Dream Dancer (11 page)

When the pilot was gone and he was alone but for the chiming, beeping, buzzing solicitations of his console, Parma Kerrion put hands behind his head and let out a long sigh. There was no use in any of this, really: if Shebat Kerrion had flown away or been blown away, or not, he would still have to proclaim that such was the truth of it. It was too near elections to take the risk of having the girl used against him. Chance, or good luck, had given him the perfect out.

And also, the only help he could give the girl was to express emphatically his disinterest in her.

He leaned over his desk and rubbed his eyes, trying to rub away the feeling that there was something here he had missed.

Then he called his secretary and dictated three orders.

He called Chaeron to Draconis from Lorelie, effective immediately.

He instructed the investigators of these murky events in the outcome he wished made official: Shebat Kerrion was logged missing in space, presumed dead; the three-year waiting period was unilaterally waived; a successor was designated in her stead.

The third missive informed Marada Seleucus Kerrion of all that had taken place.

Parma sat back once more. Then, as an afterthought, he called off the search he had earlier ordered. If Shebat were down there, she would either come up on her own, or not. In such teetering command of his pinnacle, he could hardly afford to bend over in an attempt to haul another up.

Almost, then, he wept, feeling suddenly thwarted and ancient and bowed by his labors.

Why was the pilot so calm?

Softa slept an uneasy dream in which Parma reversed all things: sent him after Jebediah, at which point he broke cover, brought the
Bucephalus
up beside the
Marada
, tandem-guided them both through the sponge. Only when he reemerged into spacetime, it was not his confederates who awaited him, but Marada Kerrion, hovering between the platform and the stars with a glittering knife and fork in his hands and a napkin around his neck. As he was being devoured, Softa made no struggle, could not even cry out. He had left the little girl helpless and stranded, had he not? Then he would wake, shivering, to a hand or a word spoken by a concerned vigilant who had seen him toss or heard him cry out. Then he would go back to sleep. And it would start all over again.

Shebat would never forget those first few days in the graffiti-strewn, peeling warren of the dream dancers. Only the first few hours were sharper-honed in her memory, with the initial moments of those seared so deeply that she winced whenever she thought of them, which was as infrequently as possible.

Which was not to say never. Back the memory would come, when her guard was down, when she was drowsing. It even leaked into one of her first, tentative dream dances. Thusly, to her embarrassment, the pall of her regret overflowed into public domain.

There it had been: Softa’s arms sliding around bespangled buttocks, enfolding, pulling her up and against him. Only the “her” was Shebat, not Lauren, the dream dancer who had played that role in reality. And it was to Lauren that the dance had been tendered. Perhaps because it was Lauren, this lamentable indiscretion had occurred.

But it had been done, nothing could change it. Lauren had felt Shebat’s distress, had heard “murderess” ringing in her head; had seen all the clawing hands outreaching toward her from every side; had seen Softa wink as he pulled the Shebat/Lauren close, while the Lauren/Shebat watched in disdain; in astonishment; in anguish. “That is hardly a dream dance,” had said Lauren afterward, pulling the fillet from her brow, although Shebat had thought she had reclaimed control rather well, turning bad to better, at least.

But the girl whose beauty was excruciating, who had said to David Spry with only the hint of an arch smile: “Is she not a little young for you?”, was not thereafter willing to forget what she had seen, though Shebat was a novice in the extreme, and thusly excusable.

Of the twelve in the dream dancers’ company, it was Lauren who made life most difficult for Shebat.

Aside from the shock of so many far-reaching changes, the loneliness, and the slant-eyed beauty’s sly obstructions whenever it came time for Lauren to take a turn as Shebat’s instructor, she was doing well enough. Almost happy, she could say on those occasions when all was going right. Then the dream dance ceased to become an intensely complex labor. Transmuted into a living, breathing entity like a supernal visitation, it fired her soul.

It was all of enchantment, every bit of the numinous chant she had heard pealing glory when Marada had come to Bolen’s town and whisked her off, laughing: “You can be Enchantress of all the Earth.”

There were two powers in the Consortium, two potent magics to sate the metaphysical longing of the most ardent seeker; there were the ships, and there was the dream dance.

She recollected her fright that it might not be so, that the Consortium would prove as dry and lifeless as Marada had proclaimed to her that it was: all is science, he had reaffirmed endlessly.

And she had been saddened, holding tenaciously to her meager spells, looking for their like in Ashera’s dragon-breath or Chaeron’s expediencies, and not finding anything more than human passion.

But she had not known the truth of the matter, one so much accepted by Marada that he had never thought to mention it: science and magic were one. Enchantment equals enlightenment.

Howsoever great the human divisiveness against whose currents she endlessly struggled, that light shone in her distance like a cheery beacon.

With it, she staved off dreams of the lion-maned Chaeron, whose wrath when she had gone to him to beg his backing for her leave-taking had seemed to be a terribly controlled declaration of war.

Where was Softa? she wondered endlessly the first hours, less and less as hours became days. The dream dance consumed her, as she hoped it might, so that she had less time to worry about her status or her fate.

Status was of great moment here in the lower levels, where citizenship was bought in fractions, or forged, or stolen. What had come first as an indication that Spry had neither abandoned nor forgotten her were packets of falsified credentials in the hand of a junior pilot who stared open-mouthed all about him.

They had been “one reading only” hard copy, which crumbled away within minutes after the oils of a human finger touched them: She was Sheba Spry, Softa’s full sister. She was from the Pegasus colonies. Her data pool keys and ship-key were thus-and-so. She was newly apprenticed to her brother. . . .

The bristle-haired junior with his wispy, wishful beard insisted on staying until she had read and recited back to him the information, until the hard copy was a sprinkling of dust on the floor. Then he gave her, solemn-faced, a packet full of program-cards, saying as if by rote that she was to continue her lessons on a full schedule and that no exceptions were to be made in her original timetable.

“That is impossible! I do not think any of this will work. And I certainly cannot learn two trades at once!”

The junior flushed rubescent as an X-ray star map, saying: “I am not anything but a messenger, lady,” and Shebat realized that he thought her a fully fledged dream dancer, which also explained his reluctance to leave.

He dug in the case he was carrying and came up with two identical packages sealed in opaque foil. “He said you were to open these alone. . . . Look, I mean . . . can I get a discount?”

Shebat counted to ten and said she was not the one to ask. Then she ushered the youth firmly to the door, saying: “Did he say anything else? Is he coming soon?” She did not dare ask what she would have liked.

Evidently, the junior dared not answer what he would have liked, so he hemmed instead, at last getting out: “No, I do not know. He has his own troubles.” The last of which he mumbled while backing into the hall. There he collided with Lauren, stumbled, and as he began apologizing she smiled and spirited him off, saying she had a message for him to take back to the guildhall.

Shebat closed her door and leaned upon it, trying to sort out her feelings. She had not felt this way about Softa previously; she had not felt any way about him at all. When Lauren had greeted him so longingly, she had seen him differently, as a man for the first time. But it was not jealousy she felt, she told herself, merely dependency. Softa was the only hope she had of getting off Draconis. Lauren hated her, and would do anything to make her suffer.

She remembered the two packets. Sitting on her narrow cot in her narrow gray womb in the crowded warren of the dream dancers, she opened the first one, then the other.

In the first was a large sum of scrip, and instructions as to its dispensing. Even a schedule of payments to be made was included. Feeling better—if he intended to abandon her, he would not have sent so much or designated its dispensation—she opened the second.

And hurriedly attached all her concentration thereto: a second set of credentials lay in her lap, casually thumbed before their meaning came clear. She raced the oxidization of the treated paper. When she had a little pile of dust in her lap, her upper lip was beaded with perspiration. Her mind tried uneasily to deal with two adjacent overlays of data, combinations numerically succedent. It would be difficult to keep them straight. The price of a mistake would be her criminality unmasked. She shivered. She knew why the combinations were so similar: all conversation with computers, be they data pool, private source, even ships’ intelligences, was based on tuning the mind of machine to the mind of man. Within the parameters of specification were a finite number of frequencies to which her own intelligence code could be assigned.

If anyone ever checked to see how close the code-ins for Shebat Kerrion, Sheba Spry, and Aba Cronin were, she would be found out: they were nearly identical.

One thing troubled her more than that: if Softa had gone to all this extended trouble, the stay he foresaw for her here was equally extended. And though she was already half-enthralled by the beauty and the rectitude of the dream dancers’ art, she feared it.

She feared it almost as much as she feared discovery, but for diverse reasons.

It sang more sweetly than any but the
Marada’s
song.

She understood why it was prohibited by Kerrion law, and why that law was unenforceable, as well as why, in some spaces, that prohibition had been repealed.

Whereas Parma Kerrion’s wrath would come from what she had done in life—murder, theft, illegal impersonation being only the latest—dream dancing exacted its tax from what was not done in life. If Parma killed her outright, would she be less dead than the most-accomplished dream dancer, whiling away years unlived?

As much in those early days as she was consumed with hurt that the man she had willingly called “father” would serve her up to the wolves of expediency, she felt the suction of the well of dreams.

Some one of the old Earth philosophers she had studied had proclaimed that dream was life and Hfe was dream. As untenable as the ancient’s contemporaries had found that position did Shebat find her own.

Each day the world of the dream dance became more real and the world without decreased in substance.

The lessons Spry had sent were like a bridge over the chasm of the dark warren world in which he had placed her. She did them faithfully; each completed run brought her a step closer to pilotry and freedom.

But each day she became less concerned with
then
(when all would be completed and she could take her pilot’s oath) and more concerned with
now
(where richer dreams were to be had than she had had before).

She drifted, hanging between her selves, and at length she began to dream she had passed her pilot’s boards. She would have been troubled if the dreams were not so grand, or if the other dancers did not try to emulate her; or if Lauren’s despite had not become ever more pronounced. But she was good; she was very good; and she hung the above-mentioned difficulties around her throat like a bejeweled necklace: decorations for her dreams, gilding that added depth and tone. The dream dancer in her knew these things to be the measure of her success, and accepted them graciously.

She had other tasks than the dream dance: citizenship was a serious matter, in the lower levels where it was so highly prized. All citizens had to vote to maintain their degree of privilege. To vote, a person had to absorb enough information on the article in question to be able to answer ten questions on the subject under discussion. To do that, one had to study.

Shebat was used to studying words on a screen: literacy was held in high repute in Kerrion levels. The absence of it in the lower dark explained why. Here, reading had long ago given way to the more economical method of querying via intelligence keys.

The dream dancers had no use for the written word; they could barely make use of it. They received all information directly and stored it in memory, without difficulty. They evinced only scorn for one so lacking in retention as to have to need to write something down. Shebat, having just learned reading and writing, was hard put giving them up.

To be a dream dancer, she would have to cultivate eidetic memory; to be a ship’s pilot, she must be fluent in the ships’ tongues, equally free from the need to read or write.

Yet, the lessons Spry sent were written; she needed to monopolize the only visual terminal in the dream dancers’ warren to learn them.

She was sitting there, with her stack of cards, placing one after another in the terminal’s slot, pressing
“run”
then typing her responses in, when a wave of inadequacy washed all attention from her. Somewhere around the sixth unanswered query, she realized she was hopelessly lost, being so scored, and stopped the sequence.

Sitting hunched over, fingers wound in her hair, she glared at the blank screen. She could not retrieve the card from the terminal until the sequence had been completed. But the answers in her head were not to the questions of navigation through space or sponge, but of navigation through life.

Knowing that she would probably fail the examination did not help her marshal her concentration. Six wrong by reason of being left unanswered . . . she would have to make a perfect score on the rest to squeak by. With a Bolen’s town epithet, she stabbed the
“run”
button.

Damn Spry’s circumspection. If he had just ordered up examination sequences for her in the usual manner, she would not be facing failure. But if the central data pool had given her the rating examinations without resort to printed cards, then it would be a matter of record that Sheba Spry was slumming, living with dream dancers; in fact, living in the very room with Aba Cronin, apprentice to the art of dreams.

Some long while later, when the card popped into the retrieval slot and on the screen her passing score of one point above the minimum leered greenly, she succumbed to all she had held in abeyance.

She did not weep. She had promised herself that never again would she offer tears up as sacrifice. Spry was right. It did no good. Besides, she was not sorrowful as much as terrified. Yesterday, she had danced a dream for Harmony, the troupe leader. As to how it had been received—she still had not heard.

She sat immobile while perspiration inundated her, grinding her teeth so that they would not chatter. Her stomach had fled its abode and where it had been an emptiness like ectoplasmic writhing snakes churned and bucked. She swallowed repeatedly through a tight throat. At length the perspiration defeated the protection of her mil and she shivered violently. She had seen a girl baby exposed to die in Bolen’s town one snowy winter. She saw it again, called the seeing an evil omen.

Would all be lost, then, as the terror gloated? She had felt this helplessness before, since coming among the dream dancers. She had thought she had defeated it. She had felt it after the pilot had slipped from Lauren’s arms, murmuring that as much as he wished it, he could not stay, when he left her in the care of strangers.

How awful the brink of disaster appears, when one is not sure whether or not Fate will propel cringing flesh over the edge.

She had thought she had touched bottom. Sometimes, when the dream dance took her, she was sure she had.

In the good times, she spoke with determination to herself that she would learn to hold a hundred dances, pure and perfect in their exactitude and their effect, in her mind.

In the bad times, she sought a personal solution, devaluing all but life and love and seeing the fictions of the dance as the enemies thereof.

Then she agreed with the Kerrion position that fiction and fantasy were acid eating away at the substructure of society, that these could foster nothing but discontent and malaise. In Kerrion space, there was the reality and there were the dream dancers: there was nothing in between. With the fall of literacy had gone the writers of fiction; with the ascendancy of the intelligence-keyed computer had gone poetry and music and the makers thereof.

Why listen to another man’s song, when any could make his own?

Why call up another’s vision, when any could command an uncircumscribed view of all that existed in the universe?

Why let madmen spread their illness? The maunderings of man’s unconscious were demonstrably dangerous, essentially flawed.

Madness, it is true, hardly ever clacked its slavering jaws in the Consortium. Men seldom did violence one upon the other’s person. Out of sight, out of mind? Was that why the dream dance was forbidden? It was certainly why the Kerrions purported to forbid it.

Myth had been placed on trial. The adjudication had not been in its favor. The technocrats reasoned with their compatriots, the computers, that removing the irritant might allow the sore to heal upon its own.

There were myths, just the same. The dream dancers made them, surreptitiously, fearing to record any of them lest the evidence be used against them. So the older, greater dream dances were passed from mind to mind, down the generations, learned impeccably and never altered, surviving increasingly concerted attempts to erase them from the consciousness of man.

Once, dream dancers had performed before massed audiences, whole groups of them intent upon one dream, its embellishment and its presentation, the fruits to be shared by all.

That had been long ago. The practice had been ruthlessly stamped out, the audiences, or dreamers, proclaimed as responsible for the crime as the dancers, the technicians, the musicians, and the minds who orchestrated the heinous crimes.

Now, such a gathering for sharing a single dream dance was impossible. Whatsoever occurred between two consenting adults, however, was not punishable, in theory of Consortium Law. In theory, one dream dancer and one client could not be arrested, convicted, punished for their shared crime. In practice, dream dancers disappeared with disquieting regularity. Their citizenship status, not maintained by the obligatory voting hours, was then revoked.

It was not in the dream dancers’ power to fight the Consortium.

They did, however, continue to ply their trade, some falling, some surviving, carrying on the tradition as they carried in their heads the masterworks of deceased geniuses, adding as best they could to what had gone before.

Shebat had made a dream dance which Harmony, the troupe’s leader, had asked to have performed for her, having heard of its power from the others.

It was not a pretty, seductive dance. It was awful; it was austere. It left the dreamer shaken and changed. Lauren had deemed it horrible, but even she could not thrust it aside.

Shebat was well aware that if the dream dance were judged too lacking in suitability, she would not be trusted to take clients. Like her pilotry examination, all was subject to disconcerting influences, from within and without.

How can one make a dream of joy from the dungeon of despair? How could she concentrate on one thing at a time, when both screamed for priority, shouldering each other from her view? She must get back to her little gray cubicle, in case the troupe mistress had made her judgment.

In one part of her mind, a small voice opined that since she had lost everything, why worry: she had nothing more to lose. She answered back to it that since Chance had released her from Bolen’s town and endless drudgery, all that had occurred afterward was in the nature of a gift. If she did not make use of the gift honorably, then it would surely be taken. That she had been so briefly a Kerrion was to her advantage. But it would not have lasted, had never been meant to last by those who decreed it. That she had learned to read and to write and to hold great reams of information in her head, unwritten, was enchantment’s kindest smile. If, then, the wrathful face of magic scowled, making her stumble in her studies, bequeathing the awful dream dance (which she must have chosen), then that was only fair balance.

The worlds of the platforms would surely not come down around their heads simply because Shebat had created a dream dance in which they did.

Hopelessness was not any deeper a sea because she had rowed out to its middle and thrown a plumb-line down to define its depths.

Work must stand with its integrity inherent, or better not be done at all.

Woe to the creator who spins a web of sweet fantasy, when the breath of fire crackles ominously within, for it surely must consume him who will not spew it out.

She had made the dream dance. Like her well-schooled kick, which had made out of a faithful bodyguard a gruesome corpse, she had done her best.

“Sometimes,” she hissed aloud, tearing at the hair that ever flopped over her eyes, “I think I am my own worst enemy.”

She had certainly not helped matters, with her outspoken dream dance. Softa had been adamant that she learn the dream dancer’s trade well enough to pose as one for an interval. If the troupe’s mistress forbade it, judging her unfit, no dream dancer in the Consortium would suffer her presence. Softa’s plan would be thwarted.

What would happen to her then?

She hated the dream dancers at times. Hated their sense of mission, the messianic fellowship of their bond.

It well might be that the Kerrion law was rightful, that dream dancing was degenerate and degenerative; that selling one’s person in total was more debased than the lesser prostitution it was rumored had once preceded it.

Sex for meretricious gain was no longer illegal; the Consortium was too civilized for that. Shebat picked up her cards, and with a last baleful glare at her odiously low navigational proficiency, wiped the screen with a finger’s tap.

Tap:
no record remained of what had transpired, but on the little card.
Tap:
she was no longer Shebat Kerrion, inheritor of fifty-one percent of one of the most powerful trade-bloc in all of spacetime.
Tap:
she was Sheba Spry, apprentice pilot. As easily, then;
tap:
Shebat Kerrion would not exist, even in her own memory.

She had seen for herself that although no violent solutions were admitted into the Draconis-consciousness as a whole, violence occurred. She had tapped into Current Events the day after she had smashed in the Kerrion retainer’s face, and found no mention of it there in the computer’s news broadcast. Hence, all things that occurred were not entered therein, or, being entered, were not made accessible along with the stock quotes and currency exchange rates and lading bills from incoming freighters.

Hence, too, she thought sourly, all of Softa’s precautions.

As a precaution of her own, she had not demanded of the data pool that it search for any previous mention of the slaying of the two bodyguards. As another caution, she always used Aba Cronin’s intelligence keys when activating a direct contact with the data pool. There was only one problem inherent in that: Aba Cronin was merely a fractional citizen, maintaining a one-quarter status, and as such certain areas were not within her reach: her clearances were too low.