Take No Prisoners (43 page)

I tried to make a joke of it.

"Ten minutes of that and I think the most obdurate terrorist would be begging to confess."

"You'd be surprised," he said quietly. "Some of the people who've dreamed other people's dreams actually like it. It could get addictive."

I gulped air. "Not me." My throat hurt like hell. "Have you got a drink of water ...?"

I half-expected to smell acid when he held a paper cup to my lips, but it was just water. Cold water that tasted of nothing worse than a plastic container. I drank it eagerly, and he fetched another cupful, which I sipped at more slowly, sitting on the edge of the coach, my unshod feet dangling above the carpeted floor.

"Well," he said after what seemed like quite a long while, "now you know what it's like to be inside someone else's unconscious mind. Inside your own unconscious mind, come to that, because there's not a huge generic difference in dreaming from one person to another, except at the psychological extremes."

I'd been just about to say that the person who'd had that dream must have been truly insane. Now I realized some of its elements had seemed familiar to me as I'd emerged from it. Yes, he was right. My own dreams weren't so very different.

I shook my head, trying to clear it. I still couldn't rid myself of the feeling that the dream had been realer than reality. What was it Chuang-tzu had said? "I do not know if I was a man dreaming I was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming I was a man"? Something like that. He'd added that "between Chuang-tzu and the butterfly there must be some distinction"; right at the moment I was finding it hard to work out where the distinction was between myself and my butterfly.

Between myself and someone else's butterfly.

"This is all ... very confusing," I said.

Tim put his hand on my shoulder. "It's that way for everybody, first time they do it."

His voice was intentionally comforting, which meant it was hardly any comfort to me at all.

"I don't think I'm game for a second time," I muttered.

"We'll wait a while before we try the next thing," he responded, planting himself down on the couch beside me.

I wished he hadn't done that – I wished he hadn't put himself to close to me. The cotton of my short summer skirt wasn't quite touching the denim of his jeans, but I could feel the pressure of his flesh anyway. The dream had filled me up with undiluted emotions – fear, self-doubt, uncertainty, dread, guilt, lust – and none of them had fully abated. I'd not been lying when I'd told Tim I was like a nun. I hadn't had sex in eleven years, not since Alex and I had decided to terminate our liaison, a somewhat degrading matter of lies and furtively double-booked hotel rooms; after we'd finished it, I hadn't needed or wanted sex. I'd never been terribly good at it – never able wholly to abandon myself into it. Not like in the dream. In the dream I'd been on the brink of orgasm, and I hadn't cared if God and my mother both were watching. And now there was enough of that lust left that I was within an iota of ripping off Tim's clothes and mine and straddling him where he sat. I felt as if there were a weight in my womb.

... the weight of the newsstand guy's erection ...

Not that. Just near-uncontrollable horniness.

"I think I should have another cup of water," I said hoarsely.

Mercifully, he stood up to go fetch it.

As he did so, I felt my self beginning to take full control of me again. The naked feelings weren't being banished, exactly; just suppressed by my returning intellect.

Whoever had dreamt that dream originally had been a woman, like myself. There could hardly be any doubt about it, could there? Yes, maybe people could dream themselves into being of the opposite sex, but surely only a woman who'd had sex with a man could feel everything I'd felt ...

Which of course led me on to wonder what it'd be like sharing a man's sex dream. Having a hard cock and ...

Yeah, I could understand how some people found this hijacking of dreams addictive. A few moments ago my psyche had felt as if someone had been ransacking it with a chainsaw; now I was becoming really quite seriously interested in repeating the experiment.

No, Cello. No.

My inner censor was right. Inside my mind there were dangerous terrains I had no wish to revisit.

Tim must have had to open a new bottle of water, because it took him longer this time to fetch me a cupful of it. The heat had gone from my chest and cheeks by the time he returned. Oh, Jesus, he probably saw the flush ...
I tried to take command of the conversation.

"As you say, all of this is interesting, but useless," I said. "What did Alex see in it? Why did he want you to pursue your research? What did he think was in it for us?"

Tim sat down beside me again. This time his presence wasn't unsettling.

"A dream like that," he said, "and I'm assuming it was a fairly typical one, doesn't seem to show any signs of usable information content at all. Oh, sure, I'll bet it'd give a psychoanalyst fits of delight – there'd have been information in that sense. But nothing anyone else could make use of. No data. Certainly nothing that could give us clues about future events – or distant ones, either, because initially we were almost as interested in clairvoyant dreams as we were in precognitive ones. People like Ingo Swann and G.M. Glaskin had written about dream experiences which had seemed to them to be showing scenes and events in other parts of the world, or even on other worlds. We think" – he gestured to show he was making an aside – "we think what happened in Swann's instance, fairly definitely, was that his unconscious was particularly adept at the reading-back trick."

"It'd have had to be very adept to get anything out of the mishmash I just experienced," I said, mustering a grin. "How long was I, um, 'under', by the way?"

"Eleven or twelve seconds."

"What?"

"Yeah, it always feels like a lot longer. Anyway, where was I? Oh. Yes. Well, you said it yourself. Unless you're a lucid dreamer – or, even better but also even rarer, a controlled lucid dreamer – that's basically what all your dreams are like. A mess. A rapid succession of images and emotions that don't make any sense when they're all strung together and which, even taken individually, still probably don't make any sense."

"So ...?"

"It was Alex who gave us the insight." Tim stood again and walked across to the nearest cubicle. He turned in my direction, leaning his back against its blood-red wall. His dreadlocks fell forward over his face so that when he spoke, because of the curiously flat acoustics of the place, his voice could have been coming from somewhere else entirely.

"When you listen to the radio, what you're wanting to hear is the main signal – the piece of music, the speaking voice, whatever. There's always a bit of noise, of course, that you hear in addition to that: signal hiss and that sort of thing. Everyone – the radio station, the radio manufacturer, you as listener with your finger on the tuning knob – conspires to try to reduce that level of unwanted noise as much as possible. The trouble with an individual dream, like the one you just experienced, is that it's virtually all noise. There could be a main signal in there, a genuine informational content, but it's such a small component of the whole that it's impossible to pick it out among the static. It's like your radio was giving you something that sounded like just white noise. You can't get anywhere by trying to tune it one way or the other, because you've no idea what it is you're looking for."

I propped myself up on one elbow. "Which is why you get the phenomenon of reading back."

Tim grinned, looking more than ever like a schoolboy. He nodded, encouraging me to keep speaking.

"When you listen to white noise," I said, "you can hear whatever you want in it. Think of a favourite piece of music, and that's what you'll start hearing in among all the hiss. Think about a dream afterwards, and you can make whatever story you want to out of all the scrambled story elements. What you're doing in both cases is making sense out of something that doesn't have any. It's a quality wired into our brains, and most of the time it's really helpful."

I hesitated, waving my free hand in the air to indicate not just the cavernous chamber around us, not just the structures above us, but everything beyond those. "We look at a universe that's mainly chaotic, and we're able to isolate the elements of it that make sense to us until we've built up logical strings; and eventually we can link up some of the logical strings with others until we get a network that explains a part of what we're seeing."

"We tell the universe's story," he summarized, still nodding. "Sometimes we get the story completely wrong for a while – we produce complexes of those ... What was it you called them? Oh, yeah, 'logical strings'. We produce bits of false story. They seem OK on their own, smaller scale, like the idea that God made everything in just a few days several thousand years ago, but then the self-correcting part of the process comes in, because those complexes don't match up at all with the other complexes we've constructed. It's like you'd slung a random chapter from a Jane Austen novel into the middle of a Jules Verne adventure. It soon becomes very obvious indeed that it belongs to a different story."

We were batting the line of thought back and forth between us now. "Except that in a dream," I said, "there is no main storyline. Each of the complexes we construct when we think about the dream is as valid as the next one."

He held up a finger, reminding me he was the schoolmaster and I was merely the bright student. "But that's only the case with an individual dream," he said. "We were prepared to accept that this was all there was, but then Alex stepped in, as I told you. He asked us the question: What if there are components in dreams that aren't completely random? What if there is a main storyline in there somewhere? If that's the case, it's going to turn up in other dreamers' dreams as well. While we mightn't be able to separate it out from a single dream, we might be able to detect it as a common factor in a whole bunch of different dreams."

I made to speak, but he gestured I should keep silent while I digested the implications of what he'd just said. Time for the student body to stop making its precocious contributions and start reflecting on what wiser, more experienced heads had already worked out. I swung myself up on the couch and, hands on my gingham-covered knees, stared past the bright colours of my skirt to the drabness of the floor, using it as a blank blackboard onto which I could chalk my thoughts.

"So," I said slowly, "what you could do is play the whole bank of dreams you've got here at once, and hope the common elements would sort of reinforce each other until you could pick them out against the randomness. Sort of like they were making the dark fringes in an interference pattern. Then you could, well, sort of ..."

Tim snapped his fingers to make me glance up at him. "A lot of 'sorts ofs' in there, but that's the general idea."

"But it's not as simple as that?"

"Too right." He chuckled. Using his ass to shove himself away from the wall, he strolled back to rest his forearm on the lamprey again. "I can give you the long, technical explanation or ... well, you've already given yourself the short one designed for the layperson. Choosing at random, we boost some of the shared elements in a few thousand dreams and see if the result is, uh, coherent and meaningful when we play them all together. Once in a thousand times or so we get some coherence; most of the time, though, the meaningfulness score is low or zero. Oh, meaningful to the dreamers, of course. But not useful. Sometimes dangerous, too. We accidentally boost one of the strands relating to the deeper shared human sexual impulses and someone experiences the playback, we got trouble." His face had lost its grinning. "Two heart attacks, three people in terminal psychiatric care. I suppose the score isn't bad by government standards. And, anyway, the subjects we played the composites to were from the education camps, just like the dreamers, so maybe we did them a favour."

I took a hand of his in both of mine. He flinched briefly, as if he misinterpreted my gesture, then relaxed again. "By the side of some of the other things going on these days," I said in a very low voice, watching my breath disturb the small hairs on his arm and then looking up into his eyes, "that's nothing."

He shrugged, withdrawing the hand, seeming to shiver. "Yeah. Doesn't make it any easier to live with, though." Then he brightened. "But it hasn't happened too often, now we understand better what's going on. We can block out the stuff that drives people crazy, or at least damp it down."

"Which is?" I still held his eyes with my gaze. They were brown and soft, and had very beautiful depths. Under other circumstances ...

He moved away from the lamprey a couple of paces to stand with his back to me. "Some of the other common strands we've been able to boost out of the noise obscurity have been very valuable – valuable enough to more than pay for this installation. There have been a few minor advances in science and technology – not just in psychology – thanks to work done at the Center for Neuronic Research. There have been certain knotty little problems our dreaming psyches have worked out that had proved intractable to our rational consciousness. I can't talk too much about this stuff. Most of it's classified. That probably wouldn't cause any problems, you being the DDO and all, but there might be something even you aren't supposed to hear."

I tried not to look as surprised as I felt. If there were things Tim wasn't sure I should know about, that meant he hadn't told them to Alex either, even though Alex was basically this place's sponsor. I wondered if Alex knew.

Tim was still talking. "Let's just say that a few of our spysats are a bit more effective than otherwise they'd have been, things like that." He blew out a long gust of breath. "But none of this is the really important material."

And now it seemed as if every cell in my body was devoting its attention to him. "Yeah?"

"It turns out we've been making a couple of really fundamental mistakes when we've been reading the universe. Oh, sure, we've been linking up all those complexes of logical strings just about right, and the story we've made out of them has been consistent – no Austen/Verne clashes – but it just happens, more by lousy luck than anything else, to have been the wrong story."