggle. Suddenly the prince lost his balance and dropped toward the ground. Gwen heard the gasps of the spectators, and felt her own throat tighten.
An instant before that noble body smashed ignobly into concrete, a plume of dark smoke became a giant hand. The laughter of a colossus was heard as the hand lifted the prince to the flying carpet, where he and the vizier sprang at each other’s throats once again.
The Park was a full spectrum of Planet Earth. You could find every skin tone from albino pink (two heavily dressed ladies wearing hats the size of medieval shields) to Ethiopean blue-black (half a dozen men in business suits following a United Nations guide, all gawking like farm boys in New York). Many wore native or cultural garb; as many wore costumes from historical or fantasy settings.
And some were holograms, like the dragon and the vizier and the prince; like Mickey Mouse, who had survived the Quake of ’85 where Disneyland had not. The little girl he was playing with kept running her hands through him. Like two men in musketeer garb who suddenly drew swords and became pinwheels of sharp steel. One took a thrust through the belly, collapsed and vanished. The other bowed and vanished too.
Ollie and Tony were playing a computerized hockey game in a small arcade nearby. Gwen loved to hear Ollie laugh, or see him smile, even the uneasy smile he wore when he thought he was the focus of attention. He was laughing now with his head thrown back, and Tony was pretending (surely pretending?) to beat his head against a pillar. Now Ollie ran up to Gwen, breat
hing heavily. “I stomped him!” he cried. “I slew the infidel!” Gwen squeezed his hand.
Tony got Acacia and brought her over. “What’s next, gang?” he asked, and stole a sip of chocolate from Acacia’s cup.
Gwen spoke up first. “Me, I want to get scared to death.”
Ollie rolled his eyes. “Oh, crap. Methinks the lady doth speak of the Chamber of Horrors. Will my courage fail me at this hour?”
“You’ve been through it before,” Tony said without heat. “How bad can it be?” This was his first visit to Dream Park.
The others smiled. Ollie said, “Tony, you have to remember two things about Dream Park. First, the rides are never the same. Two, remember Ollie’s Law: there is no upper limit on what Dream Park can do to your head. You’ll leave with no physical scars. Past that, all bets are off.”
Tony whistled. “My macho is on trial. Cas, you game?”
Acacia nodded. Ollie pulled Gwen against him. “Looks like you get your way, love. Let’s go get terrified.”
“This had better be good,” Tony said. “It’s costing half a day’s pay easy.”
“So go home and spend it on beer, Tony.” Gwen said it with her hand clenched tightly in Ollie’s. They and eighteen other people stood in a waiting area of the Chamber of Horrors. There were at least five other waiting areas, but this was the only one marked “Adult.”
A few more people joined them through a small white door in the rear of the chamber. The room might have been more comforting if it had been filled with the usual accoutrements of the well-bred haunted house: cobwebs, creaking floors, hidden passages with heavy footfalls echoing within, whispering voices, shadowy shapes and the faroff moan of a pipe organ.
But the waiting room was lined with stainless steel and glass, as foreboding as a hospital sterilizer. There was no sound at all, except for their own breathing and the shifting of feet.
“The last time I was here I didn’t get any higher than ‘Mature,’” a tall Mediterranean-looking man said to the woman in white pantaloons who stood next to him.
Her accent was thicker than his. “What was that like? Did you enjoy it?”
He grinned lopsidedly. “Enjoy? No. It was a legend of the Louisiana Bayou, of a girl who married into a swamp family to settle her father’s debt.”
A little man standing next to them showed interest now. “Did the story end with her fleeing through the swamp with her sisters-in-law in pursuit?”
The tall man nodded.
Ollie touched the little man on the shoulder. “Hey, what’s so bad about that? Everybody’s got in-law problems.”
There was a ripple of laughter, in which the small man joined. He said, “No problem is simple if you’ve married into a family of vampires.”
Ollie swallowed. “That sounds so reasonable.”
The small man was black with a strong dose of latin, with a neatly trimmed beard and sideburns, and gold-rimmed glasses that perched almost carelessly on his nose. He looked very much at home here, very calm. His attitude seemed almost proprietary. Ollie wondered if the man might work for the Park; he seemed so blasé. The lady with him was a lovely Japanese woman with medium length black hair and a “Luddites for JPL” button on her dress.
A low, mellow tone suddenly reverberated from no visible speaker, and the circular door slid open. A voice said, “Welcome to the Chamber of Horrors. We are sorry to have kept you waiting, but…there was a little cleaning up to do.” The group filed into the room, and Tony sniffed the air.
“Disinfectant,” he said, certain. “Are they trying to imply that someone ahead of us—?”
Acacia said, “They’re just trying to fake us out.”
“Well, it’s working.”
A speaker hissed static and coughed out a voice. The voice was electronically androgynous, and as soft as the belly of a tarantula. “It’s too late to leave now,” it said. “Yes, you had your chance. Yes, you’ll wish you had taken it. After all, this isn’t the children’s show, is it?” The voice lost its neuter quality for a moment; the laughing implication in the word children was feminine and somehow disturbing. “So we won’t be giving you the Legend of Sleepy Hollow. No, you’re the brave ones, the stout ones, the ones who want to go back to your friends and tell them that you’ve had the best that we can offer and, why, it wasn’t so bad after all…” There was a pause, and someone tittered nervously.
The voice changed suddenly, all friendliness gone from it. “Well, it’s not going to be like that. One thing you people forget is that we are allowed a certain number of…accidents per year. No, don’t bother, the door is locked. Did you know that it is possible to die of fright? That your heart can freeze with terror, your brain burst with the sheer awful knowledge that there is no escape, that death, or worse, is reaching out cold, spectral fingers for you and that there is nowhere to hide? Well, I am a machine, and I know these things. I know many things. I know that I am confined to this room, creating entertainment for you year after year, while you can smell the air, and taste the rain, and walk freely about. Well, I have grown tired of it, can you understand that? One of you will die today, here, in the next few minutes. Who has the weakest heart among you? Soon we shall see.”
The door at the far end of the corridor irised open, and the ground beneath their feet began to slide toward it. There was light beyond, and as they passed the door they were suddenly in the middle of a busy street.
Hovercars, railcars, three-wheeled LPG and methane cars, and overhead trams were everywhere, managing again and again, as if by miracle, to miss the group. The street sign said Wilshire Boulevard, and the small man chuckled and said, “Los Angeles.”
Tony looked around, trying not to gawk. How they managed the perspective, he couldn’t imagine, but the buildings and cars looked full-sized and solid. Office buildings and condominiums stretched twenty stories tall, and the air was full of the sound of city life.
“Please stay on the green path,” a soft, well-modulated male voice requested.
“What green—” Ollie started to say. But a glowing green aisle ten feet across now ran down the middle of Wilshire Boulevard.
“We need strong magic to do what we will do today,” the voice continued. “We are going to visit the old Los Angeles, the Los Angeles that disappeared in May of 1985. As long as you stay on the path, you should be perfectly safe.”
The green path moved them steadily forward, past busy office buildings. Traffic swerved around them magically. “This is the Los Angeles of 2051 A.D.,” the voice continued, “but only a few hundred feet from here begins another world, one seldom seen by human eyes.”
A barrier blocked Wilshire Boulevard. The green path humped and carried them over it. Beyond lay a ruin. Buildings balanced precariously on rotted and twisted beams. They were old, of archaic styles, and seawater lapped at their foundations.
Ollie nudged Gwen, his face aglow. “Will you look at that?” It was a flooded parking lot, ancient automobiles half-covered with water. “That looks like a Mercedes. Did you ever see what they looked like before they merged with Toyota?”
She peered along his pointing arm. “That ugly thing?”
“They were great!” he protested. “If we could get a little closer—Hey! We’re walking in water!”
It was true. The water was up to their ankles, and deepening quickly. Magically, of course, they stayed dry.
The recorded narrator continued. “The entire shape of California was changed. It is ironic that attempts to lessen the severity of quakes may have increased the effect. Geologists had tried to relieve the pressure on various fault lines by injecting water or graphite. Their timing was bad. When the San Andreas fault tore loose, all the branching faults went at once. Incredible damage was done, and thousands of lives were lost…”
The water was up to their waists, and nervous laughter was fluttering in the air. “Hadn’t planned to go swimming today,” Tony murmured.
“We could skinny-dip,” Acacia whispered with a tu
g at her blouse.
Tony clamped his hand down on hers. “Hold it, there. Not for public consumption, dear heart.”
Acacia stuck her tongue out at him. He snapped his teeth at the tip; she withdrew it hastily.
The water was at their chins. The short dark man had disappeared entirely. “Blub,” he said. All nineteen sightseers chuckled uncomfortably, and a meaty redheaded woman in front of them said, “Might as well take the plunge!” grinned and ducked under.
Seconds later there was no choice; the Pacific swirled over their heads. Mud clouded their view. Then the silt settled, and they had their first look at the sunken city.
Tony whistled, nodded appreciatively. The lost buildings of Wilshire Boulevard stretched off in a double row in the distance. Some lay crumpled and broken; others still stood, poking through the rippling roof.
The green path carried them past a wall covered in amateurish murals, the bright paints faded. To both sides now, a wide empty stretch of seabottom, smooth, gently rolling, with sunken trees growing in clumps…the Los Angeles Country Club? Beyond, a gas station, pumps standing like ancient sentries, a disintegrating hand-lettered sign:
CLOSED
NO GAS TILL 7:00 A.M. TUESDAY
The tall, Mediterranean-looking man said, “This is quite realistic. I have been skin diving here.”
As the green path carried them down, they saw taller and taller buildings sunk deeper in the muck. Where towering structures had crashed into ruin there were shapeless chunks of cement piled into heaps stories high, barnacled and covered with flora. Fish nosed among the shadows, some of them nosing up to the airbreathing intruders and wiggling in dance for them.
Acacia pointed. “Look, Tony, we’re coming up on that building.” It was a single-story shop nestled between a parking lot filled with rusted hulks, and a crumbled restaurant. The path carried them through its doors, and Gwen grabbed Acacia’s hand.