Take No Prisoners (42 page)

He grunted, his face grim. I knew what was going through his mind without having to make use of a ScanFast machine. Serial murderers are only one manifestation of sociopathy.

"I'm told great strides are being made in the therapies offered to schizophrenics, too," he continued after a few moments. "And so on."

"That must make you feel good," I said drily. "To know your work has been of humanitarian benefit."

He took the remark at face value. "It does, it does."

I was beginning to realize how much I already liked this man – I liked him far better than I liked myself, in fact. He had the looks of a benevolent reggae singer rather than an experimental psychologist, which I guessed was what he was. Or maybe an electronics engineer, a data analyst, an AI researcher; the lines between the disciplines were pretty blurred in his case.

"But that's by the way," he said.

"Precognitive dreams?" I prompted as we walked along an aisle that led between the cubicles. Our footsteps made no sound in the thick pile of the carpet.

"Yeah. If ScanFast wasn't much use for reading anything other than dominant thoughts – conscious thoughts – well, what about the unconscious thoughts? Might it be that they were of some inherent interest in themselves? Course, the trouble was we couldn't listen in on the unconscious thoughts in the normal way, because, like I said, they were getting drowned out by the blare of the conscious ones. Except, there was one way."

We'd reached the end of the room. Attached to the wall was a piece of apparatus much like those that crouched over each of the beds in the cubicles, but this one was much larger. Beneath it was what reminded me of a movie representation of a psychoanalyst's couch: overstuffed brown leather, studded into hexagonal sections, kind of expensively sweaty-looking. Tim patted one of its faux-mahogany arm-rests as he gazed expectantly at me.

"You couldn't 'read' them while people were awake," I said, taking my cue, "but during REM sleep – dreaming – the unconscious mind is allowed free rein."

"Exactly," he replied. He lightly clapped his hands. "Bravo, Cello!"

The jigsaw pieces all began to fit together in my mind. There has always been plenty of anecdotal evidence about precognitive dreaming, but – as with so much else in the para-sciences – at the same time there have always been an overwhelming number of good reasons to discount that evidence.

For a start, there's the well documented phenomenon known as "reading back". If an event in real life reminds you of something that happened to you in a dream, your memories of the dream, quite without any conscious volition on your part, alter themselves so that the dream seems more closely to parallel the reality. Quite how much this occurs has been shown through experiments using dream diaries; the experimental subject is asked, each time he or she wakes from a dream, to write down as much as possible about it. If, later, the person has an experience in real life "that was just exactly like that dream of mine", they're asked to go back and look at the description in the dream diary. And they're almost always astonished by the mismatch between the memory information that's by now lodged securely in their brain and what they themselves wrote down immediately after the dream. The general reaction is: "The diary's got it wrong. The dream wasn't like that at all ..."

Then there's the problem that supposed precognitive dream elements are always fragmentary, always ambiguous, and usually cloaked in putative symbolism that makes them difficult to interpret. In the wake of the sinking of the Titanic, for example, there was a great deal written about the claimedly precognitive dreams among those on its passenger list – a few of whom in fact cancelled their voyages. None of the dream descriptions stated flat out that "The Titanic is going to go down", or anything even approximating that. Some involved shipwrecks; others involved major disasters. Alas, major disasters happen in reality with sufficient frequency that any dream of catastrophe is sure to be followed pretty promptly by some fearful loss of life.

Further, almost as a corollary: Dreams of disaster are themselves so frequent that, even if they seem quite specific, their matching up with a real-life event doesn't have much statistical significance. Proper maths aren't possible, for obvious reasons, but to get an idea: In any given week, at least dozens of people around the world will have a dream in which the Space Shuttle explodes. If, in one of those weeks, there is a Shuttle disaster, it'll seem to the dreamers concerned as if they were given a forewarning. But this is to discount all the other "forewarnings", during other weeks, that came to nothing.

And yet ... and yet ...

The anecdotal evidence is so voluminous and so persistent that it cannot entirely be discounted.

What Alex must have thought was that, by using ScanFast on a host of experimental subjects, one would not only get far more accurate descriptions of the contents of their dreams than could ever be achieved through dream diaries, but might also be able to detect patterns in the dreams of numerous subjects that, taken together, would comprise a sort of early warning system. If a whole bunch of people suddenly started having dreams about the Empire State Building being blown up, then it would certainly be worth increasing security at the Empire State Building, putting out feelers to all the informers in foreign intelligence organizations and the major terrorist groups themselves, and so on.

I could understand entirely how Alex might be drawn to this notion.

If, of course, there was anything to the idea of precognitive dreaming at all.

A very big if.

I summarized all this to Tim.

"That was more or less exactly the way of it," he replied. "In effect, the Center for Neuronic Research became a sleep-research establishment. Alex was able to supply us with plenty of 'volunteers' from the education camps – people who were only too happy to come stay here for a few weeks or months, enjoying better food and with the promise that strings might be pulled to have their 'education' declared 'complete' earlier than it might otherwise be."

It was my turn to grin. A typical Alex setup, achieving two things at once: he got a supply of unpaid experimental subjects while at the same time he relieved the misery of at least a few of the unfortunates who'd been slung into the education camps.

"What sort of results did you have?" I said. "Presumably not great, or I'd have heard about them."

"We discovered nothing useful ... at least, not at first." He sucked in a deep breath through his teeth. "Look, there's a much easier way for me to explain all this."

"Oh?"

"Would you like to experience someone else's dream?"

"It's possible?"

"Yeah. That's the way ScanFast works. It's almost the same apparatus, actually. The devices over there" – he gestured vaguely towards the cubicles – "detect the patterns of electrical activity in the dreamer's brain. Only a relatively simple modification of the apparatus is required to make it induce the same electrical patterns in someone else's brain. Same sort of principle as the electric generator being just an electric motor in reverse. We have all the data from our experiments stored on hard drives here; I can easily pick out a dream at random from the thousands available and replay it for your benefit."

I wasn't sure I liked the idea. There was something pretty creepy about it. As a professional spook, I'm totally accustomed to invading other people's privacy – I'd not be able to do my job otherwise – but this, the dreaming of someone else's dream, seemed somehow an invasion of privacy too far. As if I were, in a way, stealing a part of their identity. Cello Prestrantra, soul raper.

Even so ...

"OK," I said. "I'll try it. I assume it's safe."

"Completely." He patted the couch. "You might feel a little nauseous afterwards, because it's sort of like being on a mental rollercoaster. But there are no physical consequences – no hidden brain damage, anything like that. And no psychological risks, either, although I'd not like to try it myself if I'd just taken a hit of LSD. You haven't" – a mock-serious look in his eyes – "been dropping acid today, have you?"

I forced a smile and made myself comfortable on the couch. The leather smelled of dust and age and polish, all mixed. Above my head, as I lay flat, the opening of the ScanFast – or whatever the playback device was called – looked like the gaping mouth of a lamprey; the lack of teeth offered little consolation.

"And you're sure this machine can't pull any information out of my brain?" For obvious reasons, this wasn't an idle question.

"Quite sure," he said calmly. "If you're worried about it, just focus your mind on something you don't care about. I told you, your dominant thoughts drown all the others."

I remembered once reading a story that relied on the fact that, if you're told on no account not to think about a horse, the one thing your mind can hardly stop thinking about is horses. But I took his point.

"It'll take me a few minutes to set this up," he said, moving out of my view.

"Whose dream will it be?" I said, hoping my nervousness wasn't translating itself into the sound of my voice.

"I don't know, and I can't know," he said. "It'll be a random selection – well, reasonably random. We weeded out all the psychopathic ones, the truly insane ones, the overly violent ones. Then, though we kept the rest of the dreams, we ... um ... we lost all our records of the volunteers. Well, Alex lost them for us."

I grimaced. Homeland Security. The business of losing data permanently had become a lucrative one. If Alex had taken it as his personal responsibility to lose these records, chances were they'd stay permanently lost. Some of the commercial systems on offer – clandestinely on offer, of course, because the penalties were severe – were less reliable.

The lamprey's mouth lit up; a low, almost grey light. There was a low hum from it. With a creak the apparatus began slowly to descend towards me. I gripped the sides of the couch tightly. This was suddenly too much like a visit to the dentist. All my primitive instincts – the ones my reptile ancestors had learned – were telling me to bolt. Irrelevantly, I found myself wondering if my skirt were riding too high up on my legs, making me appear less dignified than a DDO should be. I unpeeled a hand from the edge of the couch and checked.

Oh, hell, he's not going to jump me, for chrissakes. He's got a photo of his wife and kids in his office. Yeah, and some guarantee that can be ...

The mouth paused an inch or two above my face.

"You'll find it easier if you shut your eyes," said Tim. "The transition, I mean."

Swallowing my fears, I shut the world out of my consciousness.

"Ready?" he said from a million years away.

"Get on with it before I change my mind."

A low murmur of sympathetic laught—

~

you are watching the pirates you are among the pirates they are shouting and singing "boil her in oil boil her in oil" you are one of the pirates you are their victim they are seizing you hands between thighs rich brown glow of the smouldering oil you are being held above it the cathedral is on the horizon a distant speck you walk towards it and already you are there and you're naked with the tall guy at the newsstand on the short grass in front of the cathedral one of the gravestones has fallen over you're opening your thighs for him and for his erection you know it's enormous but you can't see it however much you look for it he's lost his erection somewhere but it's inside you and he's moving it back and forth and your legs are curling around him and you're among the fluffy grey clouds bouncing from one to the next of them as you couple only he's gone now and you think he might have vanished inside you the same as his erection did only the skies are pulling open like the shell of a lobster to reveal all the steaming glory of heaven and the air's full of celestial musical instruments which are like harps and flutes and they're playing that stupid jingle from the recruitment ads on tv you can never get it out of your head and your mother's very angry with you for showing your open crotch to god and you try to cover it up as much as you can but your hands won't do what they tell them to do and now they're flying away through the pillows of the clouds like cumbersome lopsided birds and your arms have become wings but however hard you flap them they won't hold you up in the air because of the weight of the newsstand guy's erection pulling you down but that's all right because now you're a telephone ringing and ringing but no one ever comes to answer and you know the only words you'll ever speak again are the words of other people but the message is so
urgent
and the world has to know about it but you can't pass on the message if no one answers the phone which is on the sidewalk on 41st Street just outside the kosher deli and it's ringing as you climb out of the taxi except your dress has stayed behind stuck to the seat because of the heat of the driver when he was beating his meat to make himself complete which is why you're climbing out of the car when you really wanted to go to the lincoln center getting out of the car getting out of the cat the cat you've not seen since he was run over by a harley fourteen years ago it's good to see he's alive and well even though he's
grown
a lot so he can hardly squeeze his marmalade sides between the buildings and

~

"Not much of great use to a would-be predictor of the future, as I'm sure you'll agree," Tim was saying sardonically. "Here's a bag, if you need it."

I grabbed the bag from him and put my mouth over it. My stomach tried to decant its contents, but I kept my throat clamped shut. My chest and shoulderblades ached as I fought the heaves.

Finally I looked up at him, my wet eyes making him into a darker smudge against the distant red wall. For a moment that seemed more in keeping with my – someone's – dream than the real world. The transient images had been so bright, the emotions so powerful, as if there'd been nothing to insulate me from them. And maybe that was what had really happened: decades of self-education shielded me from the full force of my thoughts, but when I was unconscious, when the me was no longer in control, I had no such protection. I felt as if I'd casually drunk down a big gulp of what I'd thought was cold water, not thinking about the action, and poured concentrated sulphuric acid into my mouth instead. My mind was burning, bleeding, raw.