Gods of the Greataway (3 page)

“And recently
we have suffered a severe setback. Fourteen neotenites have died so suddenly that we were not able to replace them before their minds, deprived of life support, were snuffed out, too.”

Juni asked, “What’s fourteen, when we have ten thousand here?”

“It’s fourteen failures by us,” Selena answered her. “And it could be the tip of the iceberg. What’s happened these last three days could be the beginning of the end of the human race.”

“There are many other Domes,” said Ebus.

“I’ve contacted them,” said Zozula. “The problem’s widespread. The neotenites are dying.”

“I suppose it couldn’t be some ancient disease that has resurfaced?” said Pallatha.

“Not in all the Domes at once.”

Suddenly Helmet said, “It’s Dream Earth. That’s the problem. They’ve lost all incentive in there. Wouldn’t you, if you could have everything you wanted, forever?”

“Let’s ask the Girl,” said Ebus. He pressed a button on the table. “If anyone knows about Dream Earth, she does.”

The Rainbow Room was vast; a kilometer long, half a kilometer wide, half a kilometer high. A distant figure sat at a console, watching a three-dimensional display. She stood and began to walk toward them, slowly, painfully. She was a neotenite — the only waking, walking neotenite on all of Earth. Her legs were plump, her body gross and her face round. She was a big baby, big as an adult, but with her physical characteristics arrested at the infantile stage. That was what had happened to the human race. The only True Humans left were the Cuidadors, and they could no longer breed true.

“In another generation, people like her will be in charge of the Dome,” said Juni. “Can you imagine that?”

“If there are any people like her left,” Zozula pointed out.

“If not, the Specialists will take over,” Helmet said, glancing at Juni.

She reacted, as he’d known she would. “I’d destroy the Dome rather than see the human race come to that,” she snapped.

A Specialist
stood nearby and he must have heard, although he gave no sign of it. He was Brutus, a huge gorilla-man whose ancestors had been created in the Whirst Institute. He was a brilliant geneticist and Selena’s assistant; he was also a man of infinite compassion. Suddenly he walked away from them, away across the Rainbow Room, took the arm of the Girl and helped her toward the table.

Juni flushed. “He’s touching her.”

“He has the decency,” said Selena. “Did we?”

The Girl sat down, smiling at them uncertainly. She had no name, although in the Ifalong she, like Manuel, was destined for glory. Then she would find a name, and a world would be named after her.

“Girl,” said Zozula gently, “you’ve heard we’ve lost some neotenites recently. Helmet suggests their minds have lost incentive because they have all they want in Dream Earth. What do you think?”

She replied, “I lived in Dream Earth for thousands of years before Eulalie died and you brought me out here to operate the special effects.” Zozula’s face became suddenly expressionless. Eulalie had been his much-loved wife of many centuries. “I never lost incentive. Life isn’t so easy in there. Certainly you can have whatever you want by making a smallwish, as they call it. But a smallwish expends psy, and there’s a limit to how much psy you can expend before you have to wait for it to regenerate. Most of the people in there are living quite normal lives between smallwishes. Dream Earth has become much more like real life, recently.”

“Why do you say ‘recently’?” asked Pallatha.

The Girl turned pink. “Oh, I … cleaned Dream Earth up, the last time I was in there. It was bursting at the seams. People had been using smallwishes to create other people. They’d create imaginary friends and enemies, and prostitutes and such, and other people would believe in these creations, and their psy would reinforce them. It got so that nobody knew who was real and who was imaginary. I put all that right.”

“Tell them about Bigwishes, Girl,” said Zozula.

“That was
built into the original Dream Earth program. Over a period of about fifty years you can accumulate enough psy to make a Bigwish, which means you can change yourself into whomever you choose. You forget most of what happened in your previous life and start off with a whole new personality.” She sighed, looking down at herself. “With it goes whatever Dream body you like. My last Dream Persona was a Marilyn, and they’re very beautiful.”

“You haven’t noticed anything unusual in there, these last three days?” asked Pallatha.

“No.”

Zozula said suddenly, “How about the Celestial Steam Locomotive?”

“I … I’d rather not talk about it.” She shivered.

“Forget the Locomotive, Zo,” said Juni. “It’s an obsession of his,” she explained to the others. “It’s nothing, really. It’s just a collection of smallwishes that looks like an ancient steam train.”

“All right, all right,” said Zozula. “So Dream Earth seems to be in order. What does that leave us with?”

There was a long silence.

*

It was like a huge morgue. There were shelves as far as the eye could see, stretching off into the distance. They were tiered one above the other and the floor was transparent, so you could look down and see another infinity of shelves, and look up and see the same.

And a body lay on each shelf, but the bodies were not dead. Tubes were embedded in them and coupled to fixed pipes, and at the junction of pipe and tube was a meter to show the rate of flow. From the heads ran wires, color-coded, leading the thoughts of the minds away into that corner of the Rainbow that people called Dream Earth.

Until recently, the Girl had occupied one of those shelves. Now, following Zozula, she lumbered along the transparent floor, looking up, looking down, feeling a sudden vertigo and thinking:
This was me. Oh, my God
.

Zozula,
leading the way, felt not vertigo but oppression.
Suppose
, he thought,
all these neotenites awakened, all at once, and arose and attacked us, all of them, all these gross babies swarming over us, furious because we don’t know how to give them proper True Human bodies
… But he kept his thoughts to himself, because he was a Cuidador and therefore must appear fearless and wise.

“This is the latest fatality,” said the racoon-nurse.

She was either a woman or a baby girl, according to the way you chose to regard her. She was a little over a meter and a half long. She was naked, unwrinkled and unmoving. A nurse was in the process of uncoupling her from an autopsy machine.

“There’s nothing wrong with her,” said the nurse. “Not physically. Her brain simply stopped working.”

“You mean the mind died first, and then the body?” said Zozula.

“That’s right, sir. The body died because the mind simply stopped giving signals to it. All the organs shut down.”

“That’s impossible,” said Zozula. “A mind can’t die.”

“The autopsy machine showed the same cause for the other deaths. It’s been happening ever since I’ve been working here,” said the nurse. “But only occasionally; perhaps once every five years.”

“There are only ten thousand neotenites here! Even at that rate, they could all be dead in — ” Zozula struggled with the unusual concept of mental arithmetic “ — a few thousand years!”

The Girl said, “You’ll be dead too, Zozula.”

“At least
I’ve
enjoyed a good life.”

“It’s not so bad in Dream Earth.”

“It’s not real!”

“It
seems
real.”

“Girl, I have a duty to these people. I will not go down in history as the Cuidador who allowed them to die. When you’ve lived among us a little longer, you will begin to realize the demands of our high calling, and I hope a little of our sense of duty will rub off on you.” Zozula had mounted his high horse. “Now we have a catastrophe on our hands. The solution must lie in Dream Earth, where their minds are. We must talk to Caradoc.”

“Now that’s a good idea,” said the Girl.

*

They returned
to the Rainbow Room and the Girl seated herself at the console. Her fingers played over the tactile surfaces — clumsily, because she had not yet learned all the skills of her predecessor, the late Cuidador Eulalie. But the mists began to form, and soon a huge image appeared in the center of the room.

He was a young man of princely bearing, dark and handsome, dressed in glittering chain mail and holding a sword. Beside him stood his princess, fair-skinned and beautiful. They were Caradoc and Eloise, dwellers in Dream Earth, and for various reasons they were the only such dwellers to be able to communicate with the real people in the Dome. Caradoc was unusual in other ways. He had a mind of staggering brilliance, and had only recently been placed in Dream Earth by Zozula, in an attempt to investigate the inner workings of the Rainbow.

Eloise didn’t really exist. She was Caradoc’s smallwish, somebody he had known on real Earth who had died, and whom he had re-created because he loved her. She didn’t exist, but nevertheless she stood at his side, smiling, ready to talk with warmth and intelligence because that was the way Caradoc had known her in real life.

“Hello, Zozula. Hello, Girl,” said Caradoc, sheathing his sword. “Can I help you?”

Zozula explained the problem of the dying neotenites.

Caradoc frowned. “Dream Earth is huge. After all, it includes the Dream Earths of all the other Domes. It would be very difficult to trace the deaths of a few minds among a million or so. And there are still probably five million humanoid smallwishes here, in spite of the Girl’s work.”

“Well, keep your eyes open, will you?” said Zozula. “This makes it even more vital that we solve the genetic problem and get the Dream People out of there and into proper bodies. And Selena hasn’t had much success with her breeding program lately. She had to deprocess every one of the last crop of babies from the People Planet.”

Suddenly,
Caradoc said, “I may be able to help you there.”

“How?”

“I’ve been able to access some of the Rainbow’s memory banks. Did you know this computer has eyes and ears everywhere? It monitors nearly everything we do. And I was able to find out what Manuel was doing, a little while back.”

The Girl had flushed at the mention of the young Wild Human’s name. “Show us,” she demanded.

Eloise looked at her. “Do you really want to see?”

“Of course. Why not?”

“I’ll set it up for you right away,” said Caradoc, and he and Eloise vanished, leaving the vaulting Rainbow Room empty.

Then the mists began to form again; when they cleared, the Rainbow Room was displaying a giant panorama. After a moment’s disorientation they recognized the coastline and the Old South Pacific, seen from above. The scene narrowed, zooming in dizzily as though the viewers were falling from the sky. A washdog, trotting through the room on some cleaning errand, yelped and scuttled past, tail between its legs. The Girl blinked and shook her head.

Manuel’s shack sat in the middle of the Rainbow Room. There was no sound, but clearly a storm was raging. Steep surf smashed at the beach, bringing thick mats of some kind of fibrous weed. Manuel was nowhere to be seen. Two vicunas stood unhappily beside the shack, their hair plastered to their plump bodies.

“Look!” Zozula pointed.

A figure could be seen beyond the breakers, sitting on a large raft of weed and gazing at the shore. The scene enlarged again until she was several times life-size, rocking in the Rainbow Room, staring before her with dread in her eyes.

“She’s beautiful,” said the Girl. “I suppose she must be Belinda.”

Belinda’s hair was fair, although darkened by the rain that drove it past her face. Her face was pale and oval, and her large blue eyes watched the breaking waves with apprehension. She wore a fine skin shirt that had torn away from one breast, and her body was unusually slim, showing none of the deep-chestedness of the Wild Humans. She looked like a mermaid from the old Earth legends as she sat there, but she was a real human with real legs.

“She’s a
True Human,” whispered Zozula. “A True Human, living outside the Dome. I’ll stake my life on it.”

Then a breaking wave picked up Belinda’s raft and tumbled it toward the beach. Belinda could be seen dragging herself to her feet. She was very weak, and a receding wave pulled at her, causing her to stumble to her knees. She began to crawl away from the water, and all around her were the buoyant mats of weed, some of them as thick as she was tall. One came surfing in and nudged her, and she fell again. Then she was clear of the waves, walking unsteadily up the beach. She knocked at the door of the shack.

In all of the Song of Earth, one of the most famous scenes is Manuel’s meeting with Belinda. It has been painted, sung and spoken, and Manuel himself captured it on his Simulator, a device that puts thoughts into visible form. Manuel’s mind-painting, titled
Belinda: The Storm-Girl
, was rediscovered six thousand years later and became part of a group of paintings called the Maloan Simulations and entered into the Rainbow, thus ensuring their immortality.

All those versions — the paintings, the songs, the poems, the mind-painting — they all tell the story from Manuel’s point of view. They are visions of Belinda, the mysterious girl who came into Manuel’s life one stormy night, lived with him for a while and then disappeared, never to be seen again — or so most legends tell.

But now the Rainbow Room showed Manuel himself. It showed a young man dressed in shabby furs dragging his cabin door open in a hurricane and seeing a vision outside. It showed his face. It showed anxious curiosity turning to pity, turning to adoration, in the few short seconds before Belinda stumbled inside and Manuel, his expression now slightly dazed, shut the door.

The Girl
swallowed heavily, hoping that Zozula hadn’t heard her gulp.
One day
, she couldn’t help thinking,
Manuel will look at me like that. One day when I’ve changed out of this terrible body
. As a sometime resident of Dream Earth, the notion of changing her body came easily to her — which is why she never lost hope.

“Is there any more?” asked Zozula, apparently unmoved.