Tom O'Bedlam

  “How do you feel?” Elszabet asked.

  Waldstein shuddered. “Dirty inside the head. Like I have gritty sand all over the lining of my skull.”

  “Bill—”

  Compassion flooded her. This was the moment to tell him that he wasn’t alone, that she had been feeling the Green World dream tickling at the edge of her mind, that she feared the same things he feared. She couldn’t do it. It was a lousy thing, holding back on him when he was plainly in so much pain. But she couldn’t do it. Letting him, anyone, know that her mind too was vulnerable to this stuff: no. No, she wouldn’t. Couldn’t. She felt like a hypocrite. So be it. So be it. She remained outwardly cool, calm, the sensitive administrator hearing the confession of the troubled staff member.

  Give him something, Elszabet thought.

  “I can tell you that you aren’t alone in this,” she said after a moment.

  “I know. Teddy Lansford. Dante. Also I think Naresh Patel, from something he let slip a few weeks ago. And probably more of us.”

  “Probably,” she said.

  “So it isn’t just a psychotic phenomenon limited to the patients.”

  “It never was limited to the patients. Almost from the beginning it’s been reaching staff members.”

  “Who are psychotic also, then? Early stages of Gelbard’s, do you think?”

  She shook her head. “A, stop throwing around loaded words like psychotic, okay? B, sharing a manifestation like this with victims of Gelbard’s doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re coming down with Gelbard’s yourself, only that something very peculiar is going on that tends to affect the patients more readily than the staff, but affects staff too. C—”

  “I’m scared, Elszabet.”

  “So am I. C, what we have here is a phenomenon not confined to Nepenthe Center, as I intend to make clear at the staff meeting tomorrow.”

  Waldstein looked startled. “What do you mean?”

  “Move back and watch the data wall,” she said.

  He ambled to his feet and turned around. She activated the wall. A map of the Pacific states appeared.

  “These dreams,” she said, “have also been reported at the mindpick centers in San Francisco, Monterey, and Eureka.” She touched a key and the screen lit up at those three places. “I’ve been in touch with the directors there. Same seven visualizations, not necessarily all seven in each center. Primarily experienced by patients, lesser frequency among staff.”

  “But what—”

  “Hold on,” she said. More lights appeared on the screen. “Dave Paolucci in San Francisco has been gathering reports of incidence of the space dreams outside Northern California, and it looks like his new data are coming on line right this minute.” Patterns of color blossomed at the lower end of the state. “Look at that,” Elszabet said. “I’ve got to call him. I’ve got to get the details. Look there: a heavy concentration of dream reports in the San Diego area, you see? And some from Los Angeles. And up there too: what’s that, Seattle, Vancouver? Oh, Christ, Bill, look at that! It’s everywhere. It’s a plague.”

  “Denver, too,” Waldstein said, pointing.

  “Yeah. Denver. Which is about as far east as we have reliable communication, but who knows what’s going on beyond the Rockies? So it isn’t just you, Bill. It’s damn near everybody that’s dreaming these dreams.”

  “Somehow that doesn’t make me feel much better,” Waldstein said.

  4

  FERGUSON said, “What I’d like to do, I’d like to get myself the hell out of this place as fast as I can and start making some money out of all this nonsense.”

  “How would you do that?” Alleluia asked.

  “Hell, wouldn’t be much of a trick. The main side of the Center there’s a gate, but on this side it’s just the forest. You could slip off in the afternoon and find your way right through, just keep the sun at your back afternoons and in front of you mornings, maybe two or three days tops if you had your wits about you. Out to the old freeway and across to Ukiah, say—”

  “No. I mean how would you make money out of it.”

  Ferguson smiled. They were lying in a quiet, mossy glade a twenty-minute stroll east of the Center, redwoods and sword ferns and a little brook. The ground was folded and tilted there in a way that would make it hard for anyone to blunder onto them. It was his favorite place. He had made sure to enter its location on his ring-recorder so he’d have no trouble finding it again, even though they might happen to pick the data from his mind every time after he had gone there. Some things you forgot, some you didn’t: you never could be sure.

  He said, “It’s a cinch. The space dreams, they aren’t just happening to the patients here. I know that for a fact.”

  “You do?”

  “I listen very carefully. You know the technician, Lansford? He’s had them two or three times. I heard them talking, Waldstein, Robinson, Elszabet Lewis. I think maybe that little Hindu doctor has had them. And even Wald-stein, is what I think. But the dreams are also happening outside the Center.”

  “You know that?” Alleluia asked.

  “I’ve got good reason to think so,” Ferguson said. He ran his hand lightly up her thigh, stopping just short of the crotch. Her skin was smooth as silk. Smoother, maybe. It was half an hour since they had done it and he still felt sweaty, but not Alleluia. That was the thing about these artificial women—they were perfect, they never even worked up much of a sweat. “I have a friend in San Francisco, she told me about a dream weeks ago, same one you had once. You remember having that dream? With the horns, the block of white stone, the two suns?”

  “I thought that you had that dream.”

  “Me? No. It was you. I never had any of the dreams, not one. The time I told you, it was that my friend had it, the one in San Francisco. If they’re having them there, having them here, you can bet they’re everywhere.”

  “So?”

  He slipped his hand up to her breast. She stirred and wriggled against him. He liked that. He felt almost ready to go again. Just like a kid, he thought: always ready for an encore, even these days.

  “You know what I was sent here for?” he asked.

  “You told me, but they picked it.”

  “I had a scam going, offering to send people to other planets where they could make a new start, escape this mess on Earth, you know? Just give me a few thousand bucks and as soon as the process is perfected you’ll be able to—”

  Alleluia said, “You can still remember doing that?”

  “It doesn’t seem to go when they pick me.”

  “And you’ll start your scam up again, is that it?”

  “How can it miss? Everybody’s presold. The dreams, they’re like advertisements for the planets that I can supply, you see? There’s the red-and-blue-sun world, there’s the green-sky planet, there’s the nine-suns planet—you see, I know them all, I have my ways, Allie. Seven of them, there are, seven dream-planets. You make your choice, you give me the money, I take care of things, I see to it that you’re shipped to the right place. The dreams, I say, that’s just the other planets sending out like travel posters to tell people how terrific they are. It can’t miss, kid. I tell you: it can’t miss.”

  “They’ll catch you again,” she said. “They caught you once, they’ll catch you again. And this time they won’t just toss you in Nepenthe Center.”

  “It won’t happen, they catch me.”

  “No?”

  “Never. First thing is, I get out of the jurisdiction. I go up north, Oregon, Washington. Then I use a dummy corporation—you know what that is?—and another dummy behind the dummy, a series of shells, everything through nominees. With a mail drop in Portland, say, or maybe Spokane, and—”

  “Ed?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I don’t give a crap, Ed. You know that?”

  “Well, why should you? You don’t give a crap about anything, do you?”

  “One thing.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “One thing. Tha
nk God for that. But I don’t understand. What good’s a sex-drive in a synthetic? Sex was put in us originally so we’d reproduce, right? And you don’t reproduce, not by sex. Right? Right?”

  “It’s there for a reason,” she said.

  “It is?”

  “It’s to make us think we’re human,” Alleluia said. “So we don’t get maladjusted and unhappy and try to take over the world. We could, you know. We’re highly superior beings. Anything you can do, we can do fifty times better. If we didn’t have sexual feelings, we might think of ourselves as even more different than we are, some sort of master race, you know? But they give us sex, it keeps us pacified, it keeps us in our place.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I can understand that.” Ferguson leaned across, kissed the tip of each nipple, lightly kissed her lips. “It makes a lot of sense,” he said. He had never spent this much time around a synthetic before, and he was learning a lot from doing it. Like most people, he had tended to keep his distance, regarding the synthetics as creepy, weird. There weren’t that many of them anyway, maybe half a million, something like that. Less. He remembered when they were being made, thirty years ago or thereabouts, just before the Dust War. Intended for military use, was what he remembered, perfect beings to fight a perfect war. A discontinued experiment of the good old days. But they weren’t quite perfect, it seemed. They had a lot of genuine human quirks. Human enough to make them wind up in a therapy center the way this one had, apparently. Well, they were human enough to love to fuck, too. You take the pluses with the minuses, hope for the best. He cupped her breasts. Softly he said, “When I leave here, you leave here with me, okay? I’ll show you all my little tricks.”

  “I’ll show you some of mine,” she said.

  5

  THE roadway looped like a great gray snake across the water, rising high above the water here, leveling off there, passing through a tunnel at one point, jumping up and becoming two huge suspension bridges later on. At the far end of it, white and glistening in the afternoon light, was San Francisco, tightly huddled on its little piece of the planet. Cool, cool air came flowing through the van’s open windows.

  “This bridge,” Charley said, “it goes way back. They built it in the middle ages, and look at it still holding together. Through all the earthquakes and who knows what sort of other stuff, and it’s still holding together.”

  “The Golden Gate Bridge,” Buffalo said. “Incredible!”

  “Nah, not the Golden Gate,” Charley said. “That’s the Golden Gate, over there on the side, going up north. This one’s the Bay Bridge. That right, Tom?”

  “I don’t know,” Tom said. “I’ve never been in San Francisco before.”

  Stidge laughed. “You been in the Eleventh Zorch Galaxy, but you never been in Frisco. That’s pretty good.”

  “I never been here neither,” Buffalo said. “What of it?”

  “Well, we’re here now,” said Charley. “Pretty city. Prettiest damn city there is. I was a kid, I lived here six years. I bet it hasn’t changed a whole lot. Somehow this place, it never changes.”

  “Even when there’s earthquakes?” Buffalo asked.

  “The earthquakes, they don’t matter none,” Charley told him. “They mess things up, the town gets put right back the way it used to be. I was ten years old they got clobbered. Six months you couldn’t tell the difference.”

  “You were here for the Big One?” Mujer asked.

  “Nah,” Charley said. “Big One, that was a hundred years ago. They had that one, 2006. Big One Two, they called it. Big One One, they had that in 1906, the fire and everything, burned down the whole goddamn place. Then a hundred years after that they were getting ready for the anniversary celebration, you know, parades and speeches? Son of a bitch, Big One Two, two days before the anniversary, knocked everything down again. That’s the kind of city this is.”

  “You weren’t here for that,” Mujer said.

  “That was ninety-seven years ago,” said Charley. “I guess I missed that one. Then they had the Little Big One, thirty years later, forty, I don’t know. That was before my time, too. The earthquake I was here for, that one didn’t get a name. Wasn’t that big, but big enough. Knocked everything off the shelves, broke windows, scared the shit out of me. I was ten years old. House across the street came right off its foundations, sitting there with one wall down looking like a doll’s house, all the rooms showing. That was more than an ordinary earthquake, they said, but not as big as a Big One. The Big One, it don’t come more than once every hundred years or so.”

  “They about due, then,” Tamale said from the back of the van.

  “Yeah,” said Choke. “Tomorrow afternoon, I hear. Half past three in the afternoon.”

  “Hot shit,” Buffalo said. “That’s just what I want, my first day in San Francisco. Start off with a real bang.”

  “What we do,” said Mujer, “we get in the van just before it starts. We turn the engine on. Then we sit there floating on the air cushion until the ground stops moving, huh? We’ll be okay. And then when it all stops, we get out and go looking around in the broken houses and fill up the van with whatever we like and we drive away north somewhere.”

  “Sure,” Charley said. “You know what they do with looters, they get an earthquake? They string ’em up by their balls. That’s the rule here, always was, always will be.”

  “And if they don’t got no balls?” Choke asked. “Not everybody got balls, Charley.”

  “They put some on you in the sex-change ward of the hospital,” said Charley. “Then they string you up by them. This town, they don’t fool around with looters none. Hey, Tom, you ever seen a prettier city than that?”

  Tom shrugged. He was far away.

  “Hey, Tom? Where are you now, Tom?”

  “Eleventh Zorch Galaxy,” said Stidge.

  “Hush it,” Charley snapped. To Tom he said, “Tell us what you see, man.”

  Things were stirring and surging in Tom’s mind. He was seeing the city called Meliluiilii on the world called Luiiliimeli, under the giant torrid blue star known as Ellullimiilu. That was one of the Thikkumuuru worlds of the Twelfth Polyarchy, Luuiiliimelli. High kings had reigned there for seven hundred thousand grand cycles of the Potentastium. “They have earthquakes there all day long,” Tom said. “It doesn’t trouble them at all. The ground is like molten, it boils and heaves like a cauldron, but the city just drifts above it.”

  “Where’s that?” Charley asked. “Which planet?”

  “Meliluiilii, on Luiiliimeli,” Tom said. “It’s one of the Pivot Worlds, the great ones that shape the Design. The sunlight on Luiiliimeli’s so strong it hits you like a hammer. Blue sunlight, a hammer that burns. We’d melt in a flash. But the Luiiliimeli people, they’re not even slightly like us. So they don’t mind it any. It’s not a planet for humans, it’s a planet for them. This is the only planet for humans, the one we’re on right now. The people on Luiiliimeli are like shining ghosts and the city, it’s only a floating bubble. That’s all, only a bubble.”

  “Listen to him,” Charley said. “You think San Francisco is pretty? Loollymoolly, it’s like a gigantic gorgeous bubble. I can almost see it floating there and shining when I listen to him talk about it. Fantastic.”

  Tom said, “All the cities are beautiful everywhere in the galaxy. There is no such thing as an ugly city, not anywhere. That one, now, that’s Shaxtharx, the Irikiqui capital. That’s on the big world in the Sapiil system, the empire of the Nine Suns. Everything is built out of a spiderweb material there, ten times strong as steel. It shimmers and bounces, and when there’s an earth-quake—they have earthquakes there often, very often, the gravity of the Nine Suns is always pulling the planet in all sorts of different directions—when there’s an earthquake, you know, the city becomes even more beautiful, the way it moves. Almost like a tapestry, showing all the different colors of the suns. At earthquake time the Sapiil people come from all around to watch Shaxtharx shaking.”

  “
You been there, huh?” Buffalo asked.

  “No, not me. But I see it, you understand me? The visions come. I see all the worlds, and someday maybe I’ll make the Crossing.” Tom’s eyes were shining. “You can’t go across in the flesh. You’d die like a gnat in a furnace, any of those worlds. The only world for humans, it’s this world, you follow what I’m saying? But when the Time of the Crossing comes we will be able to drop our bodies and go over into their bodies.”

  “That was something, those cities he was telling us about,” Buffalo said. “But he can’t keep from running off at the mouth, can he? We drop our bodies, we go over into their bodies. Just like that. You know what he’s talking about, Charley? You, Mujer? Drop our bodies, go over into their bodies.”

  “Just as is said in the Bible,” Tom went on. “In Corinthians, it’s said. That we shall be changed in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye. For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality. That’s the Crossing they’re talking about, when we go over to the other worlds. Not to heaven: that’s not what they mean. They mean we will go over to Luiiliimeli, some of us, and take on their very forms, and some of us will go to the Sapiil worlds and some to the Zygerone, or to the Poro, or will become Kusereen, even—we’ll be scattered through the universe, which is the divine plan, the dispersion of the Spirit—”

  “All right, Tom,” Charley said gently. “That’s enough for now, okay, Tom? We’re coming off the bridge. We’re in San Francisco. Right in the middle of town.”

  “Hey, look at it!” Buffalo cried. “You ever see beautiful? All those white buildings. All those green trees. Just breathe the air. That air, it’s like wine, huh? Like wine.”

  Tamale said, “Were you serious, Choke? About an earthquake tomorrow afternoon, half past three?”

  “Well, they can predict them, can’t they?” Choke said. “They can measure the earthquake gas coming out of the ground days and days before.”