Dreamers Read online

  there was a time

  when meadow

  drove and stream

  the earth and

  every common sight

  to me did seem

  appareled in

  celestial light

  the glory

  and the freshness

  of a dream

  he followed up

  this chance observation

  by transferring

  habituation

  to a loud noise

  and to a puff

  of air

  in the face

  and then replaced their

  natural fear of light

  with fear of darkness

  then

  this

  body

  is

  wearing

  out

  check

  on

  its

  life

  expectancy

  The Mnemonist's eyes creaked open, and he looked at the fluid-filled bed next to his, empty now these many cycles since his predecessor had given one last twitch inside his web and died, as quietly as he had lived. “Who will make the decisions that keep this urban center functioning?” the Mnemonist asked. He had been delinquent in not selecting and training a successor. Well, there still was time; he would live for many cycles yet. But it was not too soon to consider his replacement; it would take a man who loved what he loved, and not everyone in this world lived, as he did, for the pleasure of information, for the delight of knowing everything.

  the world which seems

  to lie before us like

  a land of dreams

  so various so

  Beautiful so new

  hath really neither

  joy nor love nor light

  nor certitude nor peace

  nor help for pain

  and we are here as on

  a darkling plain

  swept with confused

  Alarms of struggle

  and flight where

  Ignorant armies

  clash by night

  ungar

  still got

  memory transfer

  after treating

  brain extract

  with ribonuclease

  to destroy

  the rna

  but not

  when treated

  with trypsin

  he concluded

  that the

  memory molecule

  was not rna

  but a peptide

  as

  soon

  as

  that

  the search

  begins

  perhaps

  someone

  fascinated

  by

  facts

  might make

  a suitable

  successor

  a historian

  perhaps

  The Historian

  The beautiful bright children spilled into the room like a handful of golden coins.

  How long had it been since anyone had held a golden coin? Laurence wondered. How long had it been since anyone had thought of a golden coin? Perhaps only a historian would remember what it was.

  He sat in his study, interrupted at his work, not caring, smiling benignly at the young men and women as they streamed out of the lift shaft and filled the sterile room with life and laughter.

  Golden coins spilling from the hand, turning as they fall, glinting in the light....

  They seemed like actors, an Elizabethan company capering through Stratford shouting “Players!” or a commedia dell'arte troupe appropriating an Italian square.

  The forgotten console clicked, and a new display appeared upon its screen.

  Oh, happy people of the future who have not known these horrors and will, perhaps, class our testimonies with fables. We have, perhaps, deserved these punishments—but so did our forefathers. May posterity not merit the same.

  One of the young men began to sing. The song was one of those contemporary melodies haunted by echoes of the past, but it was not the song or the words that brought tears to Laurence's eyes but the clear tenor itself. Beautiful, beautiful—like one of the legendary castrati.

  Others took up the song, here and there, toying with it as if it were a colorful balloon—a red one, perhaps; yes, red would look right in the all-white room—tossing it here and there and then holding it up, steady, with their mingled voices and the intensity of their desires. And all the while they went about their games: in groups of twos or threes they danced or courted or walked about admiring the room as if it were a work of art, and it was all one whether they danced or walked. They moved with the grace of ballet dancers and the innocence of children.

  Ching-a-ching go the golden coins. Ching-a-ching rings the music clear....

  Not really children, Laurence thought, more like courtiers playing an elaborate game of manners without a thought of tomorrow, without a thought of the rest of the world, as if here and now were all the world. The boys were muscular and masculine, and the girls were rounded and feminine, but they all had an air of unstudied directness, like children, without lurking reservations or sullen needs....

  One by one they wandered past his study to run their marveling fingers over the console's plastic top, to lean past the console and touch his hand or his shoulder, to murmur a word to him.

  “Honor."

  “Pleasure."

  “Sweet."

  “Adorable."

  “Keep working."

  “We love you."

  One of the blooming girls touched his cheek with her lips. She was slim and blue-eyed and beautiful. He had not been this close to anyone since his wife died, and he felt their human warmth as they passed and smelled the spice of their bodies, driving away the old stale odors that he never smelled anymore, the odors that the room could never quite exhaust.

  Click.

  When has any such thing ever been heard of or seen? In what histories has it been read that houses were left vacant, cities deserted, the country neglected, and a fearful and universal solitude over the whole earth? Will posterity ever believe these things when we, who have seen them, can hardly credit them?

  Some of them made love like children, innocent and free, with no one to tell them shame, wherever they happened to be, or on the round bed that rose, at the touch of a button, like a white altar from the center of the floor.

  “They wanted to meet you,” one of them said. She was standing beside the console in her brief suit, shining in his eyes until he had to blink. “Father,” she had added. “Father.” But he couldn't be her father. It was only yesterday, wasn't it, that he had taken a little girl to a crèche when her mother died? A few months? A few years? He had seen her, of course, looking in upon her through the console's screen, visiting her remotely in her happiness, soft and gentle, and she had been pleased that she could see him in return and speak to him, and each time she was larger. But now—had it been so long?

  He rose and embraced her. She wound her golden arms around his neck and held him against her yielding body and kissed him, and Laurence felt old.

  Hold the coins tight in a sweaty hand, the knuckles white over the bone, the coins biting into the fingers.

  “Particularly Virginia,” his daughter said as she released him at last, laughing, pleased. Geraldine? No, of course not. Genevieve. Jenny. “I bring you Virginia."

  Behind Jenny was another golden girl, slighter, quieter, but just as beautiful. Perhaps—if it was not unfatherly to think so—even lovelier, with short dark hair and eyes as big as sunflowers that looked at him as if they two were all alone in the room. The pupils of her eyes were black mirrors in which he could see himself reflected, doubled, enhanced.

  “Women have served all these centuries,” Laurence said softly, “as looking glasses, possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size."

  “You are witty,” Virginia said. Laurence was pleased with
her voice. It was soft and low, like the breath of a lover upon the ear.

  His knees felt weak. He sat down again and ran his hands over the white plastic of the chair in which he spent most of his waking hours, feeling it moist and slick under his palms. “That wasn't original with me,” he said. “A woman wrote that long ago. An author. Another Virginia."

  “You know so much,” Virginia said.

  “You are famous, Father,” Jenny said happily. “You do not know how famous. Everybody knows your name. The author of this, the author of that. Your work is read by the dreamers, and we live their dreams. Your reality, Father."

  “I don't understand,” Laurence said. He could not stop looking at Virginia, and at the eyes that looked at him.

  “Not many historians are left,” Jenny said. “Without historians where would we be? And you're the greatest of them."

  “I seem to recall a phrase like ‘history is irrelevant.’”

  “That was cycles ago, Father. Now we know better. Without historians the past would be forgotten, and our way of life would be limited. Also, a recent cap of a historian was popular a few cycles ago. Anyway, everybody wanted to meet you."

  “An old man like me?” They made him feel old, Jenny, Virginia, and the rest, full of eager health and blossoming energy, their skins packed to bursting with self.

  Click.

  Imperfect as ancient history is, in regard to the accounts of diseases, and the extraordinary phenomena of nature, we find that between the years b.c. 480 and the Christian era, a number of violent plagues occurred, most of which coincided in time with the following phenomena, comets, eruptions of volcanoes, earthquakes, drouth, severe winters, diseases among cattle....

  “You're not old,” Virginia said. “Just older."

  “Virginia has this thing about older men,” Jenny said wickedly, but her wickedness was like the face of a child determined to be stern but unable to keep the natural good humor from breaking through in smiles.

  “About real people,” Virginia corrected. “It only happens that most of them are older.” The way she said “older” made it seem like an uncommon virtue. And all the while she spoke, she did not take her eyes from his face, as if she wished to memorize it and keep it with her always.

  And then—moments later or hours?—Jenny was gone and the others were gone and the room was empty of all but Laurence and Virginia. She had talked—no, he had talked and she had listened, leading him on with a shy question when he paused, a discreet exclamation when he said something that pleased her.

  It was he who had unfolded—or been unfolded with delicate golden hands—like a Chinese puzzle box, each box smaller and better hidden than the one before, until he lay all exposed before her sunflower eyes that seemed all black pupil, and she clapped her hands in delight and laughed. “You're wonderful,” she said.

  Stack the coins, one upon another, carefully, so that the tower does not topple....

  He told her about his childhood. “Children were different then,” he said, but he didn't really know that. He thought they were different, but he hadn't known many other children when he was a child, and he didn't know any now. “We had books."

  “Books!” she said as if they were the most marvelous objects.

  “Histories, biographies, novels...."

  “Imagine!” she said. “Reading!” Reading, too, was a miracle.

  He told her how the people in the books had become real to him, more real than people.

  “I know,” she said, as if she really knew.

  He told her how their world—the world of the self-sufficient urban centers—had developed naturally out of early experiments with chemical memory. How chemical memory had been perfected until people no longer needed to learn things from books or how to do things from other people: They simply injected themselves with knowledge. Computers, too, were improved, and the computers created better machines; society became more productive, more efficient; the urban centers were built; and people were liberated from toil, freed to do whatever they wanted. Some pursued the pleasure of sensation, and some, like himself, sought out knowledge that had not yet been reduced to proteins. For him it was knowledge of the past.

  He told her how he had thought about the past until it seemed like a living tapestry interwoven with the color of people's lives, breathing the incense of their desires. He told her how he had come of age more curious about the past than the present until he met the woman who was to become his wife and the mother of Genevieve.

  “How beautiful,” she said.

  His wife had been older and more worldly.

  Virginia approved of that.

  They had met at the home of her parents when they first moved to the building in which his parents lived. She had made the decisions—that they would be married, where they would live in the building, that he would be a scholar and write, that they would have one child. She had taken care of all the practical concerns of life.

  “She must have been a wonderful woman,” Virginia said.

  “She was,” he agreed. “Lovely, too, with pale blue eyes and fair skin and long brown hair. Her name was Susan, and I loved her. And yet—"

  “Yes?” Virginia said.

  “Nothing."

  “Tell me,” she pleaded.

  “Oh, sometimes I wonder if my life would have turned out the same. I've missed so much, you see."

  “Oh, no!” she said quickly. “You're real, and you have made things real for other people. But Susan died."

  “Yes. It was a silly thing. She didn't have to go out at all. We were happy here. We could have lived here forever and never gone anywhere. But she got bored and went out."

  “Outside the building?"

  “Yes. It was a strange thing to do, and she was not that kind of person at all. I never understood it."

  Click.

  Mezeray relates that in China, the disease originated from a vapor, which burst from the earth, was horribly offensive and consumed the face of the country through an extent of 200 leagues. This account may be inaccurate, but is not to be wholly rejected. That some action of subterranean heat was instrumental in generating the disease is very probable; or at least that some phenomena of fire accompanied it, because this supposition is consonant to the whole series of modern observations.

  After that, he told her, he had taken Jenny to the crèche.

  “The best place,” she said. “Most of us were raised there."

  And he had blinked, and he was middle-aged. Jenny was grown and the world had passed him by, and he did not know where life had gone.

  “Our world is not so wonderful,” she said.

  What is not wonderful about bright gold and its music? Add one more to the stack. One more.

  “Without the caps we'd be nothing,” she said.

  Nothing? This child, this girl, this creature of joy?

  “And it is you who make the men who make the caps."

  He felt tears welling in his eyes and blinked them back. When he could see again, she was standing beside him, leaning toward him until he felt the radiant warmth of her body caressing his face and the sweet smell of her filled his head with fantasies. Her lips touched his cheek like a bubble bursting. And before he could think or move, she was gone.

  The tower toppled ching-a-ching, the coins rolling in different directions, ending in corners and other hidden places. Impossible to catch, impossible to find, impossible to put back together.

  * * * *

  The beautiful bright children spilled into the room like quicksilver. The shimmering stream broke into glistening beads, coruscating in the light like prisms, eternally moving, changing....

  A week had passed since the children had first come to him. Laurence knew it was a week because he had marked off the days, like a prisoner scratching with a nail upon his prison wall.

  What would they think of that, the children who knew nothing of prisoners and nails? There was so much, he realized, he did not know about them and the world t
hey lived in, but there was as much or more that they did not know about him and the world they all had come from.

  It was ironic, he thought, that a lifetime had passed while he was not looking and a week had struggled by so painfully. But now it was over, and he searched the glitter for a face he knew, a face with eyes as big as sunflowers.

  Then he saw her, and he felt suddenly young and giddy. It was a ridiculous feeling, and he did not understand it, but he knew that he was happy, even though Virginia did not come to him, even though she dallied with a young man dressed in black, moving quickly around him, coming close to him and retreating in one fluid movement, speaking quickly, breathlessly, her eyes not black mirrors (did she save that for Laurence?) but surging pools flashing with light....

  She looked so different, Laurence thought. No wonder he could not pick her out at once.

  Click.

  The symptoms of this fatal malady were—violent affection in the head and stomach, buboes and other glandular swellings; small swellings like pimples or blisters; usually a fever, and a vomiting or spitting of blood.—The swellings in the glands were infallible signs of the disease; but the most fatal symptom was, the pimples or blisters spread over the whole body. Hemorrhages from the mouth, nose, and other parts, indicated a universal and sudden disorganization of the blood. The patient usually died in three days or less—which denotes the virulence of the poison, or rather the activity of the disease, which destroyed the powers of life in half the time, which the bilious plague usually employs....