Gods of the Greataway (23 page)

“My God,” said Zozula.

For a while there was silence as the clone-relatives stared at each other. Then, as if seeking an explanation, they turned to Selena.

“Don’t say it,” she muttered, close to tears.

“No.” Zozula frowned thoughtfully. “It’s interesting. In a way, it’s a little eerie, but I suppose this is what cloning is all about. I must say,” he walked around Mentor as though he were a specimen, “He’s a fine-looking fellow.”

“You were a fine-looking fellow yourself at that age, Zo,” said Selena desperately.

And Zozula still studied his double. “I’d like to think so.” Mentor said, “You must be my clone-father. It’s good to see another True Human.”

Selena turned away from them.

She heard Zozula say, “We have a lot to talk about. When we get back to Earth, I’ll introduce you to the Rainbow, and to Caradoc, our agent in there. You’ll find we have an interesting setup. Perhaps I should take a direct interest in your education. But first, I have two young people I’d like you to meet. Don’t be surprised at their appearance …”

Selena found herself alone. The moment she’d dreaded for many years had come and gone. Had it come? Had it gone?

Watching the waves roll in, she whispered,
“Zozula, will you never realize?”

O
UR TALE CONTINUES WITH THE GROUP
OF STORIES AND LEGENDS KNOWN AS
T
HE
O
UTER
T
HINK

W
hat should
we
call you?” asked
Zozula. “We can
hardly address you by my own name. That could cause some confusion.” He was in high good humor.

“Selena called me Mentor.”

“Mentor it is, then. Now, this is the Rainbow Room. It’s our access to the knowledge in the Rainbow. That’s Cytherea over there.”

Mentor was impressed and a little frightened. Since arriving in the Dome his senses had been battered by new impressions, chief among which was the awesome vastness of everything. And now this Rainbow Room. It was enormous, filled with people indulging in some huge and noisy bacchanal. “Which one is Cytherea?”

Zozula was smiling tolerantly at Mentor’s amazement. “Cytherea’s the one at the console. The others are all Dream People.”

“Dream People?”

“Inhabitants of a part of the Rainbow known as Dream Earth.”

“You’d better explain. I can’t take all this in.”

“Well, you saw the neotenites — those people who looked like the Girl, here, all asleep on benches. There are ten thousand of them, and they’re all plugged into Dream Earth. It’s an imaginary world created by the Rainbow, where the neotenites’ minds can live whatever lives they please.”

Mentor
watched the people. They were without exception beautiful and they wore flowing robes. A few animals were there, too — sleek cheetahs and lean running dogs with jeweled collars. The 83rd millennium was in vogue.

“They don’t look like neotenites,” said Mentor.

“They can adopt any form they choose, by means of a process known as a Bigwish. It takes a lot out of them, though. When they change bodies, they deplete a spiritual quality we call psy. It takes them at least fifty years to build up their psy sufficiently to change again.”

“What about those animals?” Mentor pointed at a pride of lions lazing at the foot of a classical column. “Are those people who’ve Bigwished?”

“They might be, but it’s unlikely. I expect the animals are smallwishes, just like that pavilion over there. Smallwishes don’t need so much psy. They’re used for creating background scenery. You see that?” Totally anachronistic, a hot-air balloon floated into view, garishly painted. A group of yelling Neanderthals hung over the rim of the basket, dropping objects onto the orgy beneath. These proved to be bags of a bright saffron powder that burst open on contact, dyeing the revelers and obviously producing an unpleasant smell. Confusion reigned. Guns appeared out of nowhere and the balloon came under heavy fire. For an instant it sprouted flames, but then it metamorphosied into a huge bird that flapped heavily away, bearing the cheering primitives on its back. The partying resumed, the participants gradually shedding their yellow dye.

“All done by smallwishes,” said Zozula.

Mentor regarded the Girl. “You actually lived in that place? What was it like?”

“Too easy,” she replied.

“What do you mean?”

“You could have anything you wanted, just for a smallwish. You wished, and the Rainbow set it up for you. You could never come to any harm, not unless you managed to achieve Total Death. There was no challenge. People do the craziest things in there, simply because they get so bored.”

“What
kind of things?”

“When they’re really tired of it all, when they’ve done everything and seen everything, they take a ride behind the Celestial Steam Locomotive. And I have a suspicion they never come back.”

Manuel said, “It’s not that bad. We rode the Train once, and we survived. And look — there’s Caradoc and Eloise. What could be more normal than that?”

The scene had shifted, drifting away from the noisy party, as Cytherea scanned soft hillsides and valleys, homing in on a stone cottage set among elms and chestnut trees. Two horses stood in a cobbled yard. Caradoc and Eloise were emerging from the cottage, dressed as Terrestrial Protectors of the 92nd millennium.

“Now there’s a good-looking couple,” said Mentor.

*

The story of Caradoc and Eloise is one of the classic legends of the Song of Earth, and it goes like this.

Once there was a Mole. The Mole was a grotesque thing, deaf, dumb and blind, the only son of an influential Wild Human called Lord Shout. Lord Shout loved his son dearly, but could not communicate with him, until one day they met a wild neotenite telepath called Eloise. Eloise dug into the Mole’s thoughts.

She told Lord Shout that the Mole had a brilliant mind, but no way of using it. So Lord Shout asked Zozula, a Cuidador, if the Mole could be placed in Dome Azul and his mind allowed to wander free in Dream Earth, where at least he would be able to converse with other people’s minds. Zozula agreed, partly from pity, but also because he believed the incisive brain of the Mole could benefit Dream Earth.

Meanwhile the Mole had fallen in love with Eloise, and she with him. Or perhaps their minds fell in love, because they were both very ugly people. Then Eloise fell sick and died, as is the way with neotenites.

The
Mole carried the memory of Eloise with him into Dream Earth, and he re-created her with a smallwish. But the Eloise he created was not a neotenite. She was exceptionally beautiful, even in a world where beautiful people are the norm. This was because Eloise, when describing herself to the blind Mole, had cheated on him. She had made herself out to be far prettier than she really was. It was simple vanity, and quite excusable.

And the Mole became Caradoc, a fine young man, brilliant and athletic. This was Eloise’s doing, too. She had persuaded him that he, too, was beautiful, but this time she acted out of love rather than vanity. She took the elements of his character — the kindness and the intelligence — and she expressed them in physical form, the way an artist creates a mind-painting. And she told him, telepathically:
This is the way you are, Mole
. So the Mole Bigwished himself that way, and became Caradoc.

The minstrels of later years forgave Eloise for deluding him:

Eloise stayed with Caradoc for a thousand years, sharing his adventures in Dream Earth until his real body wore out and he suffered Total Death. They lived happily, though sometimes they quarreled, of course — a thousand years is a long time. But they never parted. How could they? Caradoc couldn’t get Eloise out of his mind. She’d arranged it that way.

There was a happentrack on which Zozula appeared before Caradoc and said, “We’ve solved the neoteny problem. We have a good, strong body all ready for you. You can come back to the real world, now.”

And Caradoc looked at Eloise, who was watching her reflection in a pool. She glanced up at him, brushing the hair from her eyes, and smiled.
She is a creature of my mind,
thought Caradoc,
and if I leave Dream Earth, she will cease to exist
.

“Thank you, Zozula,” he said, “but I’ll stay here where I am.”

*

Other
legends have come out of Dream Earth, and some of them are not so happy as the story of Caradoc and Eloise. One of these legends concerns a creature so vile that he could not have existed in the real world, because he would have been quickly killed. He came into being during a period when life was dull, the Dream People having exhausted their imagination for a while. The monsters had become bigger, and their claws sharper and their teeth more numerous, and they thundered through Dream Earth while the people clung to one another in joyful fright. But the fact that the monsters could not actually hurt people caused their demise. They became parodies of themselves as people began to wish humorous appendages onto them. This culminated in the preposterous creatures known as the Tyrannosaurus Wrecks, a shambling herd of gap-toothed carnosaurs that were the butt of the Dream People’s insults for several centuries, until someone took pity on them and smallwished them out of existence. Clearly, something more subtle was needed in order to give the people the frisson of terror that they craved.

Now, the Rainbow cannot read people’s minds; it can only record what they do. Many of the legends surrounding the creation of that misshapen and terrifying creature, Blind Pew, arise out of supposition and not fact. It is fact, however, that for centuries the loathesome figure of Pew tapped his way around the dimensions of Dream Earth, black-cloaked, stinking and indescribably evil. He filled the Dream People with a very real dread, partly because he was created out of their own innermost fears, but also because he achieved such stature that he
could not be wished away
. Countless smallwishes had gone into his creation, until he became a cesspit of the unconscious, a repository into which anyone might unload their secret terrors and feel a little lighter for it. It would take more than a mere smallwish to dispose of Blind Pew.

The Dream People tried, but at first their efforts were uncoordinated. By the time they thought to assemble a group of people rich in psy, for the purpose of jointly smallwishing Pew out of existence, it was too late. The blind man had developed his own defense — which was to anticipate, by a fraction of a second, the actions of others. He could dodge bullets and meteorites, and for a while it seemed that he would stalk the reaches of Dream Earth forever. Then somebody hit upon the idea of tricking him onto the Skytrain.

The
driver of the Celestial Steam Locomotive, himself a slippery character, was able to maroon Pew in that strange corner of the Rainbow known as the Land of Lost Dreams, where he remained, tapping his way among other stranded creatures and screaming oaths at a magenta sky, for many millennia.

And during this period the Girl had fallen into his clutches.

She outwitted him and escaped, but he followed her to Dream Earth and, for a short time, held her captive again until she was rescued by Caradoc. Terror is a subjective thing, and different people have different fears, but when the Girl dreamed of Pew, which was most nights, her terror could be compared to that of Loanna when she dreamed of the Bale Wolves.

*

“I don’t think I’ll come with you into Dream Earth,” said the Girl casually. “You don’t need me. I’ll stay in the Rainbow Room and monitor you. Someone has to do that.”

“Cytherea can do it,” said Caradoc. The young man’s image, four times life-size, stood before them. This was one of the unexpected benefits of the Mole’s entry into Dream Earth. He had discovered a way to communicate directly with the Cuidadors in the Rainbow Room.

“I’ve been trained to operate the console,” said the Girl. “That’s why you brought me out of Dream Earth in the first place, wasn’t it, Zozula?”

Zozula said, “You have a knack with the Locomotive. We need you with us, Girl. Remember what happened last time? We’d be riding the Train still, if it weren’t for you. You must come.”

Now Manuel spoke, annoyed at the insensitivity of Zozula and Caradoc. “Where’s Blind Pew?” he asked Caradoc.

“The last time I saw him, he was back in the Land of Lost Dreams. You don’t need to worry about Pew, Girl. He’s a spent force.”

“Are
you sure?”

“Of course he’s sure,” said Zozula confidently. “Anyway, Pew’s only a smallwish. He hardly concerns us. It’s the Bale Wolves we must concentrate on.”

“I can’t help you there,” said Caradoc. “They’re out of reach of the Rainbow. But as for the Celestial Steam Locomotive — so far as I can tell, it’s always here within the Rainbow, in spite of the fact that it’s always out in the Greataway, too. It exists in strange dimensions, does the Locomotive. I can get you aboard without any trouble. What happens after that is not my responsibility.”

*

The third legend of Dream Earth has no end. It starts with a Dream Person whose name is lost in antiquity and who was doomed to Total Death for certain reasons. This man wished to create a single thing of beauty before he died. After many failures, he finally conceived the idea of recreating a machine of the 51st millennium — a machine that had the power to touch men with an indescribable magic.