“Mamie’s mother can’t mind if we come to her next fitting,” Rose said.
“I’m sure she won’t,” said the dressmaker.
“It’s a big responsibility—making this ball less of an ordeal for Mamie,” Laura said.
“She’ll enjoy it,” Rose said. “You wait and see. As for me, I’m going to have—a ball!”
4
ANDY STOPPED IN AT MRS. LILLEY’S ONLY TO SMUGGLE SOME BLANKETS OFF HIS BED AND STUFF THEM INTO HIS pack. He hid the pack outside, then went back into the kitchen to get Laura, whom he’d told to keep Mrs. Lilley and her girls chatting.
The Lilley girls were scarcely responding to Laura’s polite patter. They were cool and monosyllabic. The elder shot Sandy a wounded look and spun back to scrubbing the stove top.
“Well, ladies—good day,” Sandy said. Then, “Come on, Laura.” He put an arm around her shoulders and ushered her out the door. He picked up his pack.
“We’re going In only for one night, so what’s all that?” Laura said, then, “Do those girls hate me just because they had to keep airing out my room?”
Sandy grunted. He listened to Laura’s patient silence. She put her hand in his. He felt that she was waiting for a confession. He said, “I took one of them to a dance held by the Wry Valley Young Farmers. The girls sat on one side of the room and the men on the other, like a school dance. And a good proportion of the men were out among the cars and carriages drinking whiskey.”
“Which one did you take?”
“Patricia,” he said. “The elder.”
“I knew they liked you,” Laura said.
On the way back from the dance, Pat had pushed Sandy against a tree trunk and put her hand down his trousers. He’d liked that too, rather helplessly, but the very next day he’d set out walking the border—the walk that finally took him to Debt River and the site of the dream Quake.
“One of them even said to me that you weren’t really my type,” Laura said.
“I’m not,” Sandy replied, sulkily.
“I don’t have a type. Do you think you do?” She sounded breezy. “What’s she like then, your type of girl?”
Sandy thought it was best to be quiet.
“Taller, I suppose,” Laura said, musing.
They walked hand in hand into the rangers’ station and headed straight for the line before the big ledger of the intentions book. Several older dreamhunters smiled at them in an indulgent way.
“What are we going to write?” Laura whispered as they shuffled forward.
“That we’re walking a short way east along the border.”
“Is that what Da said?”
Tziga Hame had given Sandy directions on the day Sandy delivered Laura to Summerfort. He told Sandy that The Gate was just inside the border, about two hours east of Doorhandle. “It’s easy to find because it is right on a landmark rangers refer to as Foreigner’s West.”
“I’ve been to Foreigner’s North,” Sandy said. He wanted to impress Laura’s father with what he knew, to tell him all about the supposed French explorer and his crazy attempt to map the Place, and his odd compass bearings, “Nord” and “Ouest”—North and West in French. It was interesting, Sandy thought, the whole question of who the man had been and how the hell he’d gotten himself so turned around, since “Nord” may have been in the north but “Ouest” was more south and east—east of Doorhandle anyway. But Sandy hadn’t launched into a dissertation on what he knew, because he’d figured out that it wasn’t a good idea to interrupt Tziga Hame, whose concentration was ragged and who got upset when he lost the thread of his thoughts.
“The Gate is in plain sight,” Laura’s father had said to Sandy. “But scarcely anyone would think to bed down there, because the ground is hard and uneven and cut up. The dream is in a tightly confined spot, actually in the circle. You’ll find a circle on the ground. I knew the dream was there when I first saw the site. I don’t know how I knew, but my need was so great I suppose that some instinct led me to it. The confined site, the bad ground, and the rarity of dream-hunters who can catch master dreams, all have guaranteed that The Gate has sat there untapped since I caught it.”
Nearly two hours after they went In, Sandy and Laura ran into a ranger with paintbrushes in his pockets and carrying a can of paint. He had been refreshing signs, he said.
“Are we anywhere near Foreigner’s West?” Sandy asked.
The ranger laughed. “You young dreamhunters are so funny, with your little alliances and your sightseeing.” He raised one brawny arm to point with the hand holding the paint can.
“Is there a latrine near here?” Laura said. She didn’t like to squat behind bushes when she was with Sandy—and she knew that dreamhunters and rangers disapproved of such behavior in the Place’s more populated areas. She asked her question peering out at the ranger from behind the shelter of Sandy’s shoulder. The Body employed at least a thousand rangers, so she knew she shouldn’t expect that every one she met would know about the Depot, or that she’d escaped from it.
“The trail branches by those trees up there. The Inward branch leads to a latrine, then back to Foreigner’s West. I’ve painted the latrine too, so be careful, it might still be wet.”
“Thank you,” Laura said.
“What are you planning to catch?”
“We’re not dreamhunting. We’re just sightseeing, as you divined,” Sandy said.
“And spending time together.” The ranger winked at them, and went on his way.
They walked on till they reached the branch in the trail. Sandy let go of Laura. “I’ve been watering the bushes along the way,” he said.
“Yes, you have.” Laura laughed. “You’re nearly as bad as a dog.”
“It’s because we spend all our time in cafés drinking tea,” Sandy said, resentfully. Then, apparently without any thought of the connection in ideas, he said, “I’ll make a bed for us with these blankets. Your father warned me that the ground was bad.”
Laura went on peering up into his face, waiting for some sign of self-consciousness, for him to relent and acknowledge what everyone else could see and was teasing them about. They had been spending all their time in cafés when they weren’t shut up in separate rooms in hospitals. She never went home. He never used his key to his uncle’s flat. They sat in cafés—together.
Sandy looked down at her. Laura noticed that his jaw was hastily shaven and scratchy in patches. She looked into his eyes, saw resentment and, behind that, baffled, patient misery. She put a hand on his arm and felt a sharp shiver pass over him.
And then he bent his head and kissed her.
They were kissing, wrapped together, upright, his hands on her face, her hands covering his. His lips were full and firm, his chin rasping and rough.
Laura’s bladder gave her a stab.
She broke away from him. “I have to go,” she said, waved her hand in the direction of the latrines, and sprinted off.
Her bladder was full but shy. She spent a long time in the fresh-paint-smelling box before anything came. She kept giggling and shivering. The little byway was quiet—as deadly silent as anywhere else in the Place, but Laura had the impression the shelter she was standing in was in the middle of a stampede.
When she’d finished, she uncapped her water bottle and spilled water over her hands, patted her cheeks with her wet palms, then ran back along the path to find Sandy.
He’d made a bed of his purloined blankets and emptied his pack of all the cans and hard-edged packages to make one pillow. He was sitting down, setting out a picnic, but he jumped up when she appeared. He grabbed her—or she collided with him—and they continued kissing, more involved with each passing second.
Laura thought, “Do people do this?” She’d never seen anyone kissing like this. Books said things like “He rained kisses on her face.” But suddenly they seemed tied together, mouth to mouth. She felt his skin, the wiry hair on his chest. Her hands had gotten into his shirt. They seemed to have a mind of
their own. No—she agreed with her hands. Sandy’s skin was smooth, his muscles springy and supple. He was lovely to touch, warm and dewy.
He was saying her name, into her mouth.
“What should I do with your clothes?” Laura said. Her throat was so tight she wanted to cough.
Sandy caught her hands and held them away from him. “Laura. We shouldn’t. We have to be careful.”
“I don’t care!” she said fiercely. “I love you.” She began struggling with the buttons of her own shirt. She pulled its halves apart—sending one button spinning.
Sandy caught her hands again, then pulled her against him. Their bare skin came together, and Laura sighed. Sandy was saying yes, all right. “But go slower, Laura.” He began to help her with her clothes. She attacked his belt buckle, then responded to his “slower” and let go, leaned into him, kissed his shoulders, as high as she could reach when his head was raised.
He took her face between his hands again. “I love you, Laura. I mean it. I don’t want to be without you, ever. Can you—would you—do you think we might get married? Please say you will.”
“Please, Sandy, let’s lie down together.”
“I don’t really know what I’m doing,” he said. “Neither do you. That’s why we have to go slow. And I wish you’d promise.” He sounded as though he might cry.
“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 space.
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 grass 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 kumquats, 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-glass 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—God 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 glass, 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 compass marks.”