Dreamers Read online

  Sara pulled him back, and from the safe distance of some three meters he could breathe again, his pulse calmed, his eyes focused, and he could see the smudges on the window where his hands had pressed against the glass. Beyond, to the right and left, were the odd multiple towers of other urban centers, like castles on a chessboard; straight ahead and down and down was the chessboard of fields tilled by machines stretching out across the land until it stopped at the sky. Here and there fields were being watered by sprays; others were bare, as if their bounty had just been harvested. And everything was geometrically perfect, as if the land had been finally conquered by man and remade in his own image.

  “A long time ago this was a restaurant and entertainment center,” Sara said. “Nobody has been here for a long time, but the room waits for people who are not afraid of heights, who are not terrified to look out upon the world. It may have to wait for a long time."

  What a magnificent place for a human sacrifice, the thought came unbidden, and his arm was heavy with the weight of the ceremonial knife and the lives it had taken and the hearts ripped from still-heaving maiden breasts and deposited reverently before the gods.

  “Yes,” he said. “I know how they feel. I'm afraid, too."

  “Not the way they are,” she said. “You can stand here and look out."

  “Only because you are here,” he said.

  “You'll get over that, Jeri,” she said. “You'll be strong again."

  “Is that my name?” he asked, forgetting the rest.

  “Jeri? Yes,” she said, and she repeated it, “Jeri."

  He didn't reject it. It sounded good on her lips. He savored it. Jeri. Jeri. That was all right. He had a name. He felt stronger already, and he went forward to the window and looked down seventy-five stories without terror.

  Each time they left the pink room, Jeri felt that it was like a little death; each time they returned he felt himself reborn. As time passed, however, he found new strength and new courage in leaving and felt less sick relief on his return. Always there was Sara. He delighted in watching her face and the emotions that came and went upon it, like light and shadow upon the land. He memorized her breasts until he had only to close his eyes and cup his hands to recall their weight and texture, and the ways their nipples responded to his touch. He studied her body, admiring the supple slenderness of her waist, the neat round cup of her navel, the smooth spread of her hips, the firm, slim legs, and the eternally responsive mysteries that waited for him....

  The time in the pink room with Sara restored him, not just the lovemaking but the everyday events of eating and talking and sleeping; as she guided him and encouraged him in the opening of his love to her in continually more outgoing and exciting ways, he opened to the world. At last the time came when he felt restored, confident, capable of anything, even of facing the past.

  Sara seemed to sense his mood; she was as conscious of his progress as if she monitored his autonomic nervous system. “I'm going to take you one more place we haven't been before, at least not together."

  “All right,” he said with a spirit of bravado, although there was something disquieting in her manner. She seemed pleased; always before she had found it necessary to coax him from the room.

  The end of their journey was one of the areas that served the twenty-five-tower center in common. The lift shaft opened into a small, stainless-steel room, frightening in its sterility. As Jeri entered, airjets of disinfectant searched his clothing; he felt as if invisible radiation were streaming through his body. Minutes later a door opened in front of them. He stepped out into a corridor paved with pale tile. He felt uneasy. Like a criminal, he thought, returning to the scene of the crime. If he could only remember what the crime was. His hands tightened into fists until he felt the nails biting into his palms.

  He had never seen this sterile, endless corridor before, turning both ways toward some distant meeting place, and yet it seemed as familiar as a nightmare. The very air was different here, strange and astringent, and yet the thought occurred to him that he had smelled it before. He was afraid, and he looked toward Sara for help.

  She motioned him toward the interior wall of the corridor. Windows were set with geometric regularity into the walls, and he went up to a window reluctantly, fearing that it would be another test, like the one at the top of the tower, and fearing even more that it would be something worse.

  He looked in upon a scene done all in white and stainless steel. At first his eyes refused to sort out what was happening, and then it began to make sense. A woman was squatting over a machine which half-supported her and half-worked beneath her.

  Even as he watched, a bloody mass was withdrawn from underneath the woman. Suction apparatus moved over the object, and unexpectedly it turned into a baby, squalling soundlessly within the plastic and metal grasp of the same machines that tended its mother. Soon the baby was clean and calmer, and it was placed in the arms of its mother, now horizontal and looking at her child with wondering eyes.

  The next window revealed a room empty of everything except machines. Behind the next, an older man, surrounded by metallic arms and plastic feelers like an insect in the grasp of a praying mantis, was watching mechanical fingers manipulating his gaping chest while they did something inexplicable to the organs within.

  Without knowing why, Jeri knew what they were doing: They were performing a bypass operation for a faulty pulmonary artery, plugged up or constricted by deposits of ... His fingers twitched. “I want to leave,” he said.

  “No!” Sara said. It was the first time she had refused a request since she had pulled him back to life. “This is the critical point. To go back now is to undo everything we have done."

  “I'm not strong enough."

  “If you love me,” she said, “you must come with me now."

  She led him down the corridor like a reluctant child. At another window they saw a tumor the size of an apple being removed from a man's abdomen. Jeri knew what it was; he did not know how he knew, and he was too stunned to wonder. He was grasped by memories that would not set him free.

  They saw an elderly man's veins resectioned, a woman's face restructured, a man's appendix removed, kidneys transplanted, a boy's legs straightened, teeth replanted, inner ears replaced, more babies born, a mechanical heart implanted. And many rooms were empty.

  More might have been in use, Jeri knew, if the consoles in each apartment had not practiced preventive medicine at every meal, with every drink, with each injection. Here in this facility were only the major problems: the maternities, the constitutional inadequacies, the emergencies, the aged. The cave dwellers lived for a long time; they lived well and they lived without sickness, most of the time, but even their bodies wore out and needed care, and most of them got it very quickly and effectively.

  Things he once had known were flooding back to him, and he fought to keep his innocence.

  The last window was filled with sea-green water like a giant aquarium. In the water floated bodies of men and women like dead fish caught in the arms of an octopus. The bodies were naked, men and women, young and old, and they drifted and turned in some unseen current so that sometimes one and then another would come to the window as if peering out at the real world with blind, closed eyes. Jeri could not count how many there were behind the window—a hundred, two hundred, a thousand, how could he count them all?—and his mind closed against the implications of what they were and why they were there.

  “Put your hand against the window,” Sara said.

  “No,” he said hoarsely. “Let me leave. I want to go back."

  She picked up the wrist of his right hand and placed the palm of the hand against the window. “Feel it!"

  The window was as cold as death.

  “Those are the undead,” she said, “the sick people the machines can't help. Their temperatures have been lowered almost to the freezing point of water in order to slow the biological processes and the progress of their conditions."

 
Yes. He knew that.

  “Some have new conditions for which the computers aren't programmed,” she said. “Some have conditions whose repair requires a degree of judgment or of discrimination the machines cannot exercise. And some have conditions for which there is at this time no cure."

  “There is no hope for them,” he said mechanically. “The computer does no research."

  “There still are men and women!” Sara said fiercely, as if her world depended upon convincing him. “They can be physicians, surgeons, researchers. They can solve these problems. They can redeem these poor lost souls. They can bring them back to life the way I brought you back."

  “There are no physicians, no surgeons, no researchers anymore,” Jeri said, pulling himself back from the window, back from the blind eyes that stared at him through water and glass.

  “But there could be! There could be!"

  Jeri turned to look at Sara, drawn by the intensity of her voice and the play of emotions upon her face. Her eyes burned into him. “Why do you say that?” he asked. “Why do you keep saying that?"

  “Jeri,” she said. “You are a surgeon!"

  “No!” he said, shrinking back from the window, shrinking back from her.

  “Yes, you are! You are a very good surgeon with a remarkable record of successes. It's all there in the computer. You can find it out for yourself. You can help these people, some of them."

  “No!” he said again, raising his hands in front of her eyes. “Look at these hands. Are they the hands of a surgeon?” The hands were shaking.

  “They can be again,” she said. In a whisper, she added, “They must be."

  “Why must they be!” Jeri demanded. “Why do you keep after me? What is so important to you about my being a surgeon?” And then, with a flash of intuition, he turned to the window. “Which of these undead do you want restored to life?"

  Sara was silent. She stared into the window of the undead as if searching for a particular face, and when she turned back to Jeri, he saw tears in her eyes. They glittered in her dark eyes like black jewels. In spite of his anger, Jeri felt himself moved.

  “You are right,” she said. “There is one. A young man. We were going to be married. He became ill. After many tests, a small tumor was discovered in his brain. It was in the forebrain. It was too close to the seat of memory, and even personality, for the surgical machines to remove it. Toni wanted them to go ahead, but I wouldn't let them. Not while there was a chance."

  “Toni?” he said. “Which one is he?” His voice was normal, but his heartbeat was shaking his body. This is the way he once had been: emotional but able to control his feelings, able to pour his emotional energy into purpose and action.

  With the skill of long practice, Sara punched out a code on a panel of buttons beside the window. The undead milled around until the body of a naked young man came to the window as if trying to drift through and out into the world of the living. He was a pleasant-looking young man with dark hair and a trim body that did not look as bleached and dead as the others. He seemed quite ordinary, unexceptional really. Jeri caught a glimpse of his own face dimly reflected in the glass, as if he were floating among the undead, and he thought, without pride, that he was more attractive, more interesting. And weaker, he added, and more vicious. Besides, he thought sadly, who knows what fascination lies within that ailing brain, what tenderness, what charm, what capacity for love the living man possessed? It was enough to make of Sara a woman willing to raise another man from the dead and then destroy him in an effort to save her beloved. That was love. That was love. He would be destroyed by it again.

  He turned and walked away from the window, down the long, curving corridor back toward the door that led into the tower in which he lived. He remembered it now. He remembered walking this corridor many times before as he went to his humanitarian work in the surgery and he remembered returning, either victorious or defeated, to the apartment where someone waited. Someone whose face was unformed, someone who looked a bit like Sara, who shared his victories and eased his defeats.

  Sara trotted behind him. Her voice pleaded with him; he did not look at her face. “You will do it, won't you, Jeri? If I have done anything to help you, to nurse you, to make you strong again—"

  “If you did,” he said, “you did it for your own purposes."

  “I had no choice,” she said. “And it wasn't as if you were doing anybody any good, including yourself. You were as good as dead, farther gone even than Toni. I brought you back; I gave you life again. Can't you do as much for Toni? It's only fair."

  “I was better dead,” he said. “You used me. Like a machine with no feelings. Like a thing."

  “It wasn't just for me,” Sara said as they ascended in the lift shaft toward the apartment. “Nor for Toni. We do want to change the direction of humanity's slow drift toward the dream world. I can't do it alone."

  “You're very strong,” he said.

  “Together,” she went on, not heeding the interruption, “Toni and I can recruit others. People like you—I wasn't lying about that—who have talent and are willing to learn skills and want to do something new. We can set things right again."

  “By doing evil?” he asked. He would have shut and sealed the lift shaft behind him, but she was in the apartment already. Pink, he thought, is the color of betrayal; pink, he thought, is the color of hate. He could not eject her. He did not want to touch her, not in anger and not coldly; she had meant too much to him once.

  “You're bitter,” she said. “I can understand that. But—don't you see? You needed hope. You needed love. I only gave you what you needed."

  He sank down in the chair behind the console, suddenly very weary. “You gave me what you thought I needed so that I could serve your purpose. How did you ever hope to persuade me to do it after you had led me to believe that you had done everything for love of me."

  “I never said anything about love,” she said. “I never used the word."

  “You didn't have to,” he said. His hand flickered across the console, and the sickening odor of roses was replaced by the smell of an open fire.

  “It wasn't all put on,” Sara said. “I did like you. I wanted to be with you."

  She retreated from his anger, crouching back into a corner of the room far from the fireplace, where the flickering flames reached for her like knives, turning her into a nightmare figure from some dream he had forgotten....

  “How did you hope to get away with this impossible scheme?"

  She looked away from his eyes as if she saw his dreams reflected in them. “I thought I could slip him past you once you were recovered, once you were operating again. And then—well, at least he would have a chance."

  “If it depends upon me,” Jeri said, “he has none."

  The smell of the gods was powerful in the king's house. The courtiers gasped. The king fell back in his throne. Even the daughter of the king paled and trembled and was silent. Now she knew her life was in his hands....

  “All right,” Sara said. “If you operate on him, I'll stay with you. Just make him well again, and I will stay with you as long as you want me.” Her eyes pleaded with him. The body that he remembered was tense with hope.

  “You place a high valuation on yourself,” he said. “Do you think it would be enjoyable to live with a woman who was thinking every moment how much she wanted to be somewhere else?"

  My face, my moon, my everybody's moon, which everybody looks on and calls his....

  “I'd do it,” she said. “You'd never know."

  “I'd always know,” he said. “My problem is I can't forget. And what if he died during the operation?"

  Her face tightened against the underlying bones. “The bargain still would hold."

  “You realize what a temptation that would be? To win by killing your lover and call it accident?"

  “You wouldn't do that,” she said. But her voice lacked conviction.

  “You don't believe that. You know my dreams. You know the k
ind of person I am. I have killed a thousand times because a woman deserted me."

  “I'll take the chance,” she said. “It's the only chance I have."

  “And what if he should die by accident? Would you ever think it was anything but intentional? No. It wouldn't work. I can't do it."

  “But why? Tell me why? What can I do to persuade you? What can I offer?"

  “Nothing,” he said. “You brought me back, you see. I can't go through that experience of betrayal and revenge again. Even more important than that, I don't want to remember why I chose that fate. And that's why I can't operate, even if I believed everything would work out as you say, even if I wanted to."

  She looked bewildered. “I don't understand."

  “I don't remember enough of what it's like to be a surgeon,” he said. “Oh, I remember being a surgeon. You've convinced me of that, and since then I remembered a great deal. But I don't remember the techniques, I don't even remember some of the names much less what they stand for, and my fingers have forgotten the skills. Before I could operate, I would have to take a capsule. And once I took a capsule, I would remember too much. I would be back where I was, back as deeply under the influence of other people's memories as I ever was. So—what you ask is impossible. Even if I was everything you wanted me to be, even if you lived up to every promise, I would never be able to collect. I'd be back where you found me."

  Why this is hell, he thought, nor am I out of it.

  “We'd bring you back, Toni and I,” she said, panting as if she had run a long race. “We'd nurse you back to health and reality."