Dreamers Read online

  “To hold you to your bargain?” he asked. “Perhaps, out of kindness, you would say, ‘He's better off as he is.’ Or perhaps not. But how would you give me an incentive to live?"

  Her body went slack, and she turned away toward the drop shaft. Suddenly her body straightened as if something within her, beyond her control, would not surrender. She turned back. “You think you've been betrayed by women."

  He shrugged. “It seems to be my fate.” And yet the reminder of his persistent reality touched him beyond any explanation.

  “You are the betrayer,” she said. “You."

  He spread his hands helplessly. “What are you saying?"

  “What happened to your wife? Why can't you remember?"

  He sealed the lift shaft behind him with a word and called, “Love!"

  The room swallowed the word as though it had never been spoken. The pink seemed to darken.

  “Lora. Your wife.” She seemed to be taunting him. “What happened to Lora?"

  "Lora,” he called.

  No answer. The room turned to rose.

  There was no place for her to hide. The single, all-purpose room was empty. The circular bed was part of the floor again. The lavatory was empty; the kitchenette was bare.

  Everything in the room spoke of her, but Lora was not there.

  “Don't do this to me,” he pleaded.

  “What happened to Lora, Jeri?” she insisted.

  The chambers of his heart—superior vena cava, right atrium, right ventricle, left ventricle, left atrium, pulmonary vein, pulmonary artery, aorta—squeezed together. His heart pounded to drive his blood through his contracted arteries.

  "Lora!” he said.

  "Jeri,” the console said. It spoke in his wife's voice. She had left a message....

  “She—she chose total immersion,” he said. The memories flooded into his mind. “She left a message on the console."

  “Recall it."

  He stared at the console for a moment and then automatically punched the right buttons. The console said, “No such message is recorded."

  “Has it ever been recorded?” he asked.

  “A search discloses no evidence of any such message."

  He looked blankly at Sara. “I don't understand."

  “You came back one day to find Lora totally immersed,” Sara said. “Not fled. Immersed. She hadn't deserted you. But she was deeply under. And you killed her."

  “No!” he protested.

  “You killed her. You cut her wrists and watched her bleed to death, and then you cut her up with your surgeon's knives and saws and disposed of her body through the waste chute, and ever since then you have been trying to forget, trying to convince yourself that you were the one who had been betrayed, getting your revenge on a series of surrogates so that you need not face the truth."

  “No!” he said. “No!"

  She hated him while he cut off her toes one by one, and then her fingers, her ears, her eyelids, her nose.... After the first hour she began to scream. Each scream sent a shudder of pleasure down his back. She was a strong woman and she lived for most of two days....

  The power was upon him like a mantle, guiding his actions, controlling his arms as they raised above her and plunged the knife into the soft breast. The blood spurted like the blood of any peasant, and the heart lay in his hand like any heart, still throbbing with life for a moment. And he knew the great joy of serving as the instrument of divine forces to do that which his heart desired....

  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. He moved toward her, his knife ready to begin its work....

  He knew the wrongness of it as he came out of his chair. This wasn't the way it was supposed to be. How he knew that he was not sure, but he knew it was wrong, and he reached her just as the knife plunged toward her breast, in time to touch her hands as they moved but not in time to stop the knife in its descent. It was almost as if he guided the knife toward its palpitating destination....

  When he looked up, Sara was gone.

  He sat for a long time behind the console staring at his hands. Lora was gone. Now Sara was gone. His hands had been covered with blood more than once: innocent blood, guilty blood. But which memory was his? Which was real? He remembered Lora now. At least he remembered a memory of Lora. He punched the appropriate buttons on the console, and a series of views of a young woman looked out at him. A beautiful woman with dark hair and blue eyes. Yes, he remembered Lora. She spoke, and he remembered her voice. He remembered his love for her, and he remembered his desolation when she left him, but he could not remember the terrible thing Sara said he had done to her.

  Had he blocked that from his memory? Had he made up the story about her leaving him? Or had Sara made it up to destroy him or as one last desperate effort to change his mind?

  He asked the console where Lora was, and the console replied, “There is a privacy block on that information.” He could not work his way around it. At last he gave up. As he had given up before, he thought. He would never know the truth. But if the console had told him the real state of affairs, how had Sara known more?

  He asked where Sara was, and the console said, “There is a privacy block on that information."

  Both of them were gone, finally and forever. And the truth about them was gone. He felt alone and afraid. He sat quite still for hours trying to tell himself that he was capable of making a new life, that he was well and strong, that the past didn't matter. But each time two terrible truths intruded themselves into his small dream world: he had loved Lora, and she had driven him to eternal revenge; and he had loved Sara, and she, too, had betrayed him.

  Could a man love two women? he asked himself. Perhaps—if he had forgotten one. He had loved a hundred women, all with dark hair and blue eyes, all but one. Did that mean that all this was real?

  Was this experience with Sara only another variation upon an eternal theme? How could he tell the difference? What test could he use? Is memory our only reality?

  He found himself within the medical complex with no memory of getting there. Now within his favorite operating room, the surgical console recognized his voice. The moment might have been a kind of reunion, but he felt numb, like a fetus waiting to be shaped by DNA and experience, like a one-celled creature waiting to be sculpted by evolution. He looked down at the body named Toni. It was still dripping from its long immersion. He put his hand on it. The body was colder than a corpse.

  The X rays and angiograms were displayed on the monitor. He studied the position of the pea-sized tumor. It had changed scarcely at all in the year since the young man had joined the undead.

  He placed his fingers in the surgical gloves and moved them gently. On the monitor the tip of the microscopic scalpel—an invisible needle—moved in response. The prepping machines shaved the young man's head. Jeri moved the laser beam into position, and his finger traced a circle. The beam missed the young man's scalp by millimeters. The second time he managed to cut a hole in scalp and skull that only the safety mechanisms on the surgical machine kept from going too deep. As the circle of bone and flesh was lifted away, Jeri looked down at the dura mater. He tried to approach it with the scalpel. His fingers stopped. He could not move. He didn't know what lay beneath. He tried again and stopped, sweating.

  He drew his hands out of the gloves and looked at them. Then he looked down at the young man. In his chilled condition his breathing was almost imperceptible. This was Sara's love, he thought. Her chance for happiness; his chance to prove that this was real and not another dream of vengeance.

  Perhaps somewhere, sometime, there was a chance for him if he could love.

  He turned to the surgical console and punched a series of buttons and accepted the injector offered by the console. Here it was, he thought. Memories. Life for Toni, if all went well. Hell for him. Perhaps love
can redeem, he thought, and placed the nozzle against the inside of his elbow and pressed the release. It hissed briefly, and the injector dropped from his hand.

  He felt the memories beginning to stir. Yes, there was the telencephalon and there the diencephalon, with the thalamus and epithalamus and metathalamus. He put his hands back into the surgical gloves, and they fit as if they had been molded onto his hands. His fingers felt alive and purposeful, as if they had memories of their own, and he allowed them to move about their work without conscious interference.

  They cut through the tough dura mater and exposed the tumor embedded in one of the fissures of the cortex. Delicately they cut around the tumor while he studied the scalpel's movements on the monitor. A slip here, and Toni would soon be dead. Perhaps Sara would return to him, he thought. But his fingers moved on. A little more of the cortex there, and Toni would never recognize her, never speak again, never walk, perhaps would remain forever without awareness, a collection of cells without consciousness or memory. But his fingers moved on, unaware of his indecision.

  At last they finished their delicate task of decision and action, pulling the pea of abnormal tissue from the brain, dropping it into the analysis tray. Jeri pulled his hands from the gloves, leaving the surgical machine to tidy up. His fingers already were beginning to forget. If all went well, the young man would recover. Sara would have her love.

  And he—he had his memories. They were flooding back into his brain, all the demons he had exorcised, all the terrors he had driven from his world. They took him over. They ate him up. He remembered. He remembered.

  He went to the vat in which drifted the uncounted numbers of the undead and laid himself on the table beside the vat. He felt the many arms of the vat machine begin their work upon him, touching him here and there with a kind of lethal affection. A slow chill ran through his body, like the memory of winter, and he shivered, and shivered, and then his consciousness began to slip away like a man freezing, and he felt warm and pleasant, and the bath into which he slipped was like the mother sea in which all men were born.

  But the dreams did not stop. He drifted and drifted, and one day he came face to face with Lora and did not know it....

  THE COMING OF WINTER

  The cold winds blew always from the north, and all water froze over. First the puddles and then the ponds and the lakes and finally the seas and the oceans. Life that had developed in warm, tropic seas died quickly, and only those creatures lived who could hibernate at the bottoms of lakes and seas in holes or shells or spores.

  The Man Who Hunts Alone returned through the forest with the deer across his shoulders, its legs dangling against his chest on either side of his broad neck. He could feel the soft hide of the young animal against his shoulders and the head bouncing against his back as he jogged through the snow. The snow was general now, all over the forest, and he had been lucky to find the animal by the stream. He could smell the nostril-flaring odor of new blood not yet congealed in the knife wound across the deer's throat.

  He could smell the snow drifting down in heavy flakes. He wondered if it would ever stop snowing, or if the ice would keep coming south from the mountains until it covered the entire world.

  He reached the clearing. He stopped just inside the edge of the forest with the caution that came from long experience with perils that lurked everywhere. On the far side of the clearing, like a shadow on the face of the wooded bluff, was the mouth of the cave. The clearing looked just as he had left it the day before, but it was silent—no voices, no movement, and the snow lay undisturbed everywhere, even in front of the cave. He circled the entire clearing, staying just out of sight among the trees, and found nothing—no trail, no intruders. From the nearest point he could see a few paces into the dark opening of the cave; nothing moved.

  Soundlessly he put down the carcass of the deer in the snow and eased into the clearing and across it to the bluff. He glanced around one last time and then moved quickly and quietly through the opening and stopped just beyond the wintry light that spilled into the cave. The cave was dark and quiet, and it had the good familiar odors of smoke and meat and urine. In a moment his vision grew sharper and he saw the forms of his two children, a boy and a girl, lying stretched out beside the black remains of an old fire as if they were asleep. But they were lying too still.

  Their throats had been cut like little pigs. The smell of blood was thick in the cave. The bodies were small and fragile beside the old fire, smaller even than the deer he had carried back for their meal, and they were dead. Sorrow was a cold fist in his throat, and he sat there beside the old fire while the snow fell eternally outside the cave....

  The Mnemonist III

  O, I have passed a miserable night,

  So full of ugly sights, of ghastly dreams,

  That, as I am a Christian faithful man,

  I would not spend another such a night,

  Though ‘twere to buy a world of happy days.

  —William Shakespeare

  The Mnemonist felt chilled. He shivered on his supportive pallet as he considered the fate of the surgeon. “Will legends arise, in times to come,” he asked, “of a hero asleep in a distant land who will return when his people need him, to heal the fatal illness that threatens them?” Or was it too late? Was the fatal illness already working its way through the urban center? Whatever the answer to those questions, the answer to the question of his successor did not lie among the volunteers. They were not fundamentally different from the poppets; their threshold might be higher, but under sufficient stress they would snap, suddenly, like weary metal.

  we

  are

  such

  stuff

  as dreams

  are

  made on

  and our

  little

  life

  is

  rounded

  with

  a sleep

  each neuron in the brain

  has its own unique

  chemical label

  when two neurons

  form a synapse

  joining nearby pathways

  the label from one neuron

  enters the other

  as a result the other

  neuron synthesizes

  a memory molecule

  this consists

  of the labels

  from both neurons

  faulty

  molecules

  are

  being

  produced

  by

  memory

  synthesizer

  14

  pull

  off

  line

  and

  repair

  As he searched the experiences of other volunteers, the Mnemonist asked, “Are there two kinds of volunteers—one who has not yet broken and one so enamored of life and personal contact that he or she will not settle for the secondhand experience of dreams?” Some, it seemed to him, might never break, but they were all young and were fewer all the time. “Why,” he asked, “are there no old volunteers still resisting the lure of fulfillment?” And even if there were, the Mnemonist knew that they would be useless for his purpose, for they would be too much in love with living to settle for secondhand and thirdhand experience on his pallet.

  our birth is but

  a sleep and

  a forgetting

  the soul that rises

  with us our lifes star

  has had elsewhere

  its setting

  and cometh from afar

  for every separate

  memory in the mind

  said david krech

  there is a

  differentiated chemical

  in the brain

  chemical memory pellets

  as it were

  waste pipe

  378

  is clogged

  with what

  may be

  a human body

  identify

 
; and remove

  He himself, the Mnemonist knew, had never been a volunteer; he had been in love not with living but with knowing. He remembered how it had been, the eagerness with which the child had selected pellets of knowledge while the other children had chosen experience. He grew lean with his unsatisfied hunger for data and correlation while they lolled, in fleshy contentment, with their capsuled happenings. “Come with me to the library,” he had asked one of them or another. “Let us discover wonderful things.” And not one of them had come with him. Why should he care for them or do for them what they wouldn't do for themselves? They were not like him. And yet, the Mnemonist reflected, he had spent a lifetime caring for them, doing for them.

  not in entire

  Forgetfulness

  and not in utter