Dreamers Read online

  A desperate virgin...

  A reluctant bride...

  An Amazon...

  A slave...

  She came to him as all women. Each one enraptured him, whipped him into new intensities of passion, and sickened him, for what he wanted beyond desire was the honey-sweet girl he had known first, the girl he thought of as the real Virginia. But the honey was gone, and what she gave him in its place was biting and sometimes bitter.

  One morning he awoke with the consciousness that he was alone. He lay dully on the bed wondering where Virginia had gone. Finally he roused himself and looked around the room. She was gone, and he felt a moment of relief. Perhaps, he thought, she had gone to renew her supply of capsules. But he knew that he was telling himself fantasies. He sensed that she was gone for good, and relief turned into an old sickness that climbed from his loins into his chest.

  Slowly he moved to the console and discovered that a week had passed. Virginia had stayed with him for a week.

  A week. He had learned more in a week than he had learned from a lifetime of studying books and old manuscripts.

  Click.

  Some were of a more barbarous way of thinking, avouching that there was no remedy against pestilence better than to flee before them; wherefore, moved by this reasoning and recking of nought but themselves, very many, both men and women, abandoned their own city, their own houses and homes, their kinsfolk and possessions, and sought the country seats of others, or, at least, their own, as if the wrath of God, being moved to punish the iniquity of mankind, would not proceed to do so wheresoever they might be, but would content itself with afflicting those only who were found within the walls of their city, or as if they were persuaded that no person was to remain therein and that its last hour was come.... This tribulation had stricken such terror to the hearts of all, men and women alike, that brother forsook brother, uncle nephew, and sister brother and oftentimes wife husband; nay (what is yet more extraordinary and well nigh incredible) fathers and mothers refused to visit or tend their very children, as they had not been theirs.

  Where was she, he wondered. Where was his honey-sweet girl?

  The beautiful bright children came to his room no more.

  He thought he could work again. He tried to work, but the manuscripts, the documents, the pages, kept flipping past his eyes on the screen, and he had not read them.

  Click.

  Of this abandonment of the sick by neighbors, kinsfolk and friends and of the scarcity of servants arose an usage before well nigh unheard, to wit, that no woman, how fair or lovesome or well-born soever she might be, once fallen sick, recked aught of having a man to tend her, whatever he might be, or young or old, and without any shame discovered to him every part of her body, no otherwise than she would have done to a woman, so but the necessity of her sickness required it; the which belike, in those who recovered, was the occasion of lesser modesty in time to come...

  He found himself telling the console about Virginia, recalling for this unmoved, unmoving, plastic machine all the intimate moments and surprises of their relationship. When he awoke to what he was doing and asked for the information to be recalled for him so that it could be wiped from memory, he was surprised to discover that what he had talked about was not obscene.

  He was, he realized, not sensual but romantic. It was a remarkable discovery, because until a few weeks ago he had been neither and then for the past week he had thought he was all sensualist. Even the sick desires that plagued his waking moments and twisted his sleepless limbs at night faded beside the idealization of Virginia that grew in his imagination to something impossible to realize. He knew it. This was a worse sickness than the sickness of the flesh, he knew, but there was no cure.

  The days passed like plague victims crawling to hiding places to avoid the pest house. Laurence was a patient man and a healthy, slender, agile man, but he found himself becoming more distracted and nervous; he lost interest in food and grew thinner; he developed a cough and he thought he ran a fever at times. At last he tried to call Virginia, but the room reported itself empty and without information as to the whereabouts of the inhabitant.

  She's living with someone else, he thought, or reveling with the children through some euphoric masque.

  He tried to contact his daughter, but Jenny, too, was not at home.

  Until that moment he had not realized how free the society was in which he found himself. It was so free that people could cut themselves away from it without restraint, could drop out of it without concern, fade out, be unavailable, do whatever they wished whenever they wished.

  He tried to think of someone else he could reach who might know where he could locate Virginia, but even the central computer was helpless.

  Click.

  Few, again, were they whose bodies were accompanied to the church by more than half a score or a dozen of their neighbors, and of these no more worshipful and illustrious citizens, but a sort of blood-suckers, sprung from the dregs of the people, who styled themselves pickmen and did such offices for hire, shouldered the bier and bore it with hurried steps, not to that church which the dead man had chosen before his death, but most times to the nearest, behind five or six priests, with little light and whiles none at all, which latter, with the aid of the said pickmen, thrust him into what grave soever they first found unoccupied, without troubling themselves with too long or too formal a service.... The consecrated ground sufficing not to the burial of the vast multitude of corpses aforesaid, which daily and well nigh hourly came carried in crowds to every church,—especially if it were sought to give each his own place, according to ancient usance,—there were made throughout the churchyards, after every other part was full, vast trenches, wherein those who came after were laid by the hundred and being heaped up therein by layers, as good as stored aboard ship, were covered with a little earth, till such time as they reached the top of the trench.

  Laurence left a standing call for Virginia and Jenny, and turned to research—this time on the nature of the society in which he lived, about which, it seemed, he had known so little.

  It had started with chemical memory. Memory, it was discovered, was first encoded in complex protein molecules, later engraved in synaptic pathways. Chemical memory had changed society more than the Industrial Revolution. Schools disappeared. Only the perverse individual learned to read.

  Whatever anyone needed to know how to do was available in a capsule. If a computer broke down and some person had to fix it—nobody needed to do that anymore; the computers fixed themselves and everything else as well—why, all he needed to do was inject the right capsule and he not only knew the technical information but how the technician felt when he was applying it. If brain surgery was necessary—few surgeons were left—all a person had to do, if he wanted to, was inject the right capsule and he knew what had to be done, how to do it, and how it felt to do it right.

  But chemical memory had more exciting possibilities than supplying information or skills. A person could get out of a capsule the feeling itself without the burdensome information; he could feel like a surgeon or a technician. Or he could feel like more exciting people, people who lived vividly, felt intensely. Nothing remained for most of humanity to do but pursue sensation. Enjoy! Enjoy!

  Hence the dreamers. Hence the beautiful bright children who had nothing to do with their time but pursue pleasure and, when pleasure palled, sensation beyond pleasure: guilt, humiliation, sin, degradation, decadence, sorrow, grief, pain....

  He knew them by name; he had felt them all. And so long as people wanted them, dreamers would provide them.

  Laurence knew all this, and yet he could not stop himself from wanting Virginia back.

  Click.

  Moreover I say that, whilst so sinister a time prevailed in the city, on no wise therefor was the surrounding country spared, wherein, throughout the scattered villages and in the fields, the poor and miserable husbandmen and their families, without succor of physician or aid of servitor
, died, not like men, but well nigh like beasts, by the ways or in their tillages, or about the houses, indifferently by day and night.... To leave the country and return to the city, what more can be said save that such and so great was the cruelty of heaven (and in part, peradventure, that of men) that, between March and the following July, what with the virulence of that pestiferous sickness and the number of sick folk ill tended or forsaken in their need, through the fearfulness of those who were whole, it is believed for certain that upward of an hundred thousand human beings perished within the walls of the city of Florence, which, peradventure, before the advent of that death-dealing calamity had not been accounted to hold so many?

  The dreamers...

  He remembered a dreamer named Samuel. Perhaps. Perhaps? He asked the computer to call Samuel's residence. No one answered, but the glass in Laurence's console lit up and revealed a scene.

  For a moment Laurence could not interpret what his eyes saw. The room was darkly red; the walls and floors were red and the room was dimly lit so that it was difficult to see at all. Slowly, however, Laurence began to make out shapes and then figures. The figures seemed naked. They were men and women; they lay in tangled heaps about the floor. At first Laurence thought they all were dead, and then he saw, here and there, a figure moving slowly.

  In the center of the room was a chair. Samuel was seated in it. He, too, seemed naked, although Laurence could not be sure. He was leaning back in the chair as if exhausted; his eyes were closed. One arm dangled over the arm of the chair. From Samuel's hand something was dripping, a dark fluid was dripping into the mouth of a girl lying on the floor.

  The girl lying there with dark stains on her lips was Virginia.

  The beautiful bright children crawled around the floor like dark-red slugs.

  Somehow Laurence had found Samuel's residence. The computer had given him a map, but he had not left his room for so long that he soon became confused. He blundered into several other rooms by lift shaft or drop shaft before he came upon the red room he had seen upon his console screen.

  The room was hot. Laurence could feel himself sweating as soon as he stepped into it. It smelled of incense and sweat and blood. It throbbed with a primitive beat like the still-living heart of a dead reptile.

  Laurence threaded his way across the floor, not wanting to touch any of the bodies that undulated across his path. He arrived at the chair in which Samuel sat bleeding from his palms.

  Laurence picked up Virginia and held her in his arms, trying not to look at the smears around her mouth or the way her tongue licked out across her lips. She seemed almost insensible and scarcely stirred.

  Samuel opened dark, shadowed eyes in his pale face and smiled. “The ultimate dream,” he said weakly. “We have eliminated the middle man. Straight from producer to consumer.” And he closed his eyes again.

  Click.

  The Brotherhood of the Cross they called themselves. The Flagellants arose in Hungary and created an order, complete with regulations and uniform, out of the formless and spontaneous wanderings of homeless people. They were robed in sombre garments with red crosses on the breast, back and on the cap and bore triple scourges tied in three knots in which points of iron were fixed. On arrival at a town, they handed the citizens a copy of a remarkable letter from Jesus Christ which they claimed had fallen from heaven. It set forth a horrifying plan which they claimed God had devised for the punishment of man. The punishment could be avoided if the example of the Flagellants was followed. Each procession was to last for thirty-three and a half days—one day for each year of Christ's life. At every place they visited, they entered the church and closed the door and each one divested himself of his upper clothing. Then marching in procession around the church, each scourged himself until the blood ran down over his ankles.

  Laurence could not remember later how he had maneuvered Virginia down drop shafts and up lift shafts, nor how he had found his way, thus burdened, back to his room. But she did not stir until he had placed her on the bed, had sealed and locked the room so that no one could enter and no one could leave without his voiced instructions, and had begun to clean her face and hands with a cloth from the lavatory. She moved then and tried to sit up, but he held her down by a shoulder. She blinked and tried to make out his features and squinted at the white walls and slowly relaxed.

  “Laurence,” she said. “It's all over, Laurence. You can't keep me here. The past is past. Enjoy! Enjoy!"

  “I think you're mad,” he said, “but I love you."

  “I'm not mad just because our ways are different,” she said. “What is normal is what people do, and everybody does what I've been doing, what we've been doing. Everybody pops but a few real people like you."

  This time when she said “real people” it sounded like profanity.

  “Let me go,” she said, her body undulating a bit in spite of the position in which he held her. “This was a good cap."

  “I'm not going to let you go until you're free of this need to be somebody else,” he said. “I'm not going to let you go until you—the real you, not someone else—can decide what you want to do."

  “That's ridiculous,” she said. “You can't keep me a prisoner. You can't keep me from popping."

  “I can,” Laurence said grimly, foreseeing darkly what lay ahead, “and I will. I am going to speak to the real Virginia."

  She screamed. It was the scream of a wounded cat, filled with pain and anger and incredulity. But it was nothing to the way she screamed later.

  With a robe pulled tight around her and her face contorted with anger, she screamed at him and reviled him with language Laurence had encountered only occasionally in his research. She was not beautiful now, he thought; indeed, she was not nice to look at, and yet he thought he loved her more. He felt a strange sense of pleasure that it was not her beauty that enslaved him.

  He sat at his console and ignored her anger. He was not afraid, even when she pounded at him with her fists. Knowing she was there, he was not even distracted. His work went well.

  Click.

  NOTICE TO BE GIVEN OF THE SICKNESS.

  The Master of every House, as soon as any one in his House complains either of Botch, or Purple, or Swelling in any part of his body, or falleth otherwife dangerously sick, without apparent cause of some other Disease, shall give knowledge thereof to the Examiner of Health within two hours after the said sign shall appear.

  SEQUESTRATION OF THE SICK.

  As soon as any man shall be found by this Examiner, Chirurgion or Searcher to be sick of the Plague, he shall the same night be sequestred in the same house. And in case he be so sequestred, then though he afterwards die not, the House wherein he sickened shall be shut up for a Moneth, after the use of due Preservatives taken by the rest.

  A day later Virginia pleaded with him to let her go. “I will never be anything but a burden to you. I will never be anything but hateful. You will get no joy of me. Please let me go. Don't do this to me."

  “You have enjoyed similar caps of imprisonment and suffering,” Laurence said. “Why can't you enjoy this one?"

  The next day she was sullen and would not speak. She sat on the edge of the bed, her back to him, her body bent over her hands.

  She was not even attractive, Laurence thought. The golden girl with the quicksilver moods and the honey-sweet taste was gone. She had been replaced by this drab creature. But Laurence did not relent. Someday soon, he told himself, she would cast off the remnants of her capsule personas like a snake shedding its winter skin and she would be herself. That self, he knew, had to be beautiful and loving and kind.

  The fourth day she crawled to him and kissed his feet and begged him for one little cap. “I'll do anything,” she said. “Just one little cap. You can pick it out. And then we'll be like we were before. I'll be anything you want me to be. I'll stay with you. I'll—"

  “All I want,” he said gently, “is the real you."

  An hour later she was back. She let her paper rob
e drop to the floor and tried to shape her shaking body into an enticing pose. “You want me?” she said. “Take me. Do anything you want with me. Just let me have one cap."

  He did not find her desirable. Her face was haggard and twisted; her body was dull and flaccid. She did not value it anymore, and he could not want it.

  He shook his head.

  “Damn you!” she screamed. “Damn you! What are you? What kind of fiend? What kind of pervert? You're getting even with me for what I did to you, aren't you! Admit it!"

  “You didn't do anything to me,” he said.

  She laughed harshly: “I found you innocent and alone and contented, and I seduced you. I did it deliberately. I took you away from your studies and your writing and taught you what it is to feel things. Now you're no longer innocent. You're no longer contented. You feel dirty and betrayed, and you want to hurt me.

  He shook his head again. “I love you,” he said. “I don't want to hurt you. I want to find you. And if you must hurt for a little, it is only to let the real you come out from behind all the masks you've been putting between yourself and the world."

  “The real me!” she said. “The real me! Don't you understand? There is no real me! I am what I pop. Strip that away and there's nothing left. I'm nothing. Nothing."

  “I don't believe that,” he said. But he was shaken.

  “Believe this, then,” she said. “I left you because you bored me. You're the most boring person I ever knew. You have only two emotions: tolerance and a pallid sort of pleasure. I thought perhaps I could find something else beneath that wishy-washy exterior, but there isn't anything else. Nothing I could do could induce you to let loose and enjoy. All the time holding back, preaching and disapproving! You're dull and boring, Laurence, that's all. And I couldn't stand it anymore. I had to go find something alive."

  He was shaken now; what she accused him of confirmed all the fears he had ever known, all the self-doubts and inadequacies that had kept him from participating in life.